UNIT ONE

ORIGIN, CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS of DRAMA

1.1 Definition of Drama

There are many definitions of drama. Martin Esslin in Anatomy of Drama has the following definitions
of drama:
 Drama can be seen as a manifestation of the play instinct as in children who are playing mother
and father.
 Drama is something one goes to see, which is organized as something to be seen.
 It is an enacted fiction an art form based on mimetic action.
 In arts, drama is the most elegant expression of thought nearest to the truth (reality).
 It is the most concrete form in which art can recreate human situation, human relationship (57).
Generally drama is an art form that explores human conflict and tension. It generally takes the form of
story presented to an audience through dialogue and action. The story is conveyed using of elements of
theatre: acting, costume, music, lightening, props, scenery, music , sound.

Aristotle’s definitions sum up these and other numerous definitions of drama by different scholars. He
defines drama simply as an imitation of an action. He links it to the mimetic impulse in human beings
like children playing father and mother in a childhood play. This means that imitation is part of life.
Human beings have the desire to imitate others, situations or events. However, Betolt Brecht insists that
drama is not just an imitation of action, but a tool for the demonstration of social conditions. It is not
just an entertainment but an instrument of political and social change. From these definitions, we can
conclude that drama is a way of creating or recreating a situation, an articulation of reality through
impersonation or re-enactment. An action becomes drama if it is an imitation of an earlier action real or
imagined. For instance, the story of a hunter who goes to the forest kills an antelope and takes it home
even if he is dancing as he goes home, is not drama. It becomes drama if the same story is reenacted
maybe as part of a festival. In the later case, some people (actors) will represent the hunter and the
antelope to the audience for entertainment or education. A young man who aspires to be a hunter could
learn, from the presentation, how to stalk an animal or how to aim the gun or bow while being
entertained. This story could be represented through mime, dance or in dialogue.
1.2 The Nature of Drama

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Drama has developed and been improved upon by various dramatists over the ages. It has also been
influenced by the developments and changes in the world. The unique nature of drama makes it possible
for it to be read and as also to be performed. Unlike the prose and poetry which depend on narration,
drama is presented only through dialogue. The novel is divided in chapters and the poem is written
mostly in stanzas, drama is presented in acts and scenes, movements or parts. William Shakespeare
made the five-act structure the standard for his plays. Each dramatist is free to adopt his/her own style.

In addition to the fact that plays can be read and enjoyed by people in the privacy of their homes, people
also watch and enjoy the plays as an audience in a theatre when the plays are presented on stage. The
audience gives an immediate reaction to the performance on stage. Drama is temporary in nature. Every
performance has a definite duration (i.e. it lasts for a certain length of time). Each performance of a
play is therefore a distinct work of art. Even if the actors, the composition and the decors remain
unchanged throughout the production, each performance varies in nature and quality as one may be
better than other. A good example is in a case where an actor may have performed badly in one
production and better in another one. It means therefore that “every performance of a play, even by the
same actors, represents a different realization of its possibilities and no single performance can fully
realize all its possibilities” (Scholes, 17). Once a performance is conducted, it ceases to exist except in
one’s memory. Ritualistic presentations could also be viewed from the same perspective.

1.3 Origin of Drama

The word drama comes from the Greek verb “dran” which means ‘to act’ or to perform. Many scholars
trace the origin of drama to wordless actions like ritual dances and mimes performed by dancers,
masked players or priests during traditional festivals or ceremonies. One account traces the origin
to ritual. In the traditional society or in the primordial times, sometimes, the seasons did not come as
expected. When this happened, men felt that they had offended the gods, so they devised means of
appeasing these gods. That act of appeasing the gods is what we refer to as ritual. This ritual, as
expected, involved a ceremony in which the priest played an important role at a designated location,
mostly shrines. The priest would normally wear a special dress for the occasion. That role, the dress
(costume), and the utterance or incantations are regarded as dramatic elements. Drama could therefore
emerge from this. So, if it is presented for entertainment and there is an element of impersonation,
imitation of an action, and re-enactment of an action, it is drama. Another account traces the origin to
man’s desire for entertainment. Here, during festivals or other ceremonies, they recreate the feats of
some legendary or mythical heroes to entertain the people.
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Scholars are divided on the origin of drama. Some trace the origin to Greece but others insist that drama
in its definitive form or pattern evolved from Egypt which is regarded as one of the cradles of
civilization in the world. The latter group argues that it was borrowed by western merchants who
developed and documented it, and who now trace the origin to Greece. However, the account of tracing
the origin of drama to Greece is more plausible. The evolution is clearer and well-documented.

Apparently, Greek drama evolved from religious festivals (ritual) that were celebrated to ensure the
fertility of the land and the well being of its people around 5th C B.C . These festivals were connected
with the worship of the god Dionysius, a native god who like the vegetation dies and was reborn each
year. The festival involved singing and dancing by a chorus of fifty men. The choral song, known as
Dithyramb, was sung in honor of the god. The men danced around the altar of Dionysius in a circular
dancing place called orchestra. Sometimes a story about the god was improvised by the leader of the
chorus, though remaining part of the chorus. Sometimes he dresses like a character from mythology.

1.3.1 Classical Period

The origins of Western drama can be traced to the celebratory music of 6th-century BC Attica, the
Greek region centered on Athens. Although accounts of this period are inadequate, 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 thirty two plays by the three major
innovators in this new art form survive. Aeschylus created the possibility of developing conflict
between characters by introducing a second actor into the format. His seven surviving plays, three of
which constitute the only extant trilogy are richly ambiguous inquiries into the paradoxical 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.

1.3.2 Medieval Period

Medieval drama, when it emerged hundreds of years later, was a new creation rather than a rebirth, the
drama of earlier times having had almost no influence on it. The reason for this creation came from a
quarter that had traditionally opposed any form of theater: the Christian church. In the Easter service,
and later in the Christmas service, bits of chanted dialogue, called tropes, were interpolated into the
liturgy. Priests, impersonating biblical figures, acted out minuscule scenes from the holiday stories.

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Eventually, these play lets grew more elaborate and abandoned the inside of the church for the church
steps and the adjacent marketplace. Secular 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.

1.3.3 Restoration Period and 18th-Century Drama

The theaters established in the wake of Charles II's return from exile in France and the Restoration of the
monarchy in England (1660) were intended primarily to serve the needs of a socially, politically, and
aesthetically homogeneous class. At first they relied on the pre-Civil War repertoire; before long,
however, they felt called upon to bring these plays into line with their more "refined," French-influenced
sensibilities. 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. 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.

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.

1.3.4. 19 th Century Drama and the Romantic Rebellion

In its purest form, Romanticism concentrated on the spiritual, which would allow humankind to
transcend the limitations of the physical world and body and find an ideal truth. Subject matter was
drawn from nature and "natural man" (such as the supposedly untouched Native American). Perhaps one
of the best examples of Romantic drama is Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) by the German playwright
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Based on the classic legend of the man who sells his soul to the devil,
this play of epic proportions depicts humankind's attempt to master all knowledge and power in its
constant struggle with the universe. The Romantics focused on emotion rather than rationality, drew
their examples from a study of the ideal world rather than the real, and glorified the idea of the artist as a
mad genius unfettered by rules. Romanticism thus gave rise to a vast array of dramatic literature and

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production that was often undisciplined and that often substituted emotional manipulation for substantial
ideas.

1.3.5. 20th Century Drama (The Modern Drama)

From the time of the Renaissance on, theatre seemed to be striving for total realism, or at least for the
illusion of reality. As it reached that goal in the late 19th century, a multifaceted, antirealistic reaction
erupted. Avant-garde Precursors of Modern Theatre Many movements generally lumped together as the
avant-garde, attempted to suggest alternatives to the realistic drama and production. The various
theoreticians felt that Naturalism presented only superficial and thus limited or surface reality-that a
greater truth or reality could be found in the spiritual or the unconscious. Others felt that theatre had lost
touch with its origins and had no meaning for modern society other than as a form of entertainment.
Paralleling modern art movements, they turned to symbol, abstraction, and ritual in an attempt to
revitalize the theatre. Although realism continues to be dominant in contemporary theatre, television and
film now better serve its earlier functions.

The originator of many antirealist ideas was the German opera composer Richard Wagner. He believed
that the job of the playwright/composer was to create myths. In so doing, Wagner felt, the creator of
drama was portraying an ideal world in which the audience shared a communal experience, perhaps as
the ancients had done. He sought to depict the "soul state", or inner being, of characters rather than their
superficial, realistic aspects. Furthermore, Wagner was unhappy with the lack of unity among the
individual arts that constituted the drama.

1.3.6 Contemporary Period

Although pure Naturalism was never very popular after World War I, drama in a realist style continued
to dominate the commercial theatre, especially in the United States. Even there, however, psychological
realism seemed to be the goal, and nonrealistic scenic and dramatic devices were employed to achieve
this end. The plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, for instance, use memory scenes, dream
sequences, purely symbolic characters, projections, and the like. Even O'Neill's later works-ostensibly
realistic plays such as Long Day's Journey into Night (produced 1956)-incorporate poetic dialogue and a
carefully orchestrated background of sounds to soften the hard-edged realism. Scenery was almost
always suggestive rather than realistic. European drama was not much influenced by psychological
realism but was more concerned with plays of ideas, as evidenced in the works of the Italian dramatist

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Luigi Pirandello, the French playwrights Jean Anouilh and Jean Giraudoux, and the Belgian playwright
Michel de Ghelderode.

Many playwrights of the 1960s and 1970s-Sam Shepard in the United States, Peter Handke in Austria,
Tom Stoppard in England-built plays around language: language as a game, language as sound,
language as a barrier, language as a reflection of society. In their plays, dialogue frequently cannot be
read simply as a rational exchange of information. Many playwrights also mirrored society's frustration
with a seemingly uncontrollable, self-destructive world. In Europe in the 1970s, new playwriting was
largely overshadowed by theatricalist productions, which generally took classical plays and reinterpreted
them, often in bold new scenographic spectacles, expressing ideas more through action and the use of
space than through language.

In the late 1970s a return to Naturalism in drama paralleled the art movement known as Photorealism.
Typified by such plays as American Buffalo (1976) by David Mamet, little action occurs, the focus is on
mundane characters and events, and language is fragmentary-much like everyday conversation. The
settings are indistinguishable from reality. The intense focus on seemingly meaningless fragments of
reality creates an absurdist, nightmarish quality.

1.4 .Functions of Drama

Drama is said to have originated from ritual. It is an important branch of literature and the most concrete
of all art forms. It is devoid of the distant intimacy of the novel, the abstract message of fine arts, the
incomplete message of music or the cryptic and esoteric language of poetry. It presents a story
realistically through the actors to the audience. Drama is therefore used to entertain, inform and educate
people. You can see that it is the most effective tool for mass mobilization by the government and
private agencies. For instance, most campaigns against DRUG ABUSE, CHILD ABUSE and so on, are
presented in form of drama to educate, enlighten while at the same time entertain the people.

Of all the creative artists, the dramatist is in the best position to mirror his society and to effect social
reforms. This is because is work has a unique characteristic of presenting events in a vivid,
picturesque(visually impressive) and realistic manner. This helps to imprint social conditions
realistically in the minds of the audience. Its message is therefore immediate. The rich and the poor, the
young and the old, the literate and the illiterate enjoy and assimilate the message of drama once it is
presented in the appropriate language as the actors live out the story (message) on stage.

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In most traditional societies, drama forms part of the communal rites. In Africa, reenactment of some
feats like hunting, warfare, and other events, is usually part of bigger festivals. Some of these events are
presented in form of drama to entertain the audience. In Greece also, drama formed part of a bigger
festival. Greek drama is acclaimed to be the earliest recorded form of drama (5th century B.C). It is
said to have originated from the Dionysian religious rites, and also remained a communal rite during the
classical period. The dramatists of this age gave insight into the philosophy and religious beliefs of the
ancient Greece. These early Greek plays treated life’s basic problems with utmost honesty and attacked
socials ills using legendary and mythological themes. This helped to ensure sanity and equilibrium in the
society.

In the Medieval period, drama was used to elucidate the message of the gospel through the re-enactment
of the biblical stories during mass. It was later expanded to include the dramatization of the lives of the
saints and other notable stories of the bible that did not form part of the Sunday’s lessons. It was
therefore used for the spiritual and moral growth of the people. Drama and theatre also played important
roles in the social lives of the people in the ancient Roman Empire. In England, Germany and France,
playwrights like Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Moliere, and others, in varying degrees, used their works
to enable their respective countries “… to carve out and affirm a unique identity” for themselves
(Hagher 145). The American industrial sector was radically but positively affected through the
intervention of one play, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. This play is regarded as being
responsible for the spirit of industrial revolution in America. In Africa, Kenya to be precise, a
playwright, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o was arrested and detained because of the political and social
consciousness which his play, I Will Marry When I Want, aroused in the audience after the production.
The play was written and presented in his Gikuyi language; this enabled the audience, to assimilate its
message immediately and to react accordingly. The drama of any society, therefore, reflects the
problems, aspirations, philosophy and cultural background of the people. You see that dramatists
can use their works to help to shape the future of the societies. They can do this not only by reflecting
the ugly sides of the societies but also by promoting the positive aspects of the people’s way of life that
are worth emulating or cultivating. They also help to ensure the continuity of their tradition and culture
by reflecting them in their plays. Each dramatist, therefore, tries from his perspective to use his art to
enlighten his audience on the goodness, imbalances and shortcomings of his society.

