Introduction

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 theatre, Western, 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; theatre, African; arts, East Asian; arts, Islamic; arts, South Asian; and arts,
Southeast Asian.

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 his
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
Christ, and Thespis in the 6th century BC 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 playscript 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 nō 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 man in
tragedy, or, in modern naturalistic playwriting, probe his 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 Dr. 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 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 signalled 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 inflexion. 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 his thoughts and feelings and have his audience consider his ideas
or reproduce the emotion that drove him to write as he did. In theatrical communication, however, audiences
remain living and independent participants. In the process of performance, an actor has the duty of interpreting
his author for the people watching him, and will expect to receive “feedback” in turn. The author must reckon
with this in his writing. Ideas will not be accepted, perhaps, 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 spectator reason the ideas for himself as part of his 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 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.

Dramatic expression
The language of drama can range between great extremes: on the one hand, an intensely theatrical and
ritualistic manner; and on the other, an almost exact reproduction of real life of the kind commonly associated
with motion picture and television drama. In the ritualistic drama of ancient Greece, the playwrights wrote in
verse, and it may be assumed that their actors rendered this in an incantatory speech halfway between speech
and song. Both the popular and the coterie drama of the Chinese and Japanese theatre were also essentially
operatic, with a lyrical dialogue accompanied by music and chanted rhythmically. The effect of such
rhythmical delivery of the words was to lift the mood of the whole theatre onto the level of religious worship.
Verse is employed in other drama that is conventionally elevated, like the Christian drama of the Middle Ages,
the tragedy of the English Renaissance, the heroic Neoclassical tragedies of 17th-century France by Pierre
Corneille and Jean Racine, the Romantic lyricism of Goethe and Schiller, and modern attempts at a revival of a
religious theatre like those of T.S. Eliot. Indeed, plays written in prose dialogue were at one time comparatively
rare, and then associated essentially with the comic stage. Only at the end of the 19th century, when naturalistic
realism became the mode, were characters in dramas expected to speak as well as behave as in real life.
Elevation is not the whole rationale behind the use of verse in drama. Some critics maintain that a playwright
can exercise better control both over the speech and movement of his actors and over the responses of his
audience by using the more subtle tones and rhythms of good poetry. The loose, idiomatic rhythms of ordinary
conversation, it is argued, give both actor and spectator too much freedom of interpretation and response.
Certainly, the aural, kinetic, and emotive directives in verse are more direct than prose, though, in the hands of
a master of prose dialogue like Shaw or Chekhov, prose can also share these qualities. Even more certain, the
“aesthetic distance” of the stage, or the degree of unreality and make-believe required to release the
imagination, is considerably assisted if the play uses elements of verse, like rhythm and rhyme, not found in
ordinary speech. Thus, verse drama may embrace a wide variety of nonrealistic aural and visual devices: Greek
tragic choric speech provided a philosophical commentary upon the action, which at the same time drew the
audience lyrically into the mood of the play. In the drama of India, a verse accompaniment made the actors'
highly stylized system of symbolic gestures of head and eyes, arms and fingers a harmonious whole. The tragic
soliloquy in Shakespeare permitted the hero, alone on the stage with his audience, to review his thoughts aloud
in the persuasive terms of poetry; thus, the soliloquy was not a stopping place in the action but rather an
engrossing moment of drama when the spectator's mind could leap forward.

Dramatic structure
The elements of a play do not combine naturally to create a dramatic experience but, rather, are made to work
together through the structure of a play, a major factor in the total impact of the experience. A playwright will
determine the shape of a play in part according to the conditions in which it will be performed: how long
should it take to engage an audience's interest and sustain it? How long can an audience remain in their seats?
Is the audience sitting in one place for the duration of performance, or is it moving from one pageant stage to
the next, as in some medieval festivals? Structure is also dictated by the particular demands of the material to
be dramatized: a revue sketch that turns on a single joke will differ in shape from a religious cycle, which may
portray the whole history of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgment. A realistic drama may require a
good deal of exposition of the backgrounds and memories of the characters, while in a chronicle play the
playwright may tell the whole story episodically from its beginning to the end. There is one general rule, as
Aristotle originally suggested in his Poetics: a play must be long enough to supply the information an audience
needs to be interested and to generate the experience of tragedy, or comedy, on the senses and imagination.
