Download Dramatic Literature

WEST LOS ANGELES COLLEGE
PROFESSOR: Martin Zurla
STUDY GUIDE: Dramatic Literature
(An Overview)
Contents:
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Introduction
General characteristics
o Common elements of drama
o Dramatic expression
o Dramatic structure
Drama as an expression of a culture
o East-West differences
o Drama in Western cultures
?? Biblical plays
?? Into the 16th and 17th centuries
o Drama in Eastern cultures
o Drama and communal belief
Influences on the dramatist
o The role of theory
?? Western theory
?? Eastern theory
o The role of music and dance
o The influence of theatre design
?? The arena stage
?? The open stage
?? The proscenium stage
o Audience expectations
The range of dramatic forms and styles
Bibliography
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Introduction
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
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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 city-state 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 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 wide-ranging 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
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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
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also share these qualities. Even more certain, the "aesthetic distance" of the stage, or the degree of unreality and makebelieve 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.
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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.
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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
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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 (1562-1635), 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 (1640-1716) 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
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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
Pa g e 8
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
Pa g e 9
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
Pa g e 10
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
Pa g e 11
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.
Pa g e 12
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
Pa g e 13
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.)
_____________________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Allardyce Nicoll, World Drama (1949), offers the best survey of the whole field of dramatic literature, but it should be
supplemented by John Gassner and Edward Quinn, The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama (1969); and Phyllis
Hartnoll, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 3rd ed. (1967). The classical texts of dramatic theory and criticism may
be found in a collection by B.H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama, rev. ed. (1965), which also contains an extensive
bibliography. The Natya Shastra of Bharata, the classic source for Indian dramatic theory, was translated by M.M. Ghose
in 1951.
Pa g e 14
Books of importance in the development of modern theory on drama are Bernard Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama (1970);
E.R. Bentley, The Life of the Drama (1964); Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945); Francis Fergusson, The Idea
of a Theatre (1949); S.K. Langer, Feeling and Form (1953); Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (1961);
Ronald Peacock, The Art of Drama (1957); J.L. Styan, The Elements of Drama (1960); and Keir Elam, The Semiotics of
Theatre and Drama (1980), a technical semiotic approach.
The finest study of the classical drama of Greece is probably H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy, 3rd ed. (1961); and for the
medieval drama are recommended Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vol. (1933); Hardin Craig, English
Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (1955); and O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages
(1965). Oriental theatre is surveyed in Faubion Bowers, Japanese Theatre (1952); F.A. Lombard, An Outline History of
the Japanese Drama (1928), which should be read in conjunction with Arthur Waley's classic The Noh Plays of Japan
(1922); A.C. Scott, The Classical Theatre of China (1957); A.B. Keith, The Sanskrit Drama (1924); with H.W. Wells'
comparative studies, The Classical Drama of India (1963), and The Classical Drama of the Orient (1965).
M.C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935); and U.M. Ellis-Fermor, Jacobean Drama
(1936), are standard surveys of the English Renaissance drama; and for standard Shakespearean criticism the reader
should consult A.M. Eastman, A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism (1968). The classic source books for the
commedia dell'arte are P.L. Duchartre, La Comédie italienne (Eng. trans., The Italian Comedy, 1929, reprinted 1966); and
Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles (1931). On the French classical drama H.C. Lancaster, A History of French
Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 9 vol. (1929-42), is standard; but Martin Turnell, The Classical Moment
(1947), deals more briefly with Corneille, Racine, and Molière. On Restoration comedy J.L. Palmer, The Comedy of
Manners (1913); and Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Comedy (1924), remain the best.
American drama is surveyed briefly in W.J. Meserve, An Outline History of American Drama (1965); and A.S. Downer,
Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900-1950 (1951). U.M. Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, 2nd ed. (1954), is
a comprehensive study of the early years at Dublin's Abbey Theatre; and on Western drama after Ibsen the reader should
begin by consulting Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (1946, reprinted 1955); Robert Brustein, The Theatre of
Revolt (1964); and J.L. Styan, The Dark Comedy, 2nd ed. (1968), an account of the blending of tragic and comic elements
in the post-Ibsen theatre.
Pa g e 15