CHAPTER 2: DRAMA

IMPORTANT:
 Drama (LITERARY GENRE)  theatre (BUILDING)

 Play: OBRA DE TEATRO

 Stage: Whatever actors do in it, spectators believe it (scenery/scenario) and the fourth wall
(actor don’t cross it and it and it is invisible and is used to separate stage and spectators.)

 INTRODUCTION TO DRAMA:
Drama employs more conventions, specific techniques, employed regularly so that the
audience attach specific meaning to them. There are accepted by the audience and actors.
Drama has a doble nature: it can be read as literature, although it is primarily a performative
art. That’s why has so many conventions. Besides, staging devices —such as lighting, props,
costumes— form an integral part of a play. This doble nature has 2 consequences: When we
read a play, we have full access to all the information provided by the playwright, so the reader
creates a mental image of everything, but when we watch a play, what we see is the
interpretation of the director, actors, designers, etc.…, so it’s not a direct version, but a
mediated one.
Drama seems real and seeks reality, but everything is false (the most important convention). If
these conventions weren’t accepted, the play wouldn’t seem plausible to the audience
(“willing suspension of disbelief”).
Drama imitates reality, but it’s not.

- THE DRAMATIC TEXT:

All the text in a play can be of 2 types:
- Primary texts: Speeches delivered by the characters.
- Secondary texts: All the texts accompanying the primary texts, tittle, list of “dramatic
personae”. Stage directions, etc. It constitutes an important information to understand
the primary text.
 ELEMENTS OF DRAMA:
The main components of drama are four:
1. Dialogue (speech)
2. Plot (action, story)
3. Characters
4. Stage directions
They do not at all work separately, for they are tightly related and can only operate thanks to
their interaction.
 1. DIALOGUE:
Dialogue is the basic external structuring element of the dramatic text. It is made of the
successive speeches delivered by the characters, which provides an illusion of a real
conversation among them.
Dialogue is useful for three main things:
- It presents the action.
- It builds the character’s personality.
- It can provide additional information about the time and place in which the action
takes place.
Dialogue determines the artistic quality of the play and has a strong influence on the plot, as it
can increase or decrease its pace and generates theatricality. Most contemporary drama is
written in prose, but up to the XIX-century it was frequently presented in verse (in the
Renaissance, in iambic pentameter).

 SPECIAL TYPE OF DIALOGUE:

- SOLILOQUY (MONOLOGUE):
A character speaks his thoughts directly to the audience. The audience assumes that
the character is being totally honest and opening his mind because he thinks he’s
alone. However, they can be wrong. He says what he sees as the truth. One convention
is that they speak in a very loud voice.
This idea of the character knowing less things that the audience is called dramatic
irony.
- ASIDE:
A character, in the middle of a group scene, suddenly turns to another character or to
the audience and says something directed only to them (thus “crossing” the fourth
wall). The convention requires that no one else it, even though the actor shouts.

2. PLOT:
The story or stories told in the play. It is generated by the dialogue spoken by characters. Plot is
normally not plain but contains varying degrees of dramatic intensity in the form of
(anti)climactic moments distributed along the story. There’s a distinction between story and
plot:
- Plot: The way in which those events are presented by the playwright.
- Story: Assumed chronological order in which events happen.
Plots can have various plot lines or subplots, different parts of the story which are combined to
from the entire plot. As texts are linear and don’t allow simultaneous actions, authors can alter
the chronological order:
- Depending on how the play starts “ab ovo”(from the beginning; “in media res”; and
“in ultima res”(from the end)
o “Ab ovo”: It starts at the begging of the story and provides background
information about the characters, circumstances, etc.
o “In media res”: It starts in the middle, which catches the attention of the
viewer.
 o “In ultima res”: It begins with the ending and then, relates the event in reverse
order. These plays are called Analytic, as the attention is focused on “how” and
not on “what.”
- The author sometimes decides to go back and forth:
o Flashback or Analepsis: Events from the past are inserted in the presentation
of current events (sometimes as memories).
o Flashforward or Prolepsis: Future events are anticipated (like in the prologue
of Henry V and Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare), where the audience is
already told the gist of the subsequent play. This information is said by the
narrator or the Chorus (a person who speaks to the audience); when he
finishes your go back to the present and the play starts.
 THE 3 UNITIES:
Older play, traditionally, aimed at making the plot plausible or true-to-life following Aristotle’s
concept of MIMESIS (drama must be similar to real life as much as possible) The idea of 3
unities was often used to achieve this goal:
- Unity of plot: A play should have only one single plot line.
- Unity of place: Action ought to take place in 1 single location.
- Unity of time: Everything must happen within one day.
These rules were sometimes followed, sometimes not. Occasionally, an author could adhere
only to 1 or 2 of them, but not the 3.

 STRUCTURE:
Two different kinds of structural division can be made with plot:
- External: acts, scenes, prologues, epilogues, etc.
Nº(classic theatre: tendency to 5 acts, until 19th Century)
- Internal:
o Introduction: Characters and place are introduced (general information, how
the characters are, speak… .)
o Conflict: Something happens that need a solution (Obligatory). Every play need
one.
o Denouement

Another frequent way of describing the overall structure o f plays is the so-called FREYTAG’S
PYRAMID. This presents the classical 5-act structure of plays in the shape of a pyramid with 1
particular function attributed to each of the 5 acts.
The following division is not exact but is the most usually.
1. EXPOSITION (ACT I): Background information of the plot that includes characters,
conflicts and settings are introduced. Thus, the audience is prepared for the action in
the subsequent acts.
2. RISING ACTION (ACT II): We know about the problems and characters. Further
circumstances and details are related to the main issue are introduced. The main
conflict starts to develop, and character are presented in greater details.
3. CLIMAX (ACT III): A crisis occurs where the action that will lead to the end is
committed, and this brings about a turn (peripety) plot. The most suspenseful part of
the plot. The turning point of the protagonist’s character.
4. FALLING ACTION (ACT IV): New tension is created by delaying the final outcome with
further events and details.
5. RESOLUTION ACT (ACT V): A solution to the conflict presented is offered.
o In tragedies, the solution is a catastrophe (Death of the protagonist, usually).
o In Comedies, it’s simply resolved (A wedding or other festivities, usually)

- PLAY-WITHIN-THE-PLAY: It’s a play which features another play as a part of the plot.
(Ex: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)

- : 1. SAD: TRAGEDY

HAPPY: COMEDY
2. As a speaker.

 CONVENTIONS OF PLOT:
Through the years, drama has built its own conventions and some of them have developed into
so-called schools of playwriting: sentimental drama, theatre of the absurd, etc. However, there
are two basic kinds of plot structures and therefore two kinds of drama: COMEDY and
TRAGEDY.
- Comedy: Roughly speaking, it is associated with happy endings and tragedy with sad
endings. It usually ends happily, with life triumphing over ruin and death —it ends with
a beginning, that is, by suggesting a whole new story to come.
- Tragedy ends finally, often with the death of the main character.

o DERIVATIVE FORMS:
From these two forms have grown a series of subordinate forms. Each has its special
conventions. Some of them are typical of certain periods only or affect just portions of whole
plays. Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to find clear-cut distinctions between some of these
forms.

- Hamlet:
o Revenge Play
o History Play/Chronicle
o Tragedy
- Shaw’s Major Barbare (1905):
o Comedy
o Problem Play (Poverty and its solution)
o Social Satire (To the highest class)
o Comedy of Manners (To the highest class)
In XX- and XXI-century drama, it is often hard to assign plays to a particular category, for
authors seem to prefer to transcend boundaries and do not allow their texts to be classified in
clear-cut groups. (There’re elements from different kinds of play.)

- FARCE:
It is highly exaggerated comedy wherein the playwright does not profess to maintain
an illusion of reality.
- MELODRAMA:
It is an exaggerated tragedy and therefore highly unreal rendering of a potentially
tragic situation in which characters are so stereotyped and the plot so contrived that
tragic characters seem almost funny.
- The HISTORY PLAY or CHRONICLE:
It is based on an actual historical character or event, and on it is superimposed the
form of tragedy or comedy. (Very famous in the Renaissance Period)
- The PROBLEM PLAY:
It deals with a specific, usually Contemporary Real Social Problem, and characters in
the problem, and propose solutions and audience chooses which is the best one. The
playwright often superimposes the form of tragedy, less often comedy, as in the history
play. The major difference is that:
o The HISTORY PLAYS deals with the actual past, and it is usually narrative.
o The PROBLEM PLAYS with the fictional present and it’s always argumentative.
- The DOMESTIC TRAGEDY:
It’s drama in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle class or lower-class
individuals, in contrast to CLASSICAL and NEOCLASSICAL TRAGEDY, in which the
protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank, and their downfall is an affair of state as
well as a personal matter.

- The REVENGE TRAGEDY (For 25/30 years; England, 16th Century):

It’s a drama in which the dominant motive is revenge for a real or imagined injury. It
was a favorite form of English tragedy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, with Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy as one of its most famous examples and found its highest
expression in William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Last Revenge Tragedy in England).
Whereas in Spain we had the importance of honor; in England, they had the revenge.
- The TRAGICOMEDY:
It’s dramatic work incorporating both tragic and comic elements.
- In the Renaissance, tragicomedy became a genre that mixed tragic elements into
drama that was mainly comic. Central to this kind of tragicomedy were danger,
reversal, and a happy ending.
- The COMEDY OF INTRIGUE, also called COMEDY OF SITUATION(19th Century):
It was a comic form in which type characters are involved in complex plots and
subplots based on ridiculous and contrived situations with large doses of farcical
humor.
A remarkable example of comedy of intrigue is Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors,
with the characters Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse and their
servants Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse, respectively.
- The LOW COMEDY:
 It’s dramatic or literary entertainment with no underlying purpose except to provoke
laughter by boasting, boisterous jokes, drunkenness, scolding, fighting, buffoonery, and
other riotous activity.
Used either alone or added as comic relief to more serious forms, low comedy has
origins in the comic improvisations of actors in ancient Greek and Roman comedy.
- The COMEDY OF MANNERS(Opposite to Low Comedy):
It was witty, cerebral form of dramatic comedy that depicts and often satirizes the
manners and affectations of a contemporary society. A comedy of manners is
concerned with social usage and the question of whether or not characters meet
certain social standards. Ex: The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wild)
- The SENTIMENTAL COMEDY:
It was a dramatic genre of the 18th century, denoting plays in which middle class
protagonists triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials. Such comedy aimed at
producing tears rather than laughter.
3. ACTANTS AND CHARACTERS:
 In J. A. Greimas’s narratological theory, an ACTANT is one of the six basic categories of
fictional roles common to all stories, not just drama. Actants are paired in binary
opposition: subject/object, sender/receiver, helper/opponent.
 CHARACTER:

It is an individualized manifestation of one or more actants. An actant may be a non‐human

creature (e.g. a dragon as Opponent) or inanimate object (e.g. magic sword as Helper, or Holy
Grail as Object), or in more than one character.
Characters are no doubt the most salient element of drama for all other elements converge on
them. Not only do they carry out the plot but also produce all dialogue and are the focus of all
non-linguistic elements of drama (lighting, gestures, movements on stage, clothing, etc.).
Before a play starts, each character is just like an empty box, a name on a cast list (cf. the
dramatis personae included at the beginning of most plays, often matching each name with
that of the actor or actress playing each role). Only when the action progresses do we learn
more and more about them from three possible sources:
- What each character says and how he or she says it.
- What other characters say about him or her(Subjective Information).
- What the author tells us about him or her in the stage directions.
In order to figure out the dramatic functionality of a character in a play, it is often convenient to
know about its importance in it, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
For the former, it is useful to prepare a Boolean matrix recording all scenes in which each
character participates, so that we can divide the number of these by the total number of
scenes. For the latter, we will take into consideration the length of his or her speeches in each
scene (remarkable, regular or minimum).
Characters in plays often serve more functions than characters in novels, poems, and short
stories do. This is because playwrights often use FUNCTION CHARACTERS, characters whose
major importance is what they do, not what they are.

 FUNCTION CHARACTERS:
- CHORUS:
What difference drama to fiction is the not use of 1 narrative figure. This implies that
the interpretation of the text depends largely on the spectator and his interaction with
 the perspective adopted by the director, actors, and theatre staff. There are some
exceptions in which the author uses something similar to a narrator.
The earliest kind of function character. A chorus is a group of actors sometimes a
single one speaking in unison and functioning as an expository device.
A chorus gives background information to the audience, comments on the action, or
announces what will happen. The convention requires that the audience believe what
the chorus says, for the chorus never lies.
- CONFIDANT:
A character whose main function is to carry information to and from the main
character and to provide an excuse for self-revelation by the main character.
- FOIL CHARACTER:
A convention not exclusive of drama, although especially noticeable in it. A foil is a
function character whose personality contrasts with that of the main character to
offset and clarify his qualities for the audience. It provides a more complete
perspective of the protagonist, as well as enhances its characteristic.
FOIL ANTAGONIST, though may occasionally coincide.
¿
o FOIL: It exposes something essential about the protagonist.
o ANTAGONIST: It opposes something essential about the protagonist.

4. STAGE DIRECTIONS:
STAGE DIRECTIONS [SDS] are the instructions that the playwright incorporates in his text so as
to facilitate an accurate performance (from his point of view as an author). They are addressed
to the actors and, very especially, the director.
THEY’RE NOT “ACOTATIONS”, THIS WORD DOES NOT EVEN EXIST.
Even though they are rather functional messages, in certain cases they may have intrinsic
literary value (cf. The Glass Menagerie, by T. Williams).
Their use has increased with time. Thus, classical drama practically contained no SDs at all.
In the Renaissance, they became rather frequent, but were quite short and referred basically to
characters’ entrances and exits, and also to some gestures, body movements and voice
deliverance.
In the XX century, their use has increased greatly and the same happens with their length and
diversity. Buero Vallejo’s El tragaluz contains 1475 SDs, whereas S. Beckett’s Act without Words
is a play made exclusively of SDs and no dialogue at all.
There exist a few types of SDs. They can be classified in two large groups: character SDs and
performance SDs.
- In turn, CHARACTER SDS can be of four different kinds: paralinguistic, gestural
(kinetic), movement-related (proxemic) and concerning outer aspect.
- PARALINGUISTIC STAGE DIRECTIONS:
These refer to voice qualities and how it should be used.
They are related to tone, emphasis, whispering, crying, singing… They also provide information
about silences and are highly dependent on each actor/actress’s personal qualities.
They may condition the general tone of the play, whether it mirrors real life or not; whether it
is tragic or comic, etc.

- GESTURAL (KINETIC) STAGE DIRECTIONS:

These are related to body language and either accompany or replace dialogue. They can be
highly conditioned by the audience’s cultural background.

- MOVEMENT-RELATED (PROXEMIC) STAGE DIRECTIONS:

It is concerned with characters’ movements around stage.
It also pays attention to the distance between characters, which often reflects their personal
relationship, which appears in four degrees: intimate, personal, social and public.

- OUTER ASPECT STAGE DIRECTIONS:

They are normally concerned with make-up, hair-do and clothes.
- PERFORMANCE SDS may focus either on stage scenery and objects, or on lighting and
sound:
- STAGE DIRECTIONS ABOUT STAGE SCENERY AND OBJECTS:
These SDs are related to the objects, either fixed or moving, that can be found on stage.
Those objects are usually highly representative and aim at creating an impression that the
stage is one particular kind of place (e.g. a castle, a home, a forest…).
Objects mentioned in these SDs most often have an important role in the plot of the play.

- STAGE DIRECTIONS ABOUT LIGHTING AND SOUND:

Unlike those in the previous set, these SDs are not concerned with physical objects, although
they also contribute to creating a suitable atmosphere for the play.
These are particularly useful for highlighting climactic and anticlimactic moments in the play.
Light spots help focus attention on certain areas of the stage, whereas sound (music and
noises) may create rhythm and harmony or ruin them.