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Comic and tragic masks, symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene.
Comic and tragic masks, symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene.

Drama is the specific

Classical Greek
: δράω, drao). The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional
Thalia and Melpomene. Thalia was the Muse of comedy (the laughing face), while Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy (the weeping face). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE)—the earliest work of dramatic theory.[2]

In English (as was the analogous case in as many other European languages), the word "

theatre."[3] The use of "drama" in a more narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the modern era. "Drama" in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1873) or Chekhov's Ivanov (1887). It is this narrower sense that the film and television industries, along with film studies, adopted to describe "drama" as a genre within their respective media. "Radio drama" has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a live performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio.[4]

The enactment of drama in

Drama is often combined with music and dance: the drama in opera is generally sung throughout; musicals generally include both spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have incidental music or musical accompaniment underscoring the dialogue (melodrama and Japanese , for example).[8] Closet drama describes a form that is intended to be read, rather than performed.[9] In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance; performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.[10]


History of Western drama

Classical Greek drama

Relief of a seated poet (Menander) with masks of New Comedy, 1st century BCE – early 1st century CE, Princeton University Art Museum

Western drama originates in classical Greece.[11] The theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens produced three genres of drama: tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. Their origins remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE they were institutionalised in competitions held as part of festivities celebrating the god Dionysus.[12] Historians know the names of many ancient Greek dramatists, not least Thespis, who is credited with the innovation of an actor ("hypokrites") who speaks (rather than sings) and impersonates a character (rather than speaking in his own person), while interacting with the chorus and its leader ("coryphaeus"), who were a traditional part of the performance of non-dramatic poetry (dithyrambic, lyric and epic).[13]

Only a small fraction of the work of five dramatists, however, has survived to this day: we have a small number of complete texts by the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comic writers Aristophanes and, from the late 4th century, Menander.[14] Aeschylus' historical tragedy The Persians is the oldest surviving drama, although when it won first prize at the City Dionysia competition in 472 BCE, he had been writing plays for more than 25 years.[15] The competition ("agon") for tragedies may have begun as early as 534 BCE; official records ("didaskaliai") begin from 501 BCE, when the satyr play was introduced.[16] Tragic dramatists were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play (though exceptions were made, as with Euripides' Alcestis in 438 BCE). Comedy was officially recognized with a prize in the competition from 487 to 486 BCE.

Five comic dramatists competed at the City Dionysia (though during the Peloponnesian War this may have been reduced to three), each offering a single comedy.[17] Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided between "old comedy" (5th century BCE), "middle comedy" (4th century BCE) and "new comedy" (late 4th century to 2nd BCE).[18]

Classical Roman drama

An ivory statuette of a Roman actor of tragedy, 1st century CE.

Following the expansion of the

Roman theatre was more varied, extensive and sophisticated than that of any culture before it.[20]

While Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240 BCE marks the beginning of regular

genres, Andronicus was most appreciated for his tragedies and Naevius for his comedies; their successors tended to specialise in one or the other, which led to a separation of the subsequent development of each type of drama.[23]

By the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, drama was firmly established in Rome and a guild of writers (collegium poetarum) had been formed.[24] The Roman comedies that have survived are all fabula palliata (comedies based on Greek subjects) and come from two dramatists: Titus Maccius Plautus (Plautus) and Publius Terentius Afer (Terence).[25] In re-working the Greek originals, the Roman comic dramatists abolished the role of the chorus in dividing the drama into episodes and introduced musical accompaniment to its dialogue (between one-third of the dialogue in the comedies of Plautus and two-thirds in those of Terence).[26] The action of all scenes is set in the exterior location of a street and its complications often follow from eavesdropping.[26]

Plautus, the more popular of the two, wrote between 205 and 184 BCE and twenty of his comedies survive, of which his

Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius Accius.[26]

From the time of the empire, the work of two tragedians survives—one is an unknown author, while the other is the

extant example of the fabula praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects), Octavia, but in former times it was mistakenly attributed to Seneca due to his appearance as a character in the tragedy.[28]

Medieval

Stage drawing from 15th-century vernacular morality play The Castle of Perseverance.

Beginning in the early Middle Ages, churches staged dramatised versions of biblical events, known as liturgical dramas, to enliven annual celebrations.[30] The earliest example is the Easter trope Whom do you Seek? (Quem-Quaeritis) (c. 925).[31] Two groups would sing responsively in Latin, though no impersonation of characters was involved. By the 11th century, it had spread through Europe to Russia, Scandinavia, and Italy; only Muslim-occupied Spain was excluded.

In the 10th century,

Hrosvitha wrote six plays in Latin modeled on Terence's comedies, but which treated religious subjects.[32] Her plays are the first known to be composed by a female dramatist and the first identifiable Western drama of the post-Classical era.[32] Later, Hildegard of Bingen wrote a musical drama, Ordo Virtutum (c. 1155).[32]

One of the most famous of the early secular plays is the courtly pastoral Robin and Marion, written in the 13th century in French by Adam de la Halle.[33] The Interlude of the Student and the Girl (c. 1300), one of the earliest known in English, seems to be the closest in tone and form to the contemporaneous French farces, such as The Boy and the Blind Man.[34]

A large number of plays survive from

extant: York (48 plays), Chester (24), Wakefield (32) and the so-called "N-Town" (42). The Second Shepherds' Play from the Wakefield cycle is a farcical story of a stolen sheep that its protagonist, Mak, tries to pass off as his new-born child asleep in a crib; it ends when the shepherds from whom he has stolen are summoned to the Nativity of Jesus.[36]

Mummers Play, performed during the Christmas season. Court masques were particularly popular during the reign of Henry VIII.[38]

Elizabethan and Jacobean

One of the great flowerings of drama in

Tudor monarchy. Authors of this period drew some of their storylines from Greek mythology and Roman mythology or from the plays of eminent Roman playwrights such as Plautus and Terence
.

English Restoration comedy

Colley Cibber as the extravagant and affected fop Lord Foppington, "brutal, evil, and smart", in Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696).

In England, the

Greek and Roman classical comedies, combining the various plotlines in adventurous ways. Resulting differences of tone in a single play were appreciated rather than frowned on, as the audience prized "variety" within as well as between plays. Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to spectacular maturity in the mid-1670s with an extravaganza of aristocratic comedies. Twenty lean years followed this short golden age, although the achievement of the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn
, in the 1680s is an important exception. In the mid-1690s, a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience. The comedies of the golden 1670s and 1690s peak times are significantly different from each other.

The unsentimental or "hard" comedies of

Restoration rake (actually never a very common character in Restoration comedy). The single play that does most to support the charge of obscenity levelled then and now at Restoration comedy is probably Wycherley's masterpiece The Country Wife
(1675).

During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of

William Congreve and John Vanbrugh set out to appeal to more socially diverse audience with a strong middle-class element, as well as to female spectators. The comic focus shifts from young lovers outwitting the older generation to the vicissitudes of marital relations. In Congreve's Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), the give-and-take set pieces of couples testing their attraction for one another have mutated into witty prenuptial debates on the eve of marriage, as in the latter's famous "Proviso" scene. Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife (1697) has a light touch and more humanly recognisable characters, while The Relapse (1696) has been admired for its throwaway wit and the characterisation of Lord Foppington, an extravagent and affected burlesque fop with a dark side.[39] The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was running out by the end of the 17th century, as public opinion turned to respectability and seriousness even faster than the playwrights did.[40] At the much-anticipated all-star première in 1700 of The Way of the World, Congreve's first comedy for five years, the audience showed only moderate enthusiasm for that subtle and almost melancholy work. The comedy of sex and wit was about to be replaced by sentimental comedy
and the drama of exemplary morality.

Modern and postmodern

The pivotal and innovative contributions of the

meta-theatricality, and social critique.[42] In terms of the traditional theoretical discourse of genre, Ibsen's work has been described as the culmination of "liberal tragedy", while Brecht's has been aligned with an historicised comedy.[43]

Other important playwrights of the modern era include Antonin Artaud, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Frank Wedekind, Maurice Maeterlinck, Federico García Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, Luigi Pirandello, George Bernard Shaw, Ernst Toller, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Dario Fo, Heiner Müller, and Caryl Churchill.

Asian drama

India

Sanskrit theatre
.

