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Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" (Classical Greek: δράμα, dráma), which is derived from "to do" (Classical Greek: δράω, dráō). 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. The early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus the King (c. 429 BCE) by Sophocles are among the supreme masterpieces of the art of drama.

The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene. Thalia was the Muse of comedy (the laughing face), while Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy (the weeping face). 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 BCE)—the earliest work of dramatic theory.

The use of "drama" in the narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the 19th century. 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 narrow sense that the film and television industry and film studies adopted to describe "drama" as a genre within their respective media. "Radio drama" has been used in both senses--originally transmitted in a live performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio.

Drama is often combined with music and dance: the drama in opera is sung throughout; musicals include spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have regular musical accompaniment (melodrama and Japanese Nō, for example). In certain periods of history (the ancient Roman and modern Romantic) dramas have been written to be read rather than performed. In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance; performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.

History of Western drama

Athenian and Hellenistic drama

Actor wearing the mask of a bald-headed man, from the new comedy, 2nd century BCE.

Western drama originates in classical Greece. The theatrical culture of the city-state of Athens produced three genres of drama: tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. Their origins remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE they were institutionalised in competitions held as part of festivities celebrating the god Dionysus. Historians know the names of many ancient Greek dramatists, not least Thespis, who is credited with the innovation of an actor ("hypokrites") who speaks (rather than sings) and impersonates a character (rather than speaking in his own person), while interacting with the chorus and its leader ("coryphaeus"), who were a traditional part of the performance of non-dramatic poetry (dithyrambic, lyric and epic). Only a small fraction of the work of five dramatists, however, has survived to this day: we have a small number of complete texts by the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comic writers Aristophanes and, from the late 4th century, Menander. Aeschylus' historical tragedy The Persians is the oldest surviving drama, although when it won first prize at the City Dionysia competition in 472 BCE, he had been writing plays for more than 25 years. The competition ("agon") for tragedies may have begun as early as 534 BCE; official records ("didaskaliai") begin from 501 BCE, when the satyr play was introduced. Tragic dramatists were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play (though exceptions were made, as with Euripides' Alcestis in 438 BCE). Comedy was officially recognised with a prize in the competition from 487-486 BCE. Five comic dramatists competed at the City Dionysia (though during the Peloponnesian War this may have been reduced to three), each offering a single comedy. Ancient Greek comedy is traditionally divided between "old comedy" (5th century BCE), "middle comedy" (4th century BCE) and "new comedy" (late 4th century to 2nd BCE).

• Anticipated by Euripides and tragicomedy, New comedy as Hellenistic. New role for chorus. Colloquial verse. Hybrid tone, mixing serious, pathetic and moral elements with its farcical comedy. Stock characters. Julius Pollux. Menander and his fragments; reputation in Rome. Hellenistic spread to India and Afghanistan. Plato, Aristotle and birth of dramatic theory. Declineof tragedy in fourth century and comedy in third century BCE.

Roman and Byzantine drama

Following the expansion of the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE) into several Greek territories between 270-240 BCE, Rome encountered Greek drama. From the later years of the republic and by means of the Roman Empire (27 BCE-476 CE), theatre spread west across Europe, around the Mediterranean and reached England; Roman theatre was more varied, extensive and sophisticated than that of any culture before it. While Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240 BCE marks the beginning of regular Roman drama. From the beginning of the empire, however, interest in full-length drama declined in favour of a broader variety of theatrical entertainments. The first important works of Roman literature were the tragedies and comedies that Livius Andronicus wrote from 240 BCE. Five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also began to write drama. No plays from either writer have survived. While both dramatists composed in both genres, Andronicus was most appreciated for his tragedies and Naevius for his comedies; their successors tended to specialise in one or the other, which led to a separation of the subsequent development of each type of drama. By the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, drama was firmly established in Rome and a guild of writers (collegium poetarum) had been formed. The Roman comedies that have survived are all fabula palliata (comedies based on Greek subjects) and come from two dramatists: Titus Maccius Plautus (Plautus) and Publius Terentius Afer (Terence). In re-working the Greek originals, the Roman comic dramatists abolished the role of the chorus in dividing the drama into episodes and introduced musical accompaniment to its dialogue (between one-third of the dialogue in the comedies of Plautus and two-thirds in those of Terence). The action of all scenes is set in the exterior location of a street and its complications often follow from eavesdropping. Plautus, the more popular of the two, wrote between 205-184 BCE and twenty of his comedies survive, of which his farces are best known; he was admired for the wit of his dialogue and his use of a variety of poetic meters. All of the six comedies that Terence wrote between 166-160 BCE have survived; the complexity of his plots, in which he often combined several Greek originals, was sometimes denounced, but his double-plots enabled a sophisticated presentation of contrasting human behaviour. No early Roman tragedy survives, though it was highly-regarded in its day; historians know of three early tragedians—Quintus Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius Accius. From the time of the empire, the work of two tragedians survives—one is an unknown author, while the other is the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of which are fabula crepidata (tragedies adapted from Greek originals); his Phaedra, for example, was based on Euripides' Hippolytus. Historians do not know who wrote the only extant example of the fabula praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects), Octavia, but in former times it was mistakenly attributed to Seneca due to his appearance as a character in the tragedy.

