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Dramatic Literature
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The texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that "literature" originally meant something written
and "drama" meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of the interest, in the study of
dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play may be appreciated solely for its
qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those who remain alert to the volatility of the play as
a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements--acting, directing, staging,
etc.--should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully understood.
General Characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience takes away from the
theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life. Questions therefore arise as to what
is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a
play the way in which those words are intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director
and his actors on a particular stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it
the real response to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its
study and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants--author, actors, and audience--to accept the
operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as players and spectators accept the rules of a
game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here
lies some of the fascination of its study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator
beyond his own immediate reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of
drama must know the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all conventions are
working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience is enjoyed passionately with
mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the combined work of a good playwright, good
players, and a good audience who have come together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has served a wide variety
of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred drama in Egypt 2,000 years before
Christ, and Thespis in the 6th century BC in ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first
known playwright. Elements of drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the
introduction of words and the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic
elements were not superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a playscript
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains measurable
evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays embraced nearly
the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the male citizens of a Greek citystate came together to honor their gods; or when the annual Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the
great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early No
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Copyright © 1994-2001 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
drama of Japan was performed at religious festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also
serve a more directly didactic purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century
melodramas, and the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can
satirize society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of man in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe his mind. Drama is the most wideranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Dr.
Samuel Johnson's contention that there can be no certain limit to The modes of composition open to the
dramatist.
Common Elements Of Drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain elements in common. For
one thing, drama can never become a "private" statement--in the way a novel or a poem may be--without
ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and
deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely
recognizable human ways the spectator can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to
communicate as theatre. Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god
in Greek tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behavior. The remoteness or nearness of that behavior to the real life of the audience can importantly
affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may laugh with detached
superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of alienation or empathy are
important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap between the stage and the audience that a
dramatist is able to control the spectator's experience of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully symbolic on a
stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-important control of the audience's
responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the figures in action. A situation must be represented on
the stage, one recognizable and believable to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life.
Some argue that action is the primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no
play exists without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether the
playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are the scope and
scale of the character-in-situation--whether, for example, it is man confronting God or man confronting his
wife--for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is offering its audience. Even here one must
beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less
affecting than the teasing vision of human madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by the traditions of its
theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something imposed by actors upon the text
after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play. Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not
communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful play has style and little else. By "style," therefore, is
implied the whole mood and spirit of the play, its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or
illusion, and the way in which these qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of
the play. In its finer detail, a play's style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his
tone of speech, its pace and inflexion. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also: nothing is
more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and to find the opposite,
although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By means of signals of style, the audience
may be led to expect that the play will follow known paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the
rhythm of response in the auditorium. Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the
rules are constantly broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given pattern, a
playwright will endeavor to communicate his thoughts and feelings and have his audience consider his ideas
or reproduce the emotion that drove him to write as he did. In theatrical communication, however, audiences
remain living and independent participants. In the process of performance, an actor has the duty of
interpreting his author for the people watching him, and will expect to receive "feedback" in turn. The author
must reckon with this in his writing. Ideas will not be accepted, perhaps, if they are offered forthrightly; and
great dramatists who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectator reason the ideas for himself as
part of his response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if overstatement of feeling
("sentimentality") is used without a due balance of thinking and even the detachment of laughter:
Shakespeare and Chekhov are two outstanding examples in Western drama of writers who achieved an
exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to ensure the affective function of their plays.
Dramatic Expression
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely theatrical and
ritualistic manner; and on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the kind commonly
associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of ancient Greece, the
playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered this in an incantatory speech
halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie drama of the Chinese and Japanese
theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue accompanied by music and chanted
rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre
onto the level of religious worship. Verse is employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the
Christian drama of the Middle Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical
tragedies of 17th-century France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed, plays written
in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated essentially with the comic stage.
Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism became the mode, were characters in dramas
expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics maintain that a playwright
can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of his actors and over the responses of his
audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of
ordinary conversation, it is argued, give both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and
response. Certainly, the aural, kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in
the hands of a master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even
more certain, the "aesthetic distance" of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required to
release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, like rhythm and rhyme,
not found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide variety of nonrealistic aural and visual
devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same
time drew the audience lyrically into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment
made the actors' highly stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a
harmonious whole. The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with his
audience, to review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator's mind could leap
forward.
Dramatic Structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but, rather, are made to work
together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total impact of the experience. A playwright
will determine the shape of a play in part according to the conditions in which it will be performed: how long
should it take to engage an audience's interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats?
Is the audience sitting in one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to
the next, as in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious cycle, which
may portray the whole history of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgment. A realistic drama may
require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and memories of the characters, while in a chronicle
play the playwright may tell the whole story episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general
rule, as Aristotle originally suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an
audience needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time. In a play in which
the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be precisely identified, and the
scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a play, stage time will follow chronological
time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each
change of scene to adjust the clock or the calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its
nature it allows an extraordinary freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Dr.
Samuel Johnson observed in his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the
play to manipulate the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their "heath" with its
"fog and filthy air" for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady Macbeth later
is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in surroundings appropriate to the
wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist the imagination, whether the altar of the
gods situated in the center of the Greek orchestra, a strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval
miracle play, or a chair on which the Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of
fantasy, it is no wonder that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future,
from this world to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of "action" in a play describes what happens on the stage or
what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do with merely physical activity by the
players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience's image of the play and encourages the growth of
its imagination is a valid part of the play's action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist
Aeschylus to have only two speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and
facial expression. In the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell'arte, the standard characters Pantalone
and Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behavior of the grasping old merchant and
his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to contribute nothing to the action
of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the audience's sense of the action, its direction
and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to "do"
nothing, but their intimate speeches of evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel
about the action of the main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art,
moving constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious time
is of immeasurable value.
Drama As An Expression Of A Culture
In spite of the wide divergences in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the popular kabuki of Japan
and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese puppet play and a modern social drama by
the contemporary American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of dramatic literature have some points in
common.
Differences between plays arise from differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the
purpose of theatre within the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the
most important, if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West Differences
Oriental drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in Malaya and of
Burma, Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at its peak during the period known in the West as the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Oriental
culture showed little of the interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little
emphasis on authors and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of the drama of the Orient are lost in
time, although its themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were
kept. The slow-paced, self-contained civilizations of the East have only recently been affected by Western
theatre, just as the West has only recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and what it
could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of William Butler Yeats
and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in French, and of Bertolt Brecht in
German).
In its representation of life, classical Oriental drama is the most conventional and nonrealistic in world
theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted selflessly to the profession of a traditional art,
conventions of performance became highly stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure
became formalized to a point of exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In Oriental drama all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime, speech and
song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their refined dance patterns, and
the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the players and the action of the play, suggest
to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet with opera, in which the written text assumes a
subordinate role. In this drama, place could be shifted with a license that would have astonished the most
romantic of Elizabethan dramatists, the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the
"flashback" of the modern cinema, and events could be telescoped with the abandon of modern
expressionism. This extreme theatricality lent an imaginative freedom to its artists and audiences upon which
great theatre could thrive. Significantly, most Oriental cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which
stylization of character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In the classical puppet
theatre of Japan, the bunraku, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill with the
dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century master Chikamatsu, who
enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather than for the actors of the Kabuki. By contrast,
Western drama during and after the Renaissance has offered increasing realism, not only in decor and
costume but also in the treatment of character and situation.
It is generally thought that Oriental drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in religious festivals.
Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular legendary stories to imbue their
plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This was never the sensationalism of novelty that
Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so
that the slightest changes of emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not
unlike that found in the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Oriental
drama is that restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with commercial
pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of Greek tragedy, the character
psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual criticism of Ibsen and Strindberg, nor the
contemporary drama of shock and argument, is imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Drama In Western Cultures
The form and style of ancient Greek tragedy, which flowered in the 5th century BC in Athens, was dictated
by its ritual origins and by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring and winter
festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows what to expect. Ritual
dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in festival after festival. Each new drama
provided the spectators with a reassessment of the meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious
exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist's intention.
The chorus not only provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought
and emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC) and Sophocles (c. 496-406
BC) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480-406 BC) it remained
lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist in the form and style he
could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena demanded that the players make
grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never approach modern conversational dialogue.
Today, the superhuman characters of these plays, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra,
Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for they display little "characterization" in the modern sense and their
fates are sealed. Nevertheless, these great operatic tableaux, built, as one critic has said, for weight and not
speed, were evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr-plays and comedies, bawdy
and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the wildly inventive satires of
Aristophanes (c. 445-c. 385 BC.)
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both play and performance.
