Handout drama 05092012

Drama

1. a. A prose or verse composition, especially one telling a serious story, that is intended for representation by actors impersonating the characters and performing the dialogue and action. b. A serious narrative work or program for television, radio, or the cinema.2. Theatrical plays of a particular kind or period: Elizabethan drama. 3. The art or practice of writing or producing dramatic works. 4. A situation or succession of events in real life having the dramatic progression or emotional effect characteristic of a play: the drama of the prisoner's escape and recapture. 5. The quality or condition of being dramatic: a summit meeting full of drama. [Late Latin drāma, drāmat-, from Greek, from drān, to do, perform.]

drama, the general term for performances in which actors impersonate the actions and speech of fictional or historical characters (or non‐human entities) for the entertainment of an audience, either on a stage or by means of a broadcast; or a particular example of this art, i.e. a play. Drama is usually expected to represent stories showing situations of conflict between characters, although the monodrama is a special case in which only one performer speaks. Drama is a major genre of literature, but includes non‐literary forms (in mime), and has several dimensions that lie beyond the domain of the literary dramatist or playwright (see mise en scène). The major dramatic genres in the West are comedy and tragedy, but several other kinds of dramatic work fall outside these categories (see drame, history play, masque, melodrama, morality play, mystery play, tragicomedy). Dramatic poetry is a category of verse composition for theatrical performance; the term is now commonly extended, however, to non‐theatrical poems that involve a similar kind of impersonation, as in the closet drama and the dramatic monologue.

Western drama

drama, Western, plays produced in the Western world. This article discusses the development of Western drama in general; for further information see the various national literature articles.

Greek DramaThe Western dramatic tradition has its origins in ancient Greece. The precise evolution of its main divisions-tragedy, comedy, and satire-is not definitely known. According to Aristotle, Greek drama, or, more explicitly, Greek tragedy, originated in the dithyramb. This was a choral hymn to the god Dionysus and involved exchanges between a lead singer and the chorus. It is thought that the dithyramb was sung at the Dionysia, an annual festival honoring Dionysus. Tradition has it that at the Dionysia of 534 B.C., during the reign of Pisistratus, the lead singer of the dithyramb, a man named Thespis, added to the chorus an actor with whom he carried on a dialogue, thus initiating the possibility of dramatic action. Thespis is credited with the invention of tragedy. Eventually, Aeschylus introduced a second actor to the drama and Sophocles a third, Sophocles' format being continued by Euripides, the last of the great classical Greek dramatists. Generally, the earlier Greek tragedies place more emphasis on the chorus than the later ones. In the majestic plays of Aeschylus, the chorus serves to underscore the personalities and situations of the characters and to provide ethical comment on the action. Much of Aeschylus' most beautiful poetry is contained in the choruses of his plays. The increase in the number of actors resulted in less concern with communal problems and beliefs and more with dramatic conflict between individuals. Accompanying this emphasis on individuals' interaction, from the time of Aeschylus to that of Euripides, there was a marked tendency toward realism. Euripides' characters are ordinary, not godlike, and the gods themselves are introduced more as devices of plot manipulation (as in the use of the deus ex machina in Medea, 431 B.C.) than as strongly felt representations of transcendent power. Utilizing three actors, Sophocles developed dramatic action beyond anything Aeschylus had achieved with only two and also introduced more natural speech. However, he did not lose a sense of the godlike in man and man's affairs, as Euripides often did. Thus, it is Sophocles who best represents the classical balance between the human and divine, the realistic and the symbolic.

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Greek comedy is divided by scholars into Old Comedy (5th cent. B.C.), Middle Comedy (c.404-c.321 B.C.), and New Comedy (c.320-c.264 B.C.). The sole literary remains of Old Comedy are the plays of Aristophanes, characterized by obscenity, political satire, fantasy, and strong moral overtones. While there are no extant examples of Middle Comedy, it is conjectured that the satire, obscenity, and fantasy of the earlier plays were much mitigated during this transitional period. Most extant examples of New Comedy are from the works of Menander; these comedies are realistic and elegantly written, often revolving around a love-interest.

Roman Drama The Roman theater never approached the heights of the Greek, and the Romans themselves had little interest in serious dramatic endeavors, being drawn toward sensationalism and spectacle. The earliest Roman dramatic attempts were simply translations from the Greek. Gnaeus Naevius (c.270-c.199 B.C.) and his successors imitated Greek models in tragedies that never transcended the level of violent melodrama. Even the nine tragedies of the philosopher and statesman Seneca are gloomy and lurid, emphasizing the sensational aspects of Greek myth; they are noted primarily for their inflated rhetoric. Seneca became an important influence on Renaissance tragedy, but it is unlikely that his plays were intended for more than private readings. Although Roman tragedy produced little of worth, a better judgment may be passed on the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Plautus incorporated native Roman elements into the plots and themes of Menander, producing plays characterized by farce, intrigue, romance, and sentiment. Terence was a more polished stylist who wrote for and about the upper classes and dispensed with the element of farce. The Roman preference for spectacle and the Christian suppression of drama led to a virtual cessation of dramatic production during the decline of the Roman Empire. Pantomimes accompanied by a chorus developed out of tragedy, and comic mimes were popular until the 4th cent. A.D. (see pantomime). It is this mime tradition, carried on by traveling performers, that provided the theatrical continuity between the ancient world and the medieval. The Roman mime tradition has been suggested as the origin of the commedia dell'arte of the Italian Renaissance, but this conjecture has never been proved.

Medieval Drama While the Christian church did much to suppress the performance of plays, paradoxically it is in the church that medieval drama began. The first record of this beginning is the trope in the Easter service known as the Quem quaeritis [whom you seek]. Tropes, originally musical elaborations of the church service, gradually evolved into drama; eventually the Latin lines telling of the Resurrection were spoken, rather than sung, by priests who represented the angels and the two Marys at the tomb of Jesus. Thus, simple interpolations developed into grandiose cycles of mystery plays, depicting biblical episodes from the Creation to Judgment Day. The most famous of these plays is the Second Shepherds' Play. Another important type that developed from church liturgy was the miracle play, based on the lives of saints rather than on scripture. The miracle play reached its peak in France and the mystery play in England. Both types gradually became secularized, passing into the hands of trade guilds or professional actors. The Second Shepherds' Play, for all its religious seriousness, is most noteworthy for its elements of realism and farce, while the miracle plays in France often emphasized comedy and adventure (see miracle play).

The morality play, a third type of religious drama, appeared early in the 15th cent. Morality plays were religious allegories, the most famous being Everyman. Another type of drama popular in medieval times was the interlude, which can be generally defined as a dramatic work with characteristics of the morality play that is primarily intended for entertainment.

Renaissance Drama By the advent of the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th cent., most European countries had established native traditions of religious drama and farce that contended with the impact of the newly discovered Greek and Roman plays. Little had been known of classical drama during the Middle Ages, and evidently the only classical imitations during that period were the Christian imitations of Terence by the Saxon nun Hrotswitha in the 10th cent.

Italy The translation and imitation of the classics occurred first in Italy, with Terence, Plautus, and Seneca as the models. The Italians strictly applied their interpretation of Aristotle's rules for

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the drama, and this rigidity was primarily responsible for the failure of Italian Renaissance drama. Some liveliness appeared in the comic sphere, particularly in the works of Ariosto and in Machiavelli's satiric masterpiece, La Mandragola (1524). The pastoral drama-set in the country and depicting the romantic affairs of rustic people, usually shepherds and shepherdesses-was more successful than either comedy or tragedy. Notable Italian practitioners of the genre were Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612) and Torquato Tasso.The true direction of the Italian stage was toward the spectacular and the musical. A popular Italian Renaissance form was the intermezzo, which presented music and lively entertainment between the acts of classical imitations. The native taste for music and theatricality led to the emergence of the opera in the 16th cent. and the triumph of this form on the Italian stage in the 17th cent. Similarly, the commedia dell'arte, emphasizing comedy and improvisation and featuring character types familiar to a contemporary audience, was more popular than academic imitations of classical comedy.

France Renaissance drama appeared somewhat later in France than in Italy. Estienne Jodelle's Senecan tragedy Cleopatre captive (1553) marks the beginning of classical imitation in France. The French drama initially suffered from the same rigidity as the Italian, basing itself on Roman models and Italian imitations. However, in the late 16th cent. in France there was a romantic reaction to classical dullness, led by Alexandre Hardy, France's first professional playwright. This romantic trend was stopped in the 17th cent. by Cardinal Richelieu, who insisted on a return to classic forms. Richelieu's judgment, however, bore fruit in the triumphs of the French neoclassical tragedies of Jean Racine and the comedies of Molière. The great tragedies of Pierre Corneille, although classical in their grandeur and in their concern with noble characters, are decidedly of the Renaissance in their exaltation of man's ability, by force of will, to transcend adverse circumstances.

Spain Renaissance drama in Spain and England was more successful than in France and Italy because the two former nations were able to transform classical models with infusions of native characteristics. In Spain the two leading Renaissance playwrights were Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Earlier, Lope de Rueda had set the tone for future Spanish drama with plays that are romantic, lyrical, and generally in the mixed tragicomic form. Lope de Vega wrote an enormous number of plays of many types, emphasizing plot, character, and romantic action. Best known for his La vida es sueño [life is a dream], a play that questions the nature of reality, Calderón was a more controlled and philosophical writer than Lope.

