dramatic literature

Introduction

      the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and heard in performance.

      The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant something written and drama meant something performed (theatrical production). Most of the problems, and much of the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.

      In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting, directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the article theatre, Western, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other cultures, see African literature; theatre, African; arts, East Asian; arts, Islamic (Islamic arts); arts, South Asian (South Asian arts); and arts, Southeast Asian (Southeast Asian arts).

General characteristics

      From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life. Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and his actors on a particular stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.

      All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment. These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come together in the best possible physical circumstances.

      Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred drama in Egypt (art and architecture, Egyptian) 2,000 years before Christ, and Thespis in the 6th century BC in ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a playscript assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic literature be discussed as such.

      The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods; or when the annual Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early nō drama of Japan was performed at religious festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the limitations of man in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe his mind. Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Dr. Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel)'s contention that there can be no certain limit to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.

Common elements of drama

      Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre. Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation (mimesis) of human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator's experience of the play and give it purpose.

      The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-important control of the audience's responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting God or man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human madness portrayed in a good farce.

      A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play. Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful play has style and little else. By “style,” therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play, its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these qualities are signalled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer detail, a play's style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone of speech, its pace and inflexion. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also: nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium. Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly broken.

      By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate his thoughts and feelings and have his audience consider his ideas or reproduce the emotion that drove him to write as he did. In theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting his author for the people watching him, and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this in his writing. Ideas will not be accepted, perhaps, if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectator reason the ideas for himself as part of his response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William) and Chekhov are two outstanding examples in Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to ensure the affective function of their plays.

Dramatic expression

      The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely theatrical and ritualistic manner; and on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song (prosody). Both the popular and the coterie drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed, plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.

      Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of his actors and over the responses of his audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it is argued, give both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural, kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, like rhythm and rhyme, not found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors' highly stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole. The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with his audience, to review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator's mind could leap forward.

Dramatic structure (plot)

      The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but, rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience's interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious cycle, which may portray the whole history of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and imagination.

      In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time. In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Dr. Samuel Johnson observed in his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world to the next, and from reality to dream.

      It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience's image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play's action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell'arte, the standard characters Pantalone (Pantaloon) and Arlecchino (Harlequin), each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the audience's sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious time is of immeasurable value.

Drama as an expression of a culture

      In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese puppet play and a modern social drama by the contemporary American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important, if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately distinguishable from that of the West.

East (Southeast Asian arts)-West differences

      Oriental drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in Malaya and of Burma, Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Oriental culture showed little of the interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of the drama of the Orient are lost in time, although its themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept. The slow-paced, self-contained civilizations of the East have only recently been affected by Western theatre, just as the West has only recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in French, and of Bertolt Brecht in German).

      In its representation of life, classical Oriental drama is the most conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In Oriental drama all the elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime, speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the players and the action of the play, suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists, the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the “flashback” of the modern cinema, and events could be telescoped with the abandon of modern expressionism. This extreme theatricality lent an imaginative freedom to its artists and audiences upon which great theatre could thrive. Significantly, most Oriental cultures also nourished a puppet theatre (puppetry), in which stylization of character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In the classical puppet theatre of Japan (Japanese literature), the Bunraku, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century master Chikamatsu, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather than for the actors of the Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character and situation.

      It is generally thought that Oriental drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Oriental drama is that restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual criticism of Ibsen and Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is imaginable in the classical drama of the East.

Drama in Western cultures

Greek origins (Greek religion)

      Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century BC in Athens. Its form and style—influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist's intention. The chorus not only provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC) and Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406 BC) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless, these great operatic tableaux, built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed, were evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr-plays and comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 BC.)

      The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy and comedy. The Roman comedies (Latin literature) of Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) and Terence (c. 186/185–159 BC) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus) (c. 4 BC–AD 65) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste. Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational content and stoical attitudes of Seneca (Senecan tragedy)'s drama reappeared centuries later when classical literature was rediscovered.

Biblical plays

      Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church (Middle Ages), and, again, the texts (trope) reflect the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy (liturgical drama), the climax of the Christian calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery cycles (mystery play). From at least the 10th century the clerics of the church enacted the simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the visit to Jesus Christ's tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi, Feast of) was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of Biblical plays (the mystery or miracle cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of man from the Creation to the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details, familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms, religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its simple audiences.