In the majority of plays it is necessary to establish a conventional code of place and time. In a play in which the
stage must closely approximate reality, the location of the action will be precisely identified, and the scenic
representation on stage must confirm the illusion. In such a play, stage time will follow chronological time
almost exactly; and if the drama is broken into three, four, or five acts, the spectator will expect each change of
scene to adjust the clock or the calendar. But the theatre has rarely expected realism, and by its nature it allows
an extraordinary freedom to the playwright in symbolizing location and duration: as Dr. Samuel Johnson
observed in his discussion of this freedom in Shakespeare, the spectators always allow the play to manipulate
the imagination. It is sufficient for the witches in Macbeth to remark their “heath” with its “fog and filthy air”
for their location to be accepted on a stage without scenery; and when Lady Macbeth later is seen alone reading
a letter, she is without hesitation understood to be in surroundings appropriate to the wife of a Scottish
nobleman. Simple stage symbolism may assist the imagination, whether the altar of the gods situated in the
centre of the Greek orchēstra, a strip of red cloth to represent the Red Sea in a medieval miracle play, or a
chair on which the Tibetan performer stands to represent a mountain. With this degree of fantasy, it is no
wonder that the theatre can manipulate time as freely, passing from the past to the future, from this world to the
next, and from reality to dream.
It is questionable, therefore, whether the notion of “action” in a play describes what happens on the stage or
what is recreated in the mind of the audience. Certainly it has little to do with merely physical activity by the
players. Rather, anything that urges forward the audience's image of the play and encourages the growth of its
imagination is a valid part of the play's action. Thus, it was sufficient for the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus
to have only two speaking male actors who wore various masks, typed for sex, age, class, and facial expression.
In the Italian 16th- and 17th-century commedia dell'arte, the standard characters Pantalone and Arlecchino,
each wearing his traditional costume and mask, appeared in play after play and were immediately recognized,
so that an audience could anticipate the behaviour of the grasping old merchant and his rascally servant. On a
less obvious level, a speech that in reading seems to contribute nothing to the action of the play can provide in
performance a striking stimulus to the audience's sense of the action, its direction and meaning. Thus, both the
Greek chorus and the Elizabethan actor in soliloquy might be seen to “do” nothing, but their intimate speeches
of evaluation and reassessment teach the spectator how to think and feel about the action of the main stage and
lend great weight to the events of the play. For drama is a reactive art, moving constantly in time, and any
convention that promotes a deep response while conserving precious time is of immeasurable value.
Drama as an expression of a culture
In spite of the wide divergencies in purpose and convention of plays as diverse as the popular Kabuki of Japan
and the coterie comedies of the Restoration in England, a Javanese puppet play and a modern social drama by
the contemporary American dramatist Arthur Miller, all forms of dramatic literature have some points in
common. Differences between plays arise from differences in conditions of performance, in local conventions,
in the purpose of theatre within the community, and in cultural history. Of these, the cultural background is the
most important, if the most elusive. It is cultural difference that makes the drama of the East immediately
distinguishable from that of the West.
East-West differences
Oriental drama consists chiefly of the classical theatre of Hindu India and its derivatives in Malaya and of
Burma, Thailand, China, Japan, Java, and Bali. It was at its peak during the period known in the West as the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Stable and conservative, perpetuating its customs with reverence, Oriental
culture showed little of the interest in chronology and advancement shown by the West and placed little
emphasis on authors and their individual achievements. Thus the origins of the drama of the Orient are lost in
time, although its themes and characteristic styles probably remain much the same as before records were kept.
The slow-paced, self-contained civilizations of the East have only recently been affected by Western theatre,
just as the West has only recently become conscious of the theatrical wealth of the East and what it could do to
fertilize the modern theatre (as in the 20th-century experimental drama of William Butler Yeats and Thornton
Wilder in English, of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud in French, and of Bertolt Brecht in German).
