William Caxton English printer, translator, and publisher
William Caxton (born c. 1422, Kent, England—died 1491, London) was the first English
printer, who, as a translator and publisher, exerted an important influence on English literature.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
In 1438 he was apprenticed to Robert Large, a rich mercer, who in the following year
became lord mayor of London. Large died in 1441, and Caxton moved to Brugge, the centre of
the European wool trade; during the next 30 years he became an increasingly prosperous and
influential member of the English trading community in Flanders and Holland. In 1463 he took
up duties as “Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventurers” in the Low Countries—
a post of real authority over his fellow merchants. Sometime in 1470 he ceased to be governor
and entered the service of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, possibly as her financial adviser.
In that period Caxton’s interests were turning to literature. In March 1469 he had begun to
translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye, which he laid aside and did not finish
until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned
printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with
copying the book; so he “practised and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a
press in Brugge about 1474, and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published
there in 1475. Caxton’s translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in
which chess is treated as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three
other works in Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and
established his press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing.
The first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.
Although a pioneer of printing in England, Caxton showed no great typographical
originality and produced no books of remarkable beauty. Kings, nobles, and rich merchants were
Caxton’s patrons and sometimes commissioned special books. His varied output—including
books of chivalric romance, conduct, morality, history, and philosophy and an encyclopaedia,
The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481), the first illustrated English book—shows that he catered also
to a general public. The large number of service books and devotional works published by
Caxton were the staple reading of most literate persons. He also printed nearly all the English
literature available to him in his time: The Canterbury Tales (1478? and 1484?) and other poems
by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower’s Confessio amantis (1483), Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
Darthur (1485), and much of John Lydgate. Caxton translated 24 books, some of them
immensely long. By the time of his death, he had published about 100 items of various kinds.
Dramatic literature
dramatic literature, the texts of plays that can be read, as distinct from being seen and
heard in performance.
The term dramatic literature implies a contradiction in that literature originally meant
something written and drama meant something performed. Most of the problems, and much of
the interest, in the study of dramatic literature stem from this contradiction. Even though a play
may be appreciated solely for its qualities as writing, greater rewards probably accrue to those
who remain alert to the volatility of the play as a whole.
In order to appreciate this complexity in drama, however, each of its elements—acting,
directing, staging, etc.—should be studied, so that its relationship to all the others can be fully
understood. It is the purpose of this article to study drama with particular attention to what the
playwright sets down. The history of dramatic literature in Western culture is discussed in the
article Western theatre, with some discussion of dramatic literature also included in articles on
the literatures of various languages, nations, or regions—for example, English literature, French
literature, German literature, and so on. For a discussion of the dramatic literatures of other
cultures, see African literature, African theatre, East Asian arts, Islamic arts, South Asian arts,
and Southeast Asian arts.
General characteristics
From the inception of a play in the mind of its author to the image of it that an audience
takes away from the theatre, many hands and many physical elements help to bring it to life.
Questions therefore arise as to what is and what is not essential to it. Is a play what its author
thought he was writing, or the words he wrote? Is a play the way in which those words are
intended to be embodied, or their actual interpretation by a director and the actors on a particular
stage? Is a play in part the expectation an audience brings to the theatre, or is it the real response
to what is seen and heard? Since drama is such a complex process of communication, its study
and evaluation is as uncertain as it is mercurial.
All plays depend upon a general agreement by all participants—author, actors, and
audience—to accept the operation of theatre and the conventions associated with it, just as
players and spectators accept the rules of a game. Drama is a decidedly unreal activity, which
can be indulged only if everyone involved admits it. Here lies some of the fascination of its
study. For one test of great drama is how far it can take the spectator beyond his own immediate
reality and to what use this imaginative release can be put. But the student of drama must know
the rules with which the players began the game before he can make this kind of judgment.
These rules may be conventions of writing, acting, or audience expectation. Only when all
conventions are working together smoothly in synthesis, and the make-believe of the experience
is enjoyed passionately with mind and emotion, can great drama be seen for what it is: the
combined work of a good playwright, good players, and a good audience who have come
together in the best possible physical circumstances.
Drama in some form is found in almost every society, primitive and civilized, and has
served a wide variety of functions in the community. There are, for example, records of a sacred
drama in Egypt 2,000 years before the Common Era, and Thespis in the 6th century bce in
ancient Greece is accorded the distinction of being the first known playwright. Elements of
drama such as mime and dance, costume and decor long preceded the introduction of words and
the literary sophistication now associated with a play. Moreover, such basic elements were not
superseded by words, merely enhanced by them. Nevertheless, it is only when a play’s script
assumes a disciplinary control over the dramatic experience that the student of drama gains
measurable evidence of what was intended to constitute the play. Only then can dramatic
literature be discussed as such.
The texts of plays indicate the different functions they served at different times. Some plays
embraced nearly the whole community in a specifically religious celebration, as when all the
male citizens of a Greek city-state came together to honour their gods or when the annual Feast
of Corpus Christi was celebrated with the great medieval Christian mystery cycles. On the other
hand, the ceremonious temple ritual of the early Noh drama of Japan was performed at religious
festivals only for the feudal aristocracy. But the drama may also serve a more directly didactic
purpose, as did the morality plays of the later Middle Ages, some 19th-century melodramas, and
the 20th-century discussion plays of George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht. Plays can satirize
society, or they can gently illuminate human weakness; they can divine the greatness and the
limitations of humans in tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe the human mind.
Drama is the most wide-ranging of all the arts: it not only represents life but also is a way of
seeing it. And it repeatedly proves Samuel Johnson’s contention that there can be no certain limit
to the modes of composition open to the dramatist.
Common elements of drama
Despite the immense diversity of drama as a cultural activity, all plays have certain
elements in common. For one thing, drama can never become a “private” statement—in the way
a novel or a poem may be—without ceasing to be meaningful theatre. The characters may be
superhuman and godlike in appearance, speech, and deed or grotesque and ridiculous, perhaps
even puppets, but as long as they behave in even vaguely recognizable human ways the spectator
can understand them. Only if they are too abstract do they cease to communicate as theatre.
Thus, the figure of Death in medieval drama reasons like a human being, and a god in Greek
tragedy or in Shakespeare talks like any mortal. A play, therefore, tells its tale by the imitation of
human behaviour. The remoteness or nearness of that behaviour to the real life of the audience
can importantly affect the response of that audience: it may be in awe of what it sees, or it may
laugh with detached superiority at clownish antics, or it may feel sympathy. These differences of
alienation or empathy are important, because it is by opening or closing this aesthetic gap
between the stage and the audience that a dramatist is able to control the spectator’s experience
of the play and give it purpose.
The second essential is implicit in the first. Although static figures may be as meaningfully
symbolic on a stage as in a painting, the deeper revelation of character, as well as the all-
important control of the audience’s responses, depends upon a dynamic presentation of the
figures in action. A situation must be represented on the stage, one recognizable and believable
to a degree, which will animate the figures as it would in life. Some argue that action is the
primary factor in drama, and that character cannot emerge without it. Since no play exists
without a situation, it appears impossible to detach the idea of a character from the situation in
which he is placed, though it may seem possible after the experience of the whole play. Whether
the playwright conceives character before situation, or vice versa, is arbitrary. More relevant are
the scope and scale of the character-in-situation—whether, for example, it is man confronting
God or a man confronting his wife—for that comes closer to the kind of experience the play is
offering its audience. Even here one must beware of passing hasty judgment, for it may be that
the grandest design for heroic tragedy may be less affecting than the teasing vision of human
madness portrayed in a good farce.
A third factor is style. Every play prescribes its own style, though it will be influenced by
the traditions of its theatre and the physical conditions of performance. Style is not something
imposed by actors upon the text after it is written, nor is it superficial to the business of the play.
Rather, it is self-evident that a play will not communicate without it. Indeed, many a successful
play has style and little else. By style, therefore, is implied the whole mood and spirit of the play,
its degree of fantasy or realism, its quality of ritualism or illusion, and the way in which these
qualities are signaled by the directions, explicit or implicit, in the text of the play. In its finer
detail, a play’s style controls the kind of gesture and movement of the actor, as well as his tone
of speech, its pace and inflection. In this way the attitude of the audience is prepared also:
nothing is more disconcerting than to be misled into expecting either a comedy or a tragedy and
to find the opposite, although some great plays deliberately introduce elements of both. By
means of signals of style, the audience may be led to expect that the play will follow known
paths, and the pattern of the play will regularly echo the rhythm of response in the auditorium.
Drama is a conventional game, and spectators cannot participate if the rules are constantly
broken.
By presenting animate characters in a situation with a certain style and according to a given
pattern, a playwright will endeavour to communicate thoughts and feelings and to have the
audience consider those ideas or reproduce the emotion that inspired the writing of the play. In
theatrical communication, however, audiences remain living and independent participants. In the
process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting the author for the people watching
the play and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon with this
circumstance. Ideas may not be accepted if they are offered forthrightly; and great dramatists
who are intent on furthering social or political ideas, such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard
Shaw, and Bertolt Brecht, quickly learned methods of having the spectators themselves reason
the ideas as part of their response to the play. Nor will passions necessarily be aroused if
overstatement of feeling (“sentimentality”) is used without a due balance of thinking and even
the detachment of laughter: Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov are two outstanding examples in
Western drama of writers who achieved an exquisite balance of pathos with comedy in order to
ensure the affective function of their plays.