Into the 16th and 17th centuries

      In an account of dramatic literature, the ebullient but unscripted farces and romances of the commedia dell'arte properly have no place, but much in it became the basis of succeeding comedy. Two elements are worth noting. First, the improvisational (improvisation) spirit of the commedia troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business (lazzi (lazzo)) to meet the occasion of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the writing and playing of Western comedy ever since. Second, basic types of comic character derived from the central characters, who reappeared in the same masks in play after play. As these characters became well known everywhere, dramatists could rely on their audience to respond to them in predictable fashion. Their masks stylized the whole play and allowed the spectator freedom to laugh at the unreality of the action. An understanding of the commedia illuminates a great deal in the written comedies of Shakespeare in England, of Molière and Marivaux in France, and of Goldoni and Gozzi in Italy.

      In the 16th century, England and Spain provided all the conditions necessary for a drama that could rival ancient Greek drama in scope and subtlety. In both nations, there were public as well as private playhouses, audiences of avid imagination, a developing language that invited its poetic expansion, a rapid growth of professional acting companies, and a simple but flexible stage. All these factors combined to provide the dramatist with an opportunity to create a varied and exploratory new drama of outstanding interest. In Elizabethan London (Elizabethan literature), dramatists wrote in an extraordinary range of dramatic genres, from native comedy and farce to Senecan tragedy, from didactic morality plays to popular chronicle plays and tragicomedies, all before the advent of Shakespeare (1564–1616). Although Shakespeare developed certain genres, such as the chronicle play and the tragedy, to a high degree, Elizabethan dramatists characteristically used a medley of styles. With the exception of Ben Jonson (1572/73–1637) and a few others, playwrights mixed their ingredients without regard for classical rule. The result was a rich body of drama, exciting and experimental in character. A host of new devices were tested, mixing laughter and passion; shifting focus and perspective by slipping from verse to prose and back again; extending the use of the popular clown; exploiting the double values implicit in boy actors playing the parts of girls; exploring the role of the actor in and out of character; but, above all, developing an extraordinarily flexible dramatic poetry. These dramatists produced a visually and aurally exciting hybrid drama that could stress every subtlety of thought and feeling. It is not surprising that they selected their themes from every Renaissance problem of order and authority, of passion and reason, of good and evil and explored every comic attitude to people and society with unsurpassed vigour and vision.

      Quite independently in Spain (Spanish literature), dramatists embarked upon a parallel development of genres ranging from popular farce to chivalric tragedy. The hundreds of plays of Spain's greatest playwright, Lope de Vega (1562–1635), cover every subject from social satire to religion with equal exuberance. The drama of Paris of the 17th century, however, was determined by two extremes of dramatic influence. On the one hand, some playwrights developed a tragedy rigidly based in form upon Neoclassical notions of Aristotelian unity, controlled by verse that is more regular than that of the Spanish or English dramatists. On the other hand, the French theatre (French literature) developed a comedy strongly reflecting the work of the itinerant troupes of the commedia dell'arte. The Aristotelian influence resulted in the plays of Pierre Corneille (Corneille, Pierre) (1606–84) and Jean Racine (Racine, Jean) (1639–99), tragedies of honour using classical themes, highly sophisticated theatrical instruments capable of searching deeply into character and motive, and capable of creating the powerful tension of a tightly controlled plot. The other influence produced the brilliant plays of Molière (1622–73), whose training as an actor in the masked and balletic commedia tradition supplied him with a perfect mode for a more sophisticated comedy. Molière's work established the norm of French comedy, bold in plotting, exquisite in style, irresistible in comic suggestion. Soon after, upon the return of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660, a revival of theatre started the English drama on a new course. Wits such as William Wycherley (Wycherley, William) (1640–1716) and William Congreve (Congreve, William) (1670–1729) wrote for the intimate playhouses of the Restoration (Restoration literature) and an unusually homogeneous coterie audience of the court circle. They developed a “comedy of manners (manners, comedy of),” replete with social jokes that the actor, author, and spectator could share—a unique phase in the history of drama. These plays started a characteristic style of English domestic comedy still recognizable in London comedy today.