This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy and comedy. The Roman comedies of
Plautus (c. 254-184 BC) and Terence (c. 186/185-159 BC) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments,
while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4 BC-AD 65) on themes from the Greek were written probably
only to be read by the ruling caste. Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights
influenced the shape and content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the
boasting soldier, the old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the
sensational content and stoical attitudes of Seneca's drama reappeared centuries later when classical literature
was rediscovered.
Biblical Plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect the ritual function of
the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian calendar, explains much of the form of
medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the
church enacted the simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally "Whom do you seek?"), the account
of the visit to Jesus Christ's tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The liturgical
form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be shared mutually by
actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi was instituted in 1246, the great
lay cycles of Biblical plays (the mystery or miracle cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole
story of man from the Creation to the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience.
The other influence controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of
material that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage in
the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their audience not a
mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many small and intimate
dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they mixed awesome events with
moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details, familiar touches of behavior, and the comedy
and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but
meaningful in human terms, religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of
reaching its simple audiences.
Into The 16th And 17th Centuries
In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the commedia
dell'arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding comedy. Two elements are
worth noting. First, the improvisational spirit of the commedia troupes, in which the actor would invent
words and comic business (lazzi) to meet the occasion of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a
spontaneity in the action that has affected the writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second,
basic types of comic character derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play
after play. As these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to
respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the spectator
freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia illuminates a great deal in
the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Marivaux in France, and of Goldoni and
Gozzi in Italy.
In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama that could rival
ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as well as private playhouses,
audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its poetic expansion, a rapid growth of
professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible stage. All these factors combined to provide the
dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In
Elizabethan London, dramatists wrote in an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and
farce to Seneca tragedy, from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before
the advent of Shakespeare (1564-1616). Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the
chronicle play and the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of
styles. With the exception of Ben Jonson (1572/73-1637) and a few others, playwrights mixed their
ingredients without regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental
in character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and perspective
by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular clown; exploiting the double
values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the role of the actor in and out of character;
but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually
and aurally exciting hybrid drama that could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising
that they selected their themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and
reason, of good and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigor and
vision.
Quite independently in Spain, dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres ranging from
popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain's greatest playwright, Lope de Vega (15621635), cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal exuberance. The drama of Paris of the
17th century, however, was determined by two extremes of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some
playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity,
controlled by verse that is more regular than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the
French theatre developed a comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia
dell'arte. The Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean Racine
(1639-99), tragedies of honor using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of
searching deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly
controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière (1622-73), whose training as an
actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more
sophisticated comedy. Molière's work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting, exquisite in
style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the throne of England in
1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits such as William Wycherley (16401716) and William Congreve (1670-1729) wrote for the intimate playhouses of the Restoration and an
unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed a "comedy of manners," replete
with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share--a unique phase in the history of drama.
These plays started a characteristic style of English domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy
today.
German dramatists of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite different type of play:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), and others
of the passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") movement tried to echo the more romantic
tendencies in Shakespeare's plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the discipline of classical
form, wrote derivative melodramas that varied widely in quality, often degenerating into mere
sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre across Europe and America. Bold in
plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief that virtue will triumph and providence always
intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the
history of the theatre. Certainly, melodrama's elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those
interested in drama as a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre
audiences ready for the most recent phase in dramatic history.
The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As novelists developed
greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new and more realistic departures: the
dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950); the problem plays associated with
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906); the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904); the fiercely
personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg (1849-1912). These dramatists began by staging
the speech and behavior of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in the symbolic and poetic
revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modeling his tightly structured dramas of man in
society upon the formula for the "well made" play, which carefully controlled the audience's interest to the
final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later, developed a free psychological and religious dream play that
bordered on Expressionism. As sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects,
the great European playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism.
Thus the Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders
freed the drama of the 20th century to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent dramatists have been wildly
experimental. The playwright today can adopt any dramatic mode, mixing his effects to shock the spectator
into an awareness of himself, his beliefs, and his environment.
Drama In Eastern Cultures
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such diversity, despite
its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Oriental drama may be seen in the three great
classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the Indian stage, a platform erected for the
occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the
imagination of the playwright. In the plays of India's greatest playwright, Kalidasa (probably 4th century
AD), there is an exquisite refinement of detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place
by simple suggestion and mingle courtly humor and light-hearted wit with charming sentiment and religious
piety. Quite untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of reality, and
his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate to the Hindu aesthetic
of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the broader, less courtly
manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays cover a large variety of subjects and
styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as does all Oriental drama. Heroic legends, pathetic
moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated
court audience as to a popular street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yüan
dynasty (1206-1368), in which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene
introduces a song whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed heroes and
villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime. Chinese drama avoided both the
crudity of European melodrama and the esotericism of Western coterie drama.
The drama of Japan may be said to embrace both. There, the exquisite artistry of gesture and mime, and the
symbolism of setting and costume, took two major directions. The No drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences; the Kabuki (its name
suggesting its composition: ka, "singing"; bu, "dancing"; ki, "acting") in the 17th century became Japan's
popular drama. No theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the Greeks in the remoteness of its
legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of two actors and a chorus, and in the static,
oratorical majesty of its style. The Kabuki, on the other hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in
popular history, and the actors, without masks, move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic.
The Kabuki plays are less rarefied and are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional as befitting their
presentation before a broader audience. The written text of the No play is highly poetic and pious in tone,
compressed in its imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting; the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation, and melodrama. In
the Kabuki there can be moments of realism, but also whole episodes of mime and acrobatics; there can be
moments of slapstick, but also moments of violent passion. In all, the words are subordinate to performance
in the Kabuki.
Drama And Communal Belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it and is not imposed
upon it. The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery cycles
of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the theatre is a place of
worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The dramatic experience becomes a
natural extension of man's life both as an individual and as a social being. The content of the mystery cycles
speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the center of
medieval life, like the church itself. Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied
by comic or pathetic demonstration; for example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th-16th centuries, with a nicely balanced
didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with child and an Angel
explains what has happened; the humor reflects the simplicity of the audience and at the same time indicates
the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the
Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of
individual interests present in his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama commemorating national
heroes, as are seen almost universally in the Orient, is of this kind. Modern Western attempts at a religious
didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of "ideas," have had to reckon with the disparate nature of the
audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen's social drama both encouraged and divided the development of the
theatre in the last years of the 19th century. Plays like A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881),
which challenged the sanctity of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their
audiences by storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the other hand,
there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new drama of ideas.
"Problem" plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre for the 20th century.
Shaw's early Ibsenite plays in London, attacking a negative drawing-room comedy with themes of slum
landlordism (Widowers' Houses, 1892) and prostitution (Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1902) resulted only in
failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism
(Arms and the Man, 1894) and the motives for middle class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his
audiences before leading them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Influences On The Dramatist
The author of a play is affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the conditions under which he conceives
and writes, by his social and economic status as a playwright, by his personal background, by his religious or
political position, by his purpose in writing. The literary form of the play and its stylistic elements will be
influenced by tradition, a received body of theory and dramatic criticism, as well as by the author's
innovative energy. Auxiliary theatre arts such as music and design also have their own controlling traditions
and conventions, which the playwright must respect. The size and shape of the playhouse, the nature of its
stage and equipment, and the actor-audience relationship it encourages also determine the character of the
writing. Not least, the audience's cultural assumptions, holy or profane, local or international, social or
political, may override all else in deciding the form and content of the drama. These are large considerations
that can take the student of drama into areas of sociology, politics, social history, religion, literary criticism,
philosophy and aesthetics, and beyond.
The Role Of Theory
It is difficult to assess the influence of theory since theory usually is based on existing drama, rather than
drama on theory. Philosophers, critics, and dramatists have attempted both to describe what happens and to
prescribe what should happen in drama, but all their theories are affected by what they have seen and read.
Western Theory
In Europe, the earliest extant work of dramatic theory, the fragmentary Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 BC),
chiefly reflecting his views on Greek tragedy and his favorite dramatist, Sophocles, is still relevant to an
understanding of the elements of drama. Aristotle's elliptical way of writing, however, encouraged different
ages to place their own interpretation upon his statements and to take as prescriptive what many believe to
have been meant only to be descriptive. There has been endless discussion of his concepts mimesis
("imitation"), the impulse behind all the arts, and catharsis ("purgation," "purification of emotion"), the
proper end of tragedy, though these notions were conceived, in part, in answer to Plato's attack on poiesis
(making) as an appeal to the irrational. That "character" is second in importance to "plot" is another of
Aristotle's concepts that may be understood with reference to the practice of the Greeks, but not more
realistic drama, in which character psychology has a dominant importance. The concept in the Poetics that
has most affected the composition of plays in later ages has been that of the so-called unities--that is, of time,
place, and action. Aristotle was evidently describing what he observed--that a typical Greek tragedy had a
single plot and action that lasts one day; he made no mention at all of unity of place. Neoclassical critics of
the 17th century, however, codified these discussions into rules.
Considering the inconvenience of such rules and their final unimportance, one wonders at the extent of their
influence. The Renaissance desire to follow the ancients and its enthusiasm for decorum and classification
may explain it in part. Happily, the other classical work recognized at this time was Horace's Art of Poetry (c.
24 BC), with its basic precept that poetry should offer pleasure and profit and teach by pleasing, a notion that
has general validity to this day. Happily, too, the popular drama, which followed the tastes of its patrons, also
exerted a liberating influence.
Nevertheless, discussion about the supposed need for the unities continued throughout the 17th century
(culminating in the French critic Nicolas Boileau's Art of Poetry, originally published in 1674), particularly
in France, where a master like Racine could translate the rules into a taut, intense theatrical experience. Only
in Spain, where Lope de Vega published his New Art of Writing Plays (1609), written out of his experience
with popular audiences, was a commonsense voice raised against the classical rules, particularly on behalf of
the importance of comedy and its natural mixture with tragedy. In England both Sir Philip Sidney in his
Apologie for Poetry (1595) and Ben Jonson in Timber (1640) merely attacked contemporary stage practice.
Jonson, in certain prefaces, however, also developed a tested theory of comic characterization (the "humors")
that was to affect English comedy for a hundred years. The best of Neoclassical criticism in English is John
Dryden's Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668). Dryden approached the rules with a refreshing honesty and
argued all sides of the question; thus he questioned the function of the unities and accepted Shakespeare's
practice of mixing comedy and tragedy.
The lively imitation of nature came to be acknowledged as the primary business of the playwright and was
confirmed by the authoritative voices of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765)
"there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature," and the German dramatist and critic Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, who in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (or Hamburg Dramaturgy; 1767-69) sought to
accommodate Shakespeare to a new view of Aristotle. With the classical straitjacket removed, there was a
release of dramatic energies in new directions. There were still local critical skirmishes, such as Jeremy
Collier's attack on the "immorality and profaneness of the English stage" in 1698; Goldoni's attacks upon the
already dying Italian commedia on behalf of greater realism; and Voltaire's reactionary wish to return to the
unities and to rhymed verse in French tragedy, which was challenged in turn by Diderot's call for a return to
nature. But the way was open for the development of the middle class drame and the excursions of
romanticism. Victor Hugo, in his Preface to his play Cromwell (1827), capitalized on the new psychological
romanticism of Goethe and Schiller as well as the popularity of the sentimental drame in France and the
growing admiration for Shakespeare; Hugo advocated truth to nature and a dramatic diversity that could yoke
together the sublime and the grotesque. This view of what drama should be received support from Émile Zola
in the preface to his play Thérèse Raquin (1873), in which he argued a theory of naturalism that called for the
accurate observation of people controlled by their heredity and environment. From such sources came the
subsequent intellectual approach of Ibsen and Chekhov and a new freedom for such seminal innovators of the
20th century as Luigi Pirandello, with his teasing mixtures of absurdist laughter and psychological shock;
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), deliberately breaking the illusion of the stage; and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948),
advocating a theatre that should be "cruel" to its audience, employing all and any devices that lie to hand.
The modern dramatist may be grateful that he is no longer hidebound by theory and yet also regret,
paradoxically, that the theatre of his time lacks those artificial limits within which an artifact of more certain
efficiency can be wrought.
Eastern Theory
The Oriental theatre has always had such limits, but with neither the body of theory nor the pattern of
rebellion and reaction found in the West. The Sanskrit drama of India, however, throughout its recorded
existence has had the supreme authority of the Natya-sastra, ascribed to Bharata (c. 1st century AD), an
exhaustive compendium of rules for all the performing arts, but particularly for the sacred art of drama with
its auxiliary arts of dance and music. Not only does the Natya-sastra identify many varieties of gesture and
movement but it also describes the multiple patterns that drama can assume, similar to a modern treatise on
musical form. Every conceivable aspect of a play is treated, from the choice of meter in poetry to the range of
moods a play can achieve; but perhaps its primary importance lies in its justification of the aesthetic of Indian
drama as a vehicle of religious enlightenment.
