Tragedy and Other Serious Drama

PURPOSE AND POINT OF VIEW

TRAGEDY AND OTHER SERIOUS DRAMA

COMEDY AND TRAGICOMEDY

PURPOSE AND POINT OF VIEW

Theater is art, and as such it mirrors or reflects life. It does not try to encompass the whole of life at one time but rather selects and focuses on a part of the total picture. Selectivety is a key principle of all art.

The selection process of art occurs in several ways. To begin with, all art forms use certain elements while eliminating others. Music, for instance, focuses on the sounds produced by musical instruments and the human voice.

The means by which an art from present its material is often referred to as the medium. Thus, sound is the medium of music. For theater, the medium is a story enacted by performers: theater always involves actresses and actors on a stage playing characters.

HUMAN BEINGS: THE SUBJECT OF THEATER

Throughout history theater has concertrated or focused on one subject: human beings. This is the true even though different human concernt are emphasized in different plays: the pretenses of men and women in sociaty in The Way of the World by William Congreve (1670-1729); the conflict between high principle and expediency in Antigone by Sophocles; the terrible way in which members of one family can drive one another into desperation and despair in Long Day’s Journay into Night by Eugene O’Neill; the alternating hope and fatility of man waiting for salvation in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1990); the celebration of life in a small town in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

THE PURPOSE OF A THEATER EVENT

In the present-day theater, when a playwright begins work on a play, he or she may not have a clear purpose in mind. The purpose may emerge only as the script goes through several revisions. Before a play goes into production, however, the playwright should know where it is headed.

Tragedi, for example, generally occurs in periods when society as a whole assumes a certain attitude toward people and the universe in which they live. Two periods conducive to the creation of tragedi were the golden age of Greece in the fifth Century B.C. and the Renaissance. Both periods in corporated two ideas essential to tragic drama: on the one hand, the notion that human beings are capable of extraordinary accomplishments; and on the other, the notion that the world is potentially cruel and unjust. A closer look at these two periods will demonstrate how they reflected these two wiewpoints.

The celebration of the individual was apparent in all the arts, including drama. The Greek dramatist Sophocles exclaimed:

Numberless are the wonders of the worldBut noneMore wonderful than man

In the renaissance, Shakespeare has Hamlet say:What a piece of work is man! How noble In reason! How infinite in faculty!In form, in moving, how express andAdmirable! In action how like an angel!In apprehension how like a god!

Personal VisionAs important as it is, however, the outlook of society serves only as the background in creating theater. In the foreground stands the point view of the individual artist: that highly persoanl aoutlook referred to above. Proof of this is the variation among playwrights within the same area.

The Problem of CategoriesBy combining the two elements-the view of society and the individual outlook of the artist- a wide range of seriuous and comic points of view are incorporated in individual plays. For the of convenience, people often classify plays according to point of view: tragedy, comedy, and so forth. A group of plays which form a single type is called a genre, after a French word which means “category” or “type”

In chapter 6, we will study tragedy and other serious drama; and in Chapter 7, comedy. Before we turn to these subjects, however, I should express a word of caution about the question of genre, or categories of drama.

“tragedy, comedy, history pastoral, apstoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. “In spite of the absurdity of this, there are those who continue to try to pigeonhole or label every play that comes along.

Dramatists do not write categories or types of drama; they write individual plays. The dramatists, as well as everyone else concerned with producinga theater event, deals with a specific play-and so should members of the audience. A preoccupation with establishing categories diverts our attention from the main purpose of theater: experience the play in performance.

The reason we learn various forms of drama is not spend our time pinning labels on plays, but to understand that writes, as well as those responsible for the production of a play, take a point of view with regard to their material. Members of the audience must be aware of that point of view if they are to understand a performance properly.A play which aims at a purely melodramatic effect, for instance should be looked at differently from one which aspires to tragedy. A lighearted comedy should not be judged by the same standards as a philosopical play. It is to understand these differences, and the grasp the various ways in which playwrights have traditionally approached their material, that we study the categories into. Which groups of plays frequently fall.

Tragedy And Other Serious Drama

A wide range of theater experiences fall under the heading of serious theater.

These experiences include the inspiration and lofry feel who have problems like our own, the intellectual challege of plays of plays of ideas and the fright and horror induced by melodrama.

Tragedy

Tragedy asks the most basic question about human existence. Tragedy assumes that the universe is different to human concerns, and often cruel or malevolent.

We can divide tragedy into two basic kinds:1. Tragedy Traditional2. Tragedy Modern

Traditional TragedyThree noteworthy periods of history in which tragic drama was produced are Greece in the fifth century B.C., England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and France in the seventeenth century.

The tragedies which appear in these three ages have several characteristics in common, characteristics which help define traditional tragedy. They include the following:

1. Generally the hero or heroine of the play is an extraordinary person: a king, a queen, a general, or a nobleman-in other words, a person of stature.

2. The central figures of the play are caught in a series of tragic circumtances: Oedipus, without realizing it, murders his father and marries his mother; Phaedra falls hopelessly and fatally in love with her stepson

3. The situation becomes irretrievable: there is no turning back, no way out.

4. The hero or heroine accepts responsibillity for his or her actions and also shows a willingness to suffer and an immense capacity for suffering.

5. The language of traditional tragedy is verse.

Modern Tragedy

Modern tragedy involves ordinary people, not the nobility, and is written generally in prose rather than verse.

The deeper meanings of tragedy are explored in its modern form by nonverbal elements and by the cumulative or overall effect of events as well as by verbal means.

There are several kinds of nontragic serious plays, the most notable being heroic drama, melodrama, and bourgeois or domestic drama.

HEROIC DRAMAHeroic drama has many of the same elements as traditional tragedy. Frequently dealing with highborn characters and being written in verse.

In contrast to tragedy, it is marked by a happy ending, or an ending in which the deaths of the main characters are considered a triumph and not a defeat

BURGEOISBurgeois or domestic drama deals with ordinary people in a serious but nontragic manner.

It stresses the problems of the middle and lower classes and has become a particularly prominent form in the past century.

MELODRAMAMelodrama features exaggerated characters and events arranged to create horror or suspense or to present a didactic argument for some political, moral, or social point view

Comedy and Tragicomedy

Comedy

Comedy are not necessarily more frivolous or less concerned with important matters than those who create serious works; they may be extremely serious in their own way.

Characteristic of Comedy

A characteristic of most comedy the temporary suspension of the natural laws of probability and logic.

The focus in comedy is on the man’s being tripped up and getting his cameooance, not on injury because we have suspended disbelief in injury.

Techniques of comedy

Comedy is developed by means of several techniques, show up in several areas – in verbal humor, in characterization and in comic situations.

Verbal Humor : Verbal humor can be anything form a pun to the most sophisticated verbal discourse.

Comedy Of Character : in comedy of character the disperancy or in congruity lies in the way characters see themselves or pretend to be as opposed to the way they actually are.

Plot Compilations : Another way in which contradictory or the ludricous manifets it itself in comedy is in plot compilations

Form ComedyFrom the foregoing, the dramatist

fashion various kinds of comedy. Depending on the degree of exaggeration, a comedy can be farce or comedy of manners : the former of intance, features strong physical humor, while the latter relies more on verbal wit. Depending on its intent, comedy can be designed to entertain as with farce or barlesque or to correct vices, in which case it becomes satire.

TragicomedyIn tragigcomedy, a amile is

frequently cynical, chickles may be tinged with a treat, and laughter is sometimes bitter.

Tragicomedy has taken its place as a major form alongside the more tradional approaches.

Authentic tragicomedy fuses, or synthesizes, two elements – serious, the other comic. We laugh and cry at the same time. Plays by Chekhov, Beckett, Dueerenment and writers of the theater of the absurd employ tragicomedy.

Modern Tragicomedy

Tragicomedy has become a predominant form, the primary approach, in fact of many of the best playwright of our day.

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