England The English drama of the 16th cent. showed from the beginning that it would not be bound by classical rules. Elements of farce, morality, and a disregard for the unities of time, place, and action inform the early comedies Gammer Gurton's Needle and Ralph Roister Doister (both c.1553) and the Senecan tragedy Gorboduc (1562). William Shakespeare's great work was foreshadowed by early essays in the historical chronicle play, by elements of romance found in the works of John Lyly, by revenge plays such as Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (c.1586)-again inspired by the works of Seneca-and by Christopher Marlowe's development of blank verse and his deepening of the tragic perception. Shakespeare, of course, stands as the supreme dramatist of the Renaissance period, equally adept at writing tragedies, comedies, or chronicle plays. His great achievements include the perfection of a verse form and language that capture the spirit of ordinary speech and yet stand above it to give a special dignity to his characters and situations; an unrivaled subtlety of characterization; and a marvelous ability to unify plot, character, imagery, and verse movement.With the reign of James I the English drama began to decline until the closing of the theaters by the Puritans in 1642. This period is marked by sensationalism and rhetoric in tragedy, as in the works of John Webster and Thomas Middleton, spectacle in the form of the masque, and a gradual turn to polished wit in comedy, begun by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher and furthered by James Shirley. The best plays of the Jacobean period are the comedies of Ben Jonson, in which he satirized contemporary life by means of his own invention, the comedy of humours

Eighteenth-Century Drama The influence of Restoration comedy can be seen in the 18th cent. in the plays of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. This century also ushered in the middle-class or

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domestic drama, which treated the problems of ordinary people. George Lillo's London Merchant; or, The History of George Barnwell (1731), is an important example of this type of play because it brought the bourgeois tragic hero to the English stage. Such playwrights as Sir Richard Steele and Colley Cibber in England and Marivaux in France contributed to the development of the genteel, sentimental comedy. While the political satire in the plays of Henry Fielding and in John Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728) seemed to offer a more interesting potential than the sentiment of Cibber, this line of development was cut off by the Licensing Act of 1737, which required government approval before a play could be produced. The Italian Carlo Goldoni, who wrote realistic comedies with fairly sophisticated characterizations, also tended toward middle-class moralizing. His contemporary, Count Carlo Gozzi, was more ironic and remained faithful to the spirit of the commedia dell'arte. Prior to the surge of German romanticism in the late 18th cent., two playwrights stood apart from the trend toward sentimental bourgeois realism. Voltaire tried to revive classical models and introduced exotic Eastern settings, although his tragedies tend to be more philosophical than dramatic. Similarly, the Italian Count Vittorio Alfieri sought to restore the spirit of the ancients to his drama, but the attempt was vitiated by his chauvinism.

The Sturm und Drang in Germany represented a romantic reaction against French neoclassicism and was supported by an upsurge of German interest in Shakespeare, who was viewed at the time as the greatest of the romantics. Gotthold Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, and Goethe were the principal figures of this movement, but the plays produced by the three are frequently marred by sentimentality and too heavy a burden of philosophical ideas.

Nineteenth-Century Drama

The romantic movement did not blossom in French drama until the 1820s, and then primarily in the work of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père, while in England the great Romantic poets did not produce important drama, although both Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were practitioners of the closet drama. Burlesque and mediocre melodrama reigned supreme on the English stage.

Although melodrama was aimed solely at producing superficial excitement, its development, coupled with the emergence of realism in the 19th cent., resulted in more serious drama. Initially, the melodrama dealt in such superficially exciting materials as the gothic castle with its mysterious lord for a villain, but gradually the characters and settings moved closer to the realities of contemporary life.

The concern for generating excitement led to a more careful consideration of plot construction, reflected in the smoothly contrived climaxes of the "well-made" plays of Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou of France and Arthur Wing Pinero of England. The work of Émile Augier and Alexandre Dumas fils combined the drama of ideas with the "well-made" play. Realism had perhaps its most profound expression in the works of the great 19th-century Russian dramatists: Nikolai Gogol, A. N. Ostrovsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. Many of the Russian dramatists emphasized character and satire rather than plot in their works.

Related to realism is naturalism, which can be defined as a selective realism emphasizing the more sordid and pessimistic aspects of life. An early forerunner of this style in the drama is Georg Büchner's powerful tragedy Danton's Death (1835), and an even earlier suggestion may be seen in the pessimistic romantic tragedies of Heinrich von Kleist. Friedrich Hebbel wrote grimly naturalistic drama in the middle of the 19th cent., but the naturalistic movement is most commonly identified with the "slice-of-life" theory of Émile Zola, which had a profound effect on 20th-century playwrights.

Henrik Ibsen of Norway brought to a climax the realistic movement of the 19th cent. and also served as a bridge to 20th-century symbolism. His realistic dramas of ideas surpass other such works because they blend a complex plot, a detailed setting, and middle-class yet extraordinary characters in an organic whole. Ibsen's later plays, such as The Master Builder (1892), are symbolic, marking a trend away from realism that was continued by August Strindberg's dream plays, with their emphasis on the spiritual, and by the plays of the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, who incorporated into drama the theories of the symbolist poets (see symbolists).

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While these antirealistic developments took place on the Continent, two playwrights were making unique contributions to English theater. Oscar Wilde produced comedies of manners that compare favorably with the works of Congreve, and George Bernard Shaw brought the play of ideas to fruition with penetrating intelligence and singular wit.

Twentieth-Century Drama

During the 20th cent., especially after World War I, Western drama became more internationally unified and less the product of separate national literary traditions. Throughout the century realism, naturalism, and symbolism (and various combinations of these) continued to inform important plays. Among the many 20th-century playwrights who have written what can be broadly termed naturalist dramas are Gerhart Hauptmann (German), John Galsworthy (English), John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey (Irish), and Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Lillian Hellman (American).

An important movement in early 20th-century drama was expressionism. Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century technological society through such devices as minimal scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types rather than individuals. Notable playwrights who wrote expressionist dramas include Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser (German), Karel Čapek (Czech), and Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill (American). The 20th cent. also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Maxwell Anderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in English. In Spanish, however, the poetic dramas of Federico Garcia Lorca are placed among the great works of Spanish literature.

Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O'Neill's body of plays in many forms-naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological-won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his theses, he endeavored-by using expressionist techniques-to make them continually aware that they were watching a play, not vicariously experiencing reality. For Pirandello, too, it was paramount to fix an awareness of his plays as theater; indeed, the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the difficulty of differentiating between illusion and reality.

World War II and its attendant horrors produced a widespread sense of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. This sense is brilliantly expressed in the body of plays that have come to be known collectively as the theater of the absurd. By abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to convey modern humanity's feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair-the sense that reality is itself unreal. In their plays human beings often portrayed as dupes, clowns who, although not without dignity, are at the mercy of forces that are inscrutable.

Probably the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionesco's Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). The sources of the theater of the absurd are diverse; they can be found in the tenets of surrealism, Dadaism (see Dada), and existentialism; in the traditions of the music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque; and in the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Playwrights whose works can be roughly classed as belonging to the theater of the absurd are Jean Genet (French), Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Swiss), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), and the early plays of Edward Albee (American). The pessimism and despair of the 20th cent. also found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Anouilh, and in the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau.

Somewhat similar to the theater of the absurd is the so-called theater of cruelty, derived from the ideas of Antonin Artaud, who, writing in the 1930s, foresaw a drama that would assault its audience with movement and sound, producing a visceral rather than an intellectual reaction. After the violence of World War II and the subsequent threat of the atomic bomb, his approach seemed particularly appropriate to many playwrights. Elements of the theater of cruelty can be found in the brilliantly abusive language of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and

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Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in the ritualistic aspects of some of Genet's plays, in the masked utterances and enigmatic silences of Harold Pinter's "comedies of menace," and in the orgiastic abandon of Julian Beck's Paradise Now! (1968); it was fully expressed in Peter Brooks's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964).

During the last third of the 20th cent. a few continental European dramatists, such as Dario Fo in Italy and Heiner Müller in Germany, stand out in the theater world. However, for the most part, the countries of the continent saw an emphasis on creative trends in directing rather than a flowering of new plays. In the United States and England, however, many dramatists old and new continued to flourish, with numerous plays of the later decades of the 20th cent. (and the early 21st cent.) echoing the trends of the years preceding them.

Realism in a number of guises-psychological, social, and political-continued to be a force in such British works as David Storey's Home (1971), Sir Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests trilogy (1974), and David Hare's Amy's View (1998); in such Irish dramas as Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Martin McDonagh's 1990s Leenane trilogy; and in such American plays as Jason Miller's That Championship Season (1972), Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly (1979), and John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1990). In keeping with the tenor of the times, many of these and other works of the period were marked by elements of wit, irony, and satire.

A witty surrealism also characterized some of the late 20th cent.'s theater, particularly the brilliant wordplay and startling juxtapositions of the many plays of England's Tom Stoppard. In addition, two of late-20th-century America's most important dramatists, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (as well as their followers and imitators), explored American culture with a kind of hyper-realism mingled with echoes of the theater of cruelty in the former's Buried Child (1978), the latter's Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and other works. While each exhibited his own very distinctive voice and vision, both playwrights achieved many of their effects through stark settings, austere language in spare dialog, meaningful silences, the projection of a powerful streak of menace, and outbursts of real or implied violence.

The late decades of the 20th century were also a time of considerable experiment and iconoclasm. Experimental dramas of the 1960s and 70s by such groups as Beck's Living Theater and Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre were followed by a mixing and merging of various kinds of media with aspects of postmodernism, improvisational techniques, performance art, and other kinds of avant-garde theater. Some of the era's more innovative efforts included productions by theater groups such as New York's La MaMa (1961-) and Mabou Mines (1970-) and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Co. (1976-); the Canadian writer-director Robert Lepage's intricate, sometimes multilingual works, e.g. Tectonic Plates (1988); the inventive one-man shows of such monologuists as Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and John Leguizamo; the transgressive drag dramas of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater, e.g., The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984); and the operatic multimedia extravaganzas of Robert Wilson, e.g. White Raven (1999).

