Drama and Dramatic Arts. Drama is a form of literature—either prose or verse, usually in dialogue form—intended for performance; dramatic arts are the components necessary for writing and producing the drama, such as playwriting, acting, and costume and scenic design. The word drama comes from a Greek word meaning "to do," and thus drama is usually associated with the idea of action. Most often, drama is thought of as a story about events in the lives of characters. As the adjective dramatic indicates, the ideas of conflict, tension, contrast, and emotion are usually associated with drama.
Types and Uses of Theater
If theater is viewed simply as a branch of literature or only as a form of narrative, however, then large segments of theater history are inevitably slighted. Some periods or cultures have emphasized dramatic literature—plays—but others have stressed aspects of theatrical production. Some cultures see the theater's value as a means of storytelling; others see it as religion, spectacle, or entertainment.
Theater has been used as an extension of religious festivals, as a means for spreading political ideas or propagandizing mass audiences, as entertainment, and as a form of art. Through much of history, theater has existed on three levels simultaneously: as loosely organized popular entertainment, as a mainstream public activity, and as an elitist art form. At the level of popular entertainment, it consists of individuals or small groups, usually working outside established theatrