Drama

Question 1

The basics of a play (3)

Answer 1

1. characters are always caught up in some sort of crisis, dilemma or confusion or faced with some sort of problem.
   
   • Greek drama and medieval drama (miracle and morality plays) = question/problem was always concerned with people’s relationship to the gods or God
   • late 16th C emphasis shifts from religion to society and focuses on question of social and political morality (til this day)
2. It is less concerned with the individual characters, than with questions about the whole basis and nature of social organisation and order = play as a public debate!
3. all plays are about the tension of social-order created by society and chaotic-disorder that threatens it (during the ‘complication’ part) = general frame to keep in mind that incorporates the distinctive public quality of all plays and then look at how the details bring this structure alive

Question 2

difference between play, poems and novels

Answer 2

poems: we encounter personal feelings of the poet as he/she faces life’s problems

novels: explore the intricate relationship between individuals and their society

plays: are public things acted on a public stage, focusing on public questions of the social and political organisation of society. The ‘complication’ (middle section of the play) questions this social order in which people live and how close we are to disorder.

Question 3

Two dominant modes of drama

Answer 3

1. comedy
2. tragedy

Question 4

Comedy

Answer 4

1. the disorder that threatens the characters’ lives and social order is overcome
2. most comedies end with marriage or a dance (the traditional signs of harmony and order in society)

Question 5

Tragedy

Answer 5

1. generally a play which ends with the protagonist’s death
2. important is how a tragedy conveys how chaotic life becomes when the established order is destroyed
3. it (esp Shakespearean tragedy) shows the most extreme forms of disorder (madness, murder, states collapsing, family bonds torn apart) but in itself remains very patterned and ordered

Question 6

Act and scene

Answer 6

1. a play is divided into acts and different scenes within that act
   
   • most plays have 5 acts
   • 19th and 20th C plays favour 3 acts
2. as all plays deal with disruption/threat to an established order, individual scenes reveal the specific problems and thematic issues (through characters, see 3), but we also have to look at the complex texture (aka details) of the scene to see in which way the themes and issues are represented (e.g. through imagery, certain language, stage lights creating darkness and isolation, etc.)
3. dramatist is not interested in a character’s personality, but uses his character to question social and political morality!
4. many modern plays are not divided into scenes, which allows you to select dramatically interesting moments

Question 7

character

Answer 7

1. people in the play are referred to as the dramatic characters
2. they are fictional devices and we only assess them on the basis of what they say and do AND what the other characters say about them
3. we always need to relate the characters the broader themes of the play

Question 8

What is the main character called in a play

Answer 8

the hero or protagonist

(note: ‘hero’ does not mean someone brave or noble, they can be good or evil, low- or high-born + the hero himself can be the villain of antagonist too, i.e. Shakespeare’s Macbeth)

Question 9

What character opposes the hero or protagonist in a play

Answer 9

the villain or antagonist

(hero can also be the villain, but all villains have in common that their evil disrupts the social order)

Question 10

How to analyse character’s speech in a play

Answer 10

1. how does the speech relate to the larger action of the play (e.g. good-evil, order-disorder)
2. what are the details of the speech as they really bring both the character and themes to life and make them substantial
   
   • however, comedies rely more on familiar types acting out familiar roles = characters are very clearly a means for the dramatist to express the theme of the play (so details of individuals often less than in tragedy, altough theme and characters are always intertwined regardless of mode)

Question 11

Comedy: basic use (7) + shift

Answer 11

1. traditional comedy’s theme is looking at social life as an elaborate charade, disrupted by people’s folly
2. it laughs at people’s irrational impulses (love and greed) or their absurd, self-importance which contrasts with society’s claim to be a rational, civilised order
3. comedy ends with marriage or a dance when the disorer is almost always overcome
4. aim of a comic dramatist is not to correct behaviour as the folly is irreversable
5. people are types acting out familiar roles
6. it is illustrative and exaggerates how humans take themselves too seriously (>< tragedy presents how complex problems are)

shift occurs in 19th C comedy - earlier dramatists knew they were exaggerating the comedy of a fragile social order, BUT in the late 19th C that confidence dissapears and the focus becomes characters who cling to a certain role as their secure world crumbles (e.g. Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest)

• leads to a more naturalistic form of comedy (esp Chekhov) in which it is not the human absurdity as focus, but the absurdity of a world with little interest in human beings.
• these more plausible characters are also found in 20th C
• modern comic dramatists shift again as social order is an illusion and the world absurd again, leading to the theatre of the absurd and black comedy

Question 12

comedy: main types (3)

Answer 12

several types of dramatic comedy (main: romantic/tragicomedy, satiric comedy, comedy of manners)

Question 13

Romantic comedy

Answer 13

1. usually deals with how young people take love too seriously and how foolish it makes them behave
2. gentle form of comedy
3. darker version is called tragicomedy as disaster and death threatens the characters
4. most often associated with Shakespeare

Question 14

Tragicomedy

Answer 14

1. a darker version of romantic comedy as death and disaster threatens the characters
2. complicates the basic pattern of comedy:
   
   • it shows how unsympathetic society reacts towards excesses of love
   • more realistic effect than in pure romantic comedy as it focuses on society’s actions against folly rather than human’s

Question 15

Satiric comedy

Answer 15

1. similar to all comedy, it discusses the folly of people
2. but it uses caricature, characters are presented as grotesquely ludicrous (e.g. bestial version of huan beings) or as eccentric and unbalanced
3. crazy world where moral values are overturned and we get a sense that people are too corrupt or foolish ever to reform
4. most often associated with Ben Jonson

Question 16

Comedy of Manners

Answer 16

1. set in polite society
2. comedy through the gap between the character’s attempts to preserve the standards of polite behaviour and their actual behaviour
3. focus more on their morals and manners in society than just the absurdity of their behaviour

Question 17

20th C drama: Theatre of the absurd (6)

Answer 17

1. a post–World War II theatre written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s (e.g. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
2. focuse largely on the idea of existentialism and what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, alerting their audiences to pursue the opposite.
3. Logical construction and argument is replaced by irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.
4. bizarre characters in bizarre situations (e.g. Beckett - two men waiting for Godot who never comes, their existence is meaningless and absurd and their dialogue gets nowhere)
5. grimmer form of comedy including violence, sick jokes and farce
6. a world without causes, hopes, convictions or beliefs (extreme form as a response to the chaotic postwar life)

Question 18

Black or dark comedy (// theatre of the absurd)

Answer 18

1. is a comic style that makes light of subjectmatter that is generally considered taboo.
2. grimmer comedy including violence, sick jokes and farce

Question 19

Farce

Answer 19

A light dramatic work in which humour is created through:

1. highly improbable, intricate plot situations
2. exaggerated characters
3. and often slapstickelements

in modern comedy, the farce is often about people being absurd pawns in a meaningless universe, life devoid of deeper meaning

Question 20

The basic structure of a play

Answer 20

all plays employ the same structure

1. exposition: prepares the ground, an alteration in the established pattern of life occurs and hints at a future confusion about the social order of the play, plays thus begin with a collapse of a certain order
2. complication: ensues from this alteration, sense of disorder as characters are removed from their secure roles (e.g. tragedy: king gives up his thrown, comedy: characters who hated love are now absurdly in love)
3. resolution: social order is usually re-established, however plays do not offer a message or a resolution to society’s problems. A closed ending is satisfying, but the audience will mostly remember the crisis and questions it asked

the complext themes, characters, plot, language within this framework creates the sense of life’s complexity and is called the dramatic form

Question 21

The dramatic form

Answer 21

This refers to how the material (language, characters, plot, themes) are presented within the basic structure (exposition, complication, resolution) of a play

so approach a scene through the basic structure of a play, but when looking at the details and their significance we are considering the dramatic form

