Dramatic expression
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely
theatrical and ritualistic manner and, on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the
kind commonly associated with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of
ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered
this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech and song. Both the popular and the coterie
drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially operatic, with a lyrical dialogue
accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such rhythmical delivery of the
words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship. Verse is
employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle
Ages, the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century
France by Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed,
plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively rare, and then associated
essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic realism
became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics
maintain that a playwright can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of the
actors and over the responses of the audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of
good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary conversation, it has been argued, give
both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response. Certainly, the aural,
kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of a
master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more
certain, the “aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required
to release the imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, such as
rhythm and rhyme, not usually found in ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide
variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek tragic choric speech provided a
philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the audience lyrically
into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors’ highly
stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole.
The tragic soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with the audience, to
review his thoughts aloud in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a
stopping place in the action but rather an engrossing moment of drama when the spectator’s
mind could leap forward.
Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but,
rather, are made to work together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total
impact of the experience. A playwright will determine the shape of a play in part according to the
conditions in which it will be performed: how long should it take to engage an audience’s
interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats? Is the audience sitting in
one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to the next, as
in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious
cycle, which may portray the whole history of humankind from the Creation to the Last
Judgment. A realistic drama may require a good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and
memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the playwright may tell the whole story
episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as Aristotle originally
suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and
imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time.
In a play in which the stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be
precisely identified, and the scenic representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a
play, stage time will follow chronological time almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into
three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of scene to adjust the clock or the
calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows an extraordinary
freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Samuel Johnson observed in
his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog
and filthy air” for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady
Macbeth later is seen alone reading a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in
surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist
the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the centre of the Greek orchēstra, a
strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a chair on which the
Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no wonder
that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world
to the next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what
happens on the stage or what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do
with merely physical activity by the players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience’s
image of the play and encourages the growth of its imagination is a valid part of the play’s
action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus to have only two
speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression. In
the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell’arte, the standard characters Pantalone and
Arlecchino, each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were
immediately recognized, so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old
merchant and his rascally servant. On a less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to
contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in performance a striking stimulus to the
audience’s sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the Greek chorus and the
Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches of
evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the
main stage and lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving
constantly in time, and any convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious
time is of immeasurable value.
