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1.2.0.a. Drama. Theatre. Play.
Drama.- The term comes from the Greeks. It
is the action performed on a stage or a literary text.
Theatre.- Greek
term given to the place where the action is performed.
Critics tend to associate drama with the poetic text, and theatre related
to things such as production or ‘mise en scene’ (French term).
The text can be written in prose or in verse, and they are dramatic texts
or scripts. It is difficult to differenciate drama from theatre as they
are parts of the same whole.
Dramatic text.- Production. The only literary comentary of it is necessarily
uncomplete.
Play.- It is the ludic character of any dramatic piece, that is, script
plus production. There are two essential elements in a play: action and
conflict. Both elements must appear on the stage. The theatre does not depend
on words, but also on signs, gestures, symbols, silences, distance, light,
sound, music, and so on.
The dramatic work is different from poetry and novel, because it is more
than a printed text. Traditionally, it has been said that as opposed to
lyric (first person), and prose (third person), drama needs the use of the
second person. In the dramatic work we have sometimes a narrator, but he
is completely unnecessary. The means of expression is dialogue. Its existence
implies the needo of a cast of actors and actresses. They play their part
of roles in front of an audience (people eho see the play). The performance
is unique since the same representation can not be repeated twice. It has
stage directions (‘mise en scene’). These ones determine the expressions,
ways of saying things, and so on. In a way they are parts of drama and theatre
ideas. The text is written by the author in relation to the production,
indicating how words, actors, and so on must be. Connected with how actors
move on a play, we have some stage directions:
BACKSTAGE
(U.R.)Upstage Right (U.C.)Upstage Centre (U.L.)Upstage Left
(C.R.)Centre Right (C.S.)Centre Stage (C.L.)Centre Left
(D.R.)Downstage Right (D.C.)Downstage Centre (D.L.)Downstage Left
AUDIENCE
The author indicated towards an actor should look
at. We usually find the initials. Stage directions asre written in italics.
1.2.0.b Early Manifestations in England:
The Interlude.
Interlude.- It is a kind of play very close
to the morality play. It became very important since it was the closest
to what the English audience understood as theatre in those days. Like the
morality play, the interlude was designed to be performed within a small
area, inside a palace. Nevertheless, the interlude has a more popular topic:
interlude refers to a break during a party or dance.
The work Fulgens and Lucrece by Medall seems to support this theory: it
has references within the text to the drinking and dancing of the members
of the audience.
The mask or masque
which is a semidramatic show which became very popular in Italy, France,
and in the sixteenth century in England. It is a kind of masquerade or disguise
in honour of a king, queen or noble man. It dramatizes a mythological episode
with allusions to the honoured person. It usually concludes with a dance
in which actors and audience get together.
The masque celebrated an ideal monarch whose merits could be studied, like
the Bible, as "the booke of all perfection"; the narrow Bible-centred
Puritanism of the Pilgrims demanded a rejection of a cornerstone James’s
idea of kingship.
The special feature of the masque, as opposed to the public theatre, lays
in its combination of amateur and professional actors, or, more precisely,
in its use of princely or aristocracy participants in the most prominent
roles. There were two different kinds of actor:
1.- The dancers: they performed the play.
2.- The torchbearers.
The masque takes form during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It was accepted
as an independent genre during the reigns of James I and Charles I.
During the sixteenth century and up to 1580, the interlude is a kind of
play considered important by authors and companies up to the point that
interlude was used to refer to any kind of theatrical production.
The influence of the European Renaissance entered England little by little.
In 1527, the word "comedy" appears for the first time in the subtitle
of the work Calisto and Melibea. It was described: "a new commedye
in English manner of an interlude". The word "tragedy" (1538)
appears also in the subtitle of God’s Promises by John Bale: "a
tragedy or interlude".
The new terminology is bound to appear , since the interest in classical
theatre becomes more important since 1530s. At the beginning, only the students
of Cambridge and Oxford performed the plays in their originals, but the
English versions were increasingly available, and Terence and Seneca translations
appeared before 1540. From this moment onwards, the English playwriters
tried to imitate these authors.
Roister Doister (c. 1550) by Nicholas Udall is considered the first complete
English comedy. The first English tragedy is Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and
Thomas Sackville.