Question 22

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama examples of writers

Answer 22

Examples: Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Shakespeare

Question 23

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama

Answer 23

1. period from 1558 - 1625
2. time of enormous social change
   
   1. medieval society (Christian ordered universe) shifts to a secular society (court, money and politics become important rather than the church)
   2. did not happen overnight, so great variety among plays having a medieval stance in which people are fallen creatures and saved or damned by God vs. individuals caught between their own consciences and desires

Question 24

Revenge Tragedy (3)

Answer 24

1. A submode of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama (period 1558-1625)
2. focus on a specific aspect of disorder in society = justice and questions how to act towards these contradictions of:
   
   • justice (like God) should be perfect, but earthly justice is corrupt and imperfect
   • taking justice into one’s own hands is risking damnation
3. revenge tragedies often use devices such as a ghost, play within a play, scenes of violent mider, a mad hero, blood bath

Question 25

Two basic types of medieval drama + century

Answer 25

14th - 15th C

1. miracle plays
2. morality plays

Question 26

Miracle Plays (5)

Answer 26

Type of medieval drama (14th-15th C)

1. deals with the Christian history of the world from the Creation to the Last Judgement
2. each play focuses on 1 major event from the Bible (e.g. the fall of Adam and Eve, birth of Christ)
3. each play is part of a series or cycle of plays named after the tow where they were performed (e.g. York plays, Chester, Wakefield, Towneley)
4. plays are a form of didactic drama intented to explain Christianity
5. still a gap between the ideal of God’s order and the violent, often grotesque, comic actions of the characters

Question 27

Morality plays (4)

Answer 27

Type of medieval drama (14th-15th C)

1. focus on the moral dilemmas that confront mankind from birth to death
2. always a male character at the centre of the play
3. allegorical plays in which both the plot and character are used to illustrate an abstract moral lesson (good-evil, heaven-hell battle for people’s souls)
4. as it takes place in the middle ages, God’s order is still very much felt (>< secular world of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama were order is already more uncertain)

Question 28

melodramatic plays - well-made plays

Answer 28

1. most popular form of 19th C drama
2. a sensational romantic play
3. full of imposible events where the good is always rewarded and the wicked always punished
4. main focus is the plot which depends on a secret only revealed in the last act
5. also called well-made play under the French dramatist Eugène Scribe
6. caused reaction by subsequent playwriters Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde and Chekhov creating problem plays

Question 29

Problem plays (4)

Answer 29

1. reaction on well-made plays/melodramatic plays
2. e.g. Ibsen and Shaw use the ordered format of the well-made play with its melodramatic plot, but only to react against its boring morality by shifting the emphasis on to contemporary social or moral questions (marriage, prostitution, etc.)
3. they are thus concerned with a specific social problem (esp in early works, more subtle and varied on life’s complexity later on)
4. although stemming from a melodramatic formula, they are naturalistic

Question 30

Naturalism (naturalistic)

Answer 30

1. narrow form of realism at the end of 19th C
2. can be found in problem plays
3. offers an almost photographic image of life and stresses how heredity and environment shape people’s lives (nurture)
4. continues through 20th C in which characters are trapped by society unable to change or influence their surroundings

Question 31

Plot (4)

Answer 31

1. not just telling the story of a play or what happens (the plot is not a summary)
2. rather a fully developed version of the story
   
   1. the actual significance of the play
   2. the nature of the characters
   3. the way in which events are related to each other and their dramatic effect
3. main plot and subplot
4. sometimes no plot as an effective way of indicating to the audience that we live in an incoherent world without significant meaning or pattern! (e.g. absurd drama has often no plot, nothing seems to be happening - Beckett)

Question 32

Main plot and subplot

Answer 32

Focuses on the central character

focuses on another set of characters or events (it usually illuminates the main plot, especially when there are close parallels between them)

Question 33

Restoration Comedy (7)

Answer 33

1. comedy written after the restoration of Charles II, 1660
2. a type of Comedy of Manners
3. deals with sexual relations and intrigues of men and women belonging to polite society
4. theme is often marriage
5. play can either lead towards
   
   • satiric comedy
   • romantic comedy
6. comedy created through gap between the characters’ desires and their desperate attempts to keep that artifical world of appearances
7. BUT society is simultaneously seen as orderly and chaotic, civilised and corrupt (! different from other comedy)

Question 34

Sentimental Comedy

Answer 34

1. reaction against the overly sexual concerns of Restoration comedy
2. simplistic form about the virtues of family life
3. stress on how goodness is rewarded
4. more affectionate, entertaining plays about social folly

Question 35

Restoration Comedy plays can lead in two directions

Answer 35

play can either lead towards

1. satiric comedy: emphasising the grotesque sexual desires of the characters and the corruption of society
2. romantic comedy: emphasising the plight of love in a world ruled by law

Question 36

Shakespearean plays different?

Answer 36

NOT really

• they follow the structure of exposition, complication and resolution
• also deals with the threat or disruption of an established social order (like all plays written since the Middle Ages)
• set-piece speeches are found in all his plays, such as soliloquies in which the character comments on the broader implications of their situation in addition to every other speech/line that does this too in a more indirect way (! makes him distinctive)

Question 37

Shakespeare’s comedies

Answer 37

1. writes romantic comedy
2. life proceeds as usual, until characters fall in love (disruption), central part focuses on the comic mishaps of love, but problems are resolved and end with harmony through marriage and dance
3. most impressive is his characterisation and thus the use of language and imagery to bring the themes of the story to life
4. the speeches do not just advance the action but are related to the broader issues of the nature of human beings and the organisation of society that remain implicit throughout the story
5. set-piece speeches such as soliloquies in which the character specifically comments on the broader implications of their situation

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Twelfth Night)

Question 38

Shakespeare’s Tragicomedies

Answer 38

1. resembles romantic comedies, but instead of taking place in a make-believe world, these darker or problem comedies take place in a more realistic world
2. youn people come in conflict with those in authority that tries to control them
3. themes of justice and mercy as lovers are threatened by punishment and even death for their reckless behaviour
4. set-piece speeches such as soliloquies in which the character comments on the broader implications of their situation in addition to every other speech/line that does this too in a more indirect way

(The Merchant of Venice - Measure for Measure)

Question 39

Shakespeare’s History plays

Answer 39

1. character, mostly a king, who is no longer fulfilling his secure, traditional role either because of his own unadequate behaviour or because unruly forces are threatening his authority
2. therefore focus on the gap between ideal notion of being a king vs. reality of being a king
   
   1. ideal: a responsible king appointed by God governing justly over a secure and ordered society >< problems that form threat

(Richard II: king claims divine authority, but inadequate personality and actions making him not fulfil his role properly

Henry IV plays: king competent, but rebels in the country theatening his authority)

Question 40

Shakespeare’s Roman Plays

Answer 40

1. similar to his History Plays in which the complexity of political life (whether a king or not) is explored
2. disorder is inevitable as individuals will always disrupt the ideal, ordered social and political life (either caesar’s conspirators who murder him OR Anthony and Cleopatra’s love that disrupts social and political order)

(Julius Caesar - Anthony and Cleopatra)

Question 41

Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Answer 41

1. an act takes place that disrupts society’s order (e.g. murder of Hamlet’s father, or Lear’s abdication as king)
2. with society’s order gone, the worst of human beings is exposed as destruction and brutality reign:
   
   1. either the tragic hero is confronted with these horrible things but meets the challenge (as in Hamlet and King Lear)
   2. or the hero has to fight his own eveil insticts (as in Macbeth and Othello)
3. as the tragic hero comes closer to death the fundamental questions about experience are asked, mostly through set-piece speeches (meaning of life, people no more than violent animals, nature/purpose of existence etc)

