Drama in Western cultures
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the
popular Kabuki of Japan and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese
puppet play and a modern social drama by the American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of
dramatic literature have some points in common. Differences between plays arise from
differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions, in the purpose of theatre within
the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the most important,
if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Asian drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in
Peninsular Malaysia and of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at
its peak during the period known in the West as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable
and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Asian culture showed little of the
interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little emphasis on authors
and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of Asian drama are lost in time, although its
themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The civilizations of the East have only relatively recently been affected by Western theatre, just
as the West has only relatively recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and
what it could do to fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of
William Butler Yeats and Thornton Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in
French, and of Brecht in German).
In their representations of life, classical Japanese and Chinese drama are the most
conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre. Performed over the centuries by actors devoted
selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of performance became highly
stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to a point of
exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In these and other types of Asian drama, all the
elements of the performing arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime,
speech and song, narrative and poetry. The display and studied gestures of the actors, their
refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental accompaniment to the voices of the
players and the action of the play suggest to Western eyes an exquisite combination of ballet
with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place could be
shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists,
the action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the flashback of the modern cinema,
and events could be telescoped with the abandon of Expressionism. This extreme theatricality
lent to artists and audiences an imaginative freedom upon which great theatre could thrive.
Significantly, most Asian cultures also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of
character, action, and staging were particularly suitable to marionettes. In Bunraku, the classical
puppet theatre of Japan, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration and the manipulative skill
with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-century
master Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather
than for the actors of Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has
offered increasing realism, not only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character
and situation.
It is generally thought that Asian drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in
religious festivals. Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular
legendary stories to imbue their plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This
was never the sensationalism of novelty that Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern
invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that the slightest changes of
emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that found in
the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Asian drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious
questioning, spiritual disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with
commercial pressures to produce comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of
Greek tragedy, the character psychology of Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual
criticism of Ibsen and August Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama of shock and argument, is
imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century bce in Athens. Its form and style—
influenced by religious ritual, traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of
Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great dramatic competitions of the spring
and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience largely knows
what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in
festival after festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the
meaning of the legend along with a corporate religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek
tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist’s intention. The chorus not only
provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and
emotion of the audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 bce) and Sophocles (c.
496–406 bce) it might be said that the chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406
bce) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of performance also controlled the dramatist
in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of the Greek arena
demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never
approach modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays,
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for
they display little “characterization” in the modern sense and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless,
these great operatic tableaux—built, as one critic has said, for weight and not speed—were
evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of
those audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr plays and
comedies, bawdy and irreverent comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the
wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 bce).
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both
play and performance. This ritual aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy
and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184 bce) and Terence (c. 186/185–159
bce) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of Seneca (c. 4
bce–65 ce) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and
content of plays of later times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the
old miser, the rascally parasite), with the intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational
content and stoical attitudes of Seneca’s drama reappeared centuries later when classical
literature was rediscovered.
Biblical plays
Western drama had a new beginning in the medieval church, and, again, the texts reflect
the ritual function of the theatre in society. The Easter liturgy, the climax of the Christian
calendar, explains much of the form of medieval drama as it developed into the giant mystery
cycles. From at least the 10th century the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church enacted the
simple Latin liturgy of the Quem quaeritis? (literally “Whom do you seek?”), the account of the
visit to Jesus Christ’s tomb by the three Marys, who are asked this question by an angel. The
liturgical form of Lent and the Passion, indeed, embodies the drama of the Resurrection to be
shared mutually by actor-priest and audience-congregation. When the Feast of Corpus Christi
was instituted in 1246, the great lay cycles of biblical plays (the mystery plays and miracle
cycles) developed rapidly, eventually treating the whole story of humankind from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, with the Crucifixion still the climax of the experience. The other influence
controlling their form and style was their manner of performance. The vast quantity of material
that made up the story was broken into many short plays, and each was played on its own stage
in the vernacular by members of the craft guilds. Thus, the authors of these dramas gave their
audience not a mass communal experience, as the Greek dramatists had done, but rather many
small and intimate dramatizations of the Bible story. In stylized and alliterative poetry, they
mixed awesome events with moments of extraordinary simplicity, embodying local details,
familiar touches of behaviour, and the comedy and the cruelty of medieval life. Their drama
consists of strong and broad contrasts, huge in perspective but meaningful in human terms,
religious and appropriately didactic in content and yet popular in its manner of reaching its
simple audiences.
