While there are no extant examples of Middle Comedy, it is conjectured that the satire, obscenity, and fantasy of the earlier plays were much mitigated during this transitional period. The sole literary remains of Old Comedy are the plays of Aristophanes, characterized by obscenity, political satire, fantasy, and strong moral overtones. Greek comedy is divided by scholars into Old Comedy (5th cent. Thus, it is Sophocles who best represents the classical balance between the human and divine, the realistic and the symbolic.

However, he did not lose a sense of the godlike in man and man's affairs, as Euripides often did.

Utilizing three actors, Sophocles developed dramatic action beyond anything Aeschylus had achieved with only two and also introduced more natural speech. Euripides' characters are ordinary, not godlike, and the gods themselves are introduced more as devices of plot manipulation (as in the use of the deus ex machina in Medea, 431 B.C.) than as strongly felt representations of transcendent power. The increase in the number of actors resulted in less concern with communal problems and beliefs and more with dramatic conflict between individuals.ДЄccompanying this emphasis on individuals' interaction, from the time of Aeschylus to that of Euripides, there was a marked tendency toward realism. Much of Aeschylus' most beautiful poetry is contained in the choruses of his plays. In the majestic plays of Aeschylus, the chorus serves to underscore the personalities and situations of the characters and to provide ethical comment on the action. Generally, the earlier Greek tragedies place more emphasis on the chorus than the later ones. Eventually, Aeschylus introduced a second actor to the drama and Sophocles a third, Sophocles' format being continued by Euripides, the last of the great classical Greek dramatists. Thespis is credited with the invention of tragedy. Tradition has it that at the Dionysia of 534 B.C., during the reign of Pisistratus, the lead singer of the dithyramb, a man named Thespis, added to the chorus an actor with whom he carried on a dialogue, thus initiating the possibility of dramatic action. It is thought that the dithyramb was sung at the Dionysia, an annual festival honoring Dionysus. This was a choral hymn to the god Dionysus and involved exchanges between a lead singer and the chorus. According to Aristotle, Greek drama, or, more explicitly, Greek tragedy, originated in the dithyramb. The precise evolution of its main divisions- tragedy, comedy, and satire-is not definitely known. The Western dramatic tradition has its origins in ancient Greece.

This article discusses the development of Western drama in general for further information see the various national literature articles. Drama, Western, plays produced in the Western world.

Elements of a western drama