In its representation of life, classical Oriental drama is the most conventional and nonrealistic in world theatre.
Performed over the centuries by actors devoted selflessly to the profession of a traditional art, conventions of
performance became highly stylized, and traditions of characterization and play structure became formalized to
a point of exceptional finesse, subtlety, and sophistication. In Oriental drama all the elements of the performing
arts are made by usage to combine to perfection: dance and mime, speech and song, narrative and poetry. The
display and studied gestures of the actors, their refined dance patterns, and the all-pervasive instrumental
accompaniment to the voices of the players and the action of the play, suggest to Western eyes an exquisite
combination of ballet with opera, in which the written text assumes a subordinate role. In this drama, place
could be shifted with a license that would have astonished the most romantic of Elizabethan dramatists, the
action could leap back in time in a way reminiscent of the “flashback” of the modern cinema, and events could
be telescoped with the abandon of modern expressionism. This extreme theatricality lent an imaginative
freedom to its artists and audiences upon which great theatre could thrive. Significantly, most Oriental cultures
also nourished a puppet theatre, in which stylization of character, action, and staging were particularly suitable
to marionettes. In the classical puppet theatre of Japan, the bunraku, the elocutionary art of a chanted narration
and the manipulative skill with the dolls diminished the emphasis on the script except in the work of the 17th-
century master Chikamatsu, who enjoyed a creative freedom in writing for puppets rather than for the actors of
the Kabuki. By contrast, Western drama during and after the Renaissance has offered increasing realism, not
only in decor and costume but also in the treatment of character and situation.
It is generally thought that Oriental drama, like that of the West, had its beginnings in religious festivals.
Dramatists retained the moral tone of religious drama while using popular legendary stories to imbue their
plays with a romantic and sometimes sensational quality. This was never the sensationalism of novelty that
Western dramatists sometimes used: Eastern invention is merely a variation on what is already familiar, so that
the slightest changes of emphasis could give pleasure to the cognoscenti. This kind of subtlety is not unlike that
found in the repeatedly depicted myths of Greek tragedy. What is always missing in Oriental drama is that
restlessness for change characteristic of modern Western drama. In the West, religious questioning, spiritual
disunity, and a belief in the individual vision combined finally with commercial pressures to produce
comparatively rapid changes. None of the moral probing of Greek tragedy, the character psychology of
Shakespeare and Racine, the social and spiritual criticism of Ibsen and Strindberg, nor the contemporary drama
of shock and argument, is imaginable in the classical drama of the East.
Drama in Western cultures
Greek origins
Ancient Greek tragedy flowered in the 5th century BC in Athens. Its form and style—influenced by religious ritual,
traditionally thought to have contributed to the emergence of Greek theatre—were dictated by its performance in the great
dramatic competitions of the spring and winter festivals of Dionysus. Participation in ritual requires that the audience
largely knows what to expect. Ritual dramas were written on the same legendary stories of Greek heroes in festival after
festival. Each new drama provided the spectators with a reassessment of the meaning of the legend along with a corporate
religious exercise. Thus, the chorus of Greek tragedy played an important part in conveying the dramatist's intention. The
chorus not only provided a commentary on the action but also guided the moral and religious thought and emotion of the
audience throughout the play: for Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC) and Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) it might be said that the
chorus was the play, and even for Euripides (c. 480–406 BC) it remained lyrically powerful. Other elements of
performance also controlled the dramatist in the form and style he could use in these plays: in particular, the great size of
the Greek arena demanded that the players make grand but simple gestures and intone a poetry that could never approach
modern conversational dialogue. Today the superhuman characters of these plays, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
Orestes and Electra, Oedipus and Antigone, seem unreal, for they display little “characterization” in the modern sense
and their fates are sealed. Nevertheless, these great operatic tableaux, built, as one critic has said, for weight and not
speed, were evidently able to carry their huge audiences to a catharsis of feeling. It is a mark of the piety of those
audiences that the same reverent festivals supported a leavening of satyr-plays and comedies, bawdy and irreverent
comments on the themes of the tragedies, culminating in the wildly inventive satires of Aristophanes (c. 445–c. 385 BC.)
