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drama
1. Some characteristics of drama
2. Drama and society
3. Drama as a composite art
4. Connections with religion
5. Rules of drama

The word 'drama' is used in at least four distinct though overlapping meanings. It may loosely describe any uncommon event — say, a 'dramatic encounter'. More properly, it means a play script destined either for the theatre or for more recent media such as television or radio. More specifically still, it denotes a particular kind of play — one that, occupying the middle ground, slips through conventional categories such as tragedy, melodrama, farce, or whatever. In its widest meaning 'drama' stands for playwriting as such, a distinct form of literary production. This has inherent advantages as well as drawbacks One of the main advantages of drama in the general sense is the presence of the public watching (as 'spectators') as well as listening (as the 'audience') to a performance of the text. The drawbacks are the reverse of this. Fortuitous events (the weather, the casting, capricious reviews) may colour the reception of plays regardless of their intrinsic quality. What is more, some aspects of the human condition do not readily lend themselves to dramatization. Subtle shifts in relationships that result in a minimal outer action may be hard to portray on the stage. Emotions left unuttered, thoughts left concealed can indeed be expressed by such — now unfashionable — devices as the soliloquy and the aside, but the novel can handle them far more adequately. In contrast to music, which is a universal human activity, drama is not in fact encountered everywhere and at all times. At its heart there are certain ambiguities.

1. Some characteristics of drama

Let us remember that drama as a vehicle just for the spoken word only, unaccompanied by song, instrumental music, dance, and stylized gesture, is a relatively new phenomenon in the long history of theatre. Ancient Greek drama was what Wagner called a 'Gesamtkunstwerk' — a total work of art — in which the role of the verse-speaking, singing, and dancing chorus was crucial. In Europe, opera and ballet split off as distinct genres only in the late 16th century as the spoken drama was itself becoming an autonomous vehicle for new and challenging ideas. A purely verbal drama deprived of music and dance is to this day alien to traditional forms of Asian theatre.

Like other forms of narrative literature, drama is a time-based art. But — unlike, say, the novel that tends to use the narrative past — drama works in the present tense. An action performed on stage takes on a palpable immediacy, amplified by the reactions of the audience. This power has often anatagonized the powers that be who have tended to view with suspicion any entertainments capable of challenging their social, moral, or political hegemony. Hence censorship has left its greasy finger mark on many pages of stage history, from the French Crown issuing edicts against satirical plays in the 15th century to Glavrepertkom controlling the repertoire of Soviet theatres or the Lord Chamberlain blue-pencilling play scripts in Britain between 1737 and 1968.

For all its pitfalls, the art of drama has at various times enjoyed the highest literary prestige. In the last chapter of his Poetics the philosopher Aristotle (4th century bc) placed tragedy (admittedly only one aspect of drama) above the parallel literary art of the epic. And it is true that drama has furnished the world's imagination with such figures as Oedipus, Electra, Hamlet, Falstaff, Tartuffe, and Faust — no less recognizable as recurrent types of humanity than their counterparts in narrative fiction – e.g. Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and Emma Bovary.

2. Drama and society

As a medium depending on collective responses, drama cements the cohesion of social groups. In the Athens of the 5th century bc the City Dionysia, where new plays were premiered, was the expression of a self-confident democracy presenting itself to its citizens. Medieval mystery plays brought together entire Christian communities under the aegis of guilds, municipalities, and confraternities. Drama may also crystallize class allegiances. Whereas Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones's masques (1605–34) appealed to an aristocratic elite at the Stuart court, trade union audiences cheering the plays at London's Unity Theatre (1936–75) were bonded by a common anti-Establishment stance. Drama has at times strengthened a sense of national identity: Shakespeare's histories are notable examples of this. At other times it has served the interests of the autocratic state. The setting up of the Comédie-Française by Louis XVI (1680) consecrated the cultural–political importance of what was then the dominant power on the Continent. The theatres of imperial countries, from Rome to Great Britain, have imposed metropolitan values on the colonies by cultural means. Conversely, in countries late in achieving political independence, drama has often helped to fire popular aspirations. Thus, the National Theatre in Prague was built out of the Czech people's voluntary contributions and opened in 1881 — only to be burnt down and rebuilt two years later with yet further popular support; above its proscenium arch it was to bear the proud legend: 'A Nation's Gift to Itself.'