Question 42

Shakespeare’s Romances

Answer 42

1. deals with the problem of desirability of order and the inevitability of disorder
2. stylised plays
3. set in a far-away magical world even more remote than the make-believe world of comedies
4. no realistic characters or plausible stories
   
   • he seems to make explicit what remains implicit in his other work, namely that his true subject always was the whole question of order and disorder in life (and not the characters themselves)

Question 43

Tragedy has two main types

Answer 43

1. tragedy which focuses on a terrible disorder in a society = found in classical and Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
   
   • e.g. Shakespeare
2. tragedy which focuses on the breakdown of a family = modern tragedy
   
   • family can also be seen as the central unit in a society
   • when family life becomes corrupt, question arises if coherent order in society is possible
   • • often not only society’s/family’s corruption, but also focus on the individual mind (Miller’s Death of a Salesmen)
   • e.g. Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Ibsen and Strindberg

Question 44

Tragedy’s characteristics (4)

Answer 44

1. tragedies begin with an alteration in the existing social order
2. this change leads to a shocking destruction of human life
3. where comedy laughs at the folly of people, tragedy asks fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of existence in a world where, if society is disordered, violence and self-interest becomes dominant
4. tragic heroes and heroines will ask these questions about life (forming a medium) through set-piece speeches as they experience that horror

Question 45

difference/similarities between modern and earlier tragedy

Answer 45

similarities

both explore a painful world where an idealised rational social order can no longer be maintained

difference

• central characters of modern tragedy are anti-heroes, they are ordinary people >< central characters of earlier poetry are great men/women, kings and queens
• modern tragedy looks inwards, focusing on the family and both the disorder of their own minds as the disorder of the world >< earlier tragedy looks outwards, focusing on questions about the position of human beings in the universe

Question 46

20th C drama

Answer 46

1. they undermine conventional social myths, beliefs and convictions
2. innovative form of their plays, for instance breaking up the neat pattern of the well-made play introducing life’s confusion/complexity
3. audience comes to the theatre to have their convictions questioned

use of a box set: creates the appearance of being in someone’s house, focus on the gap between social and ethical values of characters they’ve been raised in vs. reality = TOO SAFE

MORE RADICAL: Brecht’s epic theatre and theatre of the absurd

Question 47

Brecht’s epic theatre (5)

Answer 47

20th C drama

1. still questions established ideas like previous modern drama
2. but Brecht alienates audience: he makes it clear that the audience is watching a play and thus doesn’t become sympathetically involved
3. both traditional social values as well as the artifice of drama itself are questioned making it clear they’re both conventional structures
4. all the institutional frameworks of society (inclluding the frame of drama) are thus subverted
5. extreme form as a respones to the chaotic post-war world

Question 48

Feminist Theatre

Answer 48

1. starts with American dramatist Megan Terry in 1960s
2. opens up the door for many others (Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems) and acting production companies (Women’s Theatre group)
3. audience has to review the past and present from a different perspective
   
   • social and political order is constructed in favour of men by men and victimises women
   • celebration of women, to be positive, challenging us with ideas about the need to change society

Question 49

Film, Television and Media Studies // drama

Answer 49

1. Film and television have become the main vehicle for drama (plays, television soaps, series, films and situation comedies)
2. massive change of cultural production since WOII through advances of technology, but:
   
   • many plays on television use the box set or the well-made play format
   • narrative often cleary defined by exposition, complication and resolution structure
   • questions are raised about society’s order, but dominant ideology of society reinforced
   • television often clings to traditional values about family and of stereotyping women (esp in soap operas, where most dramatic scenes are caused by an alteration of traditional social or gender roles
   • questioning that often reinforces the conservative thought >< Ibsen, Brecht or Churchill (but quite normal as most texts will always be conventional and traditional apart from some)