      German dramatists (German literature) of the later part of the 18th century achieved stature through a quite different type of play: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), and others of the passionate, poetic Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) movement tried to echo the more romantic tendencies in Shakespeare's plays. Dramatists of the 19th century, however, lacking the discipline of classical form, wrote derivative melodramas (melodrama) that varied widely in quality, often degenerating into mere sensationalism. Melodrama rapidly became the staple of the theatre across Europe and America. Bold in plotting and characterization, simple in its evangelical belief that virtue will triumph and providence always intervene, it pleased vast popular audiences and was arguably the most prolific and successful drama in the history of the theatre. Certainly, melodrama's elements of essential theatre should not be ignored by those interested in drama as a social phenomenon. At least melodramas encouraged an expansion of theatre audiences ready for the most recent phase in dramatic history.

      The time grew ripe for a new and more adult drama at the end of the 19th century. As novelists developed greater naturalism in both content and style, dramatists too looked to new and more realistic departures: the dialectical comedies of ideas of George Bernard Shaw (Shaw, George Bernard) (1856–1950); the problem plays associated with Henrik Ibsen (Ibsen, Henrik) (1828–1906); the more lyrical social portraits of Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton) (1860–1904); the fiercely personal, social, and spiritual visions of August Strindberg (Strindberg, August) (1849–1912). These dramatists began by staging the speech and behaviour of real life, in devoted detail, but became more interested in the symbolic and poetic revelation of the human condition. Where Ibsen began by modelling his tightly structured dramas of man in society upon the formula for the “well made” play, which carefully controlled the audience's interest to the final curtain, Strindberg, a generation later, developed a free psychological and religious dream play that bordered on Expressionism. As sophisticated audiences grew interested more in causes rather than in effects, the great European playwrights of the turn of the century mixed their realism increasingly with symbolism. Thus the Naturalistic movement in drama, though still not dead, had a short but vigorous life. Its leaders freed the drama of the 20th century to pursue every kind of style, and subsequent dramatists have been wildly experimental. The playwright today can adopt any dramatic mode, mixing his effects to shock the spectator into an awareness of himself, his beliefs, and his environment.

Drama in Eastern cultures

      Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Oriental drama may be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the Indian stage (Indian literature), a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of India's greatest playwright, Kālidāsa (probably 4th century AD), there is an exquisite refinement of detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and mingle courtly humour and light-hearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite untrammelled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.

      Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit (Sanskrit literature) drama and the broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese (Chinese literature) and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as does all Oriental drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yüan dynasty (Yuan dynasty) (1206–1368), in which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime. Chinese drama avoided both the crudity of European melodrama and the esotericism of Western coterie drama.

      The drama of Japan may be said to embrace both. There, the exquisite artistry of gesture and mime, and the symbolism of setting and costume, took two major directions. The drama (Noh theatre), emerging from religious ritual, maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences; the Kabuki (its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th century became Japan's popular drama. Nō theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. The Kabuki, on the other hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks, move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. The Kabuki plays are less rarefied and are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional as befitting their presentation before a broader audience. The written text of the nō play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse plotting; the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation, and melodrama. In the Kabuki there can be moments of realism, but also whole episodes of mime and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick, but also moments of violent passion. In all, the words are subordinate to performance in the Kabuki.

Drama and communal belief

      The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it and is not imposed upon it. The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of man's life both as an individual and as a social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself. Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic demonstration; for example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was presented in the York (York plays) (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with child and an Angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in his audience.

      When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in the Orient, is of this kind. Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen's social drama both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century. Plays like A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new drama of ideas. “Problem” plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre for the 20th century. Shaw's early Ibsenite plays in London, attacking a negative drawing-room comedy with themes of slum landlordism (Widowers' Houses, 1892) and prostitution (Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1902) resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the motives for middle class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences before leading them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.

Influences on the dramatist

      The author of a play is affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the conditions under which he conceives and writes, by his social and economic status as a playwright, by his personal background, by his religious or political position, by his purpose in writing. The literary form of the play and its stylistic elements will be influenced by tradition, a received body of theory and dramatic criticism, as well as by the author's innovative energy. Auxiliary theatre arts such as music and design also have their own controlling traditions and conventions, which the playwright must respect. The size and shape of the playhouse, the nature of its stage and equipment, and the actor–audience relationship it encourages also determine the character of the writing. Not least, the audience's cultural assumptions, holy or profane, local or international, social or political, may override all else in deciding the form and content of the drama. These are large considerations that can take the student of drama into areas of sociology, politics, social history, religion, literary criticism, philosophy and aesthetics, and beyond.

The role of theory

      It is difficult to assess the influence of theory since theory usually is based on existing drama, rather than drama on theory. Philosophers, critics, and dramatists have attempted both to describe what happens and to prescribe what should happen in drama, but all their theories are affected by what they have seen and read.

