What this chamber argues

Western drama is rooted in a single Athenian century — 472 BC (the Persians) to roughly 388 BC (the late Aristophanes) — but theatre is not Greek alone: this room now also holds the Sanskrit court drama of Kalidasa and the Japanese Noh of Zeami.
Its Athenian founders survive in any number — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the only complete comic playwright of the period, Aristophanes — beside whom stand two non-Western masters: Kalidasa, the Shakespeare of the Sanskrit stage, and Zeami Motokiyo, who codified the Noh.
Every later theatrical form, including the modern screen, descends from the chorus, the messenger speech, and the tragic recognition invented here — devices arrived at independently again in the courts of Gupta India and Ashikaga Japan.

Primary works in this chamber (12)

Epics — Aeschylus called his tragedies "slices from the great banquet of Homer."
First Novels — Drama and prose fiction both interiorize action; the novel inherits the soliloquy as reported thought.
Wisdom Literature — The chorus speaks in the register of gnomic counsel — wisdom literature, set to music.
Psychology — Aristotle's Poetics already reads tragedy as a study of motive and pity; the hexagonal gallery connects forward to the science of mind.
First Mystery Novels and Stories — The reveal scene in detective fiction restages tragic anagnorisis: the truth named in front of the assembled chorus of suspects.
First Romance Novels — The comedy of manners hands its plot machinery — mistaken identity, parental block, comic resolution — to the romance novel.