The earliest form of

Islamic conquests that began in the 10th and 11th centuries, theatre was discouraged or forbidden entirely.[46] Later, in an attempt to re-assert indigenous values and ideas, village theatre was encouraged across the subcontinent, developing in a large number of regional languages from the 15th to the 19th centuries.[47] Modern Indian theatre developed during the period of colonial rule under the British Empire, from the mid-19th century until the mid-20th.[48]

Sanskrit theatre

The earliest-surviving fragments of

The major source of evidence for Sanskrit theatre is

props, the organisation of companies, the audience, competitions, and offers a mythological account of the origin of theatre.[51]

Its drama is regarded as the highest achievement of

Śakuntalā (in English translation) influenced Goethe's Faust (1808–1832).[52]

Modern Indian drama

Rabindranath Tagore, was a pioneering modern playwright who wrote plays noted for their exploration and questioning of nationalism, identity, spiritualism and material greed.[53] His plays are written in Bengali and include Chitra (Chitrangada, 1892), The King of the Dark Chamber (Raja, 1910), The Post Office (Dakghar, 1913), and Red Oleander (Raktakarabi, 1924).[53] Girish Karnad is a noted playwright, who has written a number of plays that use history and mythology, to critique and problematize ideas and ideals that are of contemporary relevance. Karnad's numerous plays such as Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Taledanda and Naga-Mandala are significant contributions to Indian drama. Vijay Tendulkar and Mahesh Dattani are amongst the major Indian playwrights of the 20th century. Mohan Rakesh in Hindi and Danish Iqbal in Urdu are considered architects of new age Drama. Mohan Rakesh's Aadhe Adhoore and Danish Iqbal's 'Dara Shikoh' are considered modern classics.

Modern Urdu drama of India and Pakistan

Urdu Drama evolved from the prevailing dramatic traditions of North India shaping Rahas or Raas as practiced by exponents like

Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh. His dramatic experiments led to the famous Inder Sabha of Amanat
and later this tradition took the shape of Parsi Theatre. Agha Hashr Kashmiri is the culmination of this tradition.

In some way or other, Urdu theatre tradition has greatly influenced modern

Hindi film industry
. All the early gems of Urdu Theatre (performed by Parsi Companies) were made into films. Urdu Dramatic tradition has been a spectator’s delight since 100 years and counting.

Drama as a theme is made up of several elements. It focuses on life and different aspects of it. The thing to be noticed here is that drama on stage imitates drama in life. It has been said that, there has always been a mutual relationship between theatre and real life. Great historical personalities like Shakespeare have influenced Modern Urdu tradition to a large extent when Indian, Iranian, Turkish stories and folk was adapted for stage with heavy doses of Urdu poetry. In modern times writers like Imtiaz Ali Taj, Rafi Peer, Krishan Chander, Manto, Upender Nath Ashk, Ghulam Rabbani, Prof. Mujeeb and many others shaped this tradition.

While Prof Hasan, Ghulam Jeelani, J.N,Kaushal, Shameem Hanfi, Jameel Shaidayi, etc. belong to the old generation, contemporary writers like Danish Iqbal, Sayeed Alam, Shahid Anwar, Iqbal Niyazi, and Anwar are a few

postmodern
playwrights actively contributing in the field of Urdu Drama.

Sayeed Alam is known for his wit and humour and more particularly for Plays like 'Ghalib in New Delhi', 'Big B' and many other gems which are regularly staged for massive turn out of theatre lovers. Maulana Azad is his magnum opus both for its content and style.

Danish Iqbal's play about '

Rawalpindi Conspiracy days. He has written 14 other plays including 'Dilli Jo Ek Shehr Thaa' and 'Main Gaya Waqt Nahin hoon'. Shahid's 'Three B' is also a significant play. He has been associated with many groups like 'Natwa' and others. Zaheer Anwar has kept the flag of Urdu theatre flying in Kolkata. Unlike the writers of previous generation Sayeed, Shahid, Danish Iqbal and Zaheer do not write bookish plays but their work is a product of vigorous performing tradition. Iqbal Niyazi of Mumbai
has written several plays in Urdu, his play "AUR KITNE JALYANWALA BAUGH?" won a National award other awards. Hence this is the only generation after Amanat and Agha Hashr who actually write for stage and not for libraries.

China

U.S.S.R. postage stamp commemorating Guan Hanqing, one of the great Chinese dramatists, who is renowned for his "zaju
" plays.

Chinese theatre has a long and complex history. Today it is often called

Beijing opera and Kunqu; there have been many other forms of theatre in China, such as zaju
.

Japan

Japanese Nō drama is a serious dramatic form that combines drama, music, and dance into a complete aesthetic performance experience. It developed in the 14th and 15th centuries and has its own musical instruments and performance techniques, which were often handed down from father to son. The performers were generally male (for both male and female roles), although female amateurs also perform Nō dramas. Nō drama was supported by the government, and particularly the military, with many military commanders having their own troupes and sometimes performing themselves. It is still performed in Japan today.[54]

Kyōgen is the comic counterpart to Nō drama. It concentrates more on dialogue and less on music, although Nō instrumentalists sometimes appear also in Kyōgen. Kabuki drama, developed from the 17th century, is another comic form, which includes dance.

Forms of drama

Opera

music dramas
".

Chinese opera has seen a more conservative development over a somewhat longer period of time.

Pantomime

These stories follow in the tradition of

moral dilemmas
, and good always triumphs over evil, this kind of play is also very entertaining making it a very effective way of reaching many people.

Mime

mummer plays and later dumbshows, evolved. In the early nineteenth century Paris, Jean-Gaspard Deburau solidified the many attributes that we have come to know in modern times, including the silent figure in whiteface.[56]

Jacques Copeau, strongly influenced by Commedia dell'arte and Japanese Noh theatre, used masks in the training of his actors. Étienne Decroux, a pupil of his, was highly influenced by this and started exploring and developing the possibilities of mime and refined corporeal mime into a highly sculptural form, taking it outside of the realms of naturalism. Jacques Lecoq contributed significantly to the development of mime and physical theatre with his training methods.[57]