The study of Greek drama demonstrates how the ritual function of theatre shapes both play and performance. This ritual
aspect was lost when the Romans assimilated Greek tragedy and comedy. The Roman comedies of Plautus (c. 254–184
BC) and Terence (c. 186/185–159 BC) were brilliant but inoffensive entertainments, while the oratorical tragedies of
Seneca (c. 4 BC–AD 65) on themes from the Greek were written probably only to be read by the ruling caste.
Nevertheless, some of the dramatic techniques of these playwrights influenced the shape and content of plays of later
times. The bold prototype characters of Plautus (the boasting soldier, the old miser, the rascally parasite), with the
intricacies of his farcical plotting, and the sensational content and stoical attitudes of Seneca's drama reappeared centuries
later when classical literature was rediscovered.
Influences on the dramatist
The author of a play is affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the conditions under which he conceives and
writes, by his social and economic status as a playwright, by his personal background, by his religious or
political position, by his purpose in writing. The literary form of the play and its stylistic elements will be
influenced by tradition, a received body of theory and dramatic criticism, as well as by the author's innovative
energy. Auxiliary theatre arts such as music and design also have their own controlling traditions and
conventions, which the playwright must respect. The size and shape of the playhouse, the nature of its stage and
equipment, and the actor–audience relationship it encourages also determine the character of the writing. Not
least, the audience's cultural assumptions, holy or profane, local or international, social or political, may
override all else in deciding the form and content of the drama. These are large considerations that can take the
student of drama into areas of sociology, politics, social history, religion, literary criticism, philosophy and
aesthetics, and beyond.
The role of theory
It is difficult to assess the influence of theory since theory usually is based on existing drama, rather than drama
on theory. Philosophers, critics, and dramatists have attempted both to describe what happens and to prescribe
what should happen in drama, but all their theories are affected by what they have seen and read.
Western theory
In Europe the earliest extant work of dramatic theory, the fragmentary Poetics of Aristotle (384–322 BC),
chiefly reflecting his views on Greek tragedy and his favorite dramatist, Sophocles, is still relevant to an
understanding of the elements of drama. Aristotle's elliptical way of writing, however, encouraged different
ages to place their own interpretation upon his statements and to take as prescriptive what many believe to have
been meant only to be descriptive. There has been endless discussion of his concepts mimēsis (“imitation”),
the impulse behind all the arts, and katharsis (“purgation,” “purification of emotion”), the proper end of
tragedy, though these notions were conceived, in part, in answer to Plato's attack on poiēsis (making) as an
appeal to the irrational. That “character” is second in importance to “plot” is another of Aristotle's concepts that
may be understood with reference to the practice of the Greeks, but not more realistic drama, in which
character psychology has a dominant importance. The concept in the Poetics that has most affected the
composition of plays in later ages has been that of the so-called unities—that is, of time, place, and action.
Aristotle was evidently describing what he observed—that a typical Greek tragedy had a single plot and action
that lasts one day; he made no mention at all of unity of place. Neoclassical critics of the 17th century,
however, codified these discussions into rules.
Considering the inconvenience of such rules and their final unimportance, one wonders at the extent of their
influence. The Renaissance desire to follow the ancients and its enthusiasm for decorum and classification may
explain it in part. Happily, the other classical work recognized at this time was Horace's Art of Poetry (c. 24
BC), with its basic precept that poetry should offer pleasure and profit and teach by pleasing, a notion that has
general validity to this day. Happily, too, the popular drama, which followed the tastes of its patrons, also
exerted a liberating influence. Nevertheless, discussion about the supposed need for the unities continued
throughout the 17th century (culminating in the French critic Nicolas Boileau's Art of Poetry, originally
published in 1674), particularly in France, where a master like Racine could translate the rules into a taut,
intense theatrical experience. Only in Spain, where Lope de Vega published his New Art of Writing Plays
(1609), written out of his experience with popular audiences, was a commonsense voice raised against the
classical rules, particularly on behalf of the importance of comedy and its natural mixture with tragedy. In
England both Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poetry (1595) and Ben Jonson in Timber (1640) merely
attacked contemporary stage practice. Jonson, in certain prefaces, however, also developed a tested theory of
comic characterization (the “humours”) that was to affect English comedy for a hundred years. The best of
Neoclassical criticism in English is John Dryden's Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668). Dryden approached
the rules with a refreshing honesty and argued all sides of the question; thus he questioned the function of the
unities and accepted Shakespeare's practice of mixing comedy and tragedy.
