(UECE -2009)TEXT European drama has a less continu

(UECE - 2009)

TEXT

            European drama has a less continuous history than epic and poetry; it has sometimes flourished and sometimes declined. The first surviving drama was in Greek, performed in Athens in the 5c BC: the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (tragedy) and of Aristophanes (comedy). The main Latin contribution was the comedy of Terence and Plautus in the 2c BC. The later Roman Republic and the Empire produced no significant drama; Seneca (c.4 BC-AD 65) wrote tragedies based on the Greek model which were intended for reading to a select audience and not for the public stage. The later Roman theatre became increasingly devoted to elaborate and often decadent spectacle. The Christians opposed it and in the 6c the barbarian invasions brought it to an end. The revival of the theatre began in the 11c with the introduction of brief dramatized episodes into the Mass on the occasion of major festivals. These gradually developed into complete plays, performed in public places by the trade guilds and known as mystery plays or mysteries. These were succeeded in the 15c by morality plays, allegorical presentations of human virtues and vices in conflict.

            The high point of drama in English came in the late 16c and early 17c, with such writers as Shakespeare (especially with his tragedies), Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster. In the later 17c, the Restoration theatre was mainly devoted to the witty and often scurrilous comedy of manners and intrigue. The French classical theatre had its great period at the same time, with the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the comedies of Moliere. A long decline in Britain, briefly broken by the 18c comedies of the Anglo- Irish playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan, ended in a revival at the end of the 19c by the Irish dramatists Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Prominent playwrights of the 20c include such experimenters in the theatre of the absurd as Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. The latter belongs as much to the French theatre, which has produced plays of challenge and ¹QUESTIONING by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Giraudoux, and Eugene Ionesco. Dramatists in the 20c US have looked at the predicament of modern humanity in a complex, pluralistic society, notably Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. Some of the foremost modern plays are those of Henrik Ibsen in Norway, August Strindberg in Sweden, and Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chechov in Russia.

            Dramatists are affected, like all writers, by the presuppositions and fashions of their time and place. Medieval drama derives from the ²PREVAILING popular Catholic Christianity, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama reflects contemporary views of status, honour, and revenge, Victorian drama displays the manners and attitudes of the new middle class. Conventions also affect the structure of plays. In the 16c and 17c, European drama was often obedient to the demand for the three unities, adding the unity of place to the unities of time and action attributed to Aristotle. Dramatists in English usually disregarded these restraints, supported the main plot with a subplot, and ranged widely through time and space. The practice of reading a play instead of seeing it produced is comparatively late; the majority of early plays were not printed, and the texts which appeared were often careless and poorly produced. When Jonson had his collected plays carefully printed as his Works (1616), he aroused some ridicule but helped establish the play as a literary text, probably ³INFLUENCING the publication of Shakespeare's plays in the First Folio (1623). The printed play became in its own right a branch of literature, with the result that theatrical and textual scholarship has been applied to the work of early dramatists. As time passed, playwrights gave more consideration to the reader. Stage directions evolved from laconic indications of entrances and exits to detailed descriptions of scenes and actions, including sketches of the appearance and nature of the characters. The effect is sometimes of an excerpt from a novel in the present tense. Dramatists in general have become more self-explanatory and less inclined to entrust their work solely to the reactions of a live audience.

            Although great variety in dramatic structure is possible, most plays have a connected plot that develops through conflict to a climax followed by resolution. Even when the story is known to the audience, the dramatist creates a mood of tension and suspense by the responses of characters to the changing situation. The factors apply to both tragedy and comedy. The suspense can be terrifying or mirthful and the resolution one of sadness or relief. Because the play is witnessed in short and continuous time, the dramatist needs to be economical, ⁴TELESCOPING events that in reality would develop over a longer period and ⁵INTRODUCING meetings and juxtapositions that might seem remarkable outside the theatre. Divisions into acts and scenes may mark the passage of time and emphasize major developments. A play requires continuous action, not necessarily vigorous, but moving into new situations and relationships. Long set speeches and philosophical discourses are seldom effective.

            In spite of the fact that some types of drama, such as ritual performances and representations of myth, deliberately avoid a human focus, characterization is the device in most dramas. Characters may be depicted as great people, leaders of the community and powerful in its destiny, or, as is often the case in modern drama, as ordinary persons. They must be quickly presented to the audience and become familiar in a short time. They are created through the words they speak, their actions in the play, and what other characters report of them. Leading characters are supported by minor roles, and the quality of a dramatist is shown partly by skill in making such roles credible and individual.

            Early drama was written in verse, ranging from the poetry of ancient Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to the colloquial rhythms of the medieval mysteries. The type of verse changes from one period to another. Blank verse was dominant in 16c and early 17c English drama, the heroic couplet in Restoration tragedy, and the alexandrine in French classical drama. Prose dialogue was also used by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and by the end of the 17c was the normal medium for English drama. In the 20c, there was a revival of verse drama. It was short-lived, however, partly through the decline of popular interest in poetry and partly through the failure of the dramatists to develop an idiom that could be sustained without ⁶BECOMING artificial and forced. Modern prose dialogue has tended to become more colloquial and naturalistic, in contrast to the stylized diction of early 19c prose drama. In the 20c, some writers have given close attention to specific dialects and registers: Synge listened to Irish peasant speech and Clifford Odets to conversation in New York bars. However, dramatic dialogue can never simply reproduce normal speech. The repetitions, hesitations, and redundancies of normal conversation would be intolerable on the stage.

From: McArthur, Tom (ed.). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: OUP, 1998.

 

The verbs in: "Dramatists in English usually DISREGARDED these restraints, SUPPORTED the main plot with a subplot, and RANGED widely through time and space...", in the simple present tense would be: