Drama 2

Aristotle’s definition of Tragedy

• Drama is a mimetic art that takes its subjects
from life.
• Subject matter of a tragedy is serious.
• Hubris: protagonist’s arrogance or pride that
leads the individual to violate the Gods or
moral rules.
• Hamartia: refers to the error in judgment; also
referred to as tragic flaw
 Tragedy (Contd.)
• Anagnorisis: That crucial point, or turning point of the
drama where the hero recognizes his/her previous
misjudgment. This is often the climax of the play,
followed by the reversal of the hero’s fortune
(peripeteia).
• Peripeteia: The sudden reversal of the hero’s fortune,
in the case of a tragedy his downfall.
• Catharsis: The most debated of Aristotle’s terms. It
describes the ‘purification’ or ‘purgation’ of our souls
at the end of a tragic performance through the pity, we
feel for the lost hero and the terror, the horrifying
events raised in us.
 Types of Tragedy
• Revenge Tragedy
• Domestic Tragedy
• Heroic Tragedy
 Revenge Tragedy
• Revenge tragedy (tragedy of blood): the plot is centred on the
tragic hero’s attempts at taking revenge on the murderer of a
close relative; in these plays the hero tries to ‘right a wrong’. The
genre can be traced back to Antiquity, e.g. to the Oresteia of
Aeschylus, and the tragedies of Seneca. During the Renaissance,
there were two distinct types of revenge tragedy in Europe; the
Spanish-French tradition (Lope de Vega, Calderón, Corneille)
focusing on honour and the conflict between love and duty; and the
English revenge tragedy following the Senecan traditions of
sensational, melodramatic action and savage, often exaggerated
bloodshed in the centre. Elizabethan revenge tragedies usually
feature a ghost, some delay, feigned or real madness of the hero,
and often a play-within-the-play; cf.: Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy;
Shakespeare: Hamlet; Webster: The Duchess of Malfi.
 Domestic Tragedy
• Domestic tragedy: a play typically about middle-
class or lower middle-class life, concerned with
the domestic sphere, the private, personal,
intimate matters within the family, between
husband and wife (as opposed to the national –
matters of a nation/country, or universal – the
whole of mankind). There are plenty of examples
in Jacobean drama, e.g. Shakespeare: Othello;
Heywood: A Woman Killed with Kindness, but
also some in the 18th century, like Lillo: The
London Merchant, and the term may even be
applied to the work of later dramatists as well.
 Heroic Tragedy
• Heroic tragedy: Mostly popular during the
English Restoration, heroic tragedy or
tragicomedy usually used bombastic
language and exotic settings to depict a noble
heroic protagonist and their torment in
choosing between love and patriotic duties. A
typical example would be John Dryden’s The
Conquest of Granada.
 Comedy
• It is a drama chiefly written to amuse its
audience, with characters mostly taken from
everyday life, and, a plot usually ending happily.
• It was seen as complementary to tragedy, (in a
narrative tragedy the hero: “from wealth [is]
fallen to wretchedness,” while in a narrative
comedy climbs from wretchedness to
wealth/happiness), the two together making up
the wheel of fortune, a major symbol of human
fate.
 Old Comedy
• In Athens, the second day of the Dionysian
celebrations was traditionally devoted to five
comedies. The only playwright known, is
Aristophanes (450-385 BC), and he was
associated with the genre of Old Comedy. Old
Comedies have fantastical plots with often
surreal turns combined with political and
social satire of contemporary figures.
 New Comedy
• The New Comedy of Menander (340-290 BC),
however, evolves around love plots. The
young lovers have to face trials and
tribulations, often the opposition of their
parents and other senile or conservative
members of society, but with the help of their
witty servants they overcome the difficulties,
and get united in the end.
 New Comedy (Contd.)
• Menander’s comedies were reinvented by two
Roman authors around the 2nd century BC, by
Plautus (254-184 BC) and Terence (195-159 BC)
who, in turn, influenced both the commedia
dell’arte of the Middle-Ages (an Italian form of
comedy whose plot mainly centered around love
and intrigue, with often farcical dialogues, and
which was a popular type of marketplace
entertainment until the 15th century) and the
Renaissance plays of Shakespeare and Lope de
Vega, not only in their plots, but mostly in the
usage of stock characters.
 Comedy: Types
• Romantic Comedy
• Comedy of Humors (blood, phlegm, bile and
black bile)
• Satirical Comedy
• Comedy of Manners
• Sentimental Comedy
 Medieval Drama
• Medieval drama knew nothing of Greek drama
(the latter was considered pagan, just like the
whole of the Antique world); therefore the
starting point was the Bible, and the Latin text of
the mass.
• At the beginning, it is mainly liturgical drama, a
form of drama drawing on the inherent dramatic
elements of the mass: the spoken and sung
dialogue between priest and congregation.
 Medieval Drama (Contd.)
• The purpose of medieval drama was
instruction (the Church was the sole possessor
of education and consequently knowledge, as
the masses were illiterate).
• Drama was therefore called the “quick book”
(i.e. ‘living’ book) whose purpose was to teach
the lower classes the mysteries of the faith,
presenting the story of mankind from Creation
to the Last Judgment.
 Medieval Drama (Contd.)
• Liturgical plays were devised (probably also
written) by the clergy, first performed within
the mass.
• Later, as they were becoming more and more
secular, they were put on outside the church,
performed by trade guilds, on pageants
(wagons, moving around the city, stopping at
several points, performing the same play for a
new audience).
 Medieval Drama: Types
• Mystery: in the narrow sense: story from the
Bible, usually presented as part of a longer
sequence telling the story of man from the
Creation to the Last Judgment.
• Miracle: a later development from the mystery
play, dramatizing the lives and divine miracles of
saints, or the Virgin Mary. No significant texts
survived in English literature, but there is a
famous French cycle, with forty-two plays about
the divine interventions of the Holy Virgin.
 Medieval Drama: Types (Contd.)
• Morality: an allegory in dramatic form,
dramatizing the fight of good and bad within (and
for) the human soul; it presents man’s need for
salvation and the various temptations on his way
through life towards death. These plays serve a
didactic purpose, similarly to religious sermons:
they illustrate the war between God and the
Devil. Typical heroes are Mankind, or Everyman,
with other characters such as Good Deeds,
Knowledge, Goods, Death, God, and the Devil.