The lively imitation of nature came to be acknowledged as the primary business of the playwright and was
confirmed by the authoritative voices of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765)
that “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature,” and the German dramatist and critic Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, who in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (or Hamburg Dramaturgy; 1767–69) sought to
accommodate Shakespeare to a new view of Aristotle. With the classical straitjacket removed, there was a
release of dramatic energies in new directions. There were still local critical skirmishes, such as Jeremy
Collier's attack on the “immorality and profaneness of the English stage” in 1698; Goldoni's attacks upon the
already dying Italian commedia on behalf of greater realism; and Voltaire's reactionary wish to return to the
unities and to rhymed verse in French tragedy, which was challenged in turn by Diderot's call for a return to
nature. But the way was open for the development of the middle class drame and the excursions of
romanticism. Victor Hugo, in his Preface to his play Cromwell (1827), capitalized on the new psychological
romanticism of Goethe and Schiller as well as the popularity of the sentimental drame in France and the
growing admiration for Shakespeare; Hugo advocated truth to nature and a dramatic diversity that could yoke
together the sublime and the grotesque. This view of what drama should be received support from Émile Zola
in the preface to his play Thérèse Raquin (1873), in which he argued a theory of naturalism that called for the
accurate observation of people controlled by their heredity and environment. From such sources came the
subsequent intellectual approach of Ibsen and Chekhov and a new freedom for such seminal innovators of the
20th century as Luigi Pirandello, with his teasing mixtures of absurdist laughter and psychological shock;
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), deliberately breaking the illusion of the stage; and Antonin Artaud (1896–1948),
advocating a theatre that should be “cruel” to its audience, employing all and any devices that lie to hand. The
modern dramatist may be grateful that he is no longer hidebound by theory and yet also regret, paradoxically,
that the theatre of his time lacks those artificial limits within which an artifact of more certain efficiency can be
wrought.

Eastern theory
The Oriental theatre has always had such limits, but with neither the body of theory nor the pattern of rebellion
and reaction found in the West. The Sanskrit drama of India, however, throughout its recorded existence has
had the supreme authority of the Nāṭya-śāstra, ascribed to Bharata (c. 1st century AD), an exhaustive
compendium of rules for all the performing arts, but particularly for the sacred art of drama with its auxiliary
arts of dance and music. Not only does the Nāṭya-śāstra identify many varieties of gesture and movement
but it also describes the multiple patterns that drama can assume, similar to a modern treatise on musical form.
Every conceivable aspect of a play is treated, from the choice of metre in poetry to the range of moods a play
can achieve; but perhaps its primary importance lies in its justification of the aesthetic of Indian drama as a
vehicle of religious enlightenment.
In Japan the most celebrated of early nō writers, Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), left an influential collection of
essays and notes to his son about his practice, and his deep knowledge of Zen Buddhism infused the nō drama
with ideals for the art that have persisted. Religious serenity of mind (yūgen), conveyed through an exquisite
elegance in a performance of high seriousness, is at the heart of Zeami's theory of dramatic art. Three centuries
later the outstanding dramatist Chikamatsu (1653–1725) built equally substantial foundations for the Japanese
puppet theatre, later known as the bunraku. His heroic plays for this theatre established an unassailable
dramatic tradition of depicting an idealized life inspired by a rigid code of honour and expressed with
extravagant ceremony and fervent lyricism. At the same time, in another vein, his pathetic “domestic” plays of
middle class life and the suicides of lovers established a comparatively realistic mode for Japanese drama,
which strikingly extended the range of both the bunraku and the Kabuki. Today, these forms, together with the
more aristocratic and intellectual nō, constitute a classical theatre based on practice rather than on theory. They
may be superseded as a result of the recent invasion of Western drama, but in their perfection they are unlikely
to change. The Yüan drama of China was similarly based upon a slowly evolved body of laws and conventions
derived from practice, for, like the Kabuki of Japan, this too was essentially an actors' theatre, and practice
rather than theory accounts for its development.