Western theory

      In Europe the earliest extant work of dramatic theory, the fragmentary Poetics of Aristotle (384–322 BC), chiefly reflecting his views on Greek tragedy and his favorite dramatist, Sophocles, is still relevant to an understanding of the elements of drama. Aristotle's elliptical way of writing, however, encouraged different ages to place their own interpretation upon his statements and to take as prescriptive what many believe to have been meant only to be descriptive. There has been endless discussion of his concepts mimēsis (“imitation”), the impulse behind all the arts, and katharsis (catharsis) (“purgation,” “purification of emotion”), the proper end of tragedy, though these notions were conceived, in part, in answer to Plato's attack on poiēsis (making) as an appeal to the irrational. That “character” is second in importance to “plot” is another of Aristotle's concepts that may be understood with reference to the practice of the Greeks, but not more realistic drama, in which character psychology has a dominant importance. The concept in the Poetics that has most affected the composition of plays in later ages has been that of the so-called unities—that is, of time, place, and action. Aristotle was evidently describing what he observed—that a typical Greek tragedy had a single plot and action that lasts one day; he made no mention at all of unity of place. Neoclassical critics of the 17th century, however, codified these discussions into rules.

      Considering the inconvenience of such rules and their final unimportance, one wonders at the extent of their influence. The Renaissance desire to follow the ancients and its enthusiasm for decorum and classification may explain it in part. Happily, the other classical work recognized at this time was Horace's Art of Poetry (c. 24 BC), with its basic precept that poetry should offer pleasure and profit and teach by pleasing, a notion that has general validity to this day. Happily, too, the popular drama, which followed the tastes of its patrons, also exerted a liberating influence. Nevertheless, discussion about the supposed need for the unities continued throughout the 17th century (culminating in the French critic Nicolas Boileau (Boileau, Nicolas)'s Art of Poetry, originally published in 1674), particularly in France, where a master like Racine could translate the rules into a taut, intense theatrical experience. Only in Spain, where Lope de Vega (Vega, Lope de) published his New Art of Writing Plays (1609), written out of his experience with popular audiences, was a commonsense voice raised against the classical rules, particularly on behalf of the importance of comedy and its natural mixture with tragedy. In England both Sir Philip Sidney (Sidney, Sir Philip) in his Apologie for Poetry (1595) and Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben) in Timber (1640) merely attacked contemporary stage practice. Jonson, in certain prefaces, however, also developed a tested theory of comic characterization (humours, comedy of) (the “humours”) that was to affect English comedy for a hundred years. The best of Neoclassical criticism in English is John Dryden (Dryden, John)'s Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668). Dryden approached the rules with a refreshing honesty and argued all sides of the question; thus he questioned the function of the unities and accepted Shakespeare's practice of mixing comedy and tragedy.

      The lively imitation of nature came to be acknowledged as the primary business of the playwright and was confirmed by the authoritative voices of Dr. Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel), who said in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765) that “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature,” and the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim), who in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (or Hamburg Dramaturgy; 1767–69) sought to accommodate Shakespeare to a new view of Aristotle. With the classical straitjacket removed, there was a release of dramatic energies in new directions. There were still local critical skirmishes, such as Jeremy Collier's attack on the “immorality and profaneness of the English stage” in 1698; Goldoni's attacks upon the already dying Italian commedia on behalf of greater realism; and Voltaire's reactionary wish to return to the unities and to rhymed verse in French tragedy, which was challenged in turn by Diderot (Diderot, Denis)'s call for a return to nature. But the way was open for the development of the middle class drame (drame bourgeois) and the excursions of Romanticism. Victor Hugo (Hugo, Victor), in his Preface to his play Cromwell (1827), capitalized on the new psychological romanticism of Goethe and Schiller as well as the popularity of the sentimental drame in France and the growing admiration for Shakespeare; Hugo advocated truth to nature and a dramatic diversity that could yoke together the sublime and the grotesque. This view of what drama should be received support from Émile Zola (Zola, Émile) in the preface to his play Thérèse Raquin (1873), in which he argued a theory of naturalism that called for the accurate observation of people controlled by their heredity and environment.

