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Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.[1] Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BC)—the earliest work of dramatic theory.[2]
The term "drama" comes from a Greek word meaning "deed" or "act" (Classical Greek: δρᾶμα, drâma), which is derived from "I do" (Classical Greek: δράω, dráō). The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy.
In English (as was the analogous case in many other European languages), the word play or game (translating the Anglo-Saxon pleġan or Latin ludus) was the standard term for dramas until William Shakespeare's time—just as its creator was a play-maker rather than a dramatist and the building was a play-house rather than a theatre.[3]
The use of "drama" in a more narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the modern era. "Drama" in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1873) or Chekhov's Ivanov (1887). It is this narrower sense that the film and television industries, along with film studies, adopted to describe "drama" as a genre within their respective media. The term "radio drama" has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a live performance. It may also be used to refer to the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio.[4]
The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception.[5]
Mime is a form of drama where the action of a story is told only through the movement of the body. Drama can be combined with music: the dramatic text in opera is generally sung throughout; as for in some ballets dance "expresses or imitates emotion, character, and narrative action."[6] Musicals include both spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have incidental music or musical accompaniment underscoring the dialogue (melodrama and Japanese Nō, for example).[7] Closet drama is a form that is intended to be read, rather than performed.[8] In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance; performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.[9]
- ^ Elam (1980, 98).
- ^ Francis Fergusson writes that "a drama, as distinguished from a lyric, is not primarily a composition in the verbal medium; the words result, as one might put it, from the underlying structure of incident and character. As Aristotle remarks, 'the poet, or "maker" should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions'" (1949, 8).
- ^ Wickham (1959, 32–41; 1969, 133; 1981, 68–69). The sense of the creator of plays as a "maker" rather than a "writer" is preserved in the word playwright. The Theatre, one of the first purpose-built playhouses in London, was an intentional reference to the Latin term for that particular playhouse, rather than a term for the buildings in general (1967, 133). The word 'dramatist' "was at that time still unknown in the English language" (1981, 68).
- ^ Banham (1998, 894–900).
- ^ Pfister (1977, 11).
- ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- ^ See the entries for "opera", "musical theatre, American", "melodrama" and "Nō" in Banham (1998).
- ^ Manfred by Byron, for example, is a good example of a "dramatic poem." See the entry on "Byron (George George)" in Banham (1998).
- ^ Some forms of improvisation, notably the commedia dell'arte, improvise on the basis of 'lazzi' or rough outlines of scenic action (see Gordon (1983) and Duchartre (1929)). All forms of improvisation take their cue from their immediate response to one another, their characters' situations (which are sometimes established in advance), and, often, their interaction with the audience. The classic formulations of improvisation in the theatre originated with Joan Littlewood and Keith Johnstone in the UK and Viola Spolin in the US; see Johnstone (1981) and Spolin (1963).