The role of music and dance

The Sanskrit treatise Nāṭya-śāstra suggests that drama had its origin in the art of dance, and any survey of
Western theatre, too, must recognize a comparable debt to music in the classical Greek drama, which is
believed to have sprung from celebratory singing to Dionysus. Similarly, the drama of the medieval church
began with the chanted liturgies of the Roman mass. In the professional playhouses of the Renaissance and
after, only rarely is music absent: Shakespeare's plays, particularly the comedies, are rich with song, and the
skill with which he pursues dramatic ends with musical help is a study in itself. Molière conceived most of his
plays as comedy-ballets, and much of his verbal style derives directly from the balletic qualities of the
commedia. The popularity of opera in the 18th century led variously to John Gay's prototype for satirical
ballad-opera, The Beggar's Opera (1728), the opera buffa in Italy, and the opéra comique in France. The
development of these forms, however, resulted in the belittling of the written drama, with the notable exception
of the parodistic wit of W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911). It is worth noting, however, that the most successful modern
“musicals” lean heavily on their literary sources. Today two of the strongest influences on contemporary
theatre are those of Bertolt Brecht, who believed that a dialectical theatre should employ music not merely as a
background embellishment but as an equal voice with the actor's, and of Antonin Artaud, who argued that the
theatre experience should subordinate the literary text to mime, music, and spectacle. Since it is evident that
drama often involves a balance of the arts, an understanding of their interrelationships is proper to a study of
dramatic literature.

The influence of theatre design

Though apparently an elementary matter, the shape of the stage and auditorium probably offers the greatest
single control over the text of the play that can be measured and tested. Moreover, it is arguable that the
playhouse architecture dictates more than any other single factor the style of a play, the conventions of its
acting, and the quality of dramatic effect felt by its audience. The shape of the theatre is always changing, so
that to investigate its function is both to understand the past and to anticipate the future. Today, Western theatre
is in the process of breaking away from the dominance of the Victorian picture-frame theatre, and therefore
from the kind of experience this produced.
The contemporary English critic John Wain has called the difference between Victorian and Elizabethan theatre
a difference between “consumer” and “participation” art. The difference resulted from the physical relationship
between the audience and the actor in the two periods, a relationship that determined the kind of
communication open to the playwright and the role the drama could play in society. Three basic playhouse
shapes have emerged in the history of the theatre: the arena stage, the open stage, and the picture-frame.

The arena stage

To the arena, or theatre-in-the-round, belongs the excitement of the circus, the bullring, and such sports as
boxing and wrestling. Arena performance was the basis for all early forms of theatre—the Druid ceremonies at
Stonehenge, the Tibetan harvest-festival drama, probably early Greek ritual dancing in the orchēstra, the
medieval rounds in 14th-century England and France, the medieval street plays on pageant wagons, the early
nō drama of Japan, the royal theatre of Cambodia. Characteristic of all these theatres is the bringing together of
whole communities for a ritual experience; therefore, a sense of ritualistic intimacy and involvement is
common to the content of the drama, and only the size of the audience changes the scale of the sung or spoken
poetry. Clearly, the idiom of realistic dialogue would have been inappropriate both to the occasion and the
manner of such theatre.
The open stage
When more narrative forms of action appeared in drama and particular singers or speakers needed to control the
attention of their audience by facing them, the open, “thrust,” or platform stage, with the audience on three
sides of the actor, quickly developed its versatility. Intimate and ritualistic qualities in the drama could be
combined with a new focus on the players as individual characters. The open stage and its variants were used
by the majority of great national theatres, particularly those of China and Japan, the booths of the Italian
commedia, the Elizabethan public and private playhouses, and the Spanish corrales (i.e., the areas between
town houses) of the Renaissance. While open-stage performance discouraged scenic elaboration, it stressed the
actor and his role, his playing to and away from the spectators, with the consequent subtleties of empathy and
alienation. It permitted high style in speech and behaviour, yet it could also accommodate moments of the
colloquial and the realistic. It encouraged a drama of range and versatility, with rapid changes of mood and
great flexibility of tone. It is not surprising that in the 20th century the West saw a return to the open stage and
that recent plays of Brechtian theatre and the theatre of the absurd seem composed for open staging.
