About Drama Dr. Elizabeth Juckett | English 200 | April 6, 2016

Is there any connection between religion and drama, to your knowledge?

A connection between religion and drama:  It all started with religious ritual—both in ancient Greece and in Asia  The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery cycles of medieval Europe gave rise separately to dramatic traditions  When the place of worship involves theatre, drama and the roots of belief for a particular community get all wrapped up with each other

Overview  What is drama?  The great ages of drama  Greece  Rome  Medieval Europe  Renaissance England  17 th – 18 th century England  19 th – turn of the 20 th century Europe  20 th century American  Genres of drama  Elements of drama

What is drama?  “Drama is the art of representing for the pleasure of others events that happened or that we imagine happening. Primary elements are characters, represented by players; action, described by gestures and movement; thought, implied by dialogue, words, actions; spectacle, represented by scenery, music, costume; and finally the audience, which responds to this complex mixture.” (Lee Jacobus, Drama, 5 th edition, Bedford, page 1)  Anything you’d like to add?  I’d add: Drama is usually intended to give the illusion of reality, with actors memorizing their lines and impersonating the characters they represent  Drama involves two forms of art: the art of the playwright who conceives a play; the art of the actors, director, costume and stage designer, etc., who interpret the playwright’s script

Seeing a play; reading a play Seeing a play  Watching a drama can be a powerful artistic experience  The playwright’s words and imagination, the actors’ feeling and interpretation, make the play come alive before us Reading a play  Readers don’t have the benefit of interpretations made by the director, actors, and scene/costume designers  The play stays in our heads, open to our imagination; it’s conceptual; we may more attention to the literary art  Every reading of a play is an act of interpretation, a silent performance of it

Dramatic developments

The periods of drama Greek drama Roman drama  Originated around 500 BC  Performed at great festivals, like that of Dionysus  Great tragedians like Aeschylus, Sophocles, wrote plays still performed today  Comic playwrights like Aristophanes and Menander wrote plays like Lysistrata  Never achieved the greatness of Greek theater  Tragedians: Seneca (not remarkable)  Comic playwrights: Plautus and Terence helped to invent stock characters (skinflint, prude)  Other dramatic events included gladiatorial combat, chariot races, slaughter of wild beasts and Christians

Periods: Medieval drama  Emerged from religious ritual (the mass)  Frequently performed outside by traveling companies  Mystery play cycles like The Second Shepherd’s Play, Abraham and Isaac, were performed by traveling companies (see right)  Morality plays like Everyman were designed to be morally challenging and instructive

Periods: Renaissance drama (Shakespeare)  Revival of learning that happened with the Renaissance opened up the stage to all kinds of entertainment and inspiration, so playwrights no longer drew just on the Bible or church morality but on all the history and learning of classical Greece and Rome  Plays were meant to be derivative, to have plots drawn from other sources  Shakespeare achieved extraordinary heights in comedy, history, tragedy, and romance (tragicomedy)  Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, Ben Jonson were also fine playwrights

Periods: Play performances provided new sources of entertainment  The New Globe Theatre in London captures what Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and others looked like  Those who can’t afford box seats could stand in front of the stage (“groundlings”) for the duration of the play

Periods: Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries  French writers like Moliere, Racine, wrote plays observing Aristotle’s “unities”  Anyone know what this concept is?  Moliere was a great 17 th century comic playwright; Racine wrote tragedies  In England, the female writer Aphra Behn wrote fine plays in the late 17 th century (The Rover)  In the 18 th century, social comedies flourished in England  Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal  Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer

Periods: Late nineteenth, early 20 th century European and British plays  The great Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov wrote plays like The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya—realist plays, patient and insightful explorations of character  Influenced by Chekhov, but arguably darker, Scandinavians Strindberg and Ibsen wrote realist dramas like Miss Julie or Hedda Gabler  Powerful women characters were often showcased  Late nineteenth-century British playwrights gravitated to comedy: Oscar Wilde wrote drawing room comedies like The Importance of Being Earnest; George Bernard Shaw wrote socialist comedies like Arms and the Man

Periods: Twentieth-century drama  Bertolt Brecht’s plays, overtly political, were epic dramas that refused to let audiences sit comfortably in darkened spaces, instead forcing them to think and react. Example: Mother Courage  Waiting for Lefty, sometimes characterized as “good” agitprop, embodies both ideological and realist tendencies in early 20 th century American drama  In America, great realist tragedies like the plays of Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey Into Night) or of Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) appeared from the early twentieth through middle-twentieth century  Absurdist theater like that of Becket and Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author) were conceptual, representing metaphysical and meta-dramatic questions

Periods: Contemporary drama is vibrant  The strain of earnest realism persists (e.g. August Wilson, Fences)  Experimentalism has flourished with playwrights like Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepherd, Susan Lori Parks.  Revivals of classic plays (from Macbeth to School for Scandal to Mother Courage to A Raisin in the Sun) co-exist alongside new plays Revival of Raisin with Audra McDonald

Types of drama

Drama Genres  Tragedy demands a specific worldview. It’s serious drama in which the chief character, by some peculiarity of psychology, passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe. According to Aristotle, audience catharsis is the singular feature and goal of any tragedy.  Comedy: Originally comedy referred to a genre performed during Dionysian festivals. In medieval and Renaissance use, comedy came to mean any play or narrative poem in which the main characters managed to avert disaster and have a happy ending. In the 19 th and 20 th centuries, ‘comedy’ also came to connote humor and laughs.  Tragicomedy is an experimental literary form--either a play or piece of prose fiction--containing elements common to both comedies and tragedies. The tragic situation may develop, then add a happy ending.  Absurdist drama points to the meaninglessness of human existence by using disjointed or repetitious dialogue; purposeless and confusing situations; and plots that lack realistic or logical development.

Elements of drama

 Plot: the action of the drama. May unfold in one acts, three acts, five acts, according to the playwright’s conception  Character: The characters in a play whom actors impersonate; also, the quality of personhood displayed by characters  Setting: In drama, both the time and place of a play, plus the scenery and physical elements  Dialogue: Verbal exchanges between characters without which the play could hardly exist.  Music: May be background or intrinsic (musicals); adds to emotion  Movement: Stage directions tell us how actors are to move on the stage

Anything we have missed? Any questions? “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” won the Tony Award for Best Play, 2015