1.5 Drama as Genre of Literature

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Literature springs from our inborn love of telling a story, of arranging words in pleasing patterns, of
expressing in words some special aspect of our human experience. There are a number of different
branches such as drama, poetry, the novel, the short story; all these are works of the imagination arising
from man’s capacity for invention. The primary aim of literature is to give pleasure, to entertain those
who voluntarily attend to it. There are, of course, many different ways of giving pleasure or
entertainment, ranging from the most philosophical and profound. It is important to note that the writer
of literature is not tied to fact in quite the same way as the historian, the economist or the scientist,
whose studies are absolutely based on what has actually happened, or on what actually does happen, in
the world of reality.

We soon discover, however that the literature which entertains us best does not keep us for long in the
other-world of fantasy or unreality. The greatest pleasure and satisfaction to be found in literature occurs
where (as it so often does) it brings us back to the realities of human situations, problems, feelings
and relationships. The writers of literature, being less tied to fact than the historian or the scientist,
have more scope to comment on the facts, to arrange them in unusual ways to speculate not only on
what is, but on what ought to be, or what might be. Writers are sometimes, therefore people with
visionary or prophetic insights into human life.

Literature is an imaginative art which expresses thoughts and feelings of the artist on events around him.
In most cases, it deals with life experiences. The author/artist uses words in a powerful, effective and
captivating manner to paint his picture of human experience.. The three genres of literature are fiction,
drama and poetry. You have seen that drama is a genre of literature. A person who writes a novel is
called a novelist, the person who writes a play is a playwright while the poet writes poetry. All of
us who read literature will find our knowledge of human affairs broadened and deepened, whether in the
individual, the social, the racial or the international sphere; we shall understand the possibilities of
human life, both for good and evil; we shall understand how we came to live at a particular time and
place, with all its pleasures and vexations and problems; and we shall perhaps be able to make right
rather than wrong choices.

Drama as a literary genre is realized in performance, describes it as “staged art” (867). As a literary
form, it is designed for the theatre because characters are assigned roles and they act out their roles as
the action is enacted on stage. These characters can be human beings, dead or spiritual beings, animals,
or abstract qualities. Drama is an adaptation, recreation and reflection of reality on stage. Generally, the

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word, dramatist is used for any artist who is involved in any dramatic composition either in writing or in
performance.

Drama is different from other genres of literature. It has unique characteristics that have come about in
response to its peculiar nature. Really, it is difficult to separate drama from performance because during
the stage performance of a play, drama brings life experiences realistically to the audience. It is the most
concrete of all genres of literature. When you are reading a novel, you read a story as told by the
novelist. The poem’s message in most cases is not direct because it is presented in a compact form or
in a condensed language. The playwright does not tell the story instead you get the story as the
characters interact and live out their experiences on stage. In drama, the characters/actors talk to
themselves and react to issues according to the impulse of the moment. Drama is therefore presented in
dialogue.

It can be seen that as a genre of literature, drama occupies a unique position. It is also the most active of
other genres of literature because of the immediate impact it has on the audience. It is used to
inform, to educate to entertain and in some cases to mobilize the audience.

Most people associate funny action or other forms of entertainment as drama. An action could be
dramatic yet it will not be classified as drama. The dramatic is used for any situation or action which
creates a sense of an abnormality or the unexpected. Sometimes we use it to describe an action that is
demonstrated or exaggerated. For instance, if you are at a bus stop, a well-dressed young girl passes and
cat-walks across the road, her high-healed shoes breaks and she slips, the immediate reaction will be
laughter from almost everybody there. For some people, this is drama. So, Drama is an imitation of life.

The term drama is used at the following three different levels: performance, composition and branch of
literature.

Performance

Drama is used for plays that are acted on stage or screen. These plays are different from musical
performances because they must tell stories which are acted out by actors and actresses. You remember
what we said earlier about imitation or re-enactment and impersonation. These actors and actresses must
be playing roles by imitating other characters. It means, therefore, that they must assume other people’s
personalities by bearing different names, ages, occupation, nationalities, etc. Finally, they must be
conscious of themselves as actors by trying hard to pretend that they are the characters they are
representing.
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Composition

Drama is used to describe a dramatic composition which employs language and pantomime to present a
story or series of events intended to be performed. Sometimes, especially with written compositions,
they may not be presented on stage but this does not stop it from being drama. In as much as a play is
enjoyed more when it is performed, you can still read a play and be entertained by it.

Branch of Literature

Drama is a term used for that branch of literature that covers dramatic composition. You know already
that drama is a literary art. The basic difference between drama and other forms of literature (prose and
poetry) is that drama is presented in dialogue from the beginning to the end. Any information by the
playwright is given in stage- direction. We have dialogue in prose and poetry but they are interjected in
the course of the story.

1.6 .Drama and Theatre

It is important to explain what the difference between drama and theatre is. This is to avoid the
erroneous impression which some people have as they interchange drama and theatre at will. Theatre
comes from the Greek word Theatron which means “a place for viewing”. Theatre, therefore, refers to
the space used for dramatic presentations or for other performances. Hence you have, for example, the
National Theatre, Sebastopol Hall, Ambassador Hall in Addis Ababa, Mulualem Hall in Bahir Dar town,
and other theatre Halls. One play could be performed or presented in many theatres. There are different
types of theatre. It could be a house or an open space, depending on the performance.

Theatre is also used for other performances that are not necessarily drama. These performances
include masquerade displays, dances, puppet shows, music jamborees and other forms of festival.
Drama can be watched on TV set or listened on radio, but theatre is confined only to stage . The
basic elements of theatre are actor, space and audience. The elements help to enhance the aesthetic
aspect of the performance are scenery, costume and make-up, light and sound effects.

UNIT TWO

TYPES OF DRAMA

The most widespread and familiar subdivisions of drama are comedy and tragedy, a division
established by the Greeks. Even today the smiling and weeping masks worn by Greek actors in comedy

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and tragedy symbolize the two branches of drama. Traditionally, a tragedy is dominated by a serious
tone, concerns kings and princes, deals with profound issues, and usually concludes with the death of the
leading character. A comedy typically deals with common people, is dominated by a light tone that
encourages laughter (or at least amusement or entertainment), and ends happily, often with the uniting of
a pair of young lovers.

Tragedy in drama is believed to have originated from the Greek worship of Dionysius, the god of wine
and fertility. During the festival, the dithyramb, a choral lyric in honour of the god is sang and danced
around the altar by fifty men dressed in goat-skin (goat was the sacred animal of the god). This is
perhaps from where tragedy got its name because in Greek, “tragoedia” meant goat song. During this
song, a story about the god was improvised by the choral leader but later Thepsis stood out and instead
of singing in honour of Dionysius, sang as Dionysius. However, the song continued but a minimal part
of it was acted by one actor. As time went on, the spoken part was increased and Aeschylus added a
second actor while Sophocles added a third actor. As time went on, the number of chorus decreased
gradually as more actors increased. Thus tragedy was born. We are familiar with the words 'tragedy' and
tragic as they are associated with misfortune. Usually, they are used to describe personal misfortunes
that do not concern the rest of the society. For example, the breakdown of a marriage or death of a dear
one in an accident or even natural causes could be described as tragic. Also, some public events that are
unpleasant like the assassination of a head of state or a political leader, natural or human disasters like
earthquakes, flood disasters, plane crashes and other such disasters are referred to as tragedies. Tragedy
according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “a play of a serious or solemn kind ... a very sad event,
action or experience.” The last part of the definition explains why the word is used to describe
misfortunes, natural and human disasters in everyday life.

Tragedy is the most esteemed of all the dramatic genres. It has attracted many definitions and rules,
from the days of Aristotle, who is the first person to write on the circumstances of and what tragedy
should be, to the present day. According to him in his “Poetics”: Tragedy is an imitation of an action
that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic
ornaments, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action not of
narrative; through pity and fear effecting a proper purgation of these emotions. Aristotle explains all the
aspects of this definition and moves further to give the elements of tragedy as plot, character, thought,

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diction, music and spectacle. These principles have continued to influence the definition till date.
However, some dramatic scholars agree with him while some others disagree with him.

In drama, tragedy is a serious play that deals with the misfortunes of man. It presents a man (tragic hero)
who is not too virtuous or too vicious but one who aspires for higher ideals. He tries to improve himself
and the world around him. In the course of this, he makes a mistake, or commits an error of judgment.
Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he
is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will
be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth.
Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his
mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of judgment" or, as it is
often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies
was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine
warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the
King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves;
but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and
fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure and incidents of the play" on the
same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which
the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an
anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his
fortune from happiness to disaster.

This leads to his fall. Traditionally, in classical tragedies, the hero must be of noble birth, suffer and is
overwhelmed in the end. Tragedy presents injustice, evil, pain, misfortunes, paradoxes and mysterious
aspects of human existence. Greek tragedy has a set pattern or structure. It starts with the prologue
which introduces the play with the episodes of the play and the choral songs in between and finally the
exodus. The play contains a “single integral plot” which is presented in a very short period with one
setting. The action could be simple or complex and contains a reversal of fortune or discovery or both.
The tragic hero is drawn from princes and kings. He is a man who is not pre-eminently good, virtuous or
vicious but who commits an error of judgment. Oedipus Rex is a good example of classical tragedy. It
has a single plot, the story of how Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. The setting is just in
front of the palace. Oedipus, the tragic hero is a king who by the end of the play discovers the truth

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about himself; his fortune reverses from good to bad. His catastrophe is caused by his tragic flaw which
is arrogance.

The plays were based on myth and legends drawn mainly from the legends of the house of Atreus and
the events of the Trojan wars. They were presented as a part of a great festival and the state was
involved. As part of a religious festival, the plays were used to show how vices like arrogance and pride
lead men to destruction. The gods also play important roles in Greek tragedy. However, the dramatists
differ in their attitudes to the gods as characters in their plays.

Many critics argue that there are no tragedies in the modern period. The argument is based on the fact
that many playwrights do not adhere to the Aristotelian principles of tragedy especially as regards the
treatment of the subject matter, tragic hero and the language. Modern playwrights feel that they should
not be restricted by any rules.

According to them, drama reflects the society, so they should reflect their society in the works. In the
modern society, little or no attention is paid to kings, princes and their exploits so a poor man who is
hard working can rise to esteem. The society also encourages him to rise. He also has the capacity to fall
into misfortune through an error of judgment and according to Arthur Miller, since kings and monarchs
are no longer available, tragedy should be based “... on the heart and spirit of the average man” (Dukore:
897). Contemporary issues and human beings should, therefore, be treated in tragedy.

During the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century) other forms of drama appeared, and dramatists
modified the two traditional forms. Shakespeare divided his plays into comedies, tragedies, and
histories, the latter presenting national history in dramatic form. He also departed from classic practice
by putting important comic scenes into his tragedies. In Italy, certain critics and dramatists began mixing
elements and aspects of the two traditional kinds of theater to create a third kind, called tragicomedy. It
is the mixture of tragedy and comedy where the characters do not die but are brought sufficiently to
death as in the Merchant of Venice. Tragedy ends with exile, death, or similar resolution. Comedy
usually ends with a new beginning: a marriage or another chance of some sort. Tragicomedy often ends
with no clear resolution: the circumstances are so complex that the audience may feel perplexed at the
ending. Thus the audience response to tragicomedy is usually complex and unsetting. Tragicomedy
would become much more common in the 19th and 20th centuries.

After the Renaissance the terms comedy and tragedy remained central, but writers subdivided each type
and developed new combined forms as well. Tragedy remained the genre used most often to explore the
13
profound philosophic questions of good and evil and humankind’s place in the universe, while comedy
emphasized people in their social aspects and personal relationships. This split made comedy the more
appropriate form for social commentary and criticism as well as for simple amusement. Comedy
emphasizing wit and style among the upper classes became known as high comedy or comedy of
manners, as opposed to low comedy or farce. High comedy is serious, and deals critically, by means of
irony and satire, with subjects that are universal nature. The comedy of manners treats social errors,
which belong to the leisured high class. On the other hand low comedy does not treat any serious
subjects and usually depends on plain jokes and funny remarks for its comic influence. Low comedy
traditionally gains its effects from physical humor that can even turn violent at times and from crude
verbal jokes, rather than from verbal wit or nuance`s of social behavior. This type of comedy develops
in to farce when it employs physical movements for its funny effect. Farce as a popular, nonliterary form
can be traced back to classical Greece. The basic elements of farce are: exaggerated physical action
(often repeated), exaggeration of character and situation, absurd situations and improbable events
(even impossible ones and therefore fantastic), and surprises in the form of unexpected appearances and
disclosures. In farce, character and dialogue are nearly always subservient to plot and situation. The plot
is usually complex and events' succeed one another with almost bewildering rapidity.
Comedy

We use the words 'comedy' and comic to describe something that is funny in our everyday lives. These
include a joke, or a fantastic story that is full of nonsense, or an absurd appearance that makes us giggle,
smile or laugh. Comedy is not inherent in things or people but the way things/people are perceived.
Comedy is a deliberate presentation of events/experiences drawn from real life but not the same with
real life. We should therefore not expect dramatic comedy to be the same as real life.

Generally, the plays have good endings or resolutions, so when a play ends happily, we refer to it as
comedy. In most comedies, the principal characters begin in a state of opposition either to one another or
to their world or both. By the end of the play, their opposition is replaced by harmony.

In the classical period there was no mixture of genres. Horace maintains that tragic characters must be
noble while comic characters are ignoble and of lower birth and foolish. Moliere believed that his
audience could learn from the dramatization of ridiculous and universal types. Comedy therefore teaches
through laughter. Philip Sidney, in “Arts Poetica”, sees it as an imitation of common errors of life which
is presented in the most ridiculous and scornful manner so that the spectator is anxious to avoid such
errors himself. It should aim at being delightful though not necessarily by provoking laughter. Ben
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Jonson also believes that laughter does not really help to achieve the aims of comedy but may subvert
those aims. He draws his theme from human errors and follies. He insists that the playwright should
attempt to improve moral life and arouse gentle affections. John Dryden insists that comedy should
portray the eccentricity of character while Northrop Frye says that lightness of touch is the hallmark of
comedy.

We recognize comedy through its style, characterization, diction and other elements of style. The
purpose of comedy is to delight, to teach and to entertain the audience through the presentation of
characters, situations and ideas in a ridiculous manner. This helps to keep man close to sanity, balance
and to remind him of human frailties. It helps to keep him humble and mindful of what he is rather than
what he might wish himself to be. Modern scholars believe that the purpose of comedy is to correct
vices therefore should not exclude any class. Satire is an important instrument in comedy because
nothing reforms majority of men like the portrayal of their faults. It is easy for people to endure being
made fun of. Many people may have no objection to being considered wicked but are not willing to be
considered ridiculous. The audience is thus expected to learn from the stupidity of the characters and try
to avoid such pitfalls because nobody likes to be made an object of ridicule.

Comedy is usually presented as a moral satire used to attack vices like greed, hypocrisy, lust, laziness, or
ignorance. The aim is to correct social ills, social injustice or to ridicule a particular human fault or
social imbalance. It thrives on exaggeration of situation and character to show mankind worse than it
really is. We recognize comedy, through its style, characterization and dialogue. In both real life and
drama, comedy should indicate a kind of pleasure which finds physical expression in laughter or smile.

In the most common literary application, a comedy is a fictional work in which the materials are selected
and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage
our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident that no great
disaster will occur, and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. The term "comedy"
is customarily applied only to plays for the stage or to motion pictures; it should be noted, however, that
the comic form, so defined, also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry. Within the very broad
spectrum of dramatic comedy, the following types are frequently distinguished:
(1) Romantic comedy

It was developed by Elizabethan dramatists on the model of contemporary prose romances such as
Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), the source of Shakespeare's As You Like It (1599). Such comedy
represents a love affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine (sometimes disguised as a man);
15
the course of this love does not run smooth, yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union (refer
to E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition, 1949). Many of the boy-meets-girl plots of
later writers are instances of romantic comedy, as are many motion pictures from The Philadelphia Story
to Sleepless in Seattle. In The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye points out that some of
Shakespeare's romantic comedies manifest a movement from the normal world of conflict and trouble
into "the green world"—the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, or the fairy-haunted wood of A
Midsummer Night's Dream—in which the problems and injustices of the ordinary world are dissolved,
enemies reconciled, and true lovers united. Frye regards that phenomenon (together with other aspects of
these comedies, such as their festive conclusion in the social ritual of a wedding, a feast, a dance) as
evidence that comic plots derive from primitive myths and rituals that celebrated the victory of spring
over winter. (See archetypal criticism.) Linda Bamber's Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender
Genre in Shakespeare (1982) undertakes to account for the fact that in Shakespeare's romantic
comedies, the women are often superior to the men, while in his tragedies he "creates such nightmare
female figures as Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia."

(2) Satiric comedy

rRidicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or else attacks deviations from the social order
by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners. (See satire.) The early master
of satiric comedy was the Greek Aristophanes, c. 450-c. 385 B.C., whose plays mocked political,
philosophical, and literary matters of his age. Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson, wrote satiric or
(as it is sometimes called) "corrective comedy." In his Volpone and The Alchemist, for example, the
greed and ingenuity of one or more intelligent but rascally swindlers, and the equal greed but stupid
gullibility of their victims, are made grotesquely or repulsively ludicrous rather than lightly amusing.

(3) The comedy of manners

Originated in the New Comedy of the Greek Menander, c. 342-292 B.C. (as distinguished from the Old
Comedy represented by Aristophanes) and was developed by the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence
in the third and second centuries B.C. The comedy of manners is also satirical in its outlook and it takes
the artificial and sophisticated behaviour of the higher social classes under closer scrutiny. The plot
usually revolves around love or some sort of amorous intrigue and the language is marked by witty
repartees and cynicism. Their plays dealt with the vicissitudes of young lovers and included what
became the stock characters of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents,
and the wealthy rival. The English comedy of manners was early exemplified by Shakespeare's Love's
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Labour's Lost and Much Ado about Nothing, and was given a high polish in Restoration comedy (1660-
1700). The Restoration form owes much to the brilliant dramas of the French writer Molière, 1622-73. It
deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society,
and relies for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of
repartee, a witty conversational give-and take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match—and to
a lesser degree, on the violations of social standards and decorum by would be wits, jealous husbands,
conniving rivals, and foppish dandies. Excellent examples are William Congreve's The Way of the
World and William Wycherley's The Country Wife. A middle-class reaction against what had come to be
considered the immorality of situation and indecency of dialogue in the courtly Restoration comedy
resulted in the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century. In the latter part of the century, however,
Oliver Goldsmith {She Stoops to Conquer) and his contemporary Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals
and A School for Scandal) revived the wit and gaiety, while deleting the indecency, of Restoration
comedy. The comedy of manners lapsed in the early nineteenth century, but was revived by many
skillful dramatists, from A. W. Pinero and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895),
through George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, to Neil Simon, Alan Ayckbourn, Wendy Wasserstein,
and other writers of the present era. Many of these comedies have also been adapted for the cinema.

(4) Farce

It is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter—"belly laughs," in
the parlance of the theater. To do so it commonly employs highly exaggerated or caricatured types of
characters, puts them into improbable and ludicrous situations, and makes free use of sexual mix-ups,
broad verbal humor, and physical bustle and horseplay. Farce was a component in the comic episodes in
medieval miracle plays, such as the Wakefield plays Noah and the Second Shepherd's Play, and
constituted the matter of the Italian commedia dell'arte in the Renaissance. In the English drama that has
stood the test of time, farce is usually an episode in a more complex form of comedy—examples are the
knockabout scenes in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The
plays of the French playwright Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), employing sexual humor and innuendo,
are true farce throughout, as is Brandon Thomas' Charley's Aunt, an American play of 1892 which has
often been revived, and also some of the current plays of Tom Stoppard. Many of the movies by such
comedians as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, the Marx brothers, and Woody Allen are
excellent farce, as are the Monty Python films and television episodes. Farce is often employed in single
scenes of musical revues, and is the standard fare of television "situation comedies." It should be noted

17
that the term "farce," or sometimes "farce comedy," is applied also to plays—a supreme example is
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—in which exaggerated character-types find
themselves in ludicrous situations in the course of an improbable plot, but which achieve their comic
effects not by broad humor and bustling action, but by the sustained brilliance and wit of the dialogue.
Farce is also a frequent comic tactic in the theater of the absurd.

A distinction is often made between high and low comedy. High comedy, as described by George
Meredith in the classic essay The Idea of Comedy (1877), evokes "intellectual laughter"—thoughtful
laughter from spectators who remain emotionally detached from the action—at the spectacle of folly,
pretentiousness, and incongruity in human behavior. Meredith finds its highest form within the comedy
of manners, in the combats of wit (sometimes identified now as the "love duels") between such
intelligent, highly verbal, and well matched lovers as Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare's Much Ado
about Nothing (1598-99) and Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve's The Way of the World (1700). Low
comedy, at the other extreme, has little or no intellectual appeal, but undertakes to arouse laughter by
jokes, or "gags," and by slapstick humor and boisterous or clownish physical activity; it is, therefore,
one of the common components of farce.

(5) Comedy of Humours

It is a type of comedy developed by Ben Jonson, the Elizabethan playwright, based on the ancient
physiological theory of the "four humours" that was still current in Jonson's time. The humours were
held to be the four primary fluids—blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black
bile)—whose "temperament" or mixture, was held to determine both a person's physical condition and
character type. Having balanced mixture of these fluids enable healthy personality one being, and
having imbalance of the fluids, presence of excess of one fluid in one’s body leads to abnormal
personality. An imbalance of one or another humour in a temperament was said to produce four kinds of
disposition, whose names have survived the underlying theory: sanguine (from the Latin "sanguis,"
blood), phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. Each of these fluids produce distinct type of behavior in a
person, for instance, excess of blood fluid makes the person optimistic, phlegm is responsible for calm
nature, choler characterizes the person to be ill-tempered, while melancholy is depressing fluid. Hence
writers of humorous dram design their writing with the extremely behaved characters which are
dominated by one of these humors. This way of presenting extreme behaviors then induces fun. In
Jonson's comedy of humours each of the major characters has a preponderant humour that gives him a
characteristic distortion or eccentricity of disposition. Jonson expounds his theory in the "Induction" to

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his play Every Man in His Humour (1598) and exemplifies the mode in his later comedies; often he
identifies the ruling disposition of a humours character by his or her name: "Zealof- the-land Busy,"
"Dame Purecraft," "Wellbred." The Jonsonian type of humours character appears in plays by other
Elizabethans, and remained influential in the comediesof manners by William Wycherley, Sir George
Etheredge, William Congreve, and other dramatists of the English Restoration, 1660-1700.

Tragedy
The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions
which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character). More precise and
detailed discussions of the tragic form properly begin— although they should not end—with Aristotle's
classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century B.C.). Aristotle based his theory on induction from the
only examples available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides. In the subsequent two thousand years and more, many new and artistically effective types of
serious plots ending in a catastrophe have been developed—types that Aristotle had no way of
foreseeing. The many attempts to stretch Aristotle's analysis to apply to later tragic forms serve merely
to blur his critical categories and to obscure important differences among diverse types of plays, all of
which have proved to be dramatically effective. When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle's
discussions apply in some part to many tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve as a suggestive
starting point for identifying the differentiae of various non- Aristotelian modes of tragic construction.
Aristotle defined tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude,
complete in itself," in the medium of poetic language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of
narrative presentation, involving "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the
catharsis of such emotions" precisely how to interpret Aristotle's catharsis—which in Greek signifies
"purgation," or "purification," or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, a number of
commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable, though
remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not
depressed, but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the
reader, which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from
comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as
the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of a tragic protagonist and the organization
of the tragic plot.

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Authors in the Middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either of classical tragedies or of Aristotle's
Poetics. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of a person of high status who, whether deservedly or
not, is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune. The
short narratives in "The Monk's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century) are all, in
Chaucer's own term, "tragedies" of this kind. With the Elizabethan era came both the beginning and the
acme of dramatic tragedy in England. The tragedies of this period owed much to the native religious
drama, the miracle and morality plays, which had developed independently of classical influence, but
with a crucial contribution from the Roman writer Seneca (first century), whose dramas got to be widely
known earlier than those of the Greek tragedians. There are different types of tragedy as discussed
below.

Senecan tragedy

It was written to be recited rather than acted; but to English playwrights, who thought that these
tragedies had been intended for the stage, they provided the model for an organized five-act play with a
complex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama, in the Elizabethan Age, had
two main lines of development. One of these consisted of academic tragedies written in close imitation
of the Senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of
the three unities, which had been elaborated by Italian critics of the sixteenth century; the earliest
English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1562).

The other and much more important development was written for the popular stage, and is called the
revenge tragedy, or (in its most sensational form) the tragedy of blood. This type of play derived from
Seneca's favorite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and carnage, but while Seneca had
relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by messengers, the Elizabethan writers usually
represented them on stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror.
Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1586) established this popular form; its subject is a murder and the
quest for vengeance and it includes a ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents,
and a gruesomely bloody ending. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1592) and Shakespeare's
Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) are in this mode; and from this lively but unlikely prototype came one of the
greatest of tragedies, Hamlet, as well as John Webster's fine horror plays of 1612-13, The Duchess of
Malfi and The White Devil.

Many major tragedies in the brief flowering time between 1585 and 1625, by Marlowe, Shakespeare,
George Chapman, Webster, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger, deviate
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radically from the Aristotelian norm. Shakespeare's Othello is one of the few plays which accords
closely with Aristotle's basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot. The hero of Macbeth, however, is not
a good man who commits a tragic error, but an ambitious man who knowingly turns great gifts to evil
purposes and therefore, although he retains something of our sympathy by his courage and self insight,
deserves his destruction at the hands of his morally superior antagonists. Shakespeare's Richard III
presents first the success, then the ruin, of a protagonist who is thoroughly malign, yet arouses in us a
reluctant admiration by his intelligence and imaginative power and by the shameless candor with which
he glories in his ambition and malice. Most Shakespearean tragedies, like Elizabethan tragedies
generally, also depart from Aristotle's paradigm by introducing humorous characters, incidents, or
scenes, called comic relief which was in various ways and degrees made relevant to the tragic plot.
There developed also in this age the mixed mode called tragicomedy, a popular non-Aristotelian form
which produced a number of artistic successes.

And later in the seventeenth century the Restoration Period produced the curious genre, a cross between
epic and tragedy, called heroic tragedy. Until the close of the seventeenth century almost all tragedies
were written in verse and had as protagonist men of high rank whose fate affected the fortunes of a
state. A few minor Elizabethan tragedies, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (of uncertain authorship), had as
the chief character a man of the lower class, but it remained for eighteenth-century writers to
popularize the bourgeois or domestic tragedy, which was written in prose and presented a protagonist
from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a commonplace or domestic disaster. George Lillo's
The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1731), about a merchant's apprentice who
succumbs to a heartless courtesan and comes to a bad end by robbing his employer and murdering his
uncle, is still read, at least in college courses. Since that time most successful tragedies have been in
prose and represent middle-class, or occasionally even working-class, heroes and heroines. The great
and highly influential Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote in the latter nineteenth century
tragedies in prose, many of which (such as A Dolls House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People) revolve
around an issue of general social or political significance. One of the more notable modern tragedies,
Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman (1949), relies for its tragic seriousness on the degree to which
Willy Loman, in his bewildered defeat by life, is representative of the ordinary man whose aspirations
reflect the false values of a commercial society; the effect on the audience is one of compassionate
understanding rather than of tragic pity and terror. The protagonists of some recent tragedies are not
heroic but antiheroic, in that they manifest a character that is at an extreme from the dignity and courage

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of the protagonists in traditional dramas (see antihero); while in some recent works, tragic effects
involve elements that were once specific to the genre of farce

Tragedy since World War I has also been innovative in other ways, including experimentation with new
versions of ancient types. Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), for example, is an
adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, with the locale shifted from Greece to New England, the poetry
altered to rather flat prose, and the tragedy of fate converted into a tragedy of the psychological
compulsions of a family trapped in a tangle of Freudian complexes (see psychoanalysis). T. S. Eliot's
Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is tragic drama which, like Greek tragedy, is written in verse and has a
chorus, but also incorporates elements of two early Christian forms, the medieval miracle play (dealing
with the martyrdom of a saint) and the medieval morality play. A recent tendency, especially in the
critics associated with the new historicism, has been to interpret traditional tragedies primarily in
political terms, as incorporating in the problems and catastrophe of the tragic individual an indirect
representation of contemporary social or ideological dilemmas and crises.
Tragi-comedy

You have seen that tragedy is a serious play that ends on a sad note, while comedy ends happily. In
traditional tragedy, playwrights are not allowed to bring in any comic action. If you read Oedipus Rex,
for instance, you will observe that the atmosphere is tense from the beginning to the end. As time went
on, even from the Elizabethan period, comic characters were included in tragic plays. This is called
comic relief. Tragi-comedy is a play that mixes both comic and tragic elements in equal proportion of
each. It therefore elicits both tragic and comic emotions.

Chapter Three
Trends of drama across different period

The history of drama is closely related to the history of humanity. When the first hunters recounted their
adventures using pantomime, when the first storytellers told their tales in rhythmic chants, and when the
first organized groups of people dances, the dramatic impulse demonstrated itself. Later primitive actors
used masks to portray gods or animals. As civilization developed in different cultures, drama took
definite forms. People worshiped gods and glorified earthly rulers with elaborate pageantry. Tales were
told of the epic adventures of noble characters engaged in mighty conflicts or of humorous characters
bumbling through their comic paces. These tales led to dramatic presentations, ultimately to be written
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and found expression in the pantomime of war and fertility acted out again and again as societal ritual.
ORIGINS OF WESTERN DRAMA
GREEK DRAMA

Western drama started to develop in Greece in the sixth century B.C. as part of the worship of the Greek
god Dionysus. To commemorate the god’s death, a group of chanters, called the chorus danced around an
altar on which a goat was sacrificed. Therefore, this chorus was called the goat-singers, and their ritualistic
chant was called the goat-song, or tragos . From tragos the word tragedy was derived. These ceremonies
in honor of Dionysus evolved into dramatic contests. According to Greek folklore, Thespis won the first
competition. Legend says that when Thespis stepped from the chorus and engaged in a dialogue with the
other members, he became the first actor. The term thespian has been given to actors ever since. The
dramatic contests became part of a festival that lasted five or six days. On each of the last three days, a
different playwright would present four plays. The first three plays were tragedies, often forming a
trilogy-- three plays related by theme, myth, or characters. The fourth play was customarily an irreverent,
bawdy burlesque called a satyr play. Playwrights competed fiercely to win the laurel wreath at these
dramatic contests

Another device used in Greek plays was the machina , a cranelike hoist that permitted actors to appear
above the stage as if flying. Usually the character lowered by the machina represented a god from Mount
Olympus who came to earth to settle the affairs of human beings, including the dilemma of the playwright
who could not resolve the conflict satisfactorily without intervention from the gods. From the use of this
contrivance came the term deus ex machina (god from the machine). This term is still used today to
indicate an artificial plot device an author introduces late in a play to resolve difficulties. An unknown
relative who leaves a legacy, a long-lost letter, and the discovery of a relative assumed dead are typical of
deus ex machine

The chorus was an integral part of early Greek plays. The chorus served to explain the situation, to bring
the audience up-to-date, to make a commentary on the action from the point of view of established ideas,
and to engage in dialogue with the actors. Over time, the responsibilities of the chorus diminished as the
scope of the actors’ roles expanded. Still, vestiges of the Greek chorus are found in theater today.

Any discussion of Greek theater must begin with tragedy. The Greek tragedies, considered classics of
Western literature, involve conflicts that evolve from the clash between the will of the gods and the
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ambitions and desires of humanity. The plays show how useless human efforts are in the face of fate. The
greatest writers of Greek tragedy are Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who wrote in the fourth and
fifth centuries B.C.

Aeschylus expanded the number of actors and reduced the size of the chorus. He is noted for the elevation
and majesty of his language, which many feel has never been surpassed. Many critics refer to him as the
father of tragedy. Of his ninety plays only seven have been preserved. Aeschylus left us the only surviving
Greek trilogy, the Oresteia . One of the greatest Greek tragedians, ranked with Shakespeare as one of the
great playwrights of all time, is Sophocles. A writer of exquisitely crafted plays, he refined plot unified works.
Believing that human beings have divine qualities that elevate their struggles against fate, he achieved an
amazing balance between the power of the gods and the importance of humanity. Inquisitive, yet reverent,
Sophocles allows his characters to question fate and the wills of the gods. As a result, his characters are
among the strongest ever to walk on a stage. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex stands as one of the world’s most
powerful examples of dramatic irony. Aristotle described it as the ideal tragedy. It is the story of a man
who, through a combination of fate and his own character, unwittingly kills his own father and marries his
mother. When he realizes the truth of his situation, he puts out his eyes in horror. Sophocles’ Antigone is
also one of the world’s great tragedies. Antigone is Oedipus’s daughter.

The playwright Euripides became more interested in people’s lives than in the religious views of his day.
He emphasized human relationships and became the master of pathos , human sorrow and compassion. Of
the ninety-two plays written by Euripides, seventeen tragedies and one satyr play exist in their entirety. The
Trojan Women is one of literature’s strongest indictments of war. Medea is the tragedy of a woman who
seeks revenge on her husband to the extent of killing her own sons in order to grieve him. Medea , as well
as Antigone, still ranks among the most poignant portrayals of women in dramatic literature.

One of the outstanding authors of Greek comedy is Aristophanes, who contributed forty plays, eleven of
which have been preserved. Aristophanes, who considered nothing sacred, was a skilled satirist and a kee
observer of humanity. His barbed wit mocked the leaders of Athens and the gods themselves. Three of his
best-known plays are The Frogs, a writers’ contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades, judged by
Dionysus himself; The Clouds, a travesty on Socrates and Greek education; and Lysistrata, a scathing
attack on war Aristophanes’ first nine plays represent what has come to be known as Old Comedy, which is
noted for its wild comic fantasy. His last two plays are classified as Middle Comedy, being quieter and

24
more coherent. Roman and, later, Renaissance writers were more influenced by the gentle treatment of
everyday life in the New Comedy of Menander. Menander was a Greek playwright who wrote
approximately one hundred years after Aristophanes.

ROMAN DRAMA
Roman drama was largely an imitation of Greek drama. In fact, the first work of Roman drama was
commissioned to Andronicus, an author from a Greek colony. This first Roman tragedy was most likely a
translation from a Greek play, and most Roman dramas that followed were adaptations of Greek plays.
There were, however, a few plays written about the history of Rome. The majority of original Roman plays
were comic representations of daily life, focusing on comical business rather than the development of plot
or character. Plautus and Terence were two notable writers of Roman comedy. Only Terence’s plays,
however, showed appreciable improvement on their Greek counterparts.

At the time Terence and Plautus were writing, there were no permanent theaters. The stage was erected
only when needed for a presentation. Over the next two hundred years interest in entertainment evolved, and
theaters expanded into amphitheaters, large circular arenas that were surrounded by tiers of seats. At
this time, the beginning of the first century A.D., Seneca, a writer of bombastic tragedies, was the only
author to attempt anything like a play. Ironically, his plays, called closet dramas, were intended to be read
rather than performed.

MEDIEVAL DRAMA

During the Middle Ages, drama developed along different lines throughout Europe. It is impossible to
positively track this development because few records exist. The earliest evidence of drama in the Middle
Ages is a par records exist. The earliest evidence of drama in the Middle Ages is a partial manuscript from a
western European liturgical drama dating to the tenth century. However, the prohibitions established by
the Roman Catholic church against secular drama suggest the existence of other performances: acrobats,
mimes, and dancers. The liturgical drama of this time was definitely influential in the development of
drama, but did not direct the course of later secular plays.

The liturgical drama first came into existence as a question-and- answer song performed by monks on
Easter. These “plays” were sung in Latin, and the performers eventually included priests, choirboys, and,

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later, nuns. Soon after the rise in popularity of the Easter service, liturgical dramas became a Christmas
tradition also. As the occasions for performances grew, the dramas were translated from the Latin into the
vernacular of the region and members of the congregation were allowed to perform in the plays. Saint and
Mystery plays became popular forms of church drama. Saint plays are based on legends of saints, and
Mystery plays based on biblical history. The Passion Play, which addresses the last week of Christ’s life,
is a well-known liturgical drama performed for the Easter service.

The early Saint and Mystery plays were staged in the churches on platforms called mansions. These
mansions represented biblical settings such as Heaven, Hell, and the Sea of Galilee. As the popularity of
these dramas increased, they were moved out of the church to the town square where the mansions were
placed in a straight line. Some of these stages were permanent, but evidence exists that the players toured
from city to city using these settings.

While the liturgical dramas were developing, the secular dramas called folk dramas, were developing
simultaneously. The first record of a folk play comes from twelfth-century England. Folk plays usually took
place during planting time, harvest time, and Christmas and were staged outdoors. These plays were
presented for folk festivals, which often coincided with Christian holidays. Out of these performances arose
the famous Robin Hood plays (c. 1300), with the hero stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. An
increasing amount of secular material, especially humorous incidents, made it into the liturgical
performances. Also, the secular actors began presenting the popular liturgical dramas. Since the popularity
of drama was increasing by the fifteenth century, the church began presenting plays that were not for a
specific holiday celebration. These Morality plays were didactic in nature, teaching the difference between
right and wrong in the context of the devil and God battling for souls. These plays usually took the form of
allegories dramatized by symbolic characters who represented abstract qualities, such as the title character
who represents humankind in Everyman, the only Morality play that is still performed.

Since the church did not approve of the secular presentations of the traditional liturgical drama, the secular
dramatists began presenting Morality plays, which evolved into Moral Interludes by the early sixteenth
century. Moral Interludes were shorter than the traditional Morality play, and they included more
humorous characters and incidents. These secular dramatists became the first acting companies, and
eventually came under the patronage of the nobility. Under the influence of the nobility, forms of drama
evolved even further to include chronicle plays, productions based on historical events, and masques,

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highly artistic spectacles glorifying the nobility for which they were written and performed.

THE RENAISSANCE AND DRAMA

Renaissance (meaning ÒrebirthÓ) is the term commonly used to describe the transition from the medieval
to the modern world in western Europe. Beginning in Italy in the early fourteenth century, the Renaissance
eventually reached all of Europe and England.This rebirth of interest in the classics and belief in the
potential for human perfection touched almost every aspect of life. Painting, sculpture, ,drama and
architecture flourished. The central concept of renaissance was humanism.The humanist movement
stressed the role of man and reason in understanding the world and rejected the predominance of
religious thinking. They believe on unlimited potential of human.

THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY

Although the early offerings of Italian playwrights featured weak imitations of classical plays, cheap
obscenities, or poorly constructed scripts, some advances in the dramatic arts were made in Italy during the
Renaissance. Theater architecture was developed, as was stage equipment. Sets with perspective and colored
lighting were introduced. Another contribution to drama made by Italy during the Renaissance was the
opera, an attempt to revive the simplicity and humanism of ancient Greek drama. Originally opera was an
attempt by a group of scholars in Florence to imagine how the music of ancient Greek drama sounded.
Opera introduced to theater music that emphasized the words with a solo vocal line and simple instrumental
accompaniment. By the early seventeenth century, this form of Italian drama was being imitated in
England and France.

Commedia dell’arte (“comedy of the profession”) was performed by professional troupes specializing in
comic improvisation that provided much of the new interest in theater from the sixteenth through eighteenth
centuries. Commedia dell’arte troupes had mastered the art of playing out their comic scenarios , plot
outlines posted backstage before each performance. There were no fully composed play scripts. Instead,
the scenarios were detailed plot outlines that included lazzi and certain memorized lines. The lazzi were
special humorous bits of stage business, usually set apart from the main action. A well-known lazzi
was one in which the stage action continued while a comic actor laboriously caught a fly. Actors
memorized set speeches, such as declarations of love, hate, and madness. The troupes also learned stock
jokes, proverbs, songs, exit speeches, and comments on extraneous matters that could be used whenever

27
convenient.

A manager led each troupe and usually wrote the scripts for it. Most plots were based on comic intrigue
involving fathers who put obstacles in the way of their children’s romances. Servants were very important
characters, often successfully completing the matchmaking. All the characters of the commedia dell’arte
were stock types representing two social classes: the upper class and the servant class. The characters
were identified by their costumes and , generally, by their masks; the innamorati and innamoratae ,
however, did not wear masks. The chart on the opposite page describes the most common characters in the
commedia dell’arte.

Stock Characters of Commedia Dell’Arte

Upper-class characters
Innamorati/ Innamoratae Beautifully dressed young lovers; speak a refined language
Pantalone A middle-aged or elderly man: a father who competes romantically,
with his son, a husband deceived by a young wife, an overly protective
father guarding his young daughter from suitors
Dottore Elderly gentleman; friend, sometimes rival of Pantalone; originally a law
professor, later a medical man lacking common sense; ancestor of
absent minded professor; master of doubletalk and jargon

Servant Characters
Male servant characters
Arlecchino/ Usually clever persuaders and schemers; excellent at ad-libbing and
Harlequin(zanni acrobatics; clever pranksters, agile in mind and body

Brighella A thief and bully; street-wise; later becomes lackey Crafty and
unprincipled; runs away from danger
Pulcinella A hump-backed, doltish male character
Pedrolino A simple, awkward male character
Capitano A boastful, cowardly Spaniard who brags of battles never fought and
romances never experienced
Scaramuccia A mustached servant; sometimes clever,

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Female servant character
Fontesca: A serving maid; appears in many plays as Columbina, a clever and high spirited flirt.

Many stock characters of the commedia dell’arte have evolved into recognize today. Pulcinella was a
sometimes foolish, sometimes malicious character with a hooked nose and high peaked hat. Still another
of the male servants was Pedrolino, who later became known as Pierrot, the moonstruck eternal lover—
melancholy and gentle, but always too romantic and too sad. Later, a sincerely devoted sweetheart,
Pierrette, was paired with him, and they became the eternal lovers.

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

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

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THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND

The climax of Renaissance drama came during the Elizabethan Age in England. This was a period in which
drama was the expression of the soul of a nation, and theater became a vital force in the lives of the people.
One of the first English comedies, Ralph Roister Doister, was produced in 1552. The author, Nicholas
Udall (1504–1556), modeled his comedy on Plautus’s plays. The first true English tragedy was Gorboduc,
which was performed in 1562. Many other notable plays were written in England during this period.
THREE ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS
Towering above all the brilliant actor-playwrights responsible for the glory of the Elizabethan period, three
produced plays that have never lost their appeal. To the Elizabethans, the word humor referred not to an
attitude of amusement, but to a personality trait. The Renaissance was a period in which anatomical study,
as well as the arts, was developing. Scholars believed that all matter was made of four elements—air, earth,
fire, and water—and that the human body was composed of these same four elements, each having its own
effect on the personality. The balance of the four in each person’s body decided his or her type.

The Humors
Element Body Fluid Personality
Air Blood sanguine—light-hearted, happy-go-lucky,
optimistic
Fire yellow bile choleric—angry, hot-tempered
Water Phlegm phlegmatic—dull, listless
Earth black bile Melancholy—sad, depressed

The humor of most interest in Elizabethan plays is that of black bile, represented by earth and the
melancholy personality. The melancholy character fell into three main types: the lover, the malcontent, and
the intellectual. Hamlet is an excellent example of the intellectual melancholy humor. Although most stage
figures had a predominating humor, a balanced personality was the most desired. This is evidenced by Mark
Antony’s tribute to Brutus in Julius Caesar: “ . . . the elements [were] so mixed in him that Nature might
stand up and say to all the world, this was a man.”

The plays of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare continue to be produced today.

Christopher Marlowe

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Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) introduced the first important use of blank (unrhymed) verse, the
mighty line” of English poetic drama. Combining an extraordinary use of language and the excitement of
melodramatic plots, he wrote Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II. These plays
present the glory and the horror of the age.
Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was a master of English comedy. He wrote Volpone, The Alchemist, and
Every Man in His Humour. Jonson widened the scope of the humors to include any strong personality trait,
especially a weakness, a foible, or a folly that could make a character laughable.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is considered by many people to be not only the greatest Elizabethan
dramatist but perhaps the greatest dramatist of all time. He is a towering literary figure whose
characterizations, beautiful poetry, and never-to-be forgotten lines echo a majesty best expressed by his
friendly rival, Ben Jonson, who said that Shakespeare “was not of an age but for all time.” The ideal way
to become acquainted with Shakespeare is to see his plays, not merely to read them or read about them. The
plays were written by a practical man of the theater who intended them to be seen—not read—by a loud,
boisterous audience accustomed to shouting its approval or hissing its displeasure. A play had to be
exciting, moving, and violent, filled with fury, humor, and truth, in order to keep such an audience
interested. Shakespeare’s characters felt emotions: love, jealousy, ambition, joy, and grief— that are as
universal today as they were four hundred years ago.

RESTORATION DRAMA

Following the Elizabethan era, England experienced a period of civil war, beginning in 1642, that ended
with the formation of a republican government controlled by the Puritans. For eighteen years, all theater was
banned. It was not until the Restoration in 1660, when the monarchy was restored and Charles II became
king, that theater became legal again. Important innovations were made in drama during the Restoration.
With the English Royal Patent of 1662, which awarded a theater monopoly to two entrepreneurs, women
appeared as players for the first time. The patent said that “all women’s parts should be performed by
women” and that plays and acting should be considered “not only harmless delights but useful and
instructive representations of human life.”

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ENGLISH DRAMA SINCE 1700

The eighteenth century produced only two outstanding playwrights. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–
1816) wrote two social comedies: The School for Scandal and The Rivals, which features the immortal
Mrs. Malaprop, the world’s greatest misuser of words. Oliver Goldsmith(1730–1774) was a dramatist
whose fame in the theater rests on one play, She Stoops to Conquer.

Of all English dramatists, many people feel that Irish-born Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) ranks as the greatest
playwright next to Shakespeare. Shaw was a playwright dedicated to the exploration of ideas through
drama. His satiric humor and fascinating characters keep alive such plays as Saint Joan, Candida, Man and
Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra Pygmalion, Androcles and the Lion, and Arms and the Man. Shaw
stresses two concepts in his plays. The first of these was what he called the “Life Force”—the belief that
humanity will improve and strengthen in spite of itself. Shaw states this philosophy strongly in the third act
of Man and Superman in a dream sequence often presented alone as “Don Juan in Hell.” The second idea
is called the “Thinking Person’s Society.” Shaw said that of every group of 1,000 people, there are 700
who do not think, 299 idealists, and 1 thinking person. Shaw hoped to turn the idealists into thinkers
through engagement with his dramas.

The Early nineteen Century and Romanticism

 Until the 19th c, most European playwrights drew their tragic plots from ancient myths or
legendary history and their comic material from a repertory of stock characters and attitudes.
 By the l750s, however, the same changes that were brewing political revolution began to affect
the drama.
 And more plays began focusing on the trials and tribulations of the lower rungs of the social
ladder- bourgeois drama was emerged.
 The modern era begins around 1870.
 Romanticism is emerged early in Germany in the work of three major playwrights: Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, Johann Christophe Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), and Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe.
 It is new literary movement in German against Neo classical rules.
 There is subjective expression, imagination and individualism.

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 The romantic movement did not blossom in French drama until the 1820s, and then primarily in
the work of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas père, while in England the great Romantic poets did not
produce important drama, although both Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were practitioners of
the closet drama. Burlesque and mediocre melodrama reigned supreme on the English stage.
 Although melodrama was aimed solely at producing superficial excitement, its development,
coupled with the emergence of realism in the 19th cent., resulted in more serious drama. Initially, the
melodrama dealt in such superficially exciting materials as the gothic castle with its mysterious lord for
a villain, but gradually the characters and settings moved closer to the realities of contemporary life.
 The concern for generating excitement led to a more careful consideration of plot construction,
reflected in the smoothly contrived climaxes of the "well-made" plays of Eugène Scribe and
Victorien Sardou of France and Arthur Wing Pinero of England. The work of Émile Augier and
Alexandre Dumas fils combined the drama of ideas with the "well-made" play. Realism had perhaps its
most profound expression in the works of the great 19th-century Russian dramatists: Nikolai Gogol, A.
N. Ostrovsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. Many of the Russian
dramatists emphasized character and satire rather than plot in their works.
 Related to realism is naturalism, which can be defined as a selective realism emphasizing the
more sordid and pessimistic aspects of life. An early forerunner of this style in the drama is
Georg Büchner's powerful tragedyDanton's Death (1835), and an even earlier suggestion may be seen in
the pessimistic romantic tragedies of Heinrich von Kleist. Friedrich Hebbel wrote grimly naturalistic
drama in the middle of the 19th cent., but the naturalistic movement is most commonly identified with
the "slice-of-life" theory of Émile Zola, which had a profound effect on 20th-century playwrights.
 Henrik Ibsen of Norway brought to a climax the realistic movement of the 19th cent. and also
served as a bridge to 20th-century symbolism. His realistic dramas of ideas surpass other such works
because they blend a complex plot, a detailed setting, and middle-class yet extraordinary characters in an
organic whole. Ibsen's later plays, such asThe Master Builder (1892), are symbolic, marking a trend
away from realism that was continued by AugustStrindberg's dream plays, with their emphasis on the
spiritual, and by the plays of the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, who incorporated into drama the theories
of the symbolist poets .
 While these antirealistic developments took place on the Continent, two playwrights were
making unique contributions to English theater. Oscar Wilde produced comedies of manners that
compare favorably with the works of Congreve, and George Bernard Shaw brought the play of ideas to
fruition with penetrating intelligence and singular wit.

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 The twenty Century Drama- Modern trends
 Twentieth-Century Drama will contain 2,100 plays in English from around the world, published
from the 1890s to present day.
 The 20th century dramas can be grouped into several categories according to the general
tendencies:
 Realistic dramas: One group of dramas shows the daily lives of ordinary people in a realistic
way. They often contain social and political criticism.
 John Galsworthy, in his plays like Strife and Justice described social and political evils with
great sympathy for the people who hopelessly and helplessly suffer them. G.B. Shaw shocked his
audiences with completely new points of view and ways of looking at themselves and the society in
plays likeArms and the Man, The Devil’s Disciple, Major Barbara, etc.
 Sean O’Casey shows concern for innocent victims of the political events in The Shadow of
a Gunman and Juno and The Paycock.
 J.M Synge described the lives of the ordinary people of the Aran Islands of Ireland in Playboy of
the Western World. Other dramatists of this group are Arnold Wesker, Trevor Griffith and Edward
Bond.
 Search of Identity: The second group of dramas is related to the individual’s search for identity
in an unfriendly outside world, and the fear and difficulty of communicating with others. Samuel
Beckett, in his Waiting for Godot,Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape describe characters who refuse any
real relationship with others; they are lost and unhappy, and have only the pleasure of language left.
Harold Pinter also shows the impossibility of communication between characters in a closed situation, as
in The Birthday Party and The Caretaker.
 Dramas with language for witty and comic effect: In such dramas, the language is used not only
to express feelings and beliefs of characters, but also used for a witty or comic effect to contrast with the
seriousness of the theme. The dramatists of this group are Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard.

UNIT FOUR

ELEMENTS OF DRAMA

4.1. Imitation

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In simple terms, imitation means the act of copying somebody or something. It is an act of copying the
ways somebody talks and behaves, especially to entertain. In literature, imitation is used to describe a
realistic portrayal of life, a reproduction of natural objects and actions. In drama, imitation is more
pronounced in performance. This is understandable because a play is written primarily to be performed.
What is being imitated in drama is basically life. Drama tries to present life as realistically as possible on
stage. This is why we say that drama mirrors life. Aristotle likens the imitation in drama to the children’s
play instinct. If you cast your minds back to your childhood experiences, you will recall that sometimes
when you were playing, one child will say let me be the mother while another person becomes the
“father”. In most cases, the “mother” collects discarded empty cans and uses them as pots, collects sand
and some leaves to cook food. She uses sticks as spoons. This is imitation. The children are imitating
their parents or imitating life as it is lived in the family.

Imitation in drama involves a story. For it to be drama a story must be told through dialogue as the
characters interact among themselves and that story must have a beginning, middle and an end. It is
different from musical presentations. Musicians in these presentations do not imitate anybody. They
may wear costumes and act in weird manners but they are being themselves.

Over the ages, the attitude of dramatists on imitation differs from one dramatist to another and from one
age to another. Some dramatists advocate the imitation of life exactly as it is lived, others insist on the
imitation that is as close as possible to life. In the imitation that is as close as possible to life, the
dramatist tries to create his characters to dress and act as close as possible to real life. That explains why
we have different styles of imitation both in play-writing and acting skills. They include Emile Zola’s
naturalism, Bernard Shaw’s realism, Betolt Bretcht’s epic theatre. Generally, the most popular form of
imitation is the realistic one where the story is a representation of life and the characters are those we
could identify in real life.

Holding up to nature here means that they should reflect nature in their words and actions.
Drama is like a mirror because its mode of imitation is selective and intensive. Most plays do
not last more than three hours so the time is very short. Another issue to be considered is the
space. The stage is so small that it will be difficult to reproduce all the life experiences of a
particular character. Despite the fact that the celluloid can, with the aid of a camera, present
three-dimensional pictures, it can never present everything within the period for the play. This
explains why you have expressions like ‘two months later’ to make up for the limitations in
terms of time and space.
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In his own mode of imitation, Sophocles, in Oedipus Rex, one of the plays you will study for
this course, does not present all the incidents on stage. Those actions which he felt could not be
imitated to look as realistic as possible are reported and not presented on stage. Some critics
argue that some of the reported events are too gruesome to be presented. They are right
because one of the Aristotelian postulations on tragedy is that violence should not be presented
on stage. That notwithstanding, one could also argue that in realistic acting it is almost
impossible for Jocasta to hang herself or for Oedipus to gorge out his eyes.

In discussing reported action, we have seen how the second messenger moved from story-
telling to commentary, and this brings us to what is referred to as choric commentary in drama.
Remember that in drama the story is told through the characters. The playwright does not
narrate the story the way the novelist does. In order to make his play realistic, it is difficult for
him to present some of his views on particular issues which the characters could not imitate
realistically. This is because he cannot suspend the action in order to comment or generalize on
characters and events or appear suddenly in the play or on stage to provide a point of view on
the action. The dramatist’s alternative is the chorus or choric characters that are persons in the
play but are relatively detached from the action. They can therefore stand off from it,
somewhat like a narrator, to reflect on the significance of events. In Greek drama, the chorus
performed this function, and the detachment of the chorus was theatrically manifested by its
continuous presence in the orchestra. Thus, the chorus literally stood between the audience and
the action. In some plays, dramatic functionaries like messengers, servants, clowns and others
not directly involved in the action, can carry out the functions of the chorus, and the attitudes
they express should be examined for the point of view they provide for the action. Choric
commentary then provides a point of view, but not necessarily an authoritative one nor one to
be associated with the dramatist.

Imitation in drama does not claim to present a literal copy of reality. This is because the truth
of drama does not depend on reproducing the world exactly as it is. When we say that drama is
true to life we mean that it is being false to our conventional notions of reality. This means that
some plays present stories that we find difficult to believe or a particular actor acts in a manner
that is unbelievable. Sometimes we ask ourselves if it is possible for a man to be so wicked,
insensitive and selfish that he would kill his own mother for ritual for the acquisition of
material wealth. In most cases we still feel that maybe a person in a particular circumstance

36
could be forced or persuaded to behave like that. If you look at the story of Oedipus for
instance, you will believe that the story is highly improbable yet it creates a world that we
recognize as being in some sense like our own. This depends on the perspective of the
dramatist, the aspect of life he wants to focus his mirror. In mirroring the society, each
dramatist decides on a particular perspective. When a play presents an idealized vision of the
world as a place where everything is beautiful and orderly, we call it romance. On the other
hand, when a play focuses on the ugly and chaotic as it presents a debased view of life we refer
to it as satire.

4.2 Plot

A lot of volumes have been written on drama and aspects of drama of which plot is one of them. In One
World of Literature, Shirley Geak-Lin Lim, compiles the following definitions of plot from different
scholars which I believe will give you a broader view of plot:

 The plot as the organization of action was traditionally conceived as a sequence of important
moments arranged chronologically, with an introduction, series of complications intensifying the
conflict, a climax clinching the fate of the central characters, a resolution and a denouement that
concludes and summarizes the issues (p. 1107).

The plot is the dramatic element that is the series of events that happen in the story. There needs to by a
unifying connection between these various plot points and situations that the main character faces. These
conflicts that the protagonist faces while trying to achieve their goals contain obstacles that usually lead
to a climax and a resolution. As with the study of narrative texts, one can distinguish between story and
plot in drama. Story addresses an assumed chronological sequence of events, while plot refers to the way
events are causally and logically connected. There are five basic stages in a plot structure.
1. Exposition: initial incident that “gets the story going”
2. Rising action: A series of events following the initial incident and leading up to the dramatic
climax
3. Climax: The turning point or high point of a story, when events can go either way
4. Falling action: The series of events following the climax
5. Denouement: Another term for the conclusion from the French word for unraveling or untying
knot.
A carefully plotted play begins with exposition, and explanation of what happened before the play began
and of how the characters arrived at their present situation.
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Plot is the structure of the actions which is ordered and presented in order to achieve particular
emotional and artistic effects in a play. It helps to give the play an organic unity and a coherence that
makes the play easy to understand. A good play should therefore possess a unified plot. Plot in simple
terms is the arrangement of a story in such a way that there will be a sequential, logical and
chronological order. The plot should be arranged in such a way that the action starts from the beginning
rises to a climax and falls to a resolution. It is arranged in this form – exposition, discovery, point of
attack, complication, crisis, climax, denouement or resolution.

Structure of the Plot

As stated earlier, a good plot should have a beginning, middle, and an end. Oscar Broccket explains
further that the beginning contains the exposition or the setting forth of information about earlier events,
the identity of characters and the present situation. Another aspect of the beginning is the point of attack
which is the moment at which the main story starts as a potential conflict is identified. This is more
obvious in classical plays usually, is focused early on the potential conflict or a question and its
resolution leads to the end of the play. Such plays start with the inciting incident. This incident is usually
an occurrence that sets the main action in motion. A good example is in found in Oedipus Rex. In the
play, there is a plague in Thebes, the people are suffering and lamenting. Oedipus seeks solution from
the oracle of Delphi and this leads to the major dramatic question (in this case, the identity of Oedipus)
around which the play revolves. The middle is made up of series of complications. A complication is a
new element which changes the direction of the action. It leads to the discovery of new information. The
series of complications culminate in crises and climax. In the play, the complication starts with the
arrival of Creon with the information that the killer they seek is in their midst. Consequently, the blind
seer is invited and there are more complications as he accuses Oedipus of being the murderer. There is a
crisis with the shepherd’s revelation of the true parentage of Oedipus and this leads to the climax. The
end is the last part of the play. Here issues are unraveled, untied and resolved. In the play, the killer of
Laius is discovered towards the denouement. Oedipus realizes that he has fulfilled the Delphic oracle’s
prophecy; he actually killed his father and married his mother.

Now let us see the structure of plot in diagram. A good model frequently used to describe the overall
structure of plays is the so-called Freytag’s Pyramid, described the classical five-act structure of play.

Climax

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 Complicating Falling Action
Action

Exposition Catastrophe (Denouncement)

Act-I Act-II Act-III Act-IV Act-V

Act-I: contains all introductory information and thus serves as exposition: The main characters are
introduced and, by presenting a conflict, the play prepares the audience for the action in
subsequent acts. To illustrate this with an example: In the first act of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
the protagonist Hamlet is introduced and he is confronted with the ghost of his dead father, who
informs him that King Claudius was responsible for his death. As a consequence, Hamlet swears
vengeance and the scene is thus set for the following play.

Act-II: usually propels the plot by introducing further circumstances or problems related to the main
issue. The main conflict starts to develop and characters are presented in greater detail. Thus,
Hamlet wavers between taking action and his doubts concerning the apparition. In addition,
Hamlet puts on “an antic disposition” (Hamlet, I, 5: 180), i.e., he pretends to be mad, in order
to hide his plans from the king.

Act-III: the plot reaches its climax. A crisis occurs where the deed is committed that will lead to the
catastrophe, and this brings about a turn (peripety) in the plot. Hamlet, by organizing a play
performed at court, assures himself of the king’s guilt. In a state of frenzy, he accidentally kills
Polonius. The king realizes the danger of the situation and decides to send Hamlet to England
and to have him killed on his way there.

Act-IV: creates new tension in that it delays the final catastrophe by further events. In Hamlet, the
dramatic effect of the plot is reinforced by a number of incidents: Polonius’ daughter,
Ophelia, commits suicide and her brother, Laertes, swears vengeance against Hamlet. He and
the king conspire to arrange a duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Having escaped his
murderers, Hamlet returns to court.

39
Act-V: finally offers a solution to the conflict presented in the play. While tragedies end in a
catastrophe, usually the death of the protagonist, comedies are simply ‘resolved’ (traditionally
in a wedding or another type of festivity). A term that is applicable to both types of ending is
the French dénouement. In the final duel, Hamlet is killed by Laertes but before that he stabs
Laertes and wounds and poisons the king. The queen is poisoned by mistake when she drinks
from a cup intended for Hamlet.

Moreover, playwrights design their plots in most cases, to achieve different purposes like to create tragic
comic or ironic effects. As the plot progresses, it arouses the reader’s curiosity and expectations
concerning future events in the play especially the fate of some characters. This is called suspense. A
good playwright makes an effective use of suspense to sustain his audience.

4.2.1 Story and Plot

Some people confuse plot with story. To them, plot means a story which the play tells. A story is a series
of incidents whose development does not necessarily depend on each other which means that the
incidents may or may not be related or connected. Plot on the other hand, is the way the story is arranged
and it thrives on causality and logical unity. In it, one incident happens and as a result the next one
happens and the situation must be related to each other. It has a beginning, middle and an end. A
beginning gives rise to the middle, which in turn raises the dramatic question that is answered in the end,
thus completing what was started in the beginning.

As with the study of narrative texts, one can distinguish between story and plot in drama. Story
addresses an assumed chronological sequence of events, while plot refers to the way events are causally
and logically connected. Furthermore, plots can have various plot-lines, i.e., different elaborations of
parts of the story which are combined to form the entire plot. For example in the sentence “The people
revolt and the president step down.”, no causal relation and no plot only story. But in this sentence,
“The people revolt and then the president step down.” , causal connection and there is plot.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, is about the feud between two families, the love between
the two families’ children and their tragic death. This is roughly the story of the play, which is related in
the prologue. The plot, by contrast, encompasses the causally linked sequence of scenes presented on
stage to tell the story: Thus we are presented with a fighting scene between members of the two families
whereby the underlying conflict is shown. Thus, plot refers to the actual logical arrangement of events

40
and actions used to explain ‘why’ something happened, while ‘story’ simply designates the gist of
‘what’ happened in a chronological order.

Chronology would thus coincide with (logical) linearity. Whichever way one wants to look at it, plots
can always be either linear or non-linear. Non-linear plots are more likely to confuse the audience and
they appear more frequently in modern and contemporary drama, which often question ideas of logic
and causality. It starts at the end of the story and then presents events in reverse order (analytic form).
Although the audience is in a way invited to make connections among events .

Plot Types

There are different types of plots and each is designed for a particular purpose. Some plots, for instance,
are designed to achieve tragic effect and others the effects of comedy, satire, or romance. However all
plays do not have what we might call good plots, that is, with the beginning, middle and end. So, we
have different types of plots.

In a play, we have the main plot and subject (sub) plot. The main plot deals with the major events and
the sub plot deals with other incidents which can be complete and interesting stories on their own.
However, a skillful playwright uses the sub plot to advance our appreciation and understanding of the
main plot. According to Abrams, “the sub plot serves to broaden our perspective on the main plot and to
enhance rather than diffuse the overall effects of the play (129)”. He also identified two types of plots:
the unified plot and the episodic plot. He refers to the unified plot as the well-made plot. In the unified
plot, the incidents are presented in a logical order and there is a causal arrangement. The play starts from
the beginning followed by the middle and the incidents in the middle are consequences of what
happened in the beginning and these are resolved in the end. It is a kind of cause and effect presentation.
The incidents will be so related that when anything is removed, it will create illogicality. In episodic
plot, there is no causal relationship between the incidents. The only unifying factor is that the incidents
are related or happening to one man. In episodic plot, you can remove an aspect of the plot without
changing or destroying the plot. But he recommends that a play should contain a single and not a double
plot and condemned the episodic plot which is a plot in which the episodes have no probable or
inevitable connection. He suggests that although plot is an imitation of an action, this must not be any
action but an action in which the various incidents are constructed in such a way that if any part is
displaced or deleted, the whole plot is disturbed and dislocated. This is the unity of plot. A good plot
must therefore not end haphazardly but must have a beginning, middle and an end, and should be well
co-coordinated to give a coherent whole. The action which makes up the plot should be distinguished
41
from a series of unrelated incidents because a plot must contain a logical unity within the play.. All the
incidents in the play are expected to contribute to the plot.

