Have you ever wondered why actors are called “thespians”? It’s because of November 23. Partly, anyway. This is the day in 534 BCE that, according to Aristotle, someone named “Thespis” was the first person to portray a character on stage in a play. We’re talking about well over two thousand years ago, when record keeping hadn’t yet reached its full potential, of course. But if it really happened, then Thespis is the guy who invented acting itself.
In fact, Thespis must have started acting before November 23 that year; it’s just that this is the only date we know of. We know the date because Athens, in Ancient Greece, held a competition to decide which “tragedy” was the best, and Thespis won. It made sense because he’d invented tragedies too. That’s what they called those new-fangled entertainments. Nowadays we would just call them plays.
Before Thespis came up with the idea of impersonating characters, entertainment consisted of songs about mythical stories. There would be one principal performer and a chorus. What Thespis came up with was the idea that the principal performer (himself) would use masks and costumes to depict specific characters. In his tragedies there was only one actor, and he retained the “Greek chorus.”
Thespis wasn’t finished inventing. He went on to put together the first theatrical tour. He loaded his masks and costumes into a wagon and traveled around presenting his production. This, like his other ideas, caught on pretty well, and the touring company in the National Theatre of Greece is still called the “Wagon of Thespis.”
Thespis lived a very long time ago, but that wouldn’t be a problem if you happened to have a time machine. Nobody knows exactly what a time machine would look like, but one pretty popular one is the police box (or the thing that looks like one) used by Doctor Who. The Doctor made his first appearance on November 23, 1963. Although I suppose when you’re talking about time travel, the whole “first appearance” thing doesn’t make a lot of sense. The first episode was called either An Unearthly Child or 100,000 BC (or both), and at the time wasn’t particularly popular. The costumes and special effects were relatively casual affairs, in part because the production was aired in black and white with just 405-line resolution. It would look terrible on your smartphone screen.
Speaking of smartphones, November 23 is when the first one debuted. It had a touch screen, built in maps, various apps like a calendar, a notepad, email, predictive text, and could send and receive faxes. None of that is remarkable now, but we’re talking about 1992. It was made by IBM, and after showing it off at the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, they went on to bring it to market as the “Simon” about a year and a half later. It had its problems — the battery life was only one hour, but that didn’t really matter because it was too big to conveniently tote around anyway. But other than a camera, it had most of the features smartphones still include. It wasn’t called a “smartphone” at the time, though. It took another three years before anybody thought of that term. It had one additional feature that you never see on modern smartphones — an RJ11 telephone connector. If your cellular service wasn’t any good (a pretty good bet at the time), or if you didn’t feel like paying the sky-high bills for mobile calls, you could just plug your Simon into a land line and use it like a regular phone. But with battery life of just one hour, you probably didn’t even have time to sit through a performance by Thespis. Although you might make it through an abbreviated or censored version.
Censorship was what you’d expect, of course, if you were presenting a performance that wasn’t to the liking of whoever might be in charge of the city you were in. Actors and writers, probably from the time of Thespis, had to accept that their work could be altered by the people in power. By 1644, though, John Milton had had enough, so on November 23 he published Areopagitica. He got the name from a speech by Isocrates, an Ancient Greek orator from around the same period as Thespis. At the time Milton wrote it, the British Civil War was being fought. Milton probably wanted to influence some of the changes that (might) be in the offing. He was a Parliamentarian (the other side were the Royalists), but his main gripe was a law Parliament had enacted just the previous year: the “Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing.” It required authors to be licensed in order for their work to be published. Milton had already had several run-ins with the censors when he tried to publish pamphlets in favor of divorce as well as other ideas. He was quite the radical for the 1600s.
The Areopagitica was well received and popular, and the Parliamentarians won the war, but Parliament didn’t repeal the ordinance until 1695. Areopagitica is still an influential work, though. If you visit the main reading room in the New York Public Library, look above the main entrance. The inscription there reads: “A good Booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.” That’s a direct quote from Milton’s essay. The US Supreme Court has referred to the Areopagitica as well, mentioning it by name in four separate cases over the years.
The arguments it makes for free speech and freedom of expression are pretty compelling. Given the season of the year, you might say that Milton’s aim was to make some authoritarian hearts grow several sizes. You know, like what happened to The Grinch. If you watch the original 1966 animated-for-TV show How the Grinch Stole Christmas, you might know the voice of the Grinch is Boris Karloff, the same actor who portrayed Frankenstein’s monster in three 1930s movies. The first of the films, Frankenstein, was subject to quite a bit of censorship by local and state governments across the US. And by strange coincidence, today is Boris Karloff’s birthday.
Frankenstein, as well as other films that some people objected to, led to local ordinances like the one in Chicago that required anyone who wanted to show a movie in the city show it to government representatives first and pay for a license. In 1957, a theater owner sued the city over this law. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, where it became one of the four cases that mentioned Milton’s Areopagitica. Kind of makes you wonder if Thespis and Isocrates might have known each other and cooked up the whole thing to begin with.
