Drama in Eastern cultures
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
Because of its inborn conservatism, the dramatic literature of the East does not show such
diversity, despite its variety of cultures and subcultures. The major features of Asian drama may
be seen in the three great classical sources of India, China, and Japan. The simplicity of the
Indian stage, a platform erected for the occasion in a palace or a courtyard, like the simplicity of
the Elizabethan stage, lent great freedom to the imagination of the playwright. In the plays of
India’s greatest playwright, Kalidasa (fl. 5th century ce), there is an exquisite refinement of
detail in presentation. His delicate romantic tales leap time and place by simple suggestion and
mingle courtly humour and lighthearted wit with charming sentiment and religious piety. Quite
untrammeled by realism, lyrical in tone and refined in feeling, his fanciful love and adventure
stories completely justify their function as pure entertainment. His plots are without the pain of
reality, and his characters never descend from the ideal: such poetic drama is entirely appropriate
to the Hindu aesthetic of blissful idealism in art.
Some contrast may be felt between the idealistic style of the Sanskrit drama and the
broader, less courtly manner of the Chinese and its derivatives in Southeast Asia. These plays
cover a large variety of subjects and styles, but all combine music, speech, song, and dance, as
does all Asian drama. Heroic legends, pathetic moral stories, and brilliant farces all blended
spectacle and lyricism and were as acceptable to a sophisticated court audience as to a popular
street audience. The most important Chinese plays stem from the Yuan dynasty (1206–1368), in
which an episodic narrative is carefully structured and unified. Each scene introduces a song
whose lines have a single rhyme, usually performed by one singer, with a code of symbolic
gestures and intonations that has been refined to an extreme. The plays have strongly typed
heroes and villains, simple plots, scenes of bold emotion, and moments of pure mime.
The drama of Japan, with its exquisite artistry of gesture and mime and its symbolism of
setting and costume, took two major directions. Noh drama, emerging from religious ritual,
maintained a special refinement appropriate to its origins and its aristocratic audiences. Kabuki
(its name suggesting its composition: ka, “singing”; bu, “dancing”; ki, “acting”) in the 17th
century became Japan’s popular drama. Noh theatre is reminiscent of the religious tragedy of the
Greeks in the remoteness of its legendary content, in its masked heroic characters, in its limit of
two actors and a chorus, and in the static, oratorical majesty of its style. Kabuki, on the other
hand, finds its material in domestic stories and in popular history, and the actors, without masks,
move and speak more freely, without seeming to be realistic. Kabuki plays are less rarefied and
are often fiercely energetic and wildly emotional, as befitting their presentation before a broader
audience. The written text of the Noh play is highly poetic and pious in tone, compressed in its
imaginative ideas, fastidious and restrained in verbal expression, and formal in its sparse
plotting, whereas the text of a Kabuki play lends plentiful opportunities for spectacle, sensation,
and melodrama. In Kabuki there can be moments of realism but also whole episodes of mime
and acrobatics; there can be moments of slapstick but also moments of violent passion. In all, the
words are subordinate to performance in Kabuki.
Drama and communal belief
The drama that is most meaningful and pertinent to its society is that which arises from it.
The religious drama of ancient Greece, the temple drama of early India and Japan, the mystery
cycles of medieval Europe, all have in common more than their religious content: when the
theatre is a place of worship, its drama goes to the roots of belief in a particular community. The
dramatic experience becomes a natural extension of human life—both of the individual and of
the social being. The content of the mystery cycles speaks formally for the orthodox dogma of
the church, thus seeming to place the plays at the centre of medieval life, like the church itself.
Within such a comprehensive scheme, particular needs could be satisfied by comic or pathetic
demonstration. For example, such a crucial belief as that of the Virgin Birth of Jesus was
presented in the York (England) cycle of mystery plays, of the 14th–16th centuries, with a nicely
balanced didacticism when Joseph wonders how a man of his age could have got Mary with
child and an angel explains what has happened; the humour reflects the simplicity of the
audience and at the same time indicates the perfect faith that permitted the near-blasphemy of the
joke. In the tragedies Shakespeare wrote for the Elizabethan theatre, he had the same gift of
satisfying deep communal needs while meeting a whole range of individual interests present in
his audience.
When the whole community shares a common heritage, patriotic drama and drama
commemorating national heroes, as are seen almost universally in Asian theatre, is of this kind.
Modern Western attempts at a religious didactic drama, or indeed at any drama of “ideas,” have
had to reckon with the disparate nature of the audience. Thus the impact of Ibsen’s social drama
both encouraged and divided the development of the theatre in the last years of the 19th century.
Plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (published 1881), which challenged the sanctity
of marriage and questioned the loyalty a wife owed to her husband, took their audiences by
storm: some violently rejected the criticism of their cherished social beliefs, and thus such plays
may be said to have failed to persuade general audiences to examine their moral position; on the
other hand, there were sufficient numbers of enthusiasts (so-called Ibsenites) to stimulate a new
drama of ideas. Problem plays appeared all over Europe and undoubtedly rejuvenated the theatre
for the 20th century. Shaw’s early Ibsenite plays in London, which presented drawing-room
comedy with such sober themes as slum landlordism (Widowers’ Houses, 1892) and prostitution
(Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 1902), resulted only in failure, but Shaw quickly found a comic style
that was more disarming. In his attack on false patriotism (Arms and the Man, 1894) and the
motives for middle-class marriage (Candida, 1897), he does not affront his audiences. He leads
them by gentle laughter and surprise to review their own positions.