Medieval drama

In the Middle Ages, drama in the vernacular languages of Europe may have emerged from religious enactments of the liturgy. Mystery plays were presented on the porch of the cathedrals or by strolling players on feast days. Miracle and mystery plays (such as Everyman) later evolved into more elaborate forms of drama, such as was seen on the Elizabethan stages.

Early modern drama

One of the great flowerings of drama in England occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of these plays were written in verse, particularly iambic pentameter. In addition to Shakespeare, such authors as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and Ben Jonson were prominent playwrights during this period. As in the medieval period, historical plays celebrated the lives of past kings, enhancing the image of the Tudor monarchy. Authors of this period drew some of their storylines from Greek mythology and Roman mythology or from the plays of eminent Roman playwrights such as Plautus and Terence.

Modern drama

The pivotal and innovative contributions of the 19th-century Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and the 20th-century German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht dominate modern drama; each inspired a tradition of imitators, which include many of the greatest playwrights of the modern era. The works of both playwrights are, in their different ways, both modernist and realist, incorporating formal experimentation, meta-theatricality, and social critique. In terms of the traditional theoretical discourse of genre, Ibsen's work has been described as the culmination of "liberal tragedy," while Brecht's has been aligned with an historicised comedy.

We must come to a final settlement, Torvald. During eight whole years. . . we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.

Nora, in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879)

When dramatising controversial subjects, Ibsen's refusal to plot resolutions in conformity with received ideology—preferring instead to make such ideologies the cause of complications and thereby suggest the necessity of their change—meant that in the last two decades of the 19th century moralizing conservatives across Europe denounced his dramas, while socialists and feminists championed them. His dramatic exploration of vocation forms a clear continuity through his work, stretching from his very earliest verse dramas, including the complementary pair of dramatic poems Brand (1866) and the "supreme theatrical expression of the mature Romantic spirit in art," Peer Gynt (1867)—through the evaluation of social and moral principles in his "drama of ideas," the anti-romantic, realistic prose problem plays A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy of the People (1882)—to his later plays, which include The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896), with their narrowing of focus to the individual and their emergent symbolist and expressionist formal experimentation. The past also plays a major role in Ibsen's dramas, particularly when activated in the present through the recollection of memory, which tends to displace the dramatic focus from inter-personal action to intra-personal interiority. The dramas articulate a Darwinian understanding of inheritance (another form of the presence of the past) and the causal impact of the environment on human behaviour. Culmination of historical development in drama: secular, contemporary, indigenous, prose, social extension.

Just as Ibsen, in his role as the "father of modern drama", provided the form of prose, psychological realism that underlies many subsequent playwrights. Brecht's epic drama, with its vivid interplay of prose and verse-forms of dialogue, song, and the scope dramatisation of supra-personal transactions between human beings and larger social and historical forces.

Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.

Galileo, in Brecht's Life of Galileo (1943)

Marx rather than Darwin for Brecht. A collaborative approach to authorship that recalls the practice of the English early moderns. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the "non-Aristotelian" form of drama, as exemplified by his epic masterpieces Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), Life of Galileo (1943), The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), and explored theoretically in his A Short Organum for the Theatre (1948). Brecht's innovative experimentation with dramatic form also produced the comedy Man Equals Man (1926), the jazz musical The Threepenny Opera (1928), the epic opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) and the sparce and didactic "learning-play" The Decision (1930). Brecht's dramatic forms are related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts.

