Understanding drama

“All the world's a stage," wrote Shakespeare in one of the most famous lines in drama, "and all the men and women merely players." Indeed our human drama is persistent and universal, probably as old as the earliest hunters who disguised themselves and tried to act like those animals they were trying to lure into a trap and kill. The hunt and other crucial activities became ongoing dramas reflecting human conflict and the struggle for survival; and these dramas lent themselves to the creation of stories about bravery and cowardice, endurance and extinction, tragedy and comedy.

From its beginnings, drama (which Aristotle called "imitated human action"), like other forms of literature, was meant to tell the story of humankind in conflict with its world. In the acting out of events, drama often invested the most ancient and sometimes the most ordinary rituals with pomp and mystery. Western drama, in fact; grew from religious rituals; comedy derived from the Dionysian rites celebrating fertility and growth, and tragedy from the goat songs (again embedded in Dionysian rituals) that stressed the sacrificial nature 6f existence and the reality of death. Drama in all ages is, as William Archer stated aptly in Play-making (1926), "a representation of the will of man in conflict with the mysterious powers of natural forces which limit and belittle us: it is one of us thrown living upon the stage there to struggle against fatality, against social law, against one of his fellow mortals, against himself if need be, against the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the folly, the malevolence of those around him." There could be no drama without that universal picture, on stage, of human beings confronting physical, mental, and spiritual obstacles.

Drama differs from other forms of literature in that it demands a stage and performances. The drama critic Eric Bentley is correct when he declares that drama enjoys a double life—that it can be enjoyed by both spectator and reader. But the fact remains that most plays are written to be produced. Most critics stress this obvious but also subtle truth, that drama must be performed; in fact, performance is an element of drama. Professor J. M. Manly, for one, states that drama requires a story, told in action, by actors who impersonate the characters of the story. Similarly, Elder Olson speculates: "If we drink about the things a dramatist must do, as a minimum, to make a play, it becomes clear that he must (1) devise some sort of action, together with characters who can appropriately carry it out, (2) contrive a scenario which shows what actions are to be enacted on the stage in what order, and (3) compose the dialog, or at least indicate roughly what sort of thing shall be said by die actors." In both definitions of drama there is, as we shall see, the relentless ghost of Aristotle dominating the various elements. Yet what is most revealing about these definitions, and all other useful explanations of the nature of drama, is that they stress the theatrical perspective.

It is the theatrical perspective that forces us to focus on drama's need for producers and directors, playwright and actors, theater and stage, audience and, alas, critics. A play, after all, is human action or human experience dramatized for stage production, and this theatrical reality offers both possibilities and constraints. Playwrights have always been aware of the special environment of theater. George Bernard Shaw, writing for The New York Times in 1912, listed in several paragraphs the many factors that dictate the playwright's methods. Here is a typical paragraph:

I do not select my methods: they are imposed on me by a hundred considerations: by the physical considerations of theatrical representation, by the laws devised by the municipality to guard against fires and other accidents to which theatres are liable, by the economies of theatrical commerce, by the nature and limits of the art of acting, by the capacity of the spectators for understanding what they see and hear, and by the accidental circumstances of the particular production in hand.

Shakespeare knew about these theatrical constraints three hundred years before Shaw, just as Broadway playwrights and producers understand them more than half a century after Shaw. Theater depends on numerous art forms, and it is assuredly an expensive literary art.

The playwright, unlike the poet or fiction writer, creates for a mass audience, not for individuals. In classical times, the distinction between poet and dramatist was not so marked. In ancient Greece, playwrights were called poets, for drama was written in verse; and poets often competed in state-sponsored contests. Greek dramatic presentations (the word "drama" comes from die Greek word meaning "a thing done") were civic occasions; sometimes the performances lasted for days. Eventually, drama and poetry went their separate ways, although at times they would again merge significantly, as in works by Shakespeare, Ibsen (notably Brand and Peer Gynt), Brecht, and Archibald MacLeish. Drama can incorporate poetry while still being fiction in an imaginative sense; it shares with these major genres a telling about humankind and die world. Nevertheless, its elements ultimately contrast with those of poetry and fiction because those elements must be made visible. We go to the theater to see; that is its essence.

The question of exactly what we see has been a subject of critical debate ever since Aristotle formulated his ideas about drama, especially tragedy, in his Poetics. What we should see, to follow Aristotle's Poetics, is plot, the most important part of drama. The ancients liked to compare plot to the tying and untying of a knot. Plot should be organized, according to Aristotle, in such a way as to present the good or just hero or heroine who must suffer because of some inherent personal defect. Plot is the entire action and sequence of events in a play—all the movement arranged as an organic whole. As Aristotle explained, speaking specifically of tragedy:

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something, as some other thing follows it.

Through plot, a playwright "imitates" the cause-and-effect movement of existence, adjusting the rhythm to fit the mode of presentation, whether that mode is comedy or farce, tragedy or melodrama, tragicomedy or pantomime. Through plot, characters reach out to us in language and action, melody and spectacle (to invoke once again some key Aristotelian categories), in order to illuminate their confrontations with time and the world.

Ideally we must feel and vicariously live through these confrontations and the larger human experience of the play, if we are spectators, or bring an equal sensitivity to our solitary reading of the play. A playwright normally has only two to three hours to create this special magic of drama, to bring us into the theatrical universe. As the noted philosopher Susanne K. Langer states in Feeling and Form, drama confronts us with "the semblance of events lived and felt... so that they constitute a purely and completely experienced reality, a piece of virtual life." Perhaps we invest the characters with ourselves, sharing their pity and fear, their joy and laughter, within the enchanted context of the play. However, when it is over, we feel pleasure because our emotions have been manipulated—as we wished them to be—and we are ourselves once again. Aristotle, again referring to tragedy, termed this emotional response catharsis, the purging of pity and fear in the very being of an audience.