 From such sources came the subsequent intellectual approach of Ibsen and Chekhov and a new freedom for such seminal innovators of the 20th century as Luigi Pirandello (Pirandello, Luigi), with his teasing mixtures of absurdist laughter and psychological shock; Bertolt Brecht (Brecht, Bertolt) (1898–1956), deliberately breaking the illusion of the stage; and Antonin Artaud (Artaud, Antonin) (1896–1948), advocating a theatre that should be “cruel” to its audience, employing all and any devices that lie to hand. The modern dramatist may be grateful that he is no longer hidebound by theory and yet also regret, paradoxically, that the theatre of his time lacks those artificial limits within which an artifact of more certain efficiency can be wrought.

Eastern theory

      The Oriental theatre has always had such limits, but with neither the body of theory nor the pattern of rebellion and reaction found in the West. The Sanskrit drama of India, however, throughout its recorded existence has had the supreme authority of the Nāṭya-śāstra, ascribed to Bharata (c. 1st century AD), an exhaustive compendium of rules for all the performing arts, but particularly for the sacred art of drama with its auxiliary arts of dance and music. Not only does the Nāṭya-śāstra identify many varieties of gesture and movement but it also describes the multiple patterns that drama can assume, similar to a modern treatise on musical form. Every conceivable aspect of a play is treated, from the choice of metre in poetry to the range of moods a play can achieve; but perhaps its primary importance lies in its justification of the aesthetic of Indian drama as a vehicle of religious enlightenment.

      In Japan the most celebrated of early nō writers, Zeami Motokiyo (Zeami) (1363–1443), left an influential collection of essays and notes to his son about his practice, and his deep knowledge of Zen Buddhism infused the nō drama with ideals for the art that have persisted. Religious serenity of mind (yūgen), conveyed through an exquisite elegance in a performance of high seriousness, is at the heart of Zeami's theory of dramatic art. Three centuries later the outstanding dramatist Chikamatsu (Chikamatsu Monzaemon) (1653–1725) built equally substantial foundations for the Japanese puppet theatre, later known as the Bunraku. His heroic plays for this theatre established an unassailable dramatic tradition of depicting an idealized life inspired by a rigid code of honour and expressed with extravagant ceremony and fervent lyricism. At the same time, in another vein, his pathetic “domestic” plays of middle class life and the suicides of lovers established a comparatively realistic mode for Japanese drama, which strikingly extended the range of both the bunraku and the Kabuki. Today, these forms, together with the more aristocratic and intellectual nō, constitute a classical theatre based on practice rather than on theory. They may be superseded as a result of the recent invasion of Western drama, but in their perfection they are unlikely to change. The Yüan drama of China was similarly based upon a slowly evolved body of laws and conventions derived from practice, for, like the Kabuki of Japan, this too was essentially an actors' theatre, and practice rather than theory accounts for its development.

The role of music (music, Western) and dance

      The Sanskrit treatise Nāṭya-śāstra suggests that drama had its origin in the art of dance, and any survey of Western theatre, too, must recognize a comparable debt to music in the classical Greek drama, which is believed to have sprung from celebratory singing to Dionysus. Similarly, the drama of the medieval church began with the chanted liturgies of the Roman mass. In the professional playhouses of the Renaissance and after, only rarely is music absent: Shakespeare's plays, particularly the comedies, are rich with song, and the skill with which he pursues dramatic ends with musical help is a study in itself. Molière conceived most of his plays as comedy-ballets, and much of his verbal style derives directly from the balletic qualities of the commedia. The popularity of opera in the 18th century led variously to John Gay's prototype for satirical ballad-opera, The Beggar's Opera (1728), the opera buffa in Italy, and the opéra comique in France. The development of these forms, however, resulted in the belittling of the written drama, with the notable exception of the parodistic wit of W.S. Gilbert (Gilbert, Sir W.S.) (1836–1911). It is worth noting, however, that the most successful modern “musicals” lean heavily on their literary sources. Today two of the strongest influences on contemporary theatre are those of Bertolt Brecht, who believed that a dialectical theatre should employ music not merely as a background embellishment but as an equal voice with the actor's, and of Antonin Artaud, who argued that the theatre experience should subordinate the literary text to mime, music, and spectacle. Since it is evident that drama often involves a balance of the arts, an understanding of their interrelationships is proper to a study of dramatic literature.

The influence of theatre design

      Though apparently an elementary matter, the shape of the stage (stage design) and auditorium probably offers the greatest single control over the text of the play that can be measured and tested. Moreover, it is arguable that the playhouse architecture dictates more than any other single factor the style of a play, the conventions of its acting, and the quality of dramatic effect felt by its audience. The shape of the theatre is always changing, so that to investigate its function is both to understand the past and to anticipate the future. Today, Western theatre is in the process of breaking away from the dominance of the Victorian picture-frame theatre, and therefore from the kind of experience this produced.

      The contemporary English critic John Wain (Wain, John) has called the difference between Victorian and Elizabethan theatre a difference between “consumer” and “participation” art. The difference resulted from the physical relationship between the audience and the actor in the two periods, a relationship that determined the kind of communication open to the playwright and the role the drama could play in society. Three basic playhouse shapes have emerged in the history of the theatre: the arena stage, the open stage, and the picture-frame.

The arena stage

      To the arena, or theatre-in-the-round, belongs the excitement of the circus, the bullring, and such sports as boxing and wrestling. Arena performance was the basis for all early forms of theatre—the Druid ceremonies at Stonehenge, the Tibetan harvest-festival drama, probably early Greek ritual dancing in the orchēstra, the medieval rounds in 14th-century England and France, the medieval street plays on pageant wagons (pageant wagon), the early nō drama of Japan, the royal theatre of Cambodia. Characteristic of all these theatres is the bringing together of whole communities for a ritual experience; therefore, a sense of ritualistic intimacy and involvement is common to the content of the drama, and only the size of the audience changes the scale of the sung or spoken poetry. Clearly, the idiom of realistic dialogue would have been inappropriate both to the occasion and the manner of such theatre.

The open stage

 When more narrative forms of action appeared in drama and particular singers or speakers needed to control the attention of their audience by facing them, the open, “thrust,” or platform stage, with the audience on three sides of the actor, quickly developed its versatility. Intimate and ritualistic qualities in the drama could be combined with a new focus on the players as individual characters. The open stage and its variants were used by the majority of great national theatres, particularly those of China and Japan, the booths of the Italian commedia, the Elizabethan public and private playhouses, and the Spanish corrales (i.e., the areas between town houses) of the Renaissance. While open-stage performance discouraged scenic elaboration, it stressed the actor and his role, his playing to and away from the spectators, with the consequent subtleties of empathy and alienation. It permitted high style in speech and behaviour, yet it could also accommodate moments of the colloquial and the realistic. It encouraged a drama of range and versatility, with rapid changes of mood and great flexibility of tone. It is not surprising that in the 20th century the West saw a return to the open stage and that recent plays of Brechtian theatre and the theatre of the absurd seem composed for open staging.

The proscenium stage

 The third basic theatre form is that of the proscenium-arch or picture-frame stage, which reached its highest achievements in the late 19th century. Not until public theatres were roofed, the actors withdrawn into the scene, and the stage artifically illuminated were conditions ripe in Western theatre for a new development of spectacle and illusion. This development had a revolutionary effect upon the literary drama. In the 18th and 19th centuries, plays were shaped into a new structure of acts and scenes, with intermissions to permit scene changes. Only recently has the development of lighting techniques encouraged a return to a more flexible episodic drama. Of more importance, the actor increasingly withdrew into the created illusion of the play, and his character became part of it. In the mid-19th century, when it was possible to dim the house lights, the illusion could be made virtually complete. At its best, stage illusion could produce the delicate naturalism of a Chekhovian family scene, into which the spectator was drawn by understanding, sympathy, and recognition; at its worst, the magic of spectacle and the necessary projection of the speech and acting in the largest picture-frame theatres produced a crude drama of sensation in which literary values had no place.

Audience expectations

      It may be that the primary influence upon the conception and creation of a play is that of the audience. An audience allows a play to have only the emotion and meaning it chooses, or else it defends itself either by protest or by a closed mind. From the time the spectator began paying for his playgoing, during the Renaissance, the audience more and more entered into the choice of the drama's subjects and their treatment. This is not to say that the audience was given no consideration earlier; even in medieval plays there were popular non-biblical roles such as Noah's wife, or Mak the sheepthief among the three shepherds, and the antic devils of the Harrowing of Hell in the English mystery cycles. Nor, in later times, did a good playwright always give the audience only what it expected—Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William)'s King Lear (c. 1605), for example, in the view of many the world's greatest play, had its popular elements of folktale, intrigue, disguise, madness, clowning, blood, and horror; but each was turned by the playwright to the advantage of his theme.