3. Drama as a composite art

Drama is not always text based. Indeed the more popular and/or comic in its form, the more likely it is to depend on non-literary devices. Chinese theatre has always been intimately linked with music. The actors of the centuries-old Italian commedia dell'arte often used a scenario, i.e. a plot outline, instead of a fully written-out text; much of its humour was physical rather than verbal. Two still current forms of improvisatory theatre of the Middle East, ru-howzi and orta-oyunu, adjust the duration of performances to the given occasion: in other words, the play text is kept flexible as required.

So one could say that dramatic texts are menus rather than meals complete in themselves. In this they differ from forms of literature autonomous from their inception like the essay, as well as from those — like lyric and epic poetry — that have long since retreated from song and recitation to the printed page. Play scripts in concept and practice are linked with a wide range of sister arts: dynamic ones such as speech, movement, gesture, acrobatics, singing, instrumental music, or dance, as well as static ones such as architecture or stage and costume design. This hybridity applies even to so-called closet drama aimed at a mental rather than a physical stage. True, Aristotle conceded that tragedy could be read as easily as it could be enjoyed in the theatre. The classical canon of Greek tragedians, of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, of Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, and Molière, as well as other national authors like Schiller and Goethe, has long been and still is taught at schools and colleges — though more often than not with a fine disregard of its theatrical context. Nowadays the publication of plays is indeed a lively business. But the fact remains that drama demands to be read in a special way, i.e. empathetically. In the theatre of the mind, the unheard voices and unseen gestures of the agents are a vital part of the reading experience.

4. Connections with religion

The origins of drama are usually held to go back to religious beliefs and practices. But ritual, which may well be a universal factor in man's evolution, is not quite the same thing as drama, however closely related the two may be. Unlike ritual, a dramatic performance bears an 'as if' character that invites the onlooker's detachment which Coleridge called a 'willing suspension of disbelief'. Drama's emancipation from pure ritual is hard to pin down in time. Egyptian texts going back as far as 2500 bc are thought to represent something like the dialogue and stage action for rituals unfolding in a temple setting. Ancient Chinese and Korean theatre may well have originated in shamanistic rituals. The Natya-shastra, the Indian classic on drama compiled some time between the 2nd and the 8th centuries ad, ascribed the beginnings of the art to a heavenly performance arranged by Brahma for an audience of gods and demons. The kagura, a type of Japanese play performed as an offering to the gods at Shinto shrines from the Yamato (3rd to 6th century ad) period onwards until the present day, is traditionally linked with the myth of the goddess Ame no Uzume who tempted the sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave by dancing for her. Attic tragedy, the oldest form of high drama in the European tradition, grew according to Aristotle out of the dithyramb, a choric hymn addressed to Dionysus, god of wine, wild nature, and ecstatic possession. And indeed, when the great tragedies of 5th-century Athens were performed at the City Dionysia — celebrations partly religious, partly civic, and partly competitive — an altar to the god occupied a prominent place in the acting area. Aristotle claimed that comedy, too, derived from improvised phallic songs, celebrations of fertility linked with the god.

However, there have been long periods when some religions — notably the three monotheistic faiths — set their faces sternly against any performance art. Judaism in ancient times disapproved of the theatre as an expression of Hellenistic, i.e. pagan, culture. Early Christianity was fiercely opposed to the public spectacles of imperial Rome. Tertullian condemned the theatre as the devil's church; the hostility of many later Fathers of the Church opened a wide gulf for hundreds of years between the new faith and the ancient art of theatrical representation. It is of course the case that much later, long after the theatre of antiquity had perished in the 6th century ad, the Church itself was to use dramatic means to preach its message. This Christian drama, which depicted scriptural history as well as the lives of saints and which allegorized everyman's moral dilemmas, flourished in many parts of Western and Central Europe for centuries in the latter part of the Middle Ages. A distant echo of this is still to be found in the Oberammergau Passion Play. Even so, the Church maintained its reservations concerning profane drama. As late as 1673 the great actor/playwright Molière was refused a Christian burial. The Reformation, which proved even more hostile to theatre than the Catholic Church, brought about the total demise of scriptural drama in England and elsewhere in the 16th century. Puritan revulsion against the theatre reached its climax in England when all theatres were kept closed under the Commonwealth from 1648 to 1660.

Islam did not favour dramatic performances for a great part of its history either; it saw them as attempts to create an alternative reality to God's creation. To be sure, fundamentalism has not stifled religious drama in the Islamic world altogether. In Iran the taziyeh, a kind of Passion Play, has been developing since the 18th century as an annual commemoration of the martyrdom in 680 of Husayn ibn 'Ali', the third Imam of the Shiite faith.

But a fuller development of drama has arguably come about precisely when it cut itself adrift from its otherwordly origins. Not that religious impulses would have been the sole motivation for performance even in the earliest times. Other motives of a more profane kind must have come into play as well: the sense of a joyous public occasion, of being taken 'out of oneself', and — last but not least — open-mouthed admiration for the skills of performers. The satiric impulse, too, is an ancient one; the pleasure of poking fun at men of power had long been familiar by the time of Aristophanes.

5. Rules of drama

Aristotle's Poetics, looking back on the great period of Greek playwriting which in his day had passed its prime, was to have a long-term effect on the Western conception of drama. Intended as a philosophical approach to criticism, this brief work laid down some ground rules, particularly for tragedy. It recognized drama as a composite art but placed the playwright's skill in devising the plot above other aspects such as character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. It insisted on unity of action, i.e. a well-articulated plot complete in itself, but it did not mention the other two unities — those of time and place (except for a passing reference to the latter) — which Renaissance critics some eighteen centuries later were to consider mandatory in 'regular drama'. Practising playwrights from Lope de Vega in the early 17th century to Victor Hugo over 200 years later held out against the tyranny of these supposed 'rules'. Even as recently as the 20th century, Brecht proclaimed an anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy, objecting as he did to the philosopher's conservative view of the impact of theatre on the spectator. Dramatic theory has been in a state of flux for centuries. Many have seen conflict as being the soul of plot, and broadly speaking that is correct. But even this claim may be open to question. Some of Beckett's plays — Waiting for Godot, Endgame, or Happy Days — run counter to this conventional assumption.

The confrontation of one character with another takes place even in puppetry, employing — in place of the human actor — creatures made of wood, papier-mâché, cloth, leather, or whatever, which are operated by gloves, strings, or rods. Minuscule or huge, three-dimensional or flat shadow figures, these substitute persons represent dramatic dilemmas fully as much as 'real' actors do, albeit in a distanced, frequently caricatural form. The interrelationship between live theatre and the puppet show is a complex one. In Japan, the popular kabuki borrowed texts and even acting techniques from the bunraku (puppet) theatre. In Europe, the Punch-and-Judy show is a miniaturized offshoot of the commedia dell'arte.

It has been said that today we live in a dramatized society. The rules of the game may have changed over time, altering the function and the very shape of the playhouse. The media of the moving image have evolved new rules with their ability to incorporate large segments of external reality into their narrative. But some playwrights — Euripides, Shakespeare, Molière, to name but a few — have proved immune to the ravages of time, made freshly relevant by constant reinterpretations on the stage. Drama in some shape or form is all around us — perhaps to the extent of enveloping us in a virtual reality. It continues to be of the first importance as an outlet for creative energies as well as a key to understanding the human condition, and we are — as always — left with the critical task of sorting out ephemeral dross from works of enduring value.

(Published 2004)

— George Brandt

Bibliography

Banham, M. (ed.) (1995). The Cambridge Guide to Theatre.
Brandt, G. W. (ed.) (1998). Modern Theories of Drama.
Chambers, C. (ed.) (2002). The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre.
Dorsch, T. S. (trans.) (1965). Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle/Horace/Longinus.
Elam, K. (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama.
Kennedy, D. (ed.) (2003). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. 2 vols.