The proscenium stage
The third basic theatre form is that of the proscenium-arch or picture-frame stage, which reached its highest
achievements in the late 19th century. Not until public theatres were roofed, the actors withdrawn into the
scene, and the stage artifically illuminated were conditions ripe in Western theatre for a new development of
spectacle and illusion. This development had a revolutionary effect upon the literary drama. In the 18th and
19th centuries, plays were shaped into a new structure of acts and scenes, with intermissions to permit scene
changes. Only recently has the development of lighting techniques encouraged a return to a more flexible
episodic drama. Of more importance, the actor increasingly withdrew into the created illusion of the play, and
his character became part of it. In the mid-19th century, when it was possible to dim the house lights, the
illusion could be made virtually complete. At its best, stage illusion could produce the delicate naturalism of a
Chekhovian family scene, into which the spectator was drawn by understanding, sympathy, and recognition; at
its worst, the magic of spectacle and the necessary projection of the speech and acting in the largest picture-
frame theatres produced a crude drama of sensation in which literary values had no place.
Audience expectations
It may be that the primary influence upon the conception and creation of a play is that of the audience. An
audience allows a play to have only the emotion and meaning it chooses, or else it defends itself either by
protest or by a closed mind. From the time the spectator began paying for his playgoing, during the
Renaissance, the audience more and more entered into the choice of the drama's subjects and their treatment.
This is not to say that the audience was given no consideration earlier; even in medieval plays there were
popular non-biblical roles such as Noah's wife, or Mak the sheepthief among the three shepherds, and the antic
devils of the Harrowing of Hell in the English mystery cycles. Nor, in later times, did a good playwright always
give the audience only what it expected—Shakespeare's King Lear (c. 1605), for example, in the view of many
the world's greatest play, had its popular elements of folktale, intrigue, disguise, madness, clowning, blood, and
horror; but each was turned by the playwright to the advantage of his theme.
Any examination of the society an audience represents must illuminate not only the cultural role of its theatre
but also the content, genre, and style of its plays. The exceptionally aristocratic composition of the English
Restoration audience, for example, illuminates the social game its comedy represented, and the middle class
composition of the subsequent Georgian audience sheds light on the moralistic elements of its “sentimental”
comedy. Not unrelated is the study of received ideas in the theatre. The widespread knowledge of simple
Freudian psychology has undoubtedly granted a contemporary playwright like Tennessee Williams (1911–83)
the license to invoke it for character motivation; and Brecht increasingly informed his comedies with Marxist
thinking on the assumption that the audiences he wrote for would appreciate his dramatized argument. Things
go wrong when the intellectual or religious background of the audience does not permit a shared experience, as
when Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) could not persuade a predominantly Christian audience with an existentialist
explanation for the action of his plays, or when T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) failed to persuade an audience
accustomed to the conventions of drawing-room comedy that The Cocktail Party (1949) was a possible setting
for Christian martyrdom. Good drama persuades before it preaches, but it can only begin where the audience
begins.
A great variety of drama has been written for special audiences. Plays have been written for children, largely in
the 20th century, though Nativity plays have always been associated with children both as performers and as
spectators. These plays tend to be fanciful in conception, broad in characterization, and moralistic in intention.
Nevertheless, the most famous of children's plays, James Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), implied that the young are
no fools and celebrated children in their own right. Barrie submerged his point subtly beneath the fantasy, and
his play is still regularly performed, while Maurice Maeterlinck's Blue Bird (1908) has disappeared from the
repertory because of its weighty moral tone.
In the wider field of adult drama, the social class of the audience often accounts for a play's form and style.