Comedy.- It is a work of less exalted style than a tragedy, and usually
with a happy ending. Comedy emphasizes intelligence and judgement (levels
of awareness), although sympathy is not excluded from its range. Its characters
may be drawn from observation and experience, but they are the result of
the generalizing faculty rather than the individualizing one. For this reason
the characters in comedy tend to be realistic in externals, but in essence
to become types or even caricatures of actual human beings.
a) Main plot.- Eiron (protagonist of the main plot)
Alazon (antagonist in the main plot)
b) Subplot.- Buffon (protagonist of the subplot; comical effect)
Agroikos (typical country man; he is against the class of the buffon)
Tragedy.- A play
or other literary work of a serious or sorrowful character, with a high
tone and solemn subject matter, and a fatal or disastrous conclusion which
produces the catharsis of the emotions in the spectator. It necessarily
includes a tragic hero who suffers a downfall as a consequence of a mistake
or flaw (usually one of hubris) that the gods or fate will punish through
tragic justice bringing about a catastrophe. Conflict in tragedy is inevitable
and cannot be solved. Lesky talks about four requirements in tragedy:
a) The hero must be superior to the rest of the characters.
b) The spectator must find himself involved in the action and affected by
the hero’s suffering.
c) The hero must be concious of his downfall.
d) There must be no way out of the crisis.
Differences between comedy and tragedy in classical times:
The first one is the attitude of the members of the audience. In tragedy
one feels somehow sympathy or suffers with the pain of the characters (Pathos:
that quality in a work of art which evokes feelings of tenderness , pity
or sorrow. A sense of distress that awakes pity or tenderness in the receptor).
In tragedy one feels a kind of approach or sympathy to its characters. In
comedy one keeps an intellectual detachtment (the audience is passively
involved).
In relation with the characters, Norton Frye (a critic) distinguishes:
a) Eiron.- His duty is to accomplish an unattainable aim.
b) Alazon.- He is against the Eiron.
c) Buffon.-
d) Agroikos.-
Opposition Eiron-Alazon--> Plot
Opposition Buffon-Agroikos--> Subplot
Sometimes the real protagonist is the buffon. The protagonist is called
technical hero. On of the main buffons is Falstaff who appears in several
of Shakespeare’s plays.
Evans (another critic) adds a few more elements to the comedy: "in
order to achieve comic effect, there is trick or deceitful practise. We
need a practiser who makes a practise against a practesee". That is
to say, we need the action (the practise), a practiser, and a practisee.
The development of the plot in comedy has different levels of awareness
between the practiser and the practisee. The audience must be aware of these
levels in order to see the comic effect.
The English comedy becomes important mainly with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
Shakespeare’s comedies are romantic ones, whereas Ben Jonson’s
comedies are ironic and satirical ones. For both of them, the characterization
is more important than the action, which, in Shakespeare’s case, there
is always some hope for regeneration, some optimistic feature. In Ben Jonson’s
case, he strongly critizises the vices of the contemporaries.
The terms and the concepts come from Greece. Comedy and tragedy have their
origins in religious ceremonies. The tragedy has a solemn theme and plot
that frighten the audience and arise pity in them. There is a final purification
of the hero’s feelings called catharsis.
Tragedy.- Tragic hero > downfall > mistake.
Flaw Hamartia (> error = hubris)
Gods > tragic justice = Nemesis > catastrophe.
Every tragedy has a tragic hero who outstands on the rest, although he is
a mortal man. Because of this he is susceptible to fall. The fall is called
downfall. The hero is a good man, and the audience feels pity for him. The
downfall is the result of a mistake for flaw (English) or Hamartia (Greek).
Many times this error is what the Greeks called hubris. The hero challenges
gods and fate. Gods punish the hero (tragic justice or Nemesis), giving
way to a catastrophe (end of the play). Without conflict there is no drama,
but in tragedy this conflict has no solution and is inevitable.
The tragic works of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans are
different from the Greek tragedies for one reason: the only well-known classical
author in England is Seneca, and his idea of Hamartia for guilt is very
close to the idea of sin in the Christian morality, that is, the hero identifies
his mistake with a moral trespass . The English Elizabethan theatre is influenced
by Seneca, and horror and crime stories are brought mainly from France.
The Elizabethan audience is attracted to the macabre, cruel, misterious,
in general to anything related to the Gothic tale. Also some popular collections
of stories tried to offer a moral teaching by presenting a tragic case taken
from history. The revenge topic was a subgenre within the Elizabethan theatre
(revenge tragedy). Two good examples of this kind of tragedy are: Kyd’s
The Spanish Tragedy, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In most of them the
crime is revealed by the ghost of the murdered person. They have a long
and complicated plot until the murderer is discovered and punished. A variant
of this kind of tragedy is the domestic tragedy: it deals with the middle
class people, and the plot is about the influence of a murder on a member
of a family. These ones differ considerably from the Roman tragedy. A good
example of this kind of tragedy is Arden of Faversham.
1.2.1.a. General Introduction.
Shakespeare began his career as a poet, always fascinated
with the poetic possibilities of image, conceit , metaphor, and symbol.
Shakespeare used his prose for comic, ironic, mad or simply realistic scenes.
Most of the times we realize what Shakespeare did to the vocabulary of his
time. He inherited a language that was in process of expansion. This language
was flexible enough to enable him to manipulate it with with remarkable
freedom. He was concious of the advantages of combinig and counterpointing
the Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements in English.
Language was not for him only a way of expression, but also a way of exploration.
Terms such as theatre, stage, and actor had not in the Elizabethan times
such definited meanings as today. A theatre might be a schoolroom where
students performed under the directions of their masters. Plays were acted
under the most different conditions and places, for instance, in one of
the social halls, in a great house, in a concert chamber, in a yard and
so on. When the actors travelled, they might play in any place where the
audience could gather together (a townhall or a barn). To avoid the laws
on vagabonds, the actors described themselves as the private servants of
some lord, or even of the queen. To escape from the civil government, they
built their public play-houses outside the corporate limits. The earliest
theatres built in England were: "The Theatre and the Curtain"
(1576-77), "The Fortune" (1600), "The Red Bull" (1605),
"The Rose" (1587), "The Swan" (1595), and "The
Globe" (1599). All of these theatres followed the original inyard structure
presenting an open air auditorium and seats in roofed places for patrons
who paid more.
The manuscripts of the period are divided in quartos and folios. Shakespeare’s
folio 1 appeared in 1623. There are good and bad quartos. The playhouses
within the City (London) were private play houses. They were opened by wealthy
people and a small audience. There was always seat for everyone, there was
artificial lighting, and also there was a music. There was little time for
reharsal.
Shakespeare’s plays have between two or three characters or are played
only by one character dominating a crowded stage. The main roles were for
young men, so Shakespeare did not write big plays for them or keep them
a long time on the stage. Shakespeare was one of the principal actors in
"Lord Chamberlain’s Men" (1603, a theatre company). He was
also one of the seven partners in the building of "The Globe".
James I took the "Lord Chamberlain’s Men" under his patronage
in 1603. Shakespeare became an important writer with prestige and prosperity,
with a modest place in the court.
Several of Shakespeare’s plays had been published separatedly before
the printing of Folio 1 (first folio edition). These ones had been published
without his supervision. These editions were called quarto editions, and
they were divided into good and bad quartos, according to the merit of the
texts. Some were published by being performed, and scripts of only half
of them were printed. Some of them were edited on reported texts, now known
as bad quartos. Soon after Shakespeare had died (1616), his colleagues,
John Henninge and Condell began to prepare Mr. William Shakespeare’s
Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, better known as First Folio (F1-1623).
It is a complete edition of Shakespeare’s works in one volume folio
edition, where we find all his plays except Pericies. In this edition every
work is by Shakespeare. These colleagues worked with care, assembling manuscripts,
providing printing copies when available, and also causing quartos to be
brought only or partially from prompt books. Folio 1 includes 18 plays,
which were, in all probability, the ones that had survived. If it were not
for them, the complete edition would have included 22 plays, less than we
now find in the canon.
Shakespeare’s indifference to the publication, his preocupation for
their performance rather than with the production of books, mean no authoritative
work supervised by him. The texts edition of 16 of his plays were printed
individually in quarto editions in Shakespeare’s life, sometimes from
the author’s foul paper (final draft) with many errors. Some others
were corrupt or pirated editions. The stage copy was kept secretly from
others companies. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s texts of his plays were
published after his death, notably in folio edition. For some of them we
have only the folio text and that of the corrupt quarto, and some of them
in quarto and folio texts, with variations among them.
Shakespeare’s earliest plays show that he was interested in the Elizabethan
traditions. For instance, the three parts of Henry VI show him developing
chronicle play on English history. This was a popular variety of drama when
Shakespeare began to write. If Shakespeare had written nothing else than
his early plays, he would still be considered an outstanding writer. Richard
III, in particular, deserves a particular attention as a remarkable dramatic
presentation of the rise and fall of a villain hero, who succeeds by wit,
cunning , and Maquiavelian policies as Elizabethans understood them.
Shakespeare wrote different type of plays, and any attempt to discuss his
work chronologically is no use, as they can not be considered in chronologically
related groups.
1.2.1.b. Shakespeare’s Comedies.
Shakespeare experienced a general improvement
of his style during the decade between 1590-1600. His comedies do not show
such constants progress as his histories, but they are different in pattern.
His early comedies intend to follow any profitable fashion. He displays
admiration for the courtly comedy of John Lyly, and, similary, he continues
the style of Robert Greene, for instance, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and
his comedy of errors were of the same type as Roister and Doister.
The first play Shakespeare wrote in a new form, giving way to a new stage,
was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was a pattern of gentleness and magnanimity
in the first plot, and sets against the virtues of conviviality in the subplot.
This pattern is repeated again in The Merchant of Venice, and in three comedies:
Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As you Like It.
One of his romantic comedies was performed in 1595-96. It deals with fantasy
in which fairies of the English countryside bemuse and enchant young lovers
and yokels . It is on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This comedy was written
for a wedding entertainment. It is the most lyrical of all of his plays,
and has little resemblance with any of the rest. It has two different endings
printed one after the other. The play shows Shakespeare moving towards an
ideal romantic comedy, in which the fortunes of love and the humour of the
characters are skilfully blended . It lacks the deep undertone of Shakespeare’s
later comedies. It is a dream,a jest , a presentation of the comic irresponsability
of young love. The whole fantasy seems to be Shakespeare’s own, and
there is no clear or known source of it. The play gets a hint for its fairy
elements from James IV by Greene, the classical background from Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale, and Plutarch’s Life of Terence. The plot of
the lovers takes hint from the main theme of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Other critics see different components taken from Ovid’s Metamorphosis,
Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft, and from the Elizabethan folklore.
It was first performed in 1595-6, and first published in 1600, from foul
papers in a quarto edition. The second quarto edition appeared in 1619,
and was set up from Q1. The folio edition was set up from Q2 and some additional
stage directions.
It isn’t known Shakespeare’s reaction to the events of the turn
of the century, right before and after the death of the queen Elizabeth
I. However, three of the five plays usually assigned to these years have
become known as ‘Dark Comedies’. They show a distempered vision
of the world, although Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that Ends Well,
and Measure for Measure can be more technically tragedies. In the case of
the last two ones, there is a happy ending, that is why they have been called
‘Problem Plays’ or ‘Bitter Comedies’. They have nothing
of the golden cheerfulness of the middle comedies, and they show human behaviour
as little edifying.
All’s Well that Ends Well is a play difficult to date as it is not
homogeneous. It was first printed probably from the foul papers in folio
edition (1623). The sources are boccaccio’s Decameron: Story of Giletta
of Narbonne, translated by Painter in The Palace of Pleasure.
1.2.1.c. Histories.
Shakespeare’s first plays were in
general little different from those already performed in London. Henry VI,
in three parts, broke no new ground and lacked the strength of its successor
Richard III. These plays from Shakespeare’s first historical cycle.
His later histories, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V,
increase their power to trascend the mere subject of a play, reaching beyond
it to a larger view of the world. In the two tetralogies, Shakespeare uses
the the tragic histories of the Plantagenet knights to show the transmission
of evil from one generation to the next. They differ very much in dramatic
technique: Henry V has much in common with a patriotic pageant, and Richard
II with a morality play. In Henry IV, the creation of Falstaff, and the
way his life is, compared to the king’s, marks a new complexity in
drama, and shows Shakespeare exercising upon the past of England. Shakespeare
wrote two more history plays: King John and Henry VIII.
They are all plays on subjects on English history. He took information from
Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of
Lancaster and York (1548), and from Holinshed’s Chronicles. As second
sources he inherited traditional themes:
1.- The royal divine right to the succession.
2.- The need for unity and order.
3.- The evil of treachery .
4.- The cruelty and hardship .
5.- The power of money to corrupt.
6.- Strength of family ties.
7.- The need of human understanding and careful calculation.
8.- The power of God’s providence, who protects his followers, punishes
evils, and leads England to the stability of the Tudor Age.
In the succession of his history plays is where the development of his style
can be most clearly seen. These plays form the most numerous group is Shakespeare’s
early period (1590-1600): nine histories in ten years, even his most popular
type of drama is in 1590s, and perhaps they were the easiest to write.
Richard III is Shakespeare’s first history with self-contained unity.
He centres the drama in a single figure to commit himself murder, treason,
and deception in an invented imagination, so that the audience can condemn
him. The play was printed in 1597 in a quarto edition with a long title
beginning: The Tragedy of King Richard III... It was reprinted in 1598 in
a second quarto edition, and it was added in the title by William Shake-speare.
Subsequent quarto editions followed this one. The folio text (1623) was
set up from Q3 and Q6, and collated with the foul paper. It is difficult
to see a clear relation with an anonymous play from about 1590 entitled
The True Tragedy of Richard III. Its sources are Holinshed & Hall’s
History of Richard III.
Henry IV.- In its first and second parts, the king is often seen in the
background. The stage is mainly dominated by his son Prince Hal, and later
on by Henry V, Hotspur (young rebel), and Sir John Falstaff. The secondary
characters go from several prostitutes to Lord Chief of Justice and country
gentlemen. Both parts show Shakespeare combining the political with the
comic theme in a new and striking manner. The central theme is the education
of prince Hal, and with the character of Falstaff, Shakespeare creates someone
who becomes the substitute father and friend of prince Hal. His comment
on political situation is with shameful, inconsiderate, and egoistical good
sense. In a way, Falstaff is Shakespeare’s major introduction into
the English history. His characterization is original, although he uses
something of the early "vice" figures from the earlier tragedies
and comedies. Falstaff is mainly a comic figure of inmense proportions who
embodies in his speech and action an amoral pleasure in living. There are
instances for a way of life, which the prince must refuse before becoming
king. This rejection is prepared through the later section of Part 1, and
the earlier sections of Part 2.
Part 1 has three levels of action, each one with its appropiate language,
and every one of them plays its role in the entire politic-moral pattern:
the three levels have high political surroundings, that is, Henry IV, the
low comic surroundings of Falstaff, and the attractive but politically amoral
Hotspur and his rebels.
In Part 2, the Country Justice represents yet another level and, in a sense,
a deeper one: the England which remains unchanged throughout the political
struggles .
The juxtaposition of different moral and social levels in both parts give
the play richness and relevance. Henry IV is a part of the general pattern
of Shakespeare’s pictures of English history from Richard II to the
Tudors, but they are entertaining, stimulating, and aesthetically satisfying
plays whose subjects are human pleasures. Henry IV shows a broad mastery
and more of that ability to make the characters speak like people in real
life, which was one of Shakespeare’s accomplishments in style. Falstaff
remains as the richest comic creation in English literature. The first part
of Henry IV was first published in 1598 from foul papers in a quarto edition.
After this, another six quarto editions were published altogether . In 1620,
a quarto edition was set up from Q5 of 1613, and it was set up with some
literary editings. The folio title was put to the historical part, not to
the comical one. His historical sources are Holinshed’s works, although
Shakespeare took the comic scenes from an anonymous play: The Famous Victories
of Henry the Fifth.
The second part was first printed in 1600 from foul papers, and no subsequent
quartos are known. His sources are the same as for the first part.
1.2.1.d. Tragedies.
Shakespeare’s greatness is more visible
in his tragedies. They form a group by themselves. The great ones are those
of the Mature Age, right at the turn of the century: Hamlet, Othello, King
Lear, and Macbeth.
Hamlet must be regarded as Shakespeare’s most successful tragedy. It
has persistent theatrical energy. The character of Hamlet has become a figure
of literary mythology. The revenge situation in Hamlet is one charged with
emotional excitement and moral interest. It simply presents a good man who
is weak. In front of him is Claudius, who is a strong and bad man, and he
cannot obtain justice because justice is in the hands of the strong bad
man. The weak good man must go around and around to achieve a kind of natural
justice. The audience watches in suspense while a weak good man, subtlety
, attacks and gets his own back upon the strong man, who spens his time
trying to evade the weak good man.
Hamlet has a great and important opponent: Claudius, who is an hypocrite,
but a successful one. He achieves his desire effect on everybody. His hypocrisy
is that of a skilled politician. He is a smiling villain, and this fact
is not revealed until the end of the play. Hamlet constantly attacks him,
but Shakespeare makes that Claudius the murderer has self-control, which
makes theatrically the situation more exciting.
Hamlet is a play of far greater philosophical density than any other one
that had preceded it. The play was first printed in 1603 in a quarto edition
(Q1- "bad" quarto). The text was probably reported by the actor
who played Marcellus. A second quearto edition (Q2- "good" quarto)
appeared in 1604. It was a fairly reliable text from the foul papers with
some use of Q1. The folio text was printed in 1623 from Q2, after it was
collected from the Prompt Book (Stage Copy). The "accepted" text
of Hamlet is a kind of compromise which includes all the passages alternatively
missing from Q2 and F1.
