PURPOSE AND POINT OF

VIEW
TRAGEDY AND OTHER
SERIOUS DRAMA
COMEDY AND TRAGICOMEDY

PURPOSE AND POINT OF VIEW

Theater

is art, and as such it mirrors

or reflects life. It does not try to
encompass the whole of life at one
time but rather selects and focuses
on a part of the total picture.
Selectivety is a key principle of all
art.
The selection process of art occurs
in several ways. To begin with, all art
forms use certain elements while
eliminating
others.
Music,
for

The

means by which an art from

present its material is often referred
to as the medium. Thus, sound is
the medium of music. For theater,
the medium is a story enacted by
performers: theater always involves
actresses and actors on a stage
playing characters.

HUMAN BEINGS: THE SUBJECT

OF THEATER
Throughout

history theater has concertrated or

focused on one subject: human beings. This is the
true even though different human concernt are
emphasized in different plays: the pretenses of men
and women in sociaty in The Way of the World by
William Congreve (1670-1729); the conflict between
high principle and expediency in Antigone by
Sophocles; the terrible way in which members of one
family can drive one another into desperation and
despair in Long Days Journay into Night by Eugene
ONeill; the alternating hope and fatility of man
waiting for salvation in Waiting for Godot by Samuel
Beckett (1990); the celebration of life in a small town
in Thornton Wilders Our Town.

THE PURPOSE OF A THEATER

EVENT
In the present-day theater, when a
playwright begins work on a play, he
or she may not have a clear purpose
in mind. The purpose may emerge
only as the script goes through
several revisions. Before a play goes
into production, however, the
playwright should know where it is
headed.

Tragedi, for example, generally occurs in

periods when society as a whole assumes
a certain attitude toward people and the
universe in which they live. Two periods
conducive to the creation of tragedi were
the golden age of Greece in the fifth
Century B.C. and the Renaissance. Both
periods in corporated two ideas essential
to tragic drama: on the one hand, the
notion that human beings are capable of
extraordinary accomplishments; and on
the other, the notion that the world is
potentially cruel and unjust. A closer look
at these two periods will demonstrate how
they reflected these two wiewpoints.

The celebration of the individual was apparent in all the

arts, including drama. The Greek dramatist Sophocles
exclaimed:
Numberless are the wonders of the world
But none
More wonderful than man
In the renaissance, Shakespeare has Hamlet say:
What a piece of work is man! How noble
In reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form, in moving, how express and
Admirable! In action how like an angel!
In apprehension how like a god!

Personal Vision
As important as it is, however, the
outlook of society serves only as the
background in creating theater. In
the foreground stands the point view
of the individual artist: that highly
persoanl aoutlook referred to above.
Proof of this is the variation among
playwrights within the same area.

The Problem of Categories

By combining the two elements-the view of society
and the individual outlook of the artist- a wide
range of seriuous and comic points of view are
incorporated in individual plays. For the of
convenience, people often classify plays according
to point of view: tragedy, comedy, and so forth. A
group of plays which form a single type is called a
genre, after a French word which means category
or type
In chapter 6, we will study tragedy and other
serious drama; and in Chapter 7, comedy. Before
we turn to these subjects, however, I should
express a word of caution about the question of
genre, or categories of drama.

tragedy, comedy, history pastoral, apstoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,

tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. In spite of
the absurdity of this, there are those who
continue to try to pigeonhole or label every play
that comes along.
Dramatists do not write categories or types of
drama; they write individual plays. The
dramatists, as well as everyone else concerned
with producinga theater event, deals with a
specific play-and so should members of the
audience. A preoccupation with establishing
categories diverts our attention from the main
purpose of theater: experience the play in
performance.

The reason we learn various forms of drama is not

spend our time pinning labels on plays, but to
understand that writes, as well as those responsible for
the production of a play, take a point of view with
regard to their material. Members of the audience must
be aware of that point of view if they are to understand
a performance properly.
A play which aims at a purely melodramatic effect, for
instance should be looked at differently from one which
aspires to tragedy. A lighearted comedy should not be
judged by the same standards as a philosopical play. It
is to understand these differences, and the grasp the
various ways in which playwrights have traditionally
approached their material, that we study the categories
into. Which groups of plays frequently fall.