Thematically, the social upheavals of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s-particularly the civil rights and women's movements, gay liberation, and the AIDS crisis-provided impetus for new plays that explored the lives of minorities and women. Beginning with Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), drama by and about African Americans emerged as a significant theatrical trend. In the 1960s plays such as James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Baraka's searing Dutchman (1964), and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody (1967) explored black American life; writers including Ed Bullins (e.g., The Taking of Miss Janie, 1975), Ntozake Shange (e.g., For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1976) and Charles Fuller (e.g., A Soldier's Play, 1981) carried these themes into later decades. One of the most distinctive and prolific of the century's African-American playwrights, August Wilson, debuted on Broadway in 1984 with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and continued to define the black American experience in his ongoing dramatic cycle into the next century.

Feminist and other women-centered themes dramatized by contemporary female playwrights were plentiful in the 1970s and extended in the following decades. Significant figures included England's Caryl Churchill (e.g., the witty Top Girls, 1982), the Cuban-American experimentalist Maria Irene Forńes (e.g., Fefu and Her Friends, 1977) and American realists including Beth Henley (e.g., Crimes of the Heart, 1978), Marsha Norman (e.g., 'Night Mother, 1982), and Wendy Wasserstein (e.g., The Heidi Chronicles, 1988). Skilled monologuists also provided

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provocative female-themed one-women shows such as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (1996) and various solo theatrical performances by Lily Tomlin, Karen Finley, Anna Deveare Smith, Sarah Jones, and others.

Gay themes (often in works by gay playwrights) also marked the later decades of the 20th cent. Homosexual characters had been treated sympathetically but in the context of pathology in such earlier 20th-century works as Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953). Gay subjects were presented more explicitly during the 1960s, notably in the English farces of Joe Orton and Matt Crowley's witty but grim portrait of pre-Stonewall American gay life, The Boys in the Band (1968). In later years gay experience was explored more frequently and with greater variety and openness, notably in Britain in Martin Sherman's Bent (1979) and Peter Gill's Mean Tears (1987) and in the United States in Jane Chambers' Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (1981), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1986), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), which also dealt with Asian identity, and Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (1993). Tony Kushner's acclaimed two-part Angels in America (1991-92) is generally considered the century's most brilliant and innovative theatrical treatment of the contemporary gay world.

Bibliography

See A. Nicoll, World Drama from Aeschylus to Anouilh (1950); J. Gassner, Masters of the Drama (3d ed. 1954); M. Bieber, The History of Greek and Roman Theatre (2d ed. 1961); B. Clark, ed., European Theories of the Drama (rev. ed. 1965); G. Freedley and J. A. Reeves, A History of the Theatre (3d ed. 1968); M. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961, repr. 1969); J. Gassner and E. Quinn, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama (1969); G. E. Wellarth, The Theatre of Protest and Paradox (2d ed. 1970); C. J. Stratman, Bibliography of Medieval Drama (2d ed. 1972); S. Cheney, The Theatre (rev. ed. 1972); R. Gilman, The Making of Modern Drama (1974); J. L. Styan, ed., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice (3 vol., 1981-83); G. Loney, Twentieth Century Theater (2 vol., 1983); J. Roose-Evans, Experimental Theater (1984); P. Hartnoll The Theatre: A Concise History (rev. ed. 1985) and, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (rev. ed. 1990); R. and H. Leacroft, Theatre and Playhouse (1988); O. G. Brockett and R. R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama Since the Late 19th Century (2d ed. 1990); G. R. Kernodle, The Theatre in History (1990); F. H. Londre, The History of World Theater (1991); E. Wilson and A. Goldfarb, Theater: The Lively Art (2d ed. 1991); G. Wickham, A History of the Theatre (2d ed. 1992); D. Rubin, ed., The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre (5 vol., 1994-98); M. Banham, ed., The Cambridge Guide to Theatre (rev. ed. 1995); O. G. Brockett, History of the Theatre (7th ed. 1995); R. Drain, ed., Twentieth-Century Theater: A Sourcebook of Radical Thinking (1995); M. C. Henderson, Theater in America (1996); D. B. Wilmeth and L. T. Miller, ed., The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1996); D. B. Wilmeth and C. Bigsby, ed., The Cambridge History of American Theatre (3 vol., 2000); G. Bordman and T. S. Hischak, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (3d ed. 2004).

Drama

What this handout is about

This handout identifies common questions about drama, discusses the elements of drama that are most often discussed in theater classes, provides a few strategies for planning and writing an effective paper, and identifies various resources for research in theater history and dramatic criticism.

What is drama? And how do you write about it?)

Drama is tension. In the context of a play in a theatre, tension often means that the audience is expecting something to happen between the characters on stage. Will they shoot each other? Will

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they finally confess their undying love for one another? Will Oedipus figure out that he was the one that caused the plague by killing his father and sleeping with his mother?

For instructors in academic departments, whether the classes are about theatrical literature, theater history, performance studies, acting, or technical aspects of a production, writing about drama often means finding reasons why and how the plays we watch are filled with tension and excitement. Of course, one particular production may not be as exciting as it's supposed to be. In fact, it may not be exciting at all. Writing about drama can also involve figuring out why and how a production went horribly, horribly wrong.

Two of our other handouts might be useful if you need to do research in the specialized field of Performance Studies (a branch of Communication Studies) or want to focus especially closely on poetic or powerful language in a play:

Plays, productions, and performances

Talking about these three things can be difficult, especially since there's so much overlap in the uses of the terms. For the most part, plays are what's on the page. There are countless exceptions to this idea, but it's always worthwhile to keep an eye on what you mean by this term. A production of a play is a series of performances, each of which may have its own idiosyncratic features. For example, one production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night might set the play in 1940's Manhattan and another might set the play on an Alpaca farm in New Zealand. Furthermore, in a particular performance (say, Tuesday night) of that production, the actor playing Malvolio might get fed up with playing the role as an Alpaca herder, shout about the indignity of the whole thing, curse Shakespeare for ever writing the play, and stomp off the stage. See how that works?

Be aware that the above terms are sometimes used interchangeably—but the overlapping elements of each are often the most exciting things to talk about. For example, a series of particularly bad performances might distract from excellent production values: If the actor playing Falstaff repeatedly trips over a lance and falls off the stage, the audience may not notice the spectacular set design behind him. In the same way, a particularly dynamic and inventive script may so bedazzle an audience that they never notice the inept lighting scheme.

A few analyzable elements of plays

This brings us to the wonderful variety of things that you can gawk at, ponder, and write about when you go to see a play. Playwrights are called playwrights because, like cartwrights build carts and shipwrights build ships, playwrights build plays. The reason that the word still has that sense of "builder" or "maker" (even if the playwright actually only scribbles on pages in his or her garret) is because plays, whether considered as literary works or as cultural artifacts, rarely succeed on stage without a certain understanding of the concrete bits and pieces that end up on the planks, under the lights, and in front of an audience. To put it another way: the words of a play have a context.

For the play itself, some important contexts to consider are

The time period in which the play was written The playwright's biography and other works Contemporaneous works of theater (plays written or produced by other artists) The language of the play

Depending on your assignment, you may want to focus on any one of these elements exclusively or compare and contrast two or more of them. Keep in mind that any one of these elements may be more than enough for a dissertation, let alone a short reaction paper. Since a number of academic assignments ask you to pay attention to the language of the play and since it might be the most complicated thing to work with, it's worth looking at a few of the ways you might be asked to deal with it in more detail.

Language

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There are countless ways that you can talk about how language works in a play, a production, or a particular performance. Given a choice, you should probably focus on words, phrases, lines, or scenes that really struck you, things that you still remember weeks after reading the play or seeing the performance. You'll have a much easier time writing about a bit of language that you feel strongly about (love it or hate it).

That said, here are two common ways to talk about the way language works in a play:

1. How characters are constructed by their language

If you have a strong impression of a character, especially if you haven't seen it on stage, you probably remember one line or bit of dialogue that really captures who that character is. Playwrights often distinguish their characters with idiosyncratic or at least individualized manners of speaking. Take this example from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON: Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?LANE: I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.ALGERNON: I'm sorry for that, for your sake. I don't play accurately—anyone can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.LANE: Yes, sir.ALGERNON: And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?

This early moment in the play contributes enormously to what the audience thinks about the aristocratic Algernon and his servant, Lane. If you were to talk about language in this scene, you could discuss Lane's reserved replies (Are they funny? Do they indicate familiarity or sarcasm? How do you think of a servant who replies in that way?) or Algernon's witty responses (Does Algernon really care what Lane thinks? Is he talking more to hear himself? What does that say about how the audience is supposed to see Algernon?). Algernon's manner of speech is part of who his character is. If you are analyzing a particular performance, you might want to comment on the actor's delivery of these lines: Was his vocal inflection appropriate? Did it show something about the character?

2. How language contributes to scene and mood

Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance plays often use verbal tricks and nuances to convey the setting and time of the play because they didn't have elaborate special-effects technology to create theatrical illusions. For example, most scenes from Shakespeare's Macbeth take place at night. The play was originally performed in an open-air theatre in the bright and sunny afternoon. How did Shakespeare communicate the fact that it was night-time in the play? Mainly by starting scenes like this:

BANQUO: How goes the night, boy?FLEANCE: The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.BANQUO: And she goes down at twelve.FLEANCE: I take't, 'tis later, sir.BANQUO: Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heaven; Their candles are all out. Take thee that too. A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers, Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose!

Enter MACBETH, and a Servant with a torch

Give me my sword.Who's there?

Characters entering with torches is a pretty big clue, as is having a character say, "It's night." Later in the play, the question, "Who's there?" recurs a number of times, establishing the illusion that the characters can't see each other. The sense of encroaching

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darkness and the general mysteriousness of night contributes to a number of other themes and motifs in the play.