In Japan, the most celebrated of early No writers, Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), left an influential collection
of essays and notes to his son about his practice, and his deep knowledge of Zen Buddhism infused the No
drama with ideals for the art that have persisted. Religious serenity of mind (yugen), conveyed through an
exquisite elegance in a performance of high seriousness, is at the heart of Zeami's theory of dramatic art.
Three centuries later, the outstanding dramatist Chikamatsu (1653-1725) built equally substantial foundations
for the Japanese puppet theatre, later known as the bunraku. His heroic plays for this theatre established an
unassailable dramatic tradition of depicting an idealized life inspired by a rigid code of honor and expressed
with extravagant ceremony and fervent lyricism. At the same time, in another vein, his pathetic "domestic"
plays of middle class life and the suicides of lovers established a comparatively realistic mode for Japanese
drama, which strikingly extended the range of both the bunraku and the Kabuki. Today, these forms, together
with the more aristocratic and intellectual No, constitute a classical theatre based on practice rather than on
theory. They may be superseded as a result of the recent invasion of Western drama, but in their perfection
they are unlikely to change. The Yüan drama of China was similarly based upon a slowly evolved body of
laws and conventions derived from practice, for, like the Kabuki of Japan, this too was essentially an actors'
theatre, and practice rather than theory accounts for its development.
The Role Of Music And Dance
The Sanskrit treatise Natya-sastra suggests that drama had its origin in the art of dance, and any survey of
Western theatre, too, must recognize a comparable debt to music in the classical Greek drama, which is
believed to have sprung from celebratory singing to Dionysus. Similarly, the drama of the medieval church
began with the chanted liturgies of the Roman mass. In the professional playhouses of the Renaissance and
after, only rarely is music absent: Shakespeare's plays, particularly the comedies, are rich with song, and the
skill with which he pursues dramatic ends with musical help is a study in itself. Molière conceived most of
his plays as comedy-ballets, and much of his verbal style derives directly from the balletic qualities of the
commedia. The popularity of opera in the 18th century led variously to John Gay's prototype for satirical
ballad-opera, The Beggar's Opera (1728), the opera buffa in Italy, and the opéra comique in France. The
development of these forms, however, resulted in the belittling of the written drama, with the notable
exception of the parodistic wit of W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911). It is worth noting, however, that the most
successful modern "musicals" lean heavily on their literary sources. Today, two of the strongest influences on
contemporary theatre are those of Bertolt Brecht, who believed that a dialectical theatre should employ music
not merely as a background embellishment but as an equal voice with the actor's, and of Antonin Artaud,
who argued that the theatre experience should subordinate the literary text to mime, music, and spectacle.
Since it is evident that drama often involves a balance of the arts, an understanding of their interrelationships
is proper to a study of dramatic literature.
The Influence Of Theatre Design
Though apparently an elementary matter, the shape of the stage and auditorium probably offers the greatest
single control over the text of the play that can be measured and tested. Moreover, it is arguable that the
playhouse architecture dictates more than any other single factor the style of a play, the conventions of its
acting, and the quality of dramatic effect felt by its audience. The shape of the theatre is always changing, so
that to investigate its function is both to understand the past and to anticipate the future. Today, Western
theatre is in the process of breaking away from the dominance of the Victorian picture-frame theatre, and
therefore from the kind of experience this produced.
The contemporary English critic John Wain has called the difference between Victorian and Elizabethan
theatre a difference between "consumer" and "participation" art. The difference resulted from the physical
relationship between the audience and the actor in the two periods, a relationship that determined the kind of
communication open to the playwright and the role the drama could play in society. Three basic playhouse
shapes have emerged in the history of the theatre: the arena stage, the open stage, and the picture-frame.
The Arena Stage
To the arena, or theatre-in-the-round, belongs the excitement of the circus, the bullring, and such sports as
boxing and wrestling. Arena performance was the basis for all early forms of theatre--the Druid ceremonies
at Stonehenge, the Tibetan harvest-festival drama, probably early Greek ritual dancing in the orchestra, the
medieval rounds in 14th-century England and France, the medieval street plays on pageant wagons, the early
No drama of Japan, the royal theatre of Cambodia. Characteristic of all these theatres is the bringing together
of whole communities for a ritual experience; therefore, a sense of ritualistic intimacy and involvement is
common to the content of the drama, and only the size of the audience changes the scale of the sung or
spoken poetry. Clearly, the idiom of realistic dialogue would have been inappropriate both to the occasion
and the manner of such theatre.