Creative drama

Creative drama includes dramatic activities and games used primarily in educational settings with children. Its roots in the United States began in the early 1900s. Winifred Ward is considered to be the founder of creative drama in education, establishing the first academic use of drama in Evanston, Illinois.[58]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Elam (1980, 98).
  2. structure of incident and character. As Aristotle remarks, 'the poet, or "maker" should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imiates, and what he imitates are actions
    '" (1949, 8).
  3. ^ Wickham (1959, 32—41; 1969, 133; 1981, 68—69). The sense of the creator of plays as a "maker" rather than a "writer" is preserved in the word "playwright." The Theatre, one of the first purpose-built playhouses in London, was "a self-conscious latinism to describe one particular playhouse" rather than a term for the buildings in general (1967, 133). The word 'dramatist' "was at that time still unknown in the English language" (1981, 68).
  4. ^ Banham (1998, 894–900).
  5. ^ Pfister (1977, 11).
  6. ^ Fergusson (1949, 2–3).
  7. ^ Burt (2008).
  8. ^ See the entries for "opera", "musical theatre, American", "melodrama" and "Nō" in Banham (1998).
  9. Byron, for example, is a good example of a "dramatic poem
    ." See the entry on "Byron (George George)" in Banham (1998).
  10. ^ Some forms of improvisation, notably the Commedia dell'arte, improvise on the basis of 'lazzi' or rough outlines of scenic action (see Gordon (1983) and Duchartre (1929)). All forms of improvisation take their cue from their immediate response to one another, their characters' situations (which are sometimes established in advance), and, often, their interaction with the audience. The classic formulations of improvisation in the theatre originated with Joan Littlewood and Keith Johnstone in the UK and Viola Spolin in the USA; see Johnstone (1981) and Spolin (1963).
  11. ^ Brown (1998, 441), Cartledge (1997, 3–5), Goldhill (1997, 54), and Ley (2007, 206). Taxidou notes that "most scholars now call 'Greek' tragedy 'Athenian' tragedy, which is historically correct" (2004, 104). Brown writes that ancient Greek drama "was essentially the creation of classical Athens: all the dramatists who were later regarded as classics were active at Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE (the time of the Athenian democracy), and all the surviving plays date from this period" (1998, 441). "The dominant culture of Athens in the fifth century", Goldhill writes, "can be said to have invented theatre" (1997, 54).
  12. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 13–15) and Banham (1998, 441–447).
  13. ^ Banham (1998, 441–444). For more information on these ancient Greek dramatists, see the articles categorised under "Ancient Greek dramatists and playwrights" in Wikipedia.
  14. ^ The theory that Prometheus Bound was not written by Aeschylus would bring this number to six dramatists whose work survives.
  15. ^ Banham (1998, 8) and Brockett and Hildy (2003, 15–16).
  16. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 13, 15) and Banham (1998, 442).
  17. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 18) and Banham (1998, 444–445).
  18. ^ Banham (1998, 444–445).
  19. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 43).
  20. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 36, 47).
  21. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 43). For more information on the ancient Roman dramatists, see the articles categorised under "Ancient Roman dramatists and playwrights" in Wikipedia.
  22. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 46–47).
  23. ^ a b c Brockett and Hildy (2003, 47).
  24. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 47–48).
  25. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 48–49).
  26. ^ a b c Brockett and Hildy (2003, 49).
  27. ^ a b Brockett and Hildy (2003, 48).
  28. ^ a b Brockett and Hildy (2003, 50).
  29. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 49–50).
  30. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 76, 78). Many churches would have only performed one or two liturgical dramas per year and a larger number never performed any at all.
  31. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 76).
  32. ^ a b c Brockett and Hildy (2003, 77).
  33. ^ Wickham (1981, 191; 1987, 141).
  34. Gammer Gurton's Needle and Ralph Roister Doister is mistaken, ignoring as it does a rich tradition of medieval comic drama
    ; see Wickham (1981, 178).
  35. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 86)
  36. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 97).
  37. ^ Spivack (1958, 251-303), Bevington (1962, 58-61, 81-82, 87, 183), and Weimann (1978, 155).
  38. ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 101-103).
  39. ^ The Provoked Wife is something of a Restoration problem play in its attention to the subordinate legal position of married women and the complexities of "divorce" and separation, issues that had been highlighted in the mid-1690s by some notorious cases before the House of Lords.
  40. demographic change, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William's and Mary's dislike of the theatre, and the lawsuits brought against playwrights by the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded in 1692). When Jeremy Collier attacked Congreve and Vanbrugh in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage
    in 1698, he was confirming a shift in audience taste that had already taken place.
  41. ^ Williams (1993, 25–26) and Moi (2006, 17). Moi writes that "Ibsen is the most important playwright writing after Shakespeare. He is the founder of modern theater. His plays are world classics, staged on every continent, and studied in classrooms everywhere. In any given year, there are hundreds of Ibsen productions in the world." Ibsenites include George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Miller; Brechtians include Dario Fo, Joan Littlewood, W. H. Auden Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Peter Hacks, Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, John Arden, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, and David Hare.
  42. ^ Moi (2006, 1, 23–26). Taxidou writes: "It is probably historically more accurate, although methodologically less satisfactory, to read the Naturalist movement in the theatre in conjunction with the more anti-illusionist aesthetics of the theatres of the same period. These interlock and overlap in all sorts of complicated ways, even when they are vehemently denouncing each other (perhaps particularly when) in the favoured mode of the time, the manifesto" (2007, 58).
  43. ^ Williams (1966) and Wright (1989).
  44. ^ Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli (1993, 12).
  45. ^ Brandon (1997, 70) and Richmond (1998, 516).
  46. ^ Brandon (1997, 72) and Richmond (1998, 516).
  47. ^ Brandon (1997, 72), Richmond (1998, 516), and Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli (1993, 12).
  48. ^ Richmond (1998, 516) and Richmond, Swann, and Zarrilli (1993, 13).
  49. ^ Brandon (1981, xvii) and Richmond (1998, 516–517).
  50. ^ a b Richmond (1998, 516).
  51. ^ a b c Richmond (1998, 517).
  52. ^ a b Brandon (1981, xvii).
  53. ^ a b Banham (1998, 1051).
  54. ^ "Background to Noh-Kyogen". Archived from the original on 15 July 2005. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  55. ^ Gutzwiller (2007).
  56. ^ Rémy (1954).
  57. ^ Callery (2001).
  58. ^ Ehrlich (1974, 75–80).

Sources

External links