Productions and performances

Productions

For productions as a whole, some important elements to consider are:

Venue: How big is the theatre? Is this a professional or amateur acting company? What kind of resources do they have? How does this affect the show?

Costumes: What is everyone wearing? Is it appropriate to the historical period? Modern? Trendy? Old-fashioned? Does it fit the character? What does the costume make you think about the character? How does this affect the show?

Set design: What does the set look like? Does it try to create a sense of "realism"? Does it set the play in a particular historical period? What impressions does the set create? How does this affect the show?

Lighting design: Are characters ever in the dark? Are there spotlights? Does light come through windows? From above? From below? Is any tinted or colored light projected? How does this affect the show?

"Idea" or "concept": Do the set and lighting designs seem to work together to produce a certain interpretation? Do costumes and other elements seem coordinated? How does this affect the show?

You've probably noticed that each of these ends with the question, "How does this affect the show?" That's because you should be connecting everything, every detail that you analyze back to this question. If a particularly weird costume (King Henry in scuba gear) suggests something about the character (King Henry has gone off the deep end, literally and figuratively), then you can ask yourself, "Does this add or detract from the show?" (King Henry having an interest in aquatic mammalia may not have been what Shakespeare had in mind.)

Performances

For individual performances, you can analyze all the items considered above (for plays and performances) in the light of how they might have been different the night before. For example, some important elements to consider are:

Individual acting performances: Not how brilliant Hamlet was, but how brilliant, say, John Gielgud's Hamlet was? What did the actor playing the part bring to the performance? Was there anything particularly moving about the performance that night that surprised you, that you didn't imagine from reading the play beforehand (if you did so)?

Mishaps, flubs, and fire alarms: Did the actors mess up? Did the performance grind to a halt or did it continue?

Audience reactions: Was there applause? At inappropriate points? Did someone fall asleep and snore loudly in the second act? Did anyone cry? Did anyone walk out in utter outrage?

Response papers

Instructors in drama classes often want to know what you really think. This can have its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you may find it easier to express yourself without the pressure of specific guidelines or restrictions. On the other hand, it may be frustrating not to have anything specific to write about. Hopefully, the elements and topics listed above can also provide you with a jumping-off point for more open-ended responses, ie. How did the lighting make you feel? Nervous? Bored? Distracted?

Most of the time, responses are directed toward individual performances that you go see, so you should feel free to be as specific as possible. One the easiest ways to do this is to remember that most of the time, you can say more about less. You'll have a much more difficult time if you start

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out writing about "imagery" or "language" in a play than if you start by writing about that ridiculous face Helena made when she found out Lysander didn't love her anymore.

If you're really having trouble getting started, here's a three point plan for responding to a piece of theater.

1. Make a list of five or six specific words, images, or moments that caught your attention while you were sitting in your seat.

2. Answer one of the following questions: Did any of those moments contribute to your enjoyment or loathing of the play? Did any of these moments seem to contribute or detract from any overall theme that the play may have had? Did any of these moments make you think of something completely different and wholly irrelevant to the play?

3. Write a few sentences about how each of the moments you picked out for the second question worked.

4. Works consulted

4. We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout's topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial.

5. Worthen, W.B. The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. New York: Heinle & Heinle, 1999.6. Carter, Paul. The Backstage Handbook: An Illustrated Almanac of Technical Information,

3rd Ed. Shelter Island, New York: Broadway Press, 1994.7. UNC Libraries Comprehensive Guide to Resources for the Study of Drama and Theater.

1. Ian Johnston, " Dramatic Structure : Comedy and Tragedy" Dramatic Structure: Comedy and Tragedy. Shakespeare's plays are all about one great general theme: disorder. This may sound like a profound statement, but, ...www.siue.edu/.../eng208NotesOnComedyAndTragedy.htm - Cached[The following has been excerpted from Ian Johnston's introductory lecture to his English 366: Studies in Shakespeare course at Malaspina University College in British Columbia; it is the best introductory discussion I have ever read on the subject of dramatic comedy and tragedy, and it is especially useful as an introduction to the major themes of King Lear. The full version of this lecture can be accessed here.]

Dramatic Structure: Comedy and Tragedy

Shakespeare's plays are all about one great general theme: disorder. This may sound like a profound statement, but, as we shall see in a moment, it applies equally well to almost all drama. Still, the point is worth stressing, for reasons we shall attend to in a moment, because the major entry into every play we read is going to be an attempt to answer some key questions associated with that notion of disorder: What is the order in this society? How is that order violated? How do the characters respond to the loss of traditional order? How is order restored? Is the new order at the end of the play something healthy or is it shot through with ironic resonance?

All dramatic stories always involve conflict. Typically, the dramatic narrative will open with some sense of a normal society: we see people of all kinds going about their business, and in witnessing this initial state of affairs we quickly ascertain the various ranks of people, the bonds which hold them together, and something about their value system. In other words, we begin with a society which is held together by shared rules. Many of Shakespeare's plays begin with a large group scene (the king and his court, for example) in which everyone has a place and knows his or

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her place. The scene is offered to us as a symbol of social unity which is about to be broken and will not be restored until the closing scenes (e.g., King Lear, Macbeth, Richard II).

Then, something unusual and often unexpected happens to upset that normality. The event may be something natural, like a ship wreck (as in Twelfth Night or The Tempest), supernatural (as in Macbeth and Hamlet), a decision made by a particular character (as in King Lear or As You Like It) or a sudden quarrel (e.g., As You Like It, Henry IV, Part 1). Often this event which kick starts the action is given very quickly with no attempt to provide a detailed explanation for it or even, in some cases, instantly plausible motivation (e.g., Cordelia's refusal to answer Lear, Oliver's decision to seek Orlando's death). At all events, this upset (which typically occurs very early in the action) disturbs the normal situation, creates confusion and conflict. Such conflict may be the source of much humour (for example, in the various mistaken identities which occur when a set of twins or, as in Comedy of Errors, two sets of twins, unexpectedly get loose in the community), or it may be the source of much political, personal, and psychological torment. Attempts to understand what is going on or to deal with it simply compound the conflict, accelerating it and intensifying it. Finally, the conflict is resolved.

The terms comedy and tragedy commonly refer to the ways in which dramatic conflicts are resolved. In comedy, the confusion ends when everyone recognizes what has been going on, learns from it, forgives, forgets, and re-establishes his or her identity in the smoothly functioning social group (which may return to the original normality or may be setting up a better situation than the one the group started with). Comedies typically end with a group celebration, especially one associated with a betrothal or wedding, often accompanied by music and dancing The emphasis is on the reintegration of everyone into the group, a recommitment to their shared life together. If there has been a clearly disruptive presence in the action, a source of anti-social discord, then that person typically has reformed his ways, has been punished, or is banished from the celebration. Thus, the comic celebration is looking forward to a more meaningful communal life (hence the common ending for comedies: "And they lived happily ever after").

The ending of a tragedy is quite different. Here the conflict is resolved only with the death of the main character, who usually discovers just before his death that his attempts to control the conflict and make his way through it have simply compounded his difficulties and that, therefore, to a large extent the dire situation he is in is largely of his own making. The death of the hero is not normally the very last thing in a tragedy, however, for there is commonly (especially in classical Greek tragedy) some group lament over the body of the fallen hero, a reflection upon the significance of the life which has now ended. Some of Shakespeare's best known speeches are these laments. The final action of a tragedy is then the carrying out of the corpse. The social group has formed again, but only as a result of the sacrifice of the main character(s), and the emphasis in the group is in a much lower key, as they ponder the significance of the life of the dead hero (in that sense, the ending of a tragedy is looking back over what has happened; the ending of comedy is looking forward to a joyful future).

This apparently simple structural difference between comedy and tragedy means that, with some quick rewriting, a tragic structure can be modified into a comic one. If we forget about violating the entire vision in the work (more about this later), we can see how easily a painful tragic ending can be converted into a reassuring comic conclusion.. If Juliet wakes up in time, she and Romeo can live happily ever after. If Cordelia

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survives, then Lear's heart will not break; she can marry Edgar, and all three of them can live prosperously and happily for years to come. And so on. Such changes to the endings of Shakespeare's tragedies were commonplace in eighteenth-century productions, at a time when the tragic vision of experience was considered far less acceptable and popular by the general public.

Comedy and Tragedy as Visions of Experience

But the terms tragedy and comedy refer to more than simply the structure of a narrative (especially the ending). The terms also commonly refer to visions of experience (which those structures present). And this matter is considerably more complex than simply the matter of the final plot twist. 

Of the two, the comic vision is easier to explain, since, as we shall see, it corresponds to the way most of us think (or like to think) about life. Stated most simply, the comic vision celebrates the individual's participation in a community as the most important part of life. When the normal community is upset, the main characters in a comedy will normally have the initial urge to seek to restore that normality, to get back what they have lost. Initially, they will be unsuccessful, and they will have to adapt to unfamiliar changes (funny or otherwise). But in a comedy the main characters will have the ability to adjust, to learn, to come up with the resources necessary to meet the challenges they face. They may also have a great deal of luck. But one way and another, they persevere and the conflict is resolved happily with the reintegration of the characters into a shared community. Often an important point in the comedy is the way in which the main characters have to learn some important things about life (especially about themselves) before being able to resolve the conflict (this is particular true of the men in Shakespeare's comedies).