August Strindberg - Anton Chekhov - Federico García Lorca - Samuel Beckett

• Frank Wedekind
• Alfred Jarry
• Arthur Schnitzler
• John Galsworthy
• Gerhart Hauptmann
• Maurice Maeterlinck, William Butler Yeats
• Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Joe Orton
• Gertrude Stein
• Eugene O'Neill
• Luigi Pirandello
• George Bernard Shaw
• Ernst Toller
• Vladimir Mayakovsky
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Albert Camus
• Arthur Miller
• Tennessee Williams
• Jean Genet
• Harold Pinter
• Friedrich Dürrenmatt
• Dario Fo
• Heiner Müller
• Caryl Churchill

Modernist drama, theatre and performance

The close interaction and historical interdependence of modernist drama, theatre and performance renders their treatment together necessary. The rise of the director. The notion of "performance" as an independent aesthetic activity is formed. Training and studios (Theatre anthropology).

Dada, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the absurd

It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic.

— Carl Jung on the Dada productions.

Dada performance began in Zurich in 1916 and came to an end in Paris in 1924. Its techniques and those of the Italian Futurists bear a striking resemblance to one another.

• The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924).

• Antonin Artaud
• Roger Vitrac
• Federico García Lorca

See also

• History of theatre
• Applied Drama
• Augustan drama
• Christian drama
• Closet drama
• Costume drama
• Domestic drama
• Dramatic structure

• Dramatic theory
• Flash drama
• Folk play
• Heroic drama
• Legal drama
• Melodrama
• Monodrama
• Mystery play
• One act play

• Play
• Political drama
• Radio drama
• Theatre awards
• Two-hander
• Verse drama and dramatic verse
• Well-made play

Works cited

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378.
• Brockett, Oscar G. and Franklin J. Hildy. 2003. History of the Theatre. Ninth edition, International edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0205410502.
• Cardullo, Bert and Robert Knopf, eds. 2001. Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology. New Haven and London: Yale UP. ISBN 0300085265.
• Carlson, Marvin. 1993. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801481546.
• Duchartre, Pierre Louis. 1929. The Italian Comedy. Unabridged republication. New York: Dover, 1966. ISBN 0486216799.
• Dukore, Bernard F., ed. 1974. Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. Florence, KY: Heinle & Heinle. ISBN 0030911524.
• Durant, Will & Ariel Durant. 1963 The Story of Civilization, Volume II: The Life of Greece. 11 vols. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents Ser. London and New York: Methuen. ISBN 0416720609.
• Fergusson, Francis. 1949. The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama in a Changing Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. ISBN 0691012881.
• Gordon, Mel. 1983. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell'Arte. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. ISBN 0933826699.
• ---, ed. 1987. Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. ISBN 1555540112.
• Harsh, Philip Whaley. 1944. A Handbook of Classical Drama. Stanford: Stanford UP; Oxford: Oxford UP.
• Johnstone, Keith. 1981. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre Rev. ed. London: Methuen, 2007. ISBN 0713687010.
• Melzer, Annabelle. 1976. Dada and Surrealist Performance. PAJ Books ser. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. ISBN 0801848458.
• Pfister, Manfred. 1977. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Trans. John Halliday. European Studies in English Literature Ser. Cambridige: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 052142383X.
• Rehm, Rush. 1992. Greek Tragic Theatre. Theatre Production Studies ser. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415118948.
• Spolin, Viola. 1967. Improvisation for the Theater. Third rev. ed Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. ISBN 081014008X.
• Szondi, Peter. 1965. Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition. Ed. and trans. Michael Hays. Theory and History of Literature ser. vol. 29. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. ISBN 0816612854.
• Taxidou, Olga. 2004. Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. ISBN 0748619879.
• ---. 2007. Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. Baisingstoke and New York: Palgrave. ISBN 9781403941015.
• Weimann, Robert. 1978. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801835062.
• ---. 2000. Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare's Theatre. Ed. Helen Higbee and William West. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521787351.
• Williams, Raymond. 1966. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0701112603.
• Wright, Elizabeth. 1989. Postmodern Brecht. Critics of the Twentieth Century Ser. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415023300.

External links

• Greek & Roman Mask Timeline
• Illustrated Greek Drama - Dr. Janice Siegel, Department of Classics, Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia