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The earliest days of western theater remain obscure, but the oldest surviving plays come from ancient Greece.
The above-mentioned playwrights made some of the most renowned Greek plays, but their staging had little or nothing to do with twentieth-century theater. Their dramas were always part of a series of three performances, where the middle part only was the drama, while the events always ended with dance. The dramas rarely had more than three actors (all male), who played the different roles using masks. There was a chorus on the stage all the time which sang songs and sometimes spoke in unison. As far as we know, each drama was played just a single time, at the traditional drama contest.
The importance of ancient Greek theater came largely in retrospect, as major playwrights like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to recreate classical theater unsuccessfully. Another school attempting to revive classical theater argued that Greek actors did not speak, but sang. From this school came the opera.
The theatre of ancient Rome was heavily influenced by the Greek tradition, and, as with many other literary genres, Roman dramatists tended to adapt and translate from the Greek. For example, Seneca's Phaedra was based on that of Euripides, and many of the comedies of Plautus were direct translations of works by Menander.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, theater was a vital part of civic, economic, and religious life. Among the more notable religious plays were "The Summoning of Everyman" (an allegory designed to teach the faithful that acts of Christian charity are necessary for entry into heaven), passion plays (such as the Oberammergau Passion PlayBy tradition, in 1633 the inhabitants of the village of Oberammergau in Bavaria, now in Germany, vowed that if God were to spare them from the effects of the bubonic plague ravaging the region, they would perform a play depicting the life and death of Jes, which is still performed every 10 years), and the great cycle plays (massive, festive wagon-mounted processions involving hundreds of actors, and drawing pilgrims, tourists, and entrepreneurs) York Corpus Christi Play Simulator. The morality playMorality plays (15th-16th c. a type of theatrical allegory where the characters, in the form of personified moral attributes, must validate the virtues of Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such life over evil. These plays, most popular in and mystery playMystery plays are one of the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. They developed from the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song, such as the Quem Quaeritis a short musical performance se (as they are known in English) were two distinct genres. These plays did not have a script as such, but were passed on by memory and might exist, and be written down, in many different forms.
In an age when religion influenced nearly all aspects of public and private life, there was little formal audience for secular theater; nevertheless, wandering minstrels and folk plays developed even as the religious pageants expanded.
Since many of the most theatrically successful medieval religious plays were designed to teach Catholic doctrine, the Protestant ReformationThe Protestant Reformation was a movement which began in the 16th century as a series of attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church, but ended in division and the establishment of new institutions, most importantly Lutheranism, Reformed churches, and An targeted the theater, especially in England, in an effort to stamp out allegiance to Rome. See Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (1994).