      Any examination of the society an audience represents must illuminate not only the cultural role of its theatre but also the content, genre, and style of its plays. The exceptionally aristocratic composition of the English Restoration audience, for example, illuminates the social game its comedy represented, and the middle class composition of the subsequent Georgian audience sheds light on the moralistic elements of its “sentimental” comedy. Not unrelated is the study of received ideas in the theatre. The widespread knowledge of simple Freudian psychology has undoubtedly granted a contemporary playwright like Tennessee Williams (Williams, Tennessee) (1911–83) the license to invoke it for character motivation; and Brecht increasingly informed his comedies with Marxist thinking on the assumption that the audiences he wrote for would appreciate his dramatized argument. Things go wrong when the intellectual or religious background of the audience does not permit a shared experience, as when Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) could not persuade a predominantly Christian audience with an existentialist explanation for the action of his plays, or when T.S. Eliot (Eliot, T.S.) (1888–1965) failed to persuade an audience accustomed to the conventions of drawing-room comedy that The Cocktail Party (1949) was a possible setting for Christian martyrdom. Good drama persuades before it preaches, but it can only begin where the audience begins.

      A great variety of drama has been written for special audiences. Plays have been written for children, largely in the 20th century, though Nativity plays have always been associated with children (children's literature) both as performers and as spectators. These plays tend to be fanciful in conception, broad in characterization, and moralistic in intention. Nevertheless, the most famous of children's plays, James Barrie (Barrie, J.M.)'s Peter Pan (1904), implied that the young are no fools and celebrated children in their own right. Barrie submerged his point subtly beneath the fantasy, and his play is still regularly performed, while Maurice Maeterlinck's Blue Bird (1908) has disappeared from the repertory because of its weighty moral tone.

      In the wider field of adult drama, the social class of the audience often accounts for a play's form and style. Court or aristocratic drama is readily distinguished from that of the popular theatre. The veneration in which the nō drama was held in Japan derived in large part from the feudal ceremony of its presentation, and its courtly elements ensured its survival for an upper class and intellectual elite. Although much of it derived from the nō, the flourishing of the Kabuki at the end of the 17th century is related to the rise of a new merchant and middle class audience, which encouraged the development of less esoteric drama. The popular plays of the Elizabethan public theatres, with their broader, more romantic subjects liberally spiced with comedy, are similarly to be contrasted with those of the private theatres. The boys' companies (children's company) of the private theatres of Elizabethan London played for a better paying and more sophisticated audience, which favoured the satirical or philosophical plays of Thomas Middleton (1570?–1627), John Marston (1576–1634), and George Chapman (1559?–1634). Similarly today, in all Western dramatic media—stage, film, radio, and television—popular and “commercial” forms run alongside more “cultural” and avant-garde forms, so that the drama, which in its origins brought people together, now divides them. Whether the esoteric influences the popular theatre, or vice versa, is not clear, and research remains to be done on whether this dichotomy is good or bad for dramatic literature or the people it is written for.

The range of dramatic forms and styles

      Dramatic literature has a remarkable facility in bringing together elements from other performing and nonperforming arts: design and mime, dance and music, poetry and narrative. It may be that the dramatic impulse itself, the desire to recreate a picture of life for others through impersonation, is at the root of all the arts. Certainly, the performing arts continually have need of dramatic literature to support them. A common way of describing an opera, for example, is to say that it is a play set to music. In Wagner the music is continuous; in Verdi the music is broken into songs; in Mozart the songs are separated by recitative, a mixture of speech and song; while operettas and musical comedy consist of speech that breaks into song from time to time. All forms of opera, however, essentially dramatize a plot, even if the plot must be simplified on the operatic stage. This is because, in opera, musical conventions dominate the dramatic conventions, and the spectator who finds that the music spoils the play, or who finds that the play spoils the music, is one who has not accepted the special conventions of opera. Music is drama's natural sister; proof may be seen in the early religious music-drama of the Dionysiac festivals of Greece and the mystères of 14th-century France, as well as in the remarkable development of opera in 17th-century Italy spreading to the rest of the world. The librettist who writes the text of an opera, however, must usually subserve the composer, unless he is able to embellish his play with popular lyrics, as John Gay did in The Beggar's Opera (1728), or to work in exceptionally close collaboration with the composer, as Brecht did with Kurt Weill for his Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928).

       dance, with its modern, sophisticated forms of ballet, has also been traditionally associated with dramatic representation and has similarly changed its purpose from religious to secular. In ballet, the music is usually central, and the performance is conceived visually and aurally; hence, the writer does not play a dominant role. The scenario is prepared for dance and mime by the choreographer. The contemporary Irish writer Samuel Beckett (Beckett, Samuel), trying to reduce his dramatic statement to the barest essentials, “composed” two mimes entitled Act Without Words I and II (1957 and 1966), but this is exceptional.

      In motion pictures (motion picture), the script writer has a more important but still not dominant role. He usually provides a loose outline of dialogue, business, and camera work on which the director, his cameramen, and the cutting editor build the finished product. The director is usually the final artistic authority and the central creative mind in the process, and words are usually subordinate to the dynamic visual imagery. (This subject is developed at length in the article motion picture.)

      The media of radio and television both depend upon words in their drama to an extent that is not characteristic of the motion picture. Though these mass media have been dominated by commercial interests and other economic factors, they also have developed dramatic forms from the special nature of their medium. The writer of a radio play must acknowledge that the listener cannot see the actors but hears them in conditions of great intimacy. A radio script that stresses the suggestive, imaginative, or poetic quality of words and permits a more than conventional freedom with time and place can produce a truly poetic drama, perhaps making unobtrusive use of earlier devices like the chorus, the narrator, and the soliloquy: the outstanding example of radio drama is Under Milk Wood (1953), by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Thomas, Dylan).

      A similar kind of dramatic writing is the so-called readers' theatre, in which actors read or recite without decor before an audience. (This is not to be confused with “ closet drama,” often a dramatic poem that assumes dialogue form; e.g., Milton's Samson Agonistes, 1671, written without the intention of stage performance.) The essential discipline of the circuit of communication with an audience is what distinguishes drama as a genre, however many forms it has taken in its long history.

J.L. Styan

Additional Reading

Allardyce Nicoll, World Drama (1949), offers the best survey of the whole field of dramatic literature, but it should be supplemented by John Gassner and Edward Quinn, The Reader's Encyclopaedia of World Drama (1969); and Phyllis Hartnoll, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 3rd ed. (1967). The classical texts of dramatic theory and criticism may be found in a collection by B.H. Clark, European Theories of the Drama, rev. ed. (1965), which also contains an extensive bibliography. The Natya Shastra of Bharata, the classic source for Indian dramatic theory, was translated by M.M. Ghose in 1951.Books of importance in the development of modern theory on drama are Bernard Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama (1970); E.R. Bentley, The Life of the Drama (1964); Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945); Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theatre (1949); S.K. Langer, Feeling and Form (1953); Elder Olson, Tragedy and the Theory of Drama (1961); Ronald Peacock, The Art of Drama (1957); J.L. Styan, The Elements of Drama (1960); and Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980), a technical semiotic approach.The finest study of the classical drama of Greece is probably H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy, 3rd ed. (1961); and for the medieval drama are recommended Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vol. (1933); Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (1955); and O.B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (1965). Oriental theatre is surveyed in Faubion Bowers, Japanese Theatre (1952); F.A. Lombard, An Outline History of the Japanese Drama (1928), which should be read in conjunction with Arthur Waley's classic The Noh Plays of Japan (1922); A.C. Scott, The Classical Theatre of China (1957); A.B. Keith, The Sanskrit Drama (1924); with H.W. Wells's comparative studies, The Classical Drama of India (1963), and The Classical Drama of the Orient (1965).M.C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (1935); and U.M. Ellis-Fermor, Jacobean Drama (1936), are standard surveys of the English Renaissance drama; and for standard Shakespearean criticism the reader should consult A.M. Eastman, A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism (1968). The classic source books for the commedia dell'arte are P.L. Duchartre, La Comédie italienne (Eng. trans., The Italian Comedy, 1929, reprinted 1966); and Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles (1931). On the French classical drama H.C. Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 9 vol. (1929–42), is standard; but Martin Turnell, The Classical Moment (1947), deals more briefly with Corneille, Racine, and Molière. On Restoration comedy J.L. Palmer, The Comedy of Manners (1913); and Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Comedy (1924), remain the best.American drama is surveyed briefly in W.J. Meserve, An Outline History of American Drama (1965); and A.S. Downer, Fifty Years of American Drama, 1900–1950 (1951). U.M. Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement, 2nd ed. (1954), is a comprehensive study of the early years at Dublin's Abbey Theatre; and on Western drama after Ibsen the reader should begin by consulting Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (1946, reprinted 1955); Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (1964); and J.L. Styan, The Dark Comedy, 2nd ed. (1968), an account of the blending of tragic and comic elements in the post-Ibsen theatre.

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