Drama – the form of composition designed for performance in the theatre, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated action, and utter the written dialogue (the common alternative name for a dramatic composition is a play), sources: ancient (Greece, Rome)
In poetic drama the dialogue is written in verse, which in English is usually blank verse and in French is the twelve-syllable line called an Alexandrine.
A closet drama is written in dramatic form, with dialogue, indicated settings, and stage directions, but is intended by the author to be read rather than to be performed; examples are Milton's Samson Agonistes, Byron's Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Hardy's The Dynasts.
Miracle plays – had as its subject either a story from the Bible, or the life and martyrdom of a saint
Morality plays:
dramatized allegories of a representative Christian life in the plot form of a quest for salvation, in which the crucial events are temptations, sinning, and the climactic confrontation with death
the usual protagonist represents Mankind, or Everyman
other characters are personifications of virtues, vices, and Death, as well as angels and demons who contest for the prize of the soul of Mankind
Interlude – (Latin, "between the play") is a term applied to a variety of short stage entertainments, such as secular farces and witty dialogues with a religious or political point
Tragedy:
sources: Greece (Aristotle, Greek dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles – Oedipus the King, Euripides)
the term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character)
involves incidents arousing pity and fear
catharsis – in Greek signifies "purgation," or "purification", the "emotional cleansing" sometimes depicted in a play as occurring for one or more of its characters, as well as the same phenomenon as (an intended) part of the audience’s experience, it describes an extreme change in emotion, occurring as the result of experiencing strong feelings
tragic hero – evokes both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both
hamartia (tragic flaw) – main character’s "error of judgment" which leads to a change in his fortune from happiness to misery
hubris – "pride" or self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law
Medieval tragedy – the story of a person of high status who, whether deservedly or not, is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune
Geoffrey Chaucer – "The Monk's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Elizabethan Age
Senecan tragedy
written to be recited rather than acted
in the Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development:
I – academic tragedies written in close imitation of the Senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of the three unities (time, place, plot)
Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton – Gorboduc
II – development written for the popular stage, called the revenge tragedy, or the tragedy of blood, derived from Seneca's favourite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and carnage; Elizabethan writers usually represented them on stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror
Thomas Kyd – The Spanish Tragedy
Christopher Marlowe – The Jew of Malta
Shakespeare – Titus Andronicus
Shakespeare – Hamlet
John Webster - The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil
Shakespearean tragedies:
departed from Aristotle’s tragedies
introduced humorous characters, incidents, or scenes, called comic relief
Macbeth – the hero is not a good man who commits a tragic error, but an ambitious man who knowingly turns great gifts to evil purposes
Othello
Hamlet
Romeo and Juliet
King Lear
Tragicomedy – mixed mode, a popular non-Aristotelian form which produced a number of artistic successes
Heroic tragedy – a cross between epic and tragedy, produced in the Restoration Period
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > 18th century
Domestic tragedy (bourgeois) - written in prose and presented a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a commonplace or domestic disaster
George Lillo – The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (about a merchant's apprentice who succumbs to a heartless courtesan and comes to a bad end by robbing his employer and murdering his uncle, is still read, at least in college course)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > 19th and 20th century
Most of the successful tragedies have been in prose and represent middle-class, or occasionally even working-class, heroes and heroines
Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian playwright, his plays revolve around an issue of general social or political significance) – A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People
Arthur Miller (US) – The Death of a Salesman
Eugene O'Neill (US) – Mourning Becomes Electra (1931, an adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, with the locale shifted from Greece to New England)
T. S. Eliot – Murder in the Cathedral (1935, a tragic drama which, like Greek tragedy, is written in verse and has a chorus, but also incorporates elements of two early Christian forms, the medieval miracle play (dealing with the martyrdom of a saint) and the medieval morality play.
Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie, A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire
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Comedy:
a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us
the characters engage our pleasurable attention rather than our concern
usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters
Romantic comedy
was developed by Elizabethan dramatists on the model of contemporary prose romances such as Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), the source of Shakespeare's As You Like It
represents a love affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine (sometimes disguised as a man); the course of this love does not run smooth, yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union (boy-meets-girl plot)
Shakespeare – As You Like It (manifests a movement from the normal world of conflict and trouble into "the green world"—the Forest of Arden), A Midsummer Night's Dream
Satiric comedy
ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines, or attacks deviations from the social order by making ridiculous the violators of its standards of morals or manners
Ben Jonson – Volpone, The Alchemist
The comedy of manners
originated in the New Comedy of the Greek Menander
developed by the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence (their plays dealt with the vicissitudes [zmienność, zmienne koleje] of young lovers and included what became the stock characters of much later comedy, such as the clever servant, old and stodgy parents, and the wealthy rival)
exemplified by Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado about Nothing
given a high polish in Restoration comedy
Restoration comedy (1660-1700)
a form of the comedy of manners
owes much to the brilliant dramas of the French writer Molière
deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society
relies for comic effect in large part on the wit and sparkle of the dialogue— often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match
William Congreve – The Way of the World
William Wycherley – The Country Wife
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
Farce
a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter—"belly laughs," in the parlance of the theatre
commonly employs highly exaggerated or caricatured types of characters, puts them into improbable and ludicrous situations, and makes free use of sexual mix-ups, broad verbal humour, and physical bustle and horseplay
Shakespeare – The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being Earnest
High comedy – evokes "intellectual laughter"—thoughtful laughter from spectators who remain emotionally detached from the action—at the spectacle of folly, pretentiousness, and incongruity in human behaviour
Low comedy – has little or no intellectual appeal, but evokes laughter by jokes, or "gags," and by slapstick humour and boisterous or clownish physical activity
Comedy of Humours
developed by Ben Jonson
based on the ancient physiological theory of the "four humours" (four primary fluids—blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy), which determine both a person's physical condition and character type
an imbalance of one or another humour in a temperament was said to produce four kinds of disposition: sanguine (from the Latin "sanguis," blood), phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic
Ben Jonson – Every Man in His Humour
Comic Relief:
the introduction of comic characters, speeches, or scenes in a serious or tragic work, especially in dramas
these elements alleviate tension and add variety
in more carefully wrought plays, they are also integrated with the plot
examples of such complex uses: the gravediggers in Hamlet, the scene of the drunken porter after the murder of the king in Macbeth, the Falstaff scenes in 1 Henry IV, and the roles of Mercurio and the old nurse in Romeo and Juliet