This form of story, it will be clear, is an endorsement of the value in the communal life we share together and of the importance of adjusting our individual demands on life to suit community demands. In a sense, the comic confusion will often force the individual to encounter things he or she has taken for granted, and dealing with these may well test many different resources (above all faith, flexibility, perseverance, and trust in other people). But through a final acknowledgment (earned or learned) of the importance of human interrelationships, a social harmony will be restored (commonly symbolized by a new betrothal, a reconciliation between parents, a family reunion, and so on), and a group celebration (feast, dance, procession) will endorse that new harmony.

Tragedy, by contrast, explores something much more complex: the individual's sense of his own desire to confront the world on his own terms, to get the world to answer to his conceptions of himself, if necessary at the expense of customary social bonds and even of his own life. The tragic hero characteristically sets out to deal with a conflict by himself or at least entirely on his own terms, and as things start to get more complicated, generally the tragic figure will simply redouble his efforts, increasingly persuaded that he can deal with what is happening only on his own. In that sense, tragic heroes are passionately egocentric and unwilling to compromise their powerful sense of their own identity in the face of unwelcome facts. They will not let themselves answer to any communal system of value; they answer only to themselves. Lear would sooner face the storm on the heath than compromise his sense of being horribly wronged by his daughters; Macbeth wills himself to more killings as the only means to resolve the psychological torment he feels; Othello sets himself up as the sole judge and executioner of Desdemona.

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Tragic heroes always lose because the demands they make on life are excessive. Setting themselves up as the only authority for their actions and refusing to compromise or learn (except too late), they inevitably help to create a situation where there is no way out other than to see the action through to its increasingly grim conclusion. Hence, for most of us tragic heroes are often not particularly sympathetic characters (not at least in the way that comic protagonists are). There is something passionately uncompromising about their obsessive egoism which will only accept life on their own terms--in a sense they are radically unsociable beings (although they may occupy, and in Shakespeare almost always do occupy, important social positions).

The intriguing question is the following: Why would anyone respond to life this way? That question is very difficult to answer. The tragic response to life is not a rationally worked out position. For any rational person, the comic response to life, which requires compromise in the name of personal survival in the human community (or which sees the whole question of personal identity in social terms), makes much more sense. What does seem clear is that the tragic response to life emerges in some people from a deeply irrational but invincible conviction about themselves. Their sense of what they are, their integrity, is what they must answer to, and nothing the world presents is going to dissuade them from attending to this personal sense of worth. Hence, tragedy is, in a sense, a celebration (if that is the right word) of the most extreme forms of heroic individualism. That may help to explain the common saying "Comedy is for those who think, tragedy for those who feel."

One way of clarifying this is to think how we construct for ourselves a sense of who we are, of our identity. Most of us do that in terms of social relationships and social activities. In traditional societies, one's identity is often very closely bound up with a particular family in a specific place. We define ourselves to ourselves and to others as sons, daughters, husbands, wives, members of an academic community or a social or religious group, or participants in a social activity, and so on. In that sense we define ourselves comically (not in a funny way but in terms of a social matrix). The tragic hero is not willing or able to do this (although he or she might not be aware of that inability at first). The tragic personality wants to answer only to himself, and thus his sense of his own identity is not determined by others (they must answer to his conception of himself). Given that his passions are huge and egocentric and uncompromising, the establishment of an identity inevitably brings him into collision with the elemental forces of life, which he must then face alone (because to acknowledge any help would be a compromise with his sense of who he is).

We might also ask why we bother paying such attention to a tragic character. What is there about the tragic response which commands our imaginative respect? After all, many of these characters strike us as very naive and full of their own self-importance (in some ways, perhaps, quite childish), not the sort of people one would like to have as next door neighbours or dinner companions. Incapable of adapting to unexpected changes in life, they often seem so rigid as to defy credibility and curiously blind (a key metaphor in many tragedies). Characteristically, they don't listen to others, but rather insist that people listen to and agree with them (the pronouns I and me are very frequent in their public utterances--Lear is one of the supreme examples of this tendency).  

Why are these people worthy of our attention? We shall have much to explore on this question in dealing with Macbeth and Lear, but for the moment we might observe that we don't have to like these people particularly in order for them to command our attention. What matters is their willingness to suffer in the service of their own vision of

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themselves. They have set an emotional logic to their lives, and they are going to see it through, no matter how powerfully their originally high hopes are deceived. They are also, in a sense that we can imaginatively understand, although rarely if ever attain in our own lives, truly free, since they acknowledge no authority other than themselves. Macbeth is a mass murderer (of women and children, among others); no one watching the play will have any sympathy for his bloody actions. And yet as he faces and deals with the grim realities closing in on him, his astonishing clear sightedness, courage, and willingness to endure whatever life loads on him command our respect and attention. The same hold true for Lear, in many ways a foolish father and king and an inflexibly egocentric man, whose sufferings and whose willingness to suffer inspire awe.

Characters in plays, as in life, do not decide to be tragic or comic heroes. What they are emerges as they respond to the unexpected conflict which the opening of the drama initiates. Their response to the dislocation of normality will determine which form their story will take. To the comic hero, undertaking what is necessary for the restoration of normality is important, and that may well require serious adjustments to one's opinion of oneself, an ability to adopt all sorts of ruses and humiliations (disguise, deceptions, pratfalls, beatings, and so on), a faith in others, and some compromise in the acknowledgment of others. Comic heroes and heroines learn to listen to others and respond appropriately. The tragic hero, by contrast, takes the responsibility fully on himself. In his own mind, he is the only one who knows what needs to be done, and if circumstances indicate that he may be wrong, he is incapable of acknowledging that until it's too late. His sense of himself is too powerful to admit of change. Tragic heroes do not listen to others, only to themselves (or to others who tell them what they want to hear). People who tell them they are acting foolishly are simply part of the problem.

Tragic heroes and heroines, in other words, do not answer to community morality; they do not accept the conventional vision of things which reassures most of us by providing a group sense of what is most important in life. For that reason (as I shall mention in a moment) the tragic vision is potentially very disturbing, because we are dealing with a character who is not satisfied with traditional group explanations, with the socially reassuring rules and habits, and whose life therefore tears aside momentarily the comforting illusions which serve to justify life to us as a meaningful moral experience.

For that reason inquiring into the motivations of tragic characters is often difficult. Why do they behave the way they do? Why can't they just be reasonable and act normally? Why doesn't Lear take up his daughters' offer? Why doesn't Othello just ask Desdemona about her "affair" with Cassio? Why does Macbeth kill Duncan? Often we seek simple rational moralistic explanations: Lear is too proud, Othello is too angry, Macbeth is too ambitious. Such simplistic answers (which cater more to our desire for a reassuring reason than to the complex details of the play) are an attempt to cope with the unease which the tragic character can generate.

The critic Murray Krieger has suggested that the comic and tragic visions of experience correspond to the two things we all like to think about ourselves and our lives. Comedy celebrates our desire for and faith in community and the security and permanence that community ensures (if not for us, then for our families). To become cooperating members of the community most of us spend a lot of time educating ourselves, compromising some of the things we would most like in life, and rebounding from disappointments and set backs with a renewed sense of hope (and perhaps some new ways of dealing with things). Tragedy, by contrast, celebrates our desire for individual integrity, for a sense that there are some things which we are not prepared to compromise, even if

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asserting our individuality fully brings great (even fatal) risks. The tragic hero has this sense to an excessive degree, just as many comic heroes display an astonishing flexibility, adaptability, and willingness to learn and change.

An alternative formulation of this difference (prompted by the writings of Stanley Cavell) might be to characterize it as arising from two different ways of approaching the world we encounter: acceptance or avoidance. The first way accepts the world (including the various explanations of it offered by our culture) and seek to be accepted by it. This response clearly requires us to place ourselves and our thinking within a community (even our challenges to accepted ways of thinking will be directed by how the community allows for such disagreements) and, equally, to limit the demands we make on understanding the world (keeping such demands within conventional boundaries).

The second way (avoidance) is, in some fundamental way, suspicious of, unhappy about, afraid or contemptuous of acceptance, since that means answering to other people, letting them take full measure of us, and limiting our understanding of the world to what is available to us from our surrounding community. This response prompts the individual to powerful self-assertion in a rejection of any compromise in the direction of common social interaction. Hence, this method of encountering the world leads to isolation, suffering, and eventually self-destruction (since the reality of the world can never be known by nor will ever answer to one person's imagination).

Since one of the most common ways of representing acceptance of the world is human love, that experience is a prominent feature of plays which endorse such acceptance (i.e., comedies). For the same reason, it is a marked feature of much Shakespearean tragedy (starting with Richard III) that the hero suffers from an inability to love or else loses that capacity.

This last point introduces a gender differentiation which is important in Shakespeare (and elsewhere) and raises some important questions about contrasting male and female principles, the former associated with the origins of tragedy in some dissatisfaction with the given world and the latter associated with an acceptance of that world. I don't propose to pursue that here, but as you read these plays you will see that characteristically Shakespeare associates the drive to impose order (political or personal) on the world with men and measures the nature of this drive often by the way in which it affects (or arises out of) their ability or, rather, inability to love.

For those interested in psychoanalytic origins of behaviour, this distinction, too, offers potential insight. If the fundamental experience of life in men is a separation from and a desire to repossess the mother (Freud's Oedipal conflict) then we can see in these plays a clear distinction between those who have overcome this separation and integrated themselves into the community happily and those whose life is characterized by a continuing sense of separation from what they sense they most fully need on their own terms. I offer this here as a fertile suggestion which we may take up later on.

By way of clarifying the distinction between the comic and tragic visions further, we might consider the different emotional effects. While the ending of a comedy is typically celebratory, there is always a sense of limitation underneath the joy (how strong that sense is will determine just how ironic the ending of the comedy might be). The human beings have settled for the joys which are possible and are not going to push their demands on life beyond the barriers established by social convention.

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Hence, comedy, in a sense, always involves a turning away from the most challenging human possibilities. Tragedy, on the other hand, although generally gory and sad in its conclusion, also affirms something: the ability of human beings to dare great things, to push the human spirit to the limit no matter what the consequences. Hence, beneath the sorrowful lament for the dead hero, there often will be a sense of wonder at this manifestation of the greatness of this individual spirit.

This sense of potential sadness or limitation in the conclusion of a comedy may help to account for one of the most intriguing figures in our cultural traditions, the clown with the broken heart, the sad clown, the professional funny man who brings laughter to others because, although he knows that the social order he is serving may be an illusion, it's all there is between us and the overwhelming and destructive mystery of life. The tradition of the sadly wise professional funny man stems from this awareness: settling for the joys that are possible (like shared laughter) is a way of screening from us the tragic suffering at the heart of life. We see this in at least two of Shakespeare's most famous clowns: Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear. We also see it, incidentally, in the sad lives of many other famous clowns, fictional and otherwise (Pagliacci, Rigoletto, Tony Hancock).

The comic vision of experience is common to many cultures. Our traditions of comic drama originated with the ancient Greeks, but the form never really had to be reinvented or passed down, because it is a vital element in most dramatic rituals which communities routinely celebrate on important occasions (in harvest pageants, celebrations of spring, and so on). Any pagan culture based upon the cycles of nature which turns to some form of ritualized drama, usually as part of the celebrations associated with an agricultural or hunting festival, will almost certainly produce some form of comedy.

Tragic drama, by contrast, has a very different history. The ancient Greeks developed the vision and the style in a way unheard of in other ancient cultures. And its unique presence there is a tribute to the way this culture originated a preoccupation with the lives of heroic individuals, whose very greatness brings upon them unimaginable suffering and an early death, something very strong in our Western traditions. The Greek tradition of tragic drama was not available to Shakespeare; he knew some of the stories from various sources other than the Greek originals, but had no direct experience of what tragedy really meant to the Greeks. Hence, he had no inherited sense of the full potential of the tragic vision in drama.

Drama Theory The two primary characters in any drama are called Protagonist and Antagonist. Let's construct a simple model of them. Each character in a drama has a ...web.media.mit.edu/~bkort/Drama.html - Cached - Similar

Drama Theory

A story is an anecdote drawn from the culture. A well-crafted anecdote or story has value both as an amusement and as a source of insight into the world from which it is drawn. Since the plural of 'anecdote' is data, if you gather a large enough collection of anecdotal stories you ought to have a data base sufficient to model the culture from which the stories are drawn.

But first we need a functional model of StoryCraft. Before we can outline the plot structure of our story, we need to define the Characters who will play out our nasty little drama. The two primary characters in any drama are called Protagonist and Antagonist. Let's construct a simple model of them. Each character in a drama has a characteristic psychological profile. We propose

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modeling this profile in terms of eight basic psychological parameters: Fears, Emotions, Backstory, Issues, Beliefs, Practices, Desires, and Intentions, which drive the character's Actions/Reactions and Dramatic Life Story. This model concords with both Jungian analysis and existing models of Characterization in Drama Theory.

So, to elaborate, we have this Shreklisch Onion Layer Character Model, from the inside out:

1. Innermost Fears (Amygdala and Hippocampus)

2. Burbling Emotions (Limbic System)

3. Undisclosed Backstory (Long-Term Memory)

4. Burning Issues (Identify Fiend or Foof)

5. Sacred Beliefs (Neocortex)

6. Derivative Practices (Cerebellum)

7. Heart's Desires (HeartMind)

8. Avowed Intentions (Throat)

9. Foolish Actions & Reactions (Muscles)

10. Dreadful Drama (Shreklisch Life Story)

The Innermost Fears are the most fundamental (and deeply hidden) elements of the character's psychology. Swirling around the Innermost Fears are other Burbling Emotions which are generally acted out, but not necessarily mentioned by name. The character's Undisclosed Backstory establishes the basis for their dreads and associated unresolved problems. The Undisclosed Backstory explains the unresolved Burning Issues from the character's past. The Sacred Beliefs are the first important cognitive component of the character's psychology. Beliefs can be accurate or inaccurate as well as riddled with gaps. Associated with Beliefs are Derivative Practices, which correspond to the way the character handles (or fails to handle) recurring situations. Through the lens of the character's Belief System, he envisions his or her Heart's Desires. The Desires are the nominal inverse of the Fears and Dreads. The character believes that the object of desire will protect him from his dreads and alleviate his suffering. Among all his Heart's Desires, he undertakes to achieve at least one of them, and that becomes his Avowed Intention, his Holy Grail. That pursuit is the Opening Act of the unfolding Shreklisch Drama.

In order for the drama to get off the ground, the Protagonist and Antagonist must have Complementary Psychologies. The Desires and Intentions of the Protagonist must arouse the Fears of the Antagonist, and vice versa. This sets up the primary feedback loop that propels the conflict and the drama. To run a drama to Tragedy, it suffices that the characters consume their resources without resolving their conflict. Of all tragedies, perhaps the most complex are the Greek Tragedies which we may call Agonistic Drama. To run the drama to Comedy, something astonishing must happen. The characters must solve the Mystery of their long-suffering Agony and discover the system model we just presented. And, of course, so must the audience.

The central theorem of Drama Theory is called Clancy's Theorem, after one of Tom Clancy's book titles. But it's also inspired by one of Shakespeare's titles as well — Much Ado About Nothing.

Drama - Character and characterization : How do different characters interact witheach other, to produce dramatic relationships? ...

Introduction

Character and characterization Who are the central characters in the play? How do you know this? How do different characters interact with each other, to produce dramatic relationships? Characterization refers to the ways in which the author and the actors establish character,

through particular features of dialogue, action, gesture (manual, facial or both) and so on. How

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was this done in the play you saw, for the principal characters? Are there any characters with whom the audience especially identifies, or with whom you

identify? Why is this? Are there any characters whose viewpoint or beliefs seem to be those of the playwright, or more

persuasive to the audience than others' views?

Dramatic action Comment on whether things are directly shown in live action, or narrated or recalled by

characters in the play. Does the playwright relate past events to the present? Look in the stage directions for examples of physical actions (they may seem trivial or small) and

show how they help move the story on. How does the author use exits and entrances to bring particular characters together? Comment

on any examples of this which you can find.

Dramatic devices In general, these can be found by looking at stage directions. Comment on any such directions

which help explain how the play should be presented. Does the script contain any indication about setting or scenery? The most obvious feature of drama is perhaps the dialogue (speech) - comment on any

passages that help the audience understand action or characters better. Comment on the use of any props in the play. These are "stage properties" - objects used in the

action like the mirror in Richard II or Eddie Carbone's newspaper in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Do the props help move the story on or reveal character or themes?

Dramatic structures Explain how the divisions of the play (into acts and scenes, for example) show the structure and

plotting of the dramatic narrative. How does the author present time in the play? Does the structure of the play help show its themes or meaning?

The play in performance

To show your understanding of how the play should be a performance (not a book to read in class), explain and describe how it was performed in the version(s) you saw and how you would present it for a given medium (stage, film, television or radio). You may do this for the play generally or for specific episodes. Comment on costume, props, the set, lighting, music, sound FX, casting, direction and anything else you think interesting or relevant.

Overview and close-up

You cannot possibly write in great detail about everything in this play. Life (yours and your teachers') is too short. Try to balance general comment about the whole of the play, its broad themes, characters and relationships, with detailed and specific explanations of short episodes.

Making a judgement

Finally, you should make a judgement of the play, whether and in what ways it was good drama. Why, in your view, did the playwright write this play? Give your opinion of the play - what you like or dislike about it. Try to be positive and to relate your comments closely to the detail of the play.

Presenting your work

Theatre is a practical art - your work should recognize this. You may want to include illustrations, sketches, diagrams and plans, to show your ideas about the set, costume, lighting and so on. And remember, it's a play. Refer to the audience not the reader. Do not refer to the book but to the play, performance or production. Set out quotations conventionally, using quotation marks.

A few definitions of Rhetoric

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Kenneth Burke: "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a ... ...that sea of communicative transactionsÉthe impersonal drama of what ...

Some Definitions of Rhetoric Plato: Rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse." Aristotle: Rhetoric is "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available

means of persuasion. Cicero: "Rhetoric is one great art comprised of five lesser arts: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio." Rhetoric is "speech designed to

persuade." Quintillian: "Rhetoric is the art of speaking well." Francis Bacon: Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for the better

moving of the will." George Campbell: [Rhetoric] is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its

end. The four ends of discourse are to enlighten the understanding, pleasethe imagination, move the passion, and influence the will.

 A. Richards: Rhetoric is the study of misunderstandings and their remedies. Kenneth Burke: "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a

function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use oflanguage as a symbolic means of indjcing cooperation in beingsthat by nature respond to symbols."

 "Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning."

 Richard Weaver: Rhetoric is that "which creates an informed appetition for the good." Erika Lindemann: "Rhetoric is a form of reasoning about probabilities, based on

Assumptions people share as members of a commununity." Andrea Lunsford: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication." Francis Christensen: "Grammar maps out the possible; rhetoric narrows the possible

down to the desirable or effective." "The key question for rhetoric is howto know what is desirable."

 Sonja and Karen Foss: "Rhetoric is an action human beings perform when they use

symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another . . , [andit] is a perspective humans take that involves focusing on symbolicprocesses."

