Drama, Study notes of Theatre

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Drama

An Introduction

 Drama comes from Greek words meaning "to do" or "to act.”  A play is a story acted out.  Plays show people going through some eventful period in their lives, seriously or humorously.  The speech and action of a play recreate the flow of human life. A play comes fully to life only on the stage.

 A dramatic monologue is a type of lyrical poem or narrative piece that has a person speaking to a select listener and revealing his character in a dramatic situation

 In a strict sense, plays are classified as being either tragedies or comedies.  The broad difference between the two is in the ending.  Comedies end happily.  Tragedies end on an unhappy note.  Tragic or comic, the action of the play comes from conflict of characters how the stage people react to each other. These reactions make the play.

 A classical tragedy tells of a high and noble person who falls because of a "tragic flaw," a weakness in his own character.  A domestic tragedy concerns the lives of ordinary people brought low by circumstances beyond their control. Domestic tragedy may be realistic seemingly true to life or naturalistic realistic and on the seamy side of life.

 Comedies end happily  A romantic comedy is a love story.  The main characters are lovers; the secondary characters are comic. In the end the lovers are always united.  Farce is comedy at its broadest. Much fun and horseplay enliven the action.

 Characters are important in plays  Without the character there is no story, no climax, no resolution  The audience watches a play because the characters/ actors promise to take the audience on a journey to experience a story's fulfillment.  The audience is invested in the characters and cares what happens to them.

 Full, rich, and interesting characters who are different enough from each other so that in one way or another they conflict. From this conflict comes the story  A dramatic situations with a strongly plotted conclusions

 Ancient Drama  The origins of Western drama can be traced to the celebratory music of 6th-century BC Attica, the Greek region centered on Athens.  It appears that the poet Thespis developed a new musical form in which he impersonated a single character and engaged a chorus of singer-dancers in dialogue.  As the first composer and soloist in this new form, which came to be known as tragedy, Thespis can be considered both the first dramatist and the first actor.

 Of the hundreds of works produced by Greek tragic playwrights, only 32 plays by the three major innovators in this new art form survive.  Aeschylus added a second actor to the play format thereby creating the possibility of conflict  His seven surviving plays, three of which constitute the only extant trilogy are richly ambiguous inquiries into the paradoxical (illogical/ contradictory) relationship between humans and the cosmos, in which people are made answerable for their acts, yet recognize that these acts are determined by the gods. The battle between fate and self determination.

 Eventually, these playlets grew more elaborate and abandoned the inside of the church for the church steps and the adjacent marketplace.  Secular (worldly, material) elements crept in as the artisan guilds took responsibility for these performances;  although the glorification of God and the redemption of humanity remained prime concerns, the celebration of local industry was not neglected.

 Shakespeare dies in approximately 1616  Ben Jonson unofficial ‘poet laureate’ until his death in 1637  Plays mostly banned until Charles II takes over in 1660  Plays considered unholy, blasphemous and locations of licentious (immoral, wicked, shameless) behavior

 The themes, language, and dramaturgy of Shakespeare's plays were now considered out of date, so that during the next two centuries the works of England's greatest dramatist were never produced intact.  Owing much to Moliere, the English comedy of manners was typically a witty, brittle satire of current mores (traditions, customs) especially of relations between the sexes.  Among its leading examples were She Would if She Could (1668) and The Man of Mode (1676) by Sir George Etherege; The Country Wife (1675) by William Wycherley; The Way of the World (1700) by William Congreve; and The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) by George Farquhar.

 The resurgence of Puritanism, especially after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, had a profound effect on 18th-century drama. Playwrights, retreating from the free-spirited licentiousness of the Restoration, turned towards softer, sentimental comedy and moralizing domestic tragedy.  The London Merchant (1731) by George Lillo consolidated this trend.  A prose tragedy of the lower middle class, and thus an important step on the road to realism, it illustrated the moral that a woman of easy virtue can lead an industrious young man to the gates of hell.  Satire enjoyed a brief revival with Henry Fielding and with John Gay, whose The Beggar's Opera (1728) met with phenomenal success.  Their wit, however, was too sharp for the government, which retaliated by imposing strict censorship laws in 1737.  For the next 150 years, few substantial English authors bothered with the drama.