The Open Stage
When more narrative forms of action appeared in drama and particular singers or speakers needed to control
the attention of their audience by facing them, the open, "thrust," or platform stage, with the audience on
three sides of the actor, quickly developed its versatility. Intimate and ritualistic qualities in the drama could
be combined with a new focus on the players as individual characters. The open stage and its variants were
used by the majority of great national theatres, particularly those of China and Japan, the booths of the Italian
commedia, the Elizabethan public and private playhouses, and the Spanish corrales (i.e., the areas between
town houses) of the Renaissance. While open-stage performance discouraged scenic elaboration, it stressed
the actor and his role, his playing to and away from the spectators, with the consequent subtleties of empathy
and alienation. It permitted high style in speech and behavior, yet it could also accommodate moments of the
colloquial and the realistic. It encouraged a drama of range and versatility, with rapid changes of mood and
great flexibility of tone. It is not surprising that in the 20th century the West has seen a return to the open
stage and that recent plays of Brechtian theatre and the theatre of the absurd seem composed for open
staging.
The Proscenium Stage
The third basic theatre form is that of the proscenium-arch or picture-frame stage, which reached its highest
achievements in the late 19th century. Not until public theatres were roofed, the actors withdrawn into the
scene, and the stage artificially illuminated were conditions ripe in Western theatre for a new development of
spectacle and illusion. This development had a revolutionary effect upon the literary drama. In the 18th and
19th centuries, plays were shaped into a new structure of acts and scenes, with intermissions to permit scene
changes. Only recently has the development of lighting techniques encouraged a return to a more flexible
episodic drama. Of more importance, the actor increasingly withdrew into the created illusion of the play,
and his character became part of it. In the mid-19th century, when it was possible to dim the house lights, the
illusion could be made virtually complete. At its best, stage illusion could produce the delicate naturalism of
a Chekhovian family scene, into which the spectator was drawn by understanding, sympathy, and
recognition; at its worst, the magic of spectacle and the necessary projection of the speech and acting in the
largest picture-frame theatres produced a crude drama of sensation in which literary values had no place.
Audience Expectations
It may be that the primary influence upon the conception and creation of a play is that of the audience. An
audience allows a play to have only the emotion and meaning it chooses, or else it defends itself either by
protest or by a closed mind. From the time the spectator began paying for his play going, during the
Renaissance, the audience more and more entered into the choice of the drama's subjects and their treatment.
This is not to say that the audience was given no consideration earlier; even in medieval plays there were
popular non-biblical roles such as Noah's wife, or Mak the sheep thief among the three shepherds, and the
antic devils of the Harrowing of Hell in the English mystery cycles. Nor, in later times, did a good playwright
always give the audience only what it expected--Shakespeare's King Lear (c. 1605), for example, in the view
of many the world's greatest play, had its popular elements of folktale, intrigue, disguise, madness, clowning,
blood, and horror; but each was turned by the playwright to the advantage of his theme.
Any examination of the society an audience represents must illuminate not only the cultural role of its theatre
but also the content, genre, and style of its plays. The exceptionally aristocratic composition of the English
Restoration audience, for example, illuminates the social game its comedy represented, and the middle class
composition of the subsequent Georgian audience sheds light on the moralistic elements of its "sentimental"
comedy. Not unrelated is the study of received ideas in the theatre. The widespread knowledge of simple
Freudian psychology has undoubtedly granted a contemporary playwright like Tennessee Williams (1911-83)
the license to invoke it for character motivation; and Brecht increasingly informed his comedies with Marxist
thinking on the assumption that the audiences he wrote for would appreciate his dramatized argument.
Things go wrong when the intellectual or religious background of the audience does not permit a shared
experience, as when Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) could not persuade a predominantly Christian audience with
an existentialist explanation for the action of his plays, or when T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) failed to persuade an
audience accustomed to the conventions of drawing-room comedy that The Cocktail Party (1949) was a
possible setting for Christian martyrdom. Good drama persuades before it preaches, but it can only begin
where the audience begins.
A great variety of drama has been written for special audiences. Plays have been written for children, largely
in the 20th century, though Nativity plays have always been associated with children both as performers and
as spectators. These plays tend to be fanciful in conception, broad in characterization, and moralistic in
intention. Nevertheless, the most famous of children's plays, James Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), implied that
the young are no fools and celebrated children in their own right. Barrie submerged his point subtly beneath
the fantasy, and his play is still regularly performed, while Maurice Maeterlinck's Blue Bird (1908) has
disappeared from the repertory because of its weighty moral tone.