Court or aristocratic drama is readily distinguished from that of the popular theatre. The veneration in which
the nō drama was held in Japan derived in large part from the feudal ceremony of its presentation, and its
courtly elements ensured its survival for an upper class and intellectual elite. Although much of it derived from
the nō, the flourishing of the Kabuki at the end of the 17th century is related to the rise of a new merchant and
middle class audience, which encouraged the development of less esoteric drama. The popular plays of the
Elizabethan public theatres, with their broader, more romantic subjects liberally spiced with comedy, are
similarly to be contrasted with those of the private theatres. The boys' companies of the private theatres of
Elizabethan London played for a better paying and more sophisticated audience, which favoured the satirical or
philosophical plays of Thomas Middleton (1570?–1627), John Marston (1576–1634), and George Chapman
(1559?–1634). Similarly today, in all Western dramatic media—stage, film, radio, and television—popular and
“commercial” forms run alongside more “cultural” and avant-garde forms, so that the drama, which in its
origins brought people together, now divides them. Whether the esoteric influences the popular theatre, or vice
versa, is not clear, and research remains to be done on whether this dichotomy is good or bad for dramatic
literature or the people it is written for.
The range of dramatic forms and styles
Dramatic literature has a remarkable facility in bringing together elements from other performing and
nonperforming arts: design and mime, dance and music, poetry and narrative. It may be that the dramatic
impulse itself, the desire to recreate a picture of life for others through impersonation, is at the root of all the
arts. Certainly, the performing arts continually have need of dramatic literature to support them. A common
way of describing an opera, for example, is to say that it is a play set to music. In Wagner the music is
continuous; in Verdi the music is broken into songs; in Mozart the songs are separated by recitative, a mixture
of speech and song; while operettas and musical comedy consist of speech that breaks into song from time to
time. All forms of opera, however, essentially dramatize a plot, even if the plot must be simplified on the
operatic stage. This is because, in opera, musical conventions dominate the dramatic conventions, and the
spectator who finds that the music spoils the play, or who finds that the play spoils the music, is one who has
not accepted the special conventions of opera. Music is drama's natural sister; proof may be seen in the early
religious music-drama of the Dionysiac festivals of Greece and the mystères of 14th-century France, as well as
in the remarkable development of opera in 17th-century Italy spreading to the rest of the world. The librettist
who writes the text of an opera, however, must usually subserve the composer, unless he is able to embellish
his play with popular lyrics, as John Gay did in The Beggar's Opera (1728), or to work in exceptionally close
collaboration with the composer, as Brecht did with Kurt Weill for his Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny
Opera, 1928).
Dance, with its modern, sophisticated forms of ballet, has also been traditionally associated with dramatic
representation and has similarly changed its purpose from religious to secular. In ballet, the music is usually
central, and the performance is conceived visually and aurally; hence, the writer does not play a dominant role.
The scenario is prepared for dance and mime by the choreographer. The contemporary Irish writer Samuel
Beckett, trying to reduce his dramatic statement to the barest essentials, “composed” two mimes entitled Act
Without Words I and II (1957 and 1966), but this is exceptional.
In motion pictures, the script writer has a more important but still not dominant role. He usually provides a
loose outline of dialogue, business, and camera work on which the director, his cameramen, and the cutting
editor build the finished product. The director is usually the final artistic authority and the central creative mind
in the process, and words are usually subordinate to the dynamic visual imagery. (This subject is developed at
length in the article motion picture.)
The media of radio and television both depend upon words in their drama to an extent that is not characteristic
of the motion picture. Though these mass media have been dominated by commercial interests and other
economic factors, they also have developed dramatic forms from the special nature of their medium. The writer
of a radio play must acknowledge that the listener cannot see the actors but hears them in conditions of great
intimacy. A radio script that stresses the suggestive, imaginative, or poetic quality of words and permits a more
than conventional freedom with time and place can produce a truly poetic drama, perhaps making unobtrusive
use of earlier devices like the chorus, the narrator, and the soliloquy: the outstanding example of radio drama is
Under Milk Wood (1953), by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.