Tragedy
And
Serious Drama

Other

A wide range of theater

experiences fall under the
heading of serious theater.

These experiences include the inspiration and lofry

feel who have problems like our own, the
intellectual challege of plays of plays of ideas and
the fright and horror induced by melodrama.

Tragedy
Tragedy asks the most basic question about human existence. Tragedy assumes that the universe is different to human concerns, and
often cruel or malevolent.

We can divide tragedy into two basic kinds:

1. Tragedy Traditional
2. Tragedy Modern

Traditional Tragedy
Three noteworthy periods of
history in which tragic drama
was produced are Greece in
the fifth century B.C., England
in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, and
France in the seventeenth
century.

The tragedies which appear in these three ages

have
several
characteristics
in
common,
characteristics which help define traditional
tragedy. They include the following:

1. Generally the hero or heroine of the play is an

extraordinary person: a king, a queen, a general,
or a nobleman-in other words, a person of stature.

2. The central figures of the play are caught in a series

of tragic circumtances: Oedipus, without realizing it,
murders his father and marries his mother; Phaedra
falls hopelessly and fatally in love with her stepson

3. The situation becomes

irretrievable: there is no turning
back, no way out.

4. The hero or heroine accepts responsibillity for

his or her actions and also shows a willingness
to suffer and an immense capacity for suffering.

5. The language of
traditional tragedy is
verse.

Modern Tragedy
Modern tragedy involves ordinary people, not the nobility,
and is written generally in prose rather than verse.

The deeper meanings of tragedy are explored in

its modern form by nonverbal elements and by
the cumulative or overall effect of events as well
as by verbal means.

There are several kinds of nontragic serious

plays, the most notable being heroic drama,
melodrama, and bourgeois or domestic drama.

HEROIC DRAMA
Heroic drama has many of the same elements as
traditional tragedy. Frequently dealing with
highborn characters and being written in verse.

In contrast to tragedy, it is marked by a happy

ending, or an ending in which the deaths of the
main characters are considered a triumph and not
a defeat

BURGEOIS
Burgeois or domestic drama deals with ordinary people in a serious but nontragic manner.

It stresses the problems of the middle and

lower classes and has become a particularly
prominent form in the past century.

MELODRAMA
Melodrama features exaggerated characters and events
arranged to create horror or suspense or to present a didactic
argument for some political, moral, or social point view

Comedy and Tragicomedy

Comedy
Comedy

are not necessarily more

frivolous or less concerned with
important matters than those
who create serious works; they
may be extremely serious in their
own way.

Characteristic of Comedy
A characteristic of most comedy
the temporary suspension of the
natural laws of probability and
logic.
The focus in comedy is on the
mans being tripped up and
getting his cameooance, not on
injury
because
we
have
suspended disbelief in injury.

Techniques of comedy
Comedy is developed by means
of several techniques, show up in
several areas in verbal humor,
in characterization and in comic
situations.

Verbal Humor : Verbal humor can be

anything form a pun to the most
sophisticated verbal discourse.
Comedy Of Character : in comedy of
character the disperancy or in
congruity lies in the way characters
see themselves or pretend to be as
opposed to the way they actually
are.
Plot Compilations : Another way in
which contradictory or the ludricous
manifets it itself in comedy is in plot
compilations

Form Comedy
From

the foregoing, the dramatist

fashion various kinds of comedy.
Depending on the degree of
exaggeration, a comedy can be farce
or comedy of manners : the former of
intance, features strong physical
humor, while the latter relies more on
verbal wit. Depending on its intent,
comedy can be designed to entertain
as with farce or barlesque or to correct
vices, in which case it becomes satire.

Tragicomedy
In

tragigcomedy, a amile is
frequently cynical, chickles may
be tinged with a treat, and
laughter is sometimes bitter.

Tragicomedy

has taken its place

as a major form alongside the
more tradional approaches.

Authentic tragicomedy fuses, or

synthesizes, two elements serious,
the other comic. We laugh and cry at
the same time. Plays by Chekhov,
Beckett, Dueerenment and writers of
the theater of the absurd employ
tragicomedy.

Modern Tragicomedy
Tragicomedy has become a
predominant form, the primary
approach, in fact of many of the
best playwright of our day.

THANKYOU