Aristotle has had such a pervasive influence on the conventions of drama that playwrights and critics have been honoring, modifying, or attempting to abandon his rules ever since they were formulated in the Poetics. Of course, Aristotle based his formulations about the elements of drama (for instance, the structural elements of fable, character, and thought; and the stylistic elements of language, melody, and spectacle) and about the dramatic unities of time, place, and action upon the earlier Greek drama of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Two of these great Greek dramatists—Sophocles and Aristophanes—are represented in this anthology, including the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, which Aristotle considered the perfect example of tragedy. Aristotle, in other words, based his critical theories on living drama. In Oedipus Rex, the perfectly "Aristotelian" play, the characters come to destruction more from their own defects than from the wrath of the gods that Aeschylus used in an earlier time. Moreover, the plot embodied the rules of dramatic unity—that the action of the play be a unified whole, that the scene remain unchanged or be confined to a specific area, and that the action of the play be limited to 24 hours—that Aristotle esteemed.

Dramatists and critics have had to deal with Aristotle's ghost. Lost for a time, the Aristotelian concepts of drama's form and content surged back into Renaissance drama in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare, for one, modified Aristotle's conceptions of plot by creating double plots in many of his plays, notably in King Lear; while in Othello, presented in this text, there is a "violation" of the concept of unity of place. Historically, then, as drama has evolved, dramatists have questioned Aristotle's ghost. In 1663, Moliere declared that "the great rule of all rules is not to please." He was not comfortable with Aristotle's influence during the neoclassical period. One of his characters in School for Wives (1663) echoes the wish of Moliere to be free from old restraints: "When I see a play I look only whether the points strike me; and when I am well entertained, I do not ask whether I have been wrong, or whether the rules of Aristotle would forbid me to laugh." In the twentieth century, the great dramatist Bertolt Brecht would still be trying to expiate Aristotle's ghost. In his anti-Aristotelian essay, "Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction," Brecht insists that we must not only be amused by theater and be drawn into it, but also be detached, or alienated, from the theatrical event to such an extent that we can learn from the dramatic representation on stage and feel urged to act militantly because of this detached understanding of the human drama. We can never make too much of Aristotle, but eventually we do come back to the play itself; and a play, as Thornton Wilder observed in 1941, "visibly represents pure existing."

How playwrights recreate or reproduce "pure existing" is a matter that varies from dramatist to dramatist and age to age. Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries used plot conventions that did not exist in Aristotle's time; while Brecht, in a play like Mother Courage, works wonders with the sort of episodic plot that Aristotle despised. Again, historical progress results in revolutions in stage-setting techniques. Devices far more complicated than those used by the Greeks were common in Renaissance drama. The Renaissance produced the modern proscenium arch, instead of the usual two or three arches, and stage setting became an art in its own right. Some playwrights, seeking maximum popularity, devised plots to utilize the spectacular: fireworks, water fountains, trapdoors, flying machines, and the like.

A play—that visible representation of pure existing—derives from the artistry of the dramatist and the values of the age. For example, Shakespeare's tragedy Othello is usually discussed without reference to the question of racism, but in discussions of The Merchant of Venice the question of anti-Semitism often arises. Was Shakespeare interested in die issue of racism in Othello? Textual analysis of the play and the treatment on which Shakespeare based his tragedy indicate that racism is an issue, adding yet another dimension to this extraordinary drama. Margaret Webster, producer of the play starring Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen, wrote: "One fact stands in sharp relief. The difference in race between Othello and every other character in the play is, indeed, the heart of the matter. This is the cause of Othello's terrible vulnerability on which Iago fastens so pitilessly; because of this, the conduct of which Desdemona is accused seems to Othello only too horribly possible; this is Iago's first and most powerful weapon, twisted to every conceivable use...."

Major dramatists—Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Miller, Hansberry, Hwang— probe the values of their age in an effort to seek the individual's importance in the world. What William Rose Benet said of Ibsen, that he "brought the problems and ideas of his day onto die stage," is true of all significant playwrights looking for affirmations of life itself. Drama might very well have begun in imitation of life with only remembered or told events as guidelines, but today it is firmly wedded to the written word, or script. A script is composed of die dialogue and stage directions designed to set "pure existing" in motion, with the acts and scenes that structure this action—all of which, of course, are not to be found in a work of fiction or poetry as we know them today.

Fiction and poetry make us imagine, make us create paths that lead us into the writer's world. On stage, however, all is spoken or couched in movement. The sets and machinery visibly present us a place and a time that we do not have to imagine. The characters "play" before us: real, palpable, and, one hopes, as true to life or die spirit of life as the playwright wished them to be. Theme, symbol, tone, plot—indeed, all dramatic convention—unfold and evolve before us. The dramatic elements evolve from the written to the spoken word, defining and giving depth to die characters and action we see. The dramatist, like a demigod, literally speaks Creation into existence; and in this process the dramatist teaches the human heart, as Shelley suggested, the knowledge of itself.

Perhaps what some saw and others did not is the beginning and the essence of drama; those who had had singular experiences wished to share them, to tell a tale, to act out a story. In drama the entire process of telling stories has come full circle. The oral traditions mark our beginnings as literate peoples. Then came the signs, symbols, glyphs, and alphabets, followed by extended writing and printing. It is the combination of how well the playwright has perceived and written and how well the actor conveys the meanings of his or her words—the double utilization of language—that provides us with the most successful drama.

As you explore the rich diversity of drama in the following sections, you will find brief essays exploring theme, character, plot, and dramatic form, followed by major plays for discussion and evaluation. You will also see the interplay of many cultures that has shaped plays around the world, and be encouraged to identify those shared experiences that make for great universal drama.

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