 1. Boethius: Confessions (Howell's translation)  Rhetoric treats of and discourses upon hypotheses, that is, questions with a multitude of surroundings in time and place, and if at any time it brings up a thesis, it uses it in connection with its hyposthesis. These are its surroundings: Who? What? Where? By whose help? Why? In what manner? At what time? 2. James J. Murphy: "One Thousand Neglected Authors"  A rhetorician is someone who provides his fellows with useful precepts or directions for organizing and presenting his ideas or feeling to them. (20)  3. Marc Fumaroli: "Rhetoric, Politics and Society"

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 Rhetoric appears as the connective tissue peculiar to civil society and to its proper finalities, happiness and political peace hic et nunc. (253-4) 4. Kenneth Burke: A Rhetoric of Motives  The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents. (41)  5. Covino and Joliffe: Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries (1995) Rhetoric is primarily a verbal, situationally contingent, epistemic art that is both philosophical and practical and gives rise to potentially active texts. 6. Paolo Valesio: Novantiqua (1980)I specify now that rhetoric is the functional organization of discourse, within its social and cultural context, in all its aspects, exception made for its realization as a strictly formal metalanguage--in formal logic, mathematics, and in the sciences whose metalanguages share the same features.  In other words: rhetoric is all of language, in its realization as discourse.  7. George Kennedy: "A Hoot in the Dark" (1992) Rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication:  the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expanded in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message.  8. Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Advancement of Learning The duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will.  9. Bender and Wellbery: ...that sea of communicative transactions…the impersonal drama of what occurs among us, unnoticed and without deliberation or grandeur…the dense tangle of our triviality.   10. Lloyd Bitzer: "The Rhetorical Situation" (1968) In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.  11. Edward T. Channing: Lectures Read to the Seniors at Harvard College (c. 1856) [Rhetoric is] a body of rules derived from experience and observation, extending to all communication by language and designed to make it efficient. It does not ask whether a man is to be a speaker or writer, --a poet, philosopher, or debater; but simply,--is it his wish to be put in the right way of communicating his mind with power to others, by words spoken or written. If so, rhetoric undertakes to show him rules or principles which will help to make the expression of his thoughts effective.  12. Douglas Ehninger (1972): [Rhetoric is] that discipline which studies all of the ways in which men may influence each other's thinking and behavior through the strategic use of symbols.  13. Gerard A. Hauser: Introduction to Rhetorical Theory (1986)Rhetoric is an instrumental use of language…. One person engages another person in an exchange of symbols to accomplish some goal. It is not communication for communication's sake. Rhetoric is communication that attempts to coordinate social action. For this reason, rhetorical communication is explicitly pragmatic. Its goal is to influence human choices on specific matters that require immediate attention.  14. C. H. Knoblauch: "Modern Rhetorical Theory and Its Future Directions" (1985)...rhetoric is the process of using language to organize experience and communicate it to others. It is also the study of how people use language to organize and communicate experience. The word denotes…both distinctive human activity and the "science" concerned with understanding that activity. 

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15. John Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)[Rhetoric,] that powerful instrument of error and deceit. 16. McCloskey: ...merely speech with designs on the reade

Interpreting Drama /Prabhanjan Mane

Contents: Acknowledgements. Foreword. 1. Introduction. 2. Defining a play. 3. Dramatic structure. 4. Characters. 5. Language and rhetoric. 6. Further dimensions and devices. 7. Interpreting the play. 8. Evaluation and criticism. 9. Presenting an analysis. Glossary. Further reading.

"Interpreting Drama is a multifaceted study of drama as a form and is meant primarily for students of English at the university level. It addresses issues of cardinal significance to the Indian academia and furnishes us with elaborate analyses of various concepts of character and techniques of characterization.

The book highlights the features of drama as a genre. It confines the illustrations to plays normally taught in the institutions in India. In some ways, this limits the range of intended readership but on the other hand, it caters in a more concrete manner to a specific audience with a local habitation and a name. The students will find reading this book an enjoyable, stimulating and enriching experience, and feel inspired to pursue "gems of purest ray serene" in the inexhaustible treasure house of drama.

The ideas and analyses have been presented in a simple language and lucid manner for easy understanding by the readers. It will prove useful to the teachers and researchers of English literature, particularly drama." (jacket)

interpretation of the play

Writing About Drama: Terms and Conventions

As in all critical writing, the most important thing to remember is to keep your analysis specific and textual.  As a rule of thumb, offer five lines of analysis for every line of drama that you quote.  Develop a thesis that allows you to approach the assignment as an investigation, not only into the world of the play, but into the way that world is constructed and presented.  Your thesis will make a claim about your interpretation of the play that you will then prove through textual evidence.  In the case of Shakespearean drama, you are responsible for an accurate interpretation of that text — rely on glossaries and the Oxford English Dictionary to be sure that what you are interpreting is actually what is in the text.

Learn the difference between opinion and analysis.  Your likes and dislikes are important to your critical approach, but should be implied by your analysis, not expressly stated.  Similarly, try not to “analyze” the obvious — don’t spend time “proving” that Iago is evil, that Katherine is a shrew, that Hamlet is tormented, that King Lear is old and weak.  Look for controversy, inconsistency, words that can be interpreted in more than one way.

Analyzing drama asks much the same skill as analyzing prose fiction; however, you must provide an additional awareness that drama, unlike prose, is meant to be performed (or, if read in text form, to be imagined as it would be performed).  Thus you are not only interested in language, but also in action, in the staging or any special theatrical effects called for by the play, and in the sense of elapsed time called for by the plot.  In drama, there is also a heightened awareness of conflict — drama intensifies the clash between people and other people, between people and their culture, between people and fate or circumstance, between people and values, between men and women, between the elderly and the young, between the powerful and the oppressed, between, essentially, good and evil.  Is the conflict you are witnessing balanced or

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one-sided?  Is its outcome in doubt or inevitable?  Is it the same conflict throughout the play or does it change?  Is there more than one source of conflict?  Is the source of conflict a symbol or metaphor for a broader problem or controversy (i.e., does an argument between a man and woman reflect larger issues of power and self-determination, and if so, how does the playwright indicate this?)

All of the following may be used as part of your overall analysis:

 Character Analysis: 

•     As in prose fiction, consider the following when trying to understand a character: Age, Sex, Race, Social Class, Profession, Financial stability, Family Structure, Love/Marriage Relationships, Physical/Emotional health

•     Is the character happy or unhappy with his/her place in this list of identifying qualities? 

•     Do any of these change in the course of the play, and how does the character deal with the change?

•     Is there any discrepancy between what a character says and what s/he does?

•     Is there any discrepancy between what other people say about a character and what s/he says or does?

Language: 

•     Do all characters speak in language appropriate to their sex/age/social class, etc.?  If not, why not?

•     Is the dialogue written in prose or verse, or a combination of the two?

•     Is the prose dialogue realistic, poetic and stylized, or somewhere in between? 

•     Does the playwright incorporate figures of speech or poetic devices into the characters’ speeches?  What do such things tell us about character?

•     Do any characters speak in asides, and what is revealed in these speeches?

 Plot Analysis: 

•     Identify the rising action, the climax, the resolution and the denouement.  Do they occur in expected or unexpected places?

•     Does the plot follow the Aristotelian “Unities” (see handout on Dramatic Theory and Terms)?  Why or why not?

•     Is there a pattern of reoccurrence of any events?

•     Are the events in the plot realistic or fantastical, or a combination of both?

•     Is each event prepared for or motivated by the characters/other events, or do some things seem to happen because of random chance?

•     Are there any subplots?  What is their relationship to the main plot?  Is this relationship evident from the start, or revealed as the play progresses?

 Setting: 

•     Is the play set in a “real” or an imaginary place? 

•     Is there more than one setting (the Aristotelian Unities again)? 

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•     Do the characters belong in the place(s) they’re in, or are they misplaced/displaced?

•     Does the setting contribute to conflict, or diffuse it?

 Metadrama: 

•     At any point in the play, are the characters or the audience reminded that they’re in/seeing a play? 

•     Are there any references to the “world as a stage,” or do any characters put on a play or speak directly to the audience?  

•     What is the effect of such references? 

•     Do they change or intensify the mood or tone of the play? 

•     Are any of the important conflicts in the play exacerbated or resolved at the moment of such theatrical self-reference?

Technicalities:

While it is true that drama unfolds in the context of time, your analysis need not be chronological in structure (unless you are explicitly analyzing plot).  Most important: unless the assignment specifically asks you to, NEVER summarize the plot of a play — it’s too easy to do this instead of analyzing.

Be specific not only about what characters are doing but about how they are behaving while they're doing it.  One quick way to indicate this to your reader is through active verbs.  Seek out your "says'es" and "Is'es" and "have's" and try a more specific term, such as: (for "says") suggests, protests, insinuates, pleads, moans, proclaims; (for "has") clings to, obsesses over, possesses, steals, suffers from; . . . and so on.  Always annotate quotes by listing, in a parenthesis at the end of the sentence in which the quote appears, the numbers of the act, scene, and line(s) the quote is from: (Hamlet III. ii. 12-15).  Inclusion of the title is only necessary if you haven't already given an internal reference in the body of your essay.

Be sure to use dramatic terms accurately; refer to the following guide for definitions:

Dramatic Theory and Conventions

 I. THEORY -- Idealized rules based on classical writers; some playwrights honored them (Jonson, Dryden) while others didn't (Marlowe, Shakespeare):

      A.  The Unities (developed from Aristotle's Poetics by 16th century critics)

            1.  TIME (action on stage should occur within 2-1/2 hours)

            2.  PLACE (same locale/setting for entire play)

            3.  ACTION (all events should describe a single plot line — this was the                       only rule Aristotle actually spelled out)

      B.  Probability -- Aristotle recommends that the action proceed rationally, with no events unprepared for.

      C.  Decorum -- Characters should speak, dress, and behave in a manner suitable to their rank, sex, age, personality; also, style/expression should fit the genre or subject.

      D.  Verisimilitude -- Events must be true, believeable, and more or less realistic.

      E.  Five-Part Structure:

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            1.  EXPOSITION -- presents the situation and events leading up to the action; introduces characters and defines their relationships

            2.  RISING ACTION -- complicates the original situation, creating conflict among the characters

            3.  CLIMAX/TURNING POINT -- change in direction of the course of events, particularly for the protagonist

            4.  FALLING ACTION -- resolving of complications

            5.  CONCLUSION/CATASTROPHE -- final revelation or outcome (such as discovered identities in comedy or death in tragedy), resulting in "restored order" ("dénouement" often refers to falling action and conclusion together)

 II.  DRAMATIC CONVENTIONS

      A.  Chorus -- group of actors who speak in unison (later replaced by a single actor) functioning as an expository device

      B.  Confidant(e) -- Character whose main function is to carry information to and from the main character and to provide the excuse for a character to speak thoughts aloud.

      C.  Soliloquy -- When a character reveals inmost thoughts directly to the audience.  Reveals the speaker's perceptions, not necessarily the "truth."  Conventionally, the speaker doesn't reveal an awareness of the audience's presence, although sometimes awareness is shown for comic effect.

      D.  Aside -- During a scene, when a character suddenly turns to another character or to an audience and speaks a line heard only by the audience and addressee.  Convention requires the other characters to reveal no knowledge that the first character is speaking.

      E.  Metadrama -- Some playwrights have their characters either refer directly to the presence of the audience or other parts of the theater in the course of their speeches, or else use specifically theatrical figures of speech (i.e., Shakespeare has a character in As You Like It begin a speech, "All the world's a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players./They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts . . .).  Such references are usually included for comic or ironic effect, but can also be used in tragedy to enhance the play's critical commentary on politics, society, philosophy, etc.  Metadrama also refers to the inclusion of a play-within-a-play, as in Hamlet.

 TYPES OF COMEDY

 Comedy in Shakespeare’s time tended to fall into several categories, requiring varied levels of sophistication on the part of the listener for fullest enjoyment: 

Burlesque — purely physical comedy: potty and sexual jokes, pratfalls, foodfights, drinking/drug jokes, drag costumes.  This level of comedy requires almost no prior knowledge — references are to the most basic kinds of human experience.

Farce — plot-oriented comedy (similar to situation comedy today): disguise/mistaken identity, eavesdropping (intentional or unintentional), coincidences and accidents, get-rich-quick schemes that backfire, etc.  Familiarity with the formulas and conventions of plot increase enjoyment.

Romantic comedy — boy-get-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl-back: humor is based on the delusions and pretensions of young people in love, misunderstandings, etc.  Familiarity with the conventions of love poetry often required for appreciation of satire about lovers.

Comedy of manners — humor requires a knowledge of the social mores and fashions referred to in the plays; jokes center around social hypocrisies and pretensions.  This type of

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comedy would probably only be funny to people who were familiar with the values and behaviors of the elite characters being satirized.

Witty comedy — humor based on wordplay (puns and literary allusions) and on comic heroes who use intelligence and language to outwit their adversaries and get what they want.  This type of comedy requires the highest level of previous knowledge on the part of the audience, since much of the humor assumes a sophisticated command of the nuances of language and the uses of formal logic and rhetoric.

 No one play ever featured only one type of humor exclusively — most comic plays feature a mixture of all these types.  You will note, though, a decided hierarchy of humor in this list, from “low-class” to “high-class.”  Shakespeare’s theater was not overly concerned with observing decorum, or a separation of comic styles — that would come later, in the 18th century.

  TYPES OF TRAGEDY

Critic Northrop Frye developed a general outline for the typical tragic plot pattern: 

 1.  ENCROACHMENT — The protagonist takes on more than he should and makes a mistake that ultimately causes his own “fall;” it is often an act blindly done, demonstrating the hero’s faith in his own power to regulate the world or his insensitivity to others.  Even in cases where the act is unconscious, the tragic hero encroaches on the norms of human conduct within a given world.

2.  COMPLICATION — This builds up and includes the events that align opposing forces.    

3.  REVERSAL — This is the point at which it becomes clear that the protagonist’s expectations are mistaken, that his fate will be the reverse of what he had hoped.  At this minute, the vision of the audience and dramatist are the same.       

4.  CATASTROPHE — This exposes the limits of the protagonist’s power and dramatizes the waste of his life.  Piles of dead bodies remind us that the forces unleashed are not easily contained; there are also elaborate subplots in later tragedies, which reinforce the impression of a world inundated with evil.      

5.  RECOGNITION — The audience (and sometimes the protagonist) recognize the larger pattern inherent in the action.  If the protagonist does experience recognition, s/he begins to share the vision of reality that the dramatist and the audience see.  From this new perspective s/he can see the irony of her/his actions.   

 NOTE: You may have heard the term “tragic flaw” (hamartia) used to describe the cause of a protagonist’s downfall.  We prefer Aristotle’s “some error of human frailty” or Frye’s “encroachment” because these terms offer subtler and more complicated descriptions of the human condition.  The problem is rarely a simple personality quirk on the part of one character.

Element of DRAMA TVDrama is a literary composition involving conflict, action crisis and atmosphere designed to be acted by players on a stage before an

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audience. This definition may be applied to motion picture drama as well as to the traditional stage.

Apply these questions to a recent movie you have seen or a radio or television drama,

Conflict

1. What did the leading character want? 2. What stood in his way? (People - environment-

personality, etc,) 3. What was the high point of tension or the crisis? (This is

where the leading character must make a crucial decision that will effect the outcome of the play.)

Character analysis

1. Are the characters true to life or are they types or caricatures?

2. How is the character revealed? 3. What is the driving force of each leading character? 4. If a character changes, are the causes convincing and

true to life?

Setting

1. Are the sets appropriate? 2. Are they attractive? 3. Are they authentic?

Critical standards useful for drama, novel, motion pictures:

1. What is the chief emphasis (ideas, character, atmosphere)?

2. What was the purpose? (entertainment, humor, excitement)?

3. Is it realistic or romantic? 4. Does it show life as it really is or distort life? 5. Does it present any problem of human relationship? 6. Does it glamorize life and present an artificial happy

ending?

Types of Drama:

1. Tragedy -- In general, tragedy involves the ruin of the leading characters. To the Greeks, it meant the destruction of some noble person through fate, To the Elizabethans, it meant in the first place death and in the second place the destruction of some noble person through a flaw in his character. Today it may not involve death so much as a dismal life, Modern tragedy often shows the tragedy not of the strong and noble but of the weak and mean,

2. Comedy -- is lighter drama in which the leading characters overcome the difficulties which temporarily beset them

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3. Problem Play -- Drama of social criticism discusses social, economic, or political problems by means of a play.

4. Farce -- When comedy involves ridiculous or hilarious complications without regard for human values, it becomes farce.

5. Comedy of Manners -- Comedy which wittily portrays fashionable life.

6. Fantasy -- A play sometimes, but not always, in comic spirit in which the author gives free reign to his fantasy, allowing things to happen without regard to reality.

7. Melodrama -- Like farce, melodrama pays almost no attention to human values, but its object is to give a thrill instead of a laugh. Often good entertainment, never any literary value.

Types of Drama of Historical Interest:

1. Medieval mystery plays -- dealt with Bible stories and allegorical mysteries.

2. Chronicle plays -- dealt directly with historical scenes and characters.

3. Masques -- were slight plays involving much singing and dancing and costuming. They were usually allegorical.

Drama is the most dependent of art forms -- director, actors, scene and costume designers must interpret before the audience does.

The Place of the Actor

1. The player should respect his play, his part, his fellow players, and his audience.

2. He should have imagination enough to create character for us instead of merely exploiting his own personality.

3. He should have a technical equipment in his 'voice, facial expression, bodily poise, gesture, and by-play that enables him to project the character as he conceives it.

(Drama)1. Allusion - an indirect reference by casually mentioning something that is generally familiar (In literature we find many allusions to mythology, the Bible, history, etc.)

2. Aside - Lines whispered to the audience or to another character on stage (not meant to be heard by all the characters on stage)

3. Catastrophe - the final event in a drama (a death in a tragedy or a marriage in a comedy)

4. Comedy - A light play with a happy ending

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5. Comic Relief - A bit of humor injected into a serious play to relieve the heavy tension of tragic events

6. Crisis or Climax - the turning point in the plot (This occurs when events develop either for or against the main character and a crucial decision must be made.)

7. Dramatic Irony - occurs when the audience knows something that the character on stage is not aware.

8. Foreshadow - Lines that give a hint or clue to future events (It doesn't tell the future but hints at it.)

9. Irony -

A method of expression in which the ordinary meaning of the word is opposite to the thought in the speaker's mind

Events contrary to what would be naturally expected

10. Metaphor - an implied comparison between two different things; identifying a person or object as the thing to which it is being compared. Example: 'It is the East and Juliet is the sun.' - 'tossed on the sea of life'

11. Metonymy - a figure of speech whereby the name of a thing is substituted for the attribute which it suggests. Example: The pen (power of literature or the written word) is mightier than the sword (force).

12. Nemesis - agent of retribution (the person who punishes)

13. Personification - giving the quality of life to inanimate things

14. Poetic Justice - The operation of justice in a play with fair distribution of rewards for good deeds and punishment for wrong doing

15. Simile - an expressed comparison between two different things using 'like' or 'as' - Example: 'eyes twinkle like stars' - 'as loud as the roaring sea'

16. Soliloquy - A single character on stage thinking out loud (a way of letting the audience know what is in the character's mind)

17. Tragedy - A serious play having an unhappy ending

18. Tragic Flaw - A character trait that leads one to his/her own downfall or destruction

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