In the wider field of adult drama, the social class of the audience often accounts for a play's form and style.
Court or aristocratic drama is readily distinguished from that of the popular theatre. The veneration in which
the No drama was held in Japan derived in large part from the feudal ceremony of its presentation, and its
courtly elements ensured its survival for an upper class and intellectual elite. Although much of it derived
from the No, the flourishing of the Kabuki at the end of the 17th century is related to the rise of a new
merchant and middle class audience, which encouraged the development of less esoteric drama. The popular
plays of the Elizabethan public theatres, with their broader, more romantic subjects liberally spiced with
comedy, are similarly to be contrasted with those of the private theatres. The boys' companies of the private
theatres of Elizabethan London played for a better paying and more sophisticated audience, which favored
the satirical or philosophical plays of Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Marston (1576-1634), and
George Chapman (1559?-1634). Similarly today, in all Western dramatic media--stage, film, radio, and
television--popular and "commercial" forms run alongside more "cultural" and avant-garde forms, so that the
drama, which in its origins brought people together, now divides them. Whether the esoteric influences the
popular theatre, or vice versa, is not clear, and research remains to be done on whether this dichotomy is
good or bad for dramatic literature or the people it is written for.
The Range Of Dramatic Forms And Styles
Dramatic literature has a remarkable facility in bringing together elements from other performing and
nonperforming arts: design and mime, dance and music, poetry and narrative. It may be that the dramatic
impulse itself, the desire to recreate a picture of life for others through impersonation, is at the root of all the
arts. Certainly, the performing arts continually have need of dramatic literature to support them. A common
way of describing an opera, for example, is to say that it is a play set to music. In Wagner the music is
continuous; in Verdi the music is broken into songs; in Mozart the songs are separated by recitative, a
mixture of speech and song; while operettas and musical comedy consist of speech that breaks into song from
time to time. All forms of opera, however, essentially dramatize a plot, even if the plot must be simplified on
the operatic stage. This is because, in opera, musical conventions dominate the dramatic conventions, and the
spectator who finds that the music spoils the play, or who finds that the play spoils the music, is one who has
not accepted the special conventions of opera. Music is drama's natural sister; proof may be seen in the early
religious music-drama of the Dionysian festivals of Greece and the mystères of 14th-century France, as well
as in the remarkable development of opera in 17th-century Italy spreading to the rest of the world. The
librettist who writes the text of an opera, however, must usually subserve the composer, unless he is able to
embellish his play with popular lyrics, as John Gay did in The Beggar's Opera (1728), or to work in
exceptionally close collaboration with the composer, as Brecht did with Kurt Weill for his Die
Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928).
Dance, with its modern, sophisticated forms of ballet, has also been traditionally associated with dramatic
representation and has similarly changed its purpose from religious to secular. In ballet, the music is usually
central, and the performance is conceived visually and aurally; hence, the writer does not play a dominant
role. The scenario is prepared for dance and mime by the choreographer. The contemporary Irish writer
Samuel Beckett, trying to reduce his dramatic statement to the barest essentials, "composed" two mimes
entitled Act Without Words I and II (1957 and 1966), but this is exceptional.
In motion pictures, the script writer has a more important but still not dominant role. He usually provides a
loose outline of dialogue, business, and camera work on which the director, his cameramen, and the cutting
editor build the finished product. The director is usually the final artistic authority and the central creative
mind in the process, and words are usually subordinate to the dynamic visual imagery.
The media of radio and television both depend upon words in their drama to an extent that is not
characteristic of the motion picture. Though these mass media have been dominated by commercial interests
and other economic factors, they also have developed dramatic forms from the special nature of their
medium. The writer of a radio play must acknowledge that the listener cannot see the actors but hears them in
conditions of great intimacy. A radio script that stresses the suggestive, imaginative, or poetic quality of
words and permits a more than conventional freedom with time and place can produce a truly poetic drama,
perhaps making unobtrusive use of earlier devices like the chorus, the narrator, and the soliloquy: the
outstanding example of radio drama is Under Milk Wood (1953), by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
A similar kind of dramatic writing is the so-called readers' theatre, in which actors read or recite without
decor before an audience. (This is not to be confused with "closet drama," often a dramatic poem that
assumes dialogue form; e.g., Milton's Samson Agonistes, 1671, written without the intention of stage
performance.) The essential discipline of the circuit of communication with an audience is what distinguishes
drama as a genre, however many forms it has taken in its long history. (J.L.S.)