4.3 Character and Characterization

Characterization is the playwright’s imaginative creation of characters that can effectively dramatize his
story. The action of the play is presented through such characters. He does so by imbuing the characters
with certain recognizable human traits and qualities. These qualities include physical attributes, moral,
psychological and emotional dispositions, their attitude towards other characters and situations, and so
on. At the point of conceptualization of the idea he wants to present in his play, he thinks of the best way
to present it to make it interesting and at the same time informative.

So he uses the characters to explicate his theme and propel the plot, His ability to craft the play in such a
way that each character blends well in the plot is called characterization. These characters are presented
and they develop in the course of the action. In most cases, the characters grow from innocence to
maturity or from ignorance to knowledge. The important elements in characterization are consistency
and motivation. A good playwright must craft his play in such a way that his characters are consistent.
You don’t expect a character to behave like an educated young woman in the opening scene and in the
following acts like an illiterate village girl. This could happen if there is a proper motivation for that.
Motivation in characterization means that there must be a good reason for any action that is taken by
every character in the play.

The characters are the persons, in the play. They are endowed with moral and dispositional qualities that
are expressed in their dialogues and in their action. The reason or grounds for action, temperament and
moral dispositions constitute his motivations. They act out the story of the play from the beginning to
the end. They act within the limits of possibility and plausibility. This means that they and their actions
should be as close as possible to reality.

Types of Characters

There are different types of characters in drama. They include the protagonist, the dynamic character,
the static character, the flat character, the round character, and stereotypes.

Protagonist/Hero

He is the main character and at the centre of the story. He is called the protagonist or the hero. If he is
pitted against an important character, like in Hamlet, the opponent is called an antagonist. In the play,
42
Hamlet is the protagonist while King Claudius is the antagonist and the relationship between them is
what we refer to as conflict. Usually the story revolves around him and in fact the story is about him. He
is easily identifiable because he stands out over and above most other characters. Everything revolves
around him as he influences the action that he is going through. His role is usually central to the
development of the theme, and whatever happens to him or whatever he does has much significance to
the outcome of the story. He is often referred to as the hero of the story or the protagonist and he is one
of the major characters. In Oedipus Rex, for instance, King Oedipus is the protagonist. In the play King
Oedipus’ parents try to change his destiny by ordering, when he was born and they discovered that he
has been doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, that he be thrown into the forest where he was
expected to die but the servant spared his life and offered him to the shepherd. As he grows, he tries to
change that fate but does not succeed. Instead he moves closer to it and eventually fulfils it.

Dynamic/ Round Character

This is a character that changes according to the course of events in the story. He may or may not be the
protagonist or the hero. In most cases, he grows from innocence to maturity or from ignorance to
knowledge, so he is consistently alert to his environment with its attendant problem and reacts
accordingly. He is found almost everywhere in the story.

Static/Flat/Stock Character

Here the character is complex and does not change in any basic way in the course of the story. He is
presented in outline and without much individualization. He is usually stable and is said to be static
because he retains essentially the same outlook, attitudes, values and dispositions from the beginning of
the story to the end of the story. He is the opposite of the round character but lakes complexity in term of
presentation. In most cases his activities are easily recognizable, so, his actions can be predicted. He can
be a minor or major character as long as he is hardly transformed as the events of the story unfold.

Discovering a Character

You identify a character in a play through what he does, what he says, what other people say about him
and what the playwright says about him as contained in the stage–direction. In describing a character,
you are expected to give in details, his physical attributes and his moral, psychological and social
disposition. A character’s action helps to define his personality and his behavior in any given
circumstance or situation. It also provides clues to the kind of person he is. Whatever a character says
also helps to reveal his inner disposition.
43
However, before you can draw a valid conclusion about a character’s personality from his words, you
must consider in addition to the words themselves, the character’s mood, the situation/circumstance, his
relationship to the person about or to whom he is speaking and the consistency between his words and
his action.

Character Analysis

In the play, you can identify each character through his name, through what he says, what he does, what
other characters say about him and what the playwright says about him. The playwright’s comment is
contained in the stage direction. The stage direction is usually enclosed in a bracket and in most cases
written in italics. You can find it at the beginning of the scene or at any point in the play whenever the
playwright want to give information about the character, his action, the environment, the mood or any
other information that is relevant to the action and which is not embedded in the dialogue.

4.4 Dialogue

We have said in different units that what makes drama unique is the fact that the story is presented in
dialogue from the beginning to the end. What then is dialogue? In simple terms, dialogue is a
conversation between two or more people. It is used mostly in fiction especially, plays.

In the novel it is incorporated in the story, that is, as the story progresses, the novelist gives two or more
characters the opportunity to discuss or comment on certain issues and the story continues in prose form.
However, in drama, the entire story is presented in dialogue. This explains why some people find it
difficult to read plays because you see the name of a character, then, what the character says, the name
of another character and the response. In addition to that, you must read the stage direction for you to
understand the story, the motivation of the characters, the place where the action is taking place and
other information provided about the environment and the personality of the characters.

ANANSE: [When the song is over] While life is whipping you, rain also pours down to whip you some
more. Whatever it was that man did wrong at the beginning of things must have been really awful for all
of us to have to suffer so. [He calls:] Anansewa! Where is that typewriter of yours? Bring it here.
[Pause] I’ve been thinking, thinking, and thinking, until my head is earth quaking. Won’t somebody
who thinks he has discovered the simple solution for living this life kindly step forward and help out the
rest of us? [To the audience:]

Oh the world is hard,

44
 Is hard,
The world is really hard.
[Taking off his raincoat and calling again] Anansewa! Where is that typewriter I bought for you at a
price that nearly drove me to sell myself? Bring it here. [He closes up the umbrella.]
[Enter ANANSEWA dressed for going out, and receives the typewriter from PROPERTY MAN.]
ANANSEWA: Oh father, is it raining?
ANANSE: Yes, it’s raining. It’s rain combining with life to beat your father down. [He leans the
umbrella against the wall.]
ANANSEWA: Oh. I didn’t even know you were not in the house.

The short dialogue above is taken from The Marriage of Anansewa and it is an exchange between
Ananse and his daughter. Their names are written in bold letters to indicate that what follows is what the
person says. This is unlike what we have in the novel where what is said by a character is marked off
with inverted commas and the novelist will indicate who said it.

According to Adewoye (1993), quoted in Iwuchukwu (2001), dialogue in drama is expected to embody
these literary and stylistic values:

 It advances the action in a definite way because it is not used for mere ornamentation or
decoration.
 It is consistent with the character of the speakers, their social positions and special interests. It
varies in tone and expression according to nationalities.
 It gives the impression of naturalness without being actual, verbatim record of what may have
been said, since fiction is concerned with “the semblance of reality,” not reality itself.
 It presents interplay of ideas and personalities among the people conversing; it sets forth a
conversational give and take and not simply a series of remarks of alternating speakers.
Drama is presented only in dialogue so that it should be designed in such a way that through it, the
reader or audience must be able to infer the nature of each character, the public and private relationship
among the several characters, the past as well as the present circumstances of the various characters. It is
also important that dialogue imply the whole range of expressions, gestures, inflections, movements and
sometimes information on the environment and the total atmosphere of the play. Read the example
below, an excerpt from The Lion and the Jewel and see what you can infer from it.

45
LAKUNLE: Sidi, my love will open your mind like the chaste leaf in the morning, when the sun
touches it.
SIDI: If you state that I will run away I had enough of that nonsense yesterday.
LAKUNLE: Nonsense? Nonsense? Do you hear that?Does anybody listen? Can the stones. Bear to
listen to this? Do you call it nonsense that I poured the waters of my soul to wash your feet?
SIDI: You did what?
LAKUNLE: Wasted! Wasted! Sidi, my heart bursts into flowers with may love. But you and the dead
of this village trample it with the feet of ignorance.
SIDI: [shakes her head in bafflement]
If the snail finds splinters in his shell ,he changes house. Why do you stay?
LAKUNLE: Faith. Because I have faith. Oh Sidi, vow to me your own undying love .And I will scorn
the jibes of these bush minds. Who know no better. Swear, Sidi, Swear you will be my wife and I will
stand against earth, heaven, and nine Hells…
SIDI: Now there you go again. One little thing. And you must chirrup like a cockatoo.
You talk and talk and deafen me with wit words which always sound the same. And make no
meaning. I’ve told you and I say it again I shall marry you today, next week or any day you name
,but my bride-price must first be paid. Aha, now you turn away. But I tell you, Lakunle I must
have the full bride-price. Will you make me a laughing-stock? Well, do as you please. But Sidi
will not make herself ac heap bowl for the village spit.
LAKUNLE: On my head fall their scorn.
SIDI: They will say I was no virgin. That I was forced to sell my shame and marry you without a price.
LAKUNLE: A savage custom, barbaric, outdated, Rejected, denounced, accursed, Excommunicated,
archaic, degrading, Humiliating, unspeakable, redundant.

From this dialogue between Lakunle and Sidi, you can see that Lakunle is an educated buffoon who
wants to marry a lady in the village without fulfilling the requirements of the people’s customs. He apes
the white man and despises the African cultural heritage. Sidi is a decent but uneducated village girl who
wants to maintain her dignity.

4.5. Dramatic Action

In simple terms, action is the process of doing something or the performance itself. If somebody slaps
you and you retaliate, there is an action. The series of events that constitute the plot in any literary work
46
is referred to as action. It includes what the characters say, do, think and in some cases, fail to do.This
activity becomes more pronounced in drama where the action is presented in concrete form as the actors
present the story to the audience for entertainment and education. In the novel, you read the story as is
told by the novelist and see the action in your imagination but in drama the dramatist presents the action
through what the characters do or say.

Dramatic action is a “…series of incidents that are logically arranged by the playwright to achieve
specific response like joy, pity, fear, indignation, ridicule, laughter, thoughtful contemplation, from the
audience”. (Brocket 68)

Is there any relationship between causality and dramatic action? Yes. According to Oscar Brocket, the
cause to effect arrangement of incidents sets up the situation; the desires and motivations of the
characters out of which the later events develop. This logical arrangement of incidents presupposes that
the action must be presented in such a way that it should make sense to the audience. Any action
performed by any character must be as a result of an earlier action. Thus in the play The Marriage of
Anansewa, Ananse is poor so decides to take an action that will help him to get rich. What does he do?
He decides to give his daughter out in marriage and in the process make money for himself. He writes to
four wealthy chiefs.

The action in drama is usually organized in a climatic order with the scenes increasing in interest by
increasing suspense and emotional intensity. Dramatic action also includes what the character fails to do.
In Hamlet, the popular quote ‘to be or not to be’ refers to the action. Hamlet is contemplating on the
proper action to take against his uncle who he suspects killed his father. He does not want to act until he
is sure of it.

Motivation of characters is central to dramatic action. Therefore, let us see what motivation implies to in
drama. Motivation is the drive behind every action a character takes in a play. In The Marriage of
Anansewa, poverty drives Ananse to ‘sell’ his daughter. What this means is that there must be a reason
for any action taken by every character in the play. In drama, because the action is presented in dialogue
and the playwright does not have the space to explain the action like the novelist, some of the actions
that cannot be incorporated in dialogue are presented in the stage direction.

Three forms of dramatic action where drama is presented on stage are the following:

1. Physical Action  Movements/gestures

47
  Pantomime
 Mime
2. Reported Action
3. Mental Action

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 1. Physical Action
The physical action in drama refers to the movements made by a character in the play. It is visible and may
or may not involve dialogue. Physical action could in form of movements/gestures, mime or pantomime.
These are explained in details below.

Movements

This includes the steps taken by the character while he is speaking or in the process of undertaking other
tasks. Movement is used to describe mainly the actual movements like walking, running, pacing, kneeling,
lying down, standing or sitting. Movement is simply the process of moving, change of place, position, or
passing from one place to another. It involves the activities or whereabouts of a character or a group of
characters. These movements are usually accompanied by dialogue. This differentiates it from mime and
pantomime which are actions without words. Closely related to movement is gesture. Generally, gesture
refers to body movements like position, posture, and expressions.

In plays, you identify the movements and gestures through the dialogue and the stage direction. Can you
identify the movement/gesture in this excerpt from The Marriage of Anansewa?

AYA: [Entering to find him in this state] My son, is this weeping

You’re weeping?
What is the matter?
ANANSE: [Wringing out the handkerchief,] Mother!

