Introduction To Drama Pdf

[Arabella Kochanski]

Whywould people write or watch tragedies? Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, offered one answer in his catharsis theory. A tragedy, he said, purges or releases our emotions. Its events arouse pity for the victim, with whom we identify. As the play closes we are washed clean of these emotions, feeling unburdened and morally improved.

During the Middle Ages (from about ad 500 to about ad 1500), life centered on the cathedral. To teach an uneducated and illiterate people the Bible stories, priests introduced small playlets into their church services. The first known of these was the Quem quaeritis, acted out by the priests at Easter. It briefly presented the story of the three Marys approaching the tomb of Christ:

Whom do you seek?

Jesus of Nazareth.

He is not here. He has risen as was prophesied.

Go. Announce that he has arisen from

the dead.

This modest scene marked the birth of drama in the modern world.

Because so few of the common people understood Latin, everyday language was typically used in the plays instead. Performances were moved to the cathedral steps and churchyard. Here began the elaborate mystery plays, which told stories from the Bible in dramatic form. Later, miracle plays portrayed the lives of the saints. Next to come were the morality plays, in which characters personified moral qualities (such as charity or vice) or abstractions (as death or youth) and in which moral lessons were taught.

Modern British drama began in revolt against the general smugness of the Victorian Era. Real evils and troubles of English life were hidden from view by the self-satisfied attitudes of the upper classes. The dramatic revolt started slowly but soon gained speed.

The 1960s also witnessed further theatrical experimentation and excitement that developed in off-off-Broadway and regional theaters. There were attempts to break down the distinction between audience and performers, and taboos regarding subject matter and language were often abandoned.

Of the many fine British dramatists who were writing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, two of particular note are Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn. Stoppard established his reputation for verbal brilliance, penetrating intellect, and extremely nimble and imaginative dramatic craft with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). The play centers entirely on two minor characters from Hamlet in order to examine the idea that man is simply a tiny cog in a very large and unfathomable wheel. Stoppard continued to dazzle both audiences and critics with the virtuosity of such plays as Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), and The Invention of Love (2001). Michael Frayn captured international attention with his dizzyingly clever play-within-a-play farce, Noises Off (1982). He demonstrated great versatility and depth in his drama of ideas that probes the morality of atomic physics, Copenhagen (1998), and in Democracy (2003), set in the office of the chancellor of West Germany in the 1970s.

The story of Asian drama is a sharp contrast to the development of drama in Europe and North America. Asian drama, most prominently that of India, Japan, and China, shows neither the variety of styles nor the frequent and striking patterns of change found throughout the history of Western theater. The reasons for these differences lie in the very different cultural and religious backgrounds against which the two traditions have developed.

In a strange sense (to Western ways of thinking), classical Asian drama is probably the most formal, controlled, and yet, at the same time, imaginatively suggestive and stimulating tradition in world theater.

To understand and enjoy such challenging dramatic literature and performance modes requires considerable time, energy, and commitment. Most dramatic forms in Asia were originally created exclusively for the aristocratic elite and royalty. Those groups were the only ones who had the leisure to study and attend the theater often enough to gain an appreciation of such complexity and nuance.

Folk drama did exist in most Asian cultures, for the entertainment of the largely uneducated masses. And though they often developed out of the elite forms, the folk dramas were simpler, more flexible, more accessible.

Sometime between the 2nd century bc and about the 4th century ad, the Natya-sastra (Treatise on the Dramatic Arts) was written. This complete collection of rules for all the performing arts, especially for the sacred art of drama, contains, for example, the code of hand gestures for the dancer and the actor and describes the various patterns that drama can assume. Every imaginable aspect of a play is covered.

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The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception.[5]

Mime is a form of drama where the action of a story is told only through the movement of the body. Drama can be combined with music: the dramatic text in opera is generally sung throughout; as for in some ballets dance "expresses or imitates emotion, character, and narrative action."[6] Musicals include both spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have incidental music or musical accompaniment underscoring the dialogue (melodrama and Japanese Nō, for example).[7] Closet drama is a form that is intended to be read, rather than performed.[8] In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance; performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.[9]

Western drama originates in classical Greece.[10] The theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens produced three genres of drama: tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. Their origins remain obscure, though by the 5th century BC, they were institutionalised in competitions held as part of festivities celebrating the god Dionysus.[11] Historians know the names of many ancient Greek dramatists, not least Thespis, who is credited with the innovation of an actor ("hypokrites") who speaks (rather than sings) and impersonates a character (rather than speaking in his own person), while interacting with the chorus and its leader ("coryphaeus"), who were a traditional part of the performance of non-dramatic poetry (dithyrambic, lyric and epic).[12]

Only a small fraction of the work of five dramatists, however, has survived to this day: we have a small number of complete texts by the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comic writers Aristophanes and, from the late 4th century, Menander.[13] Aeschylus' historical tragedy The Persians is the oldest surviving drama, although when it won first prize at the City Dionysia competition in 472 BC, he had been writing plays for more than 25 years.[14] The competition ("agon") for tragedies may have begun as early as 534 BC; official records ("didaskaliai") begin from 501 BC when the satyr play was introduced.[15] Tragic dramatists were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play (though exceptions were made, as with Euripides' Alcestis in 438 BC). Comedy was officially recognized with a prize in the competition from 487 to 486 BC.

Five comic dramatists competed at the City Dionysia (though during the Peloponnesian War this may have been reduced to three), each offering a single comedy.[16] Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided between "old comedy" (5th century BC), "middle comedy" (4th century BC) and "new comedy" (late 4th century to 2nd BC).[17]

While Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240 BC marks the beginning of regular Roman drama.[20] From the beginning of the empire, however, interest in full-length drama declined in favour of a broader variety of theatrical entertainments.[21] The first important works of Roman literature were the tragedies and comedies that Livius Andronicus wrote from 240 BC.[22] Five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also began to write drama.[22] No plays from either writer have survived. While both dramatists composed in both genres, Andronicus was most appreciated for his tragedies and Naevius for his comedies; their successors tended to specialise in one or the other, which led to a separation of the subsequent development of each type of drama.[22]

By the beginning of the 2nd century BC, drama was firmly established in Rome and a guild of writers (collegium poetarum) had been formed.[23] The Roman comedies that have survived are all fabula palliata (comedies based on Greek subjects) and come from two dramatists: Titus Maccius Plautus (Plautus) and Publius Terentius Afer (Terence).[24] In re-working the Greek originals, the Roman comic dramatists abolished the role of the chorus in dividing the drama into episodes and introduced musical accompaniment to its dialogue (between one-third of the dialogue in the comedies of Plautus and two-thirds in those of Terence).[25] The action of all scenes is set in the exterior location of a street and its complications often follow from eavesdropping.[25]

Many plays survive from France and Germany in the late Middle Ages, when some type of religious drama was performed in nearly every European country. Many of these plays contained comedy, devils, villains, and clowns.[34] In England, trade guilds began to perform vernacular "mystery plays", which were composed of long cycles of many playlets or "pageants", of which four are extant: York (48 plays), Chester (24), Wakefield (32) and the so-called "N-Town" (42). The Second Shepherds' Play from the Wakefield cycle is a farcical story of a stolen sheep that its protagonist, Mak, tries to pass off as his new-born child asleep in a crib; it ends when the shepherds from whom he has stolen are summoned to the Nativity of Jesus.[35]

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