Mime
Another form of physical action is mime. Sometimes, certain actions are presented without words to show
meaning for the purpose of entertainment by dramatists. This is mime. It is regarded as a simple facial drama
that is characterized by mimicry and the ludicrous representation of familiar types of characters. Mime is
therefore the art or technique of expressing or conveying action, character, or emotion without words but
using only gestures and movements. In other words, it is an expression of action or performance using such
means. In a play, the actions in mime are usually enclosed in the stage direction and mostly in italics. Some
of these mimes are flashbacks, that is those events from the past that are recalled to help explain certain
things in the play but some of them are presented as part of the present action in the play. In The Lion and the
Jewel, for instance, the mime on the arrival of the journalist in the village and the one on the road
construction are used to recall past actions. To pinpoint:

49
LAKUNLE: [A terrific shout and a clap of drums. Lakunle enters into the spirit of the dance with
enthusiasm. He takes over from Sidi, stations his cast all over the stage as the jungle, and
leaves the right to-stage clear from the four girls who are to dance the motor-car.

You know that the playwright has no time and space to explain or describe every situation and event as much
as the novelist. That is why he uses the stage direction to present the action that could not be incorporated in
dialogue.

Pantomime

Pantomime is synonymous with mime. It is a term for silent acting; the form of dramatic activity in silent
motion, gesture, facial expression, in which costume are relied upon to express emotional state or action. It
was popular in ancient Rome where it was a dramatic entertainment in which performers expressed meaning
through gestures accompanied by music. It also refers to some traditional theatrical performances originally
significant gesture without speech, in mime, but now consisting of a dramatized fairy tale or stories with
music, dancing, topical jokes and conventional characters frequently played by actors of the opposite sex. It
is chiefly performed in Britain around Christmas. The actual pantomime opens on Boxing Day. Pantomime is
also used to dramatize absurd or outrageous behavior.

2. Reported Action

In dramatic action, sometimes, it is not possible to present every action on stage. This could be as a result of
the prevalent convention or because the action cannot be realized on stage. In the Classical Period, for
instance, violence was not presented on stage. The playwrights were expected to maintain single settings
indoor actions and violence were reported on stage. In King Oedipus, the death of Jocasta is reported on
stage.

3.Mental Action

Mental action is an action that takes place in the character’s mind. In most cases, mental action is manifested
in facial expressions.

4.6 Setting

Setting is the location of a play. It is the time and place when and where the action of the play takes place.
Setting is very important in a play because it helps us to appreciate the background of the play. Also in
productions it helps the designers to design appropriate locale, atmosphere, and costume for the play. There
are different types of setting.

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Types of Setting

Geographical/Physical/Occupational: This is the actual geographical location of the story and whatever
surrounds the place where the story is located. It also includes the manner of daily living of the people. This
helps in locating the story; for example, it helps you to know if the action of the play takes place in an urban
centre or a village, or a bush, or a market place and so on. You can identify the physical setting easily in
some plays because the playwright mentions some known landmarks like the names of towns or other
important places in the town.

In the play, Hamlet, the physical setting is easy to identify because of the fact that two of the major
characters in the play are addressed as the “Prince of Denmark” and the “King of Denmark”. Physical setting
also includes the manner of daily living of the people. This helps in locating the story; for example, it tells if
the play has an urban or rural setting?

Temporal/Historical Setting: This is the period in which a story takes place. This includes the date, the
season, the general atmosphere in the locale like war, fuel scarcity, democratic or military rule. This, like the
physical setting, could be deduced from the dialogue or from the stage direction. It could be stated in some
commentaries, especially the ones on the background of the play. In Arms and the Man for instance, the
opening part of Act 1, a date is given in the stage direction. This gives the reader a clue to the historical
setting of the play. It says:

ACT 1

Night: A lady’ bedchamber in Bulgaria, in a small town near the Dragoman Pass, late November in the year
1885.Through an open window with a little balcony a peak of the Balkans, wonderfully white and beautiful in
the starlit snow, seems quite close at hand, though it is really miles away. The interior of the room is not like
anything to be seen in the west Europe. … (15)

General Environmental Setting: The social, moral, emotional, mental and religious backgrounds of the
story. This is highlighted through dialogue, stage direction and the characters interpersonal relationships. In
Arms and the Man for instance, George Bernard Shaw presents a graphic picture of the Bulgarian way of life.
(The playwright “was able to pin the action down to actual geographical locations and to a real life war. He
took care to incorporate descriptions of Bulgarian life” The playwright admits that many aspects of the play
were based on actual facts.

4.7. Theme

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In the analysis of a play, the first issue that comes to mind is the theme. Theme is the main idea in a play that
permeates the entire play. How do you identify the theme of a play? Themes are identified through the
dialogue, actions and manifestations in the actions of the major characters as they interact with other
characters in the play. The interpersonal relationships of the characters help to highlight and advance that
particular idea. Common themes in drama include corruption, love, revenge, and many others. The theme is
the message which the playwright wants to send across to his audience and a play could have more than one
theme. Most playwrights try to make their societies better through the exploration of the impacts negative
ideas in the societies.

In Oedipus Rex for instance, the theme is man’s quest for his identity. The sub-theme is man’s helplessness
in the hands of fate or the gods. If we take the main theme, we will see that Oedipus’ search for his true
parents leads him to kill his father and marry his mother, while his search for the cause of the plague in his
kingdom and the murderer of King Laius leads to his search for his own identity. The search for his own
identity leads to his doom. The characters, the setting, the language, the plot, are chosen in such a way that
should advance the major theme of the story.

However, you must bear in mind the fact that a story may have one or more themes. It is also possible that
each reader may discover a different theme or a multiplicity of themes in the same play. You should not
worry about this. Literature is open to different interpretations and as literary students, you should be able to
identify your position and substantiate it with facts from the play. Finally, theme is the controlling idea in a
play which the reader extracts consciously as he reads the text. It is that idea or message which the
playwright wants to share with or convey to his audience.

UNIT FIVE

DRAMATIC DEVICES

5.1 Utterance in Drama

Dramatic language is modeled on real-life conversations among people, and yet, when one watches a play,
one also has to consider the differences between real talk and drama talk. Dramatic language is ultimately
always constructed or ‘made up’ and it often serves several purposes. Dramatic language is often rhetorical
and poetic, i.e., it uses language in ways which differ from standard usage in order to draw attention to its
artistic nature. When analyzing dramatic texts, one ought to have a closer look at the various forms of
utterance available for drama.

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5.1.1 Monologue, Dialogue and Soliloquy

In drama, in contrast to narrative, characters typically talk to one another and the entire plot is carried by and
conveyed through their verbal interactions. Language in drama can generally be presented either as
monologue or dialogue. Monologue means that only one character speaks while dialogue always requires
two or more participants. A special form of monologue, where no other person is present on stage beside the
speaker, is called soliloquy. Soliloquies occur frequently in Richard III for example, where Richard often
remains alone on stage and talks about his secret plans. Soliloquies are mainly used to present a character in
more detail and also on a more personal level. In other words: Characters are able to ‘speak their mind’ in
soliloquies.

In case of a monologue, other characters can be present on stage, either overhearing the speech of the person
talking or even being directly addressed by him or her. The main point is that one person holds the floor for a
lengthy period of time. Hamlet’s soliloquy reveals his inner conflict to the audience.

5.1.2 Asides

Another special form of speech in drama is the so-called aside. Asides are spoken away from other
characters, and a character either speaks aside to himself, secretively to (an) other character(s) or to the
audience (spectators). Asides are an important device because they channel extra information past other
characters directly to the audience. Thus, spectators are in a way taken into confidence and they often
become ‘partners-in-crime’, so to speak, because they ultimately know more than some of the figures on
stage.

Consider, for example, the way asides are employed in Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. After the
discovery of the Duke’s dead body, the various characters react differently and express this in asides:

LUSSURIOSO: Behold, behold, my lords!

The Duke my father’s murdered by a vassal
That owes this habit and here left disguised.
[Enter DUCHESS and SPURIO.]
DUCHESS: My lord and husband!
[FIRST NOBLE]: Reverend Majesty.
[SECOND NOBLE]: I have seen these clothes often attending on him.
VINDICE [aside]: That nobleman has been i’th’country, for he does not lie.
SUPERVACUO [aside]: Learn of our mother, let’s dissemble too.
I am glad he’s vanished; so I hope are you.
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 (The Revenger’s Tragedy, V, 1: 105-148)
5.2 Stage Directions

Stage directions are notes included in a play to describe how something should look, sound or be performed.
They can describe mood created by movements of the actors, the position of furniture, lighting, costumes,
music, and sound effects or describe setting characters’ actions and manner and other elements of a play.
They may provide historical or background information. Stage directions are described from the actors’ point
of view as he looks out at the audience. Other importance of stage directions include essential in keeping
with the playwright’s vision and providing the crucial details that cause a plan to flow accordingly. Stage
directions are very important to help director to convey the message the playwright intended to send. Look at
the label of stage directions below.

9.3. Dramatic Irony

The way information is conveyed to the audience and also how much information is given can have a number
of effects on the viewers and they are thus important questions to ask in drama analysis. The discrepancy
between the audience’s and characters’ knowledge of certain information can, for example, lead to dramatic
irony. Thus, duplicities or puns can be understood by the audience because they possess the necessary
background knowledge of events while the characters are ignorant and therefore lack sufficient insight.
Narrators in narrative texts often use irony in their comments on characters, for example, and they can do that
because they, like the audience of a play, are outside the story-world and thus possess knowledge which
characters may not have.

In the play The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur irony is created because the audience knows about
Vindice’s plans of revenge against the Duke, who poisoned Vindice’s fiancée after she resisted his lecherous
advances. The irony is pushed by the appearance of the Duke’s wife and Spurio, his bastard son, who are
secret lovers and who made an appointment at the same place. They appear on stage while the Duke is still in
the process of dying and thus fully aware of their presence, and they discuss possible ways of killing the
Duke, albeit in a playful manner, not knowing that the duke is dying at that very moment. The irony becomes
particularly poignant for the audience when Spurio and the Duchess talk about poisoning and stabbing the
Duke, which is exactly what, happened to the Duke just a minute before they appeared on stage. Thus, the
audience’s surplus of knowledge makes the scene incredibly ironic and potentially funny.

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In contrast to this, lack of vital information can lead to confusion but it also contributes to a sense of
suspense. As long as the audience is not fully informed about characters, their motives, previous actions, etc.,
the questions ‘How did all this happen?’, ‘What is going on here?’ and ‘What’s going to happen next or in
the end?’ become crucial. Lack of necessary information can also lead to surprises for the audience, and this
is often used in comedies to resolve confusions and mixed-up identities

5.4 Foreshadowing

In drama, refers to actions, words, events, incidents or other things in a play that predict a future occurrence
in the play. Sometimes it contributes to the mood and general atmosphere of the play. Hamlet provides a very
good example for us. We encounter a ghost at the beginning of the play. Its appearance creates an
atmosphere of fear. It is an ominous sign of an impending evil or devilish act. It shows that everything is not
normal in the society. This evil act is revealed later in the dialogue between the Ghost and Hamlet in Act I
Scene v:

5.5 Planting

In drama, one of the techniques that is used to present the action of the play is planting. It is the use of certain
props to give more information about some characters, the environment or situations. If for instance you are
watching a home video, and a particular scene opens in the room where a character is lying on a bed with a
wheelchair beside the bed, you will conclude immediately that the person on the bed cannot walk.

It might not be that person on the bed that is paralyzed but the presence of the wheel chair indicates that there
is a paraplegic character in the play. Thus that wheelchair is planted and without any explanation you are
able to get more information about the play, planting device. In planting, representatives of certain
issues/places/things are used to create an impression or point to an idea that will be exposed as the events of
the play unfolds.

5.6. Deus ex Machina

The phrase is “now used for any forced and improbable device - a telltale birthmark, an unexpected
inheritance, the discovery of a lost will or letter - by which a hard-pressed author makes shift to resolve his
plot” (Abrams 39). It originated from Greek drama and, in effect, when it is used in a play it means that the
gods have come on stage to save a situation. It refers to an unexpected power, event or someone that saves a
situation that seemed hopeless. This technique enables the playwright to unravel some secrets, or resolve
certain issues that seem to be beyond human capabilities. This ‘god’ from the machine, in most cases, rescues
the protagonist from an impossible situation or enlightens him on how to resolve an issue at the last minute.

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This causes a resolution of the plot by the use of an improbable coincidence. In Oedipus Rex, the arrival of
the shepherd is seen as deux ex machina. Before his arrival, the Blind Seer has accused King Oedipus of
being the murderer of King Lauis. If the Shepherd does not come, the issue will have remained unresolved
because King Oedipus has accused Creon of conniving with the Seer to accuse him of being a murderer. The
Shepherd arrives at this point and unravels the mystery of the King’s parenthood. The servant corroborates
the story and it becomes clear that King Oedipus actually killed his father and married his mother.

5.7 Play-within-play

As the name suggests, a play-within-the –play is a play that is created in another play. Usually it is a
complete play with a beginning, middle and an end. It has its own theme which in many cases is related to
the theme of the main play. It is created for a particular purpose. A very good example of the play-within the-
play is The Mousetrap in Hamlet. Shakespeare uses the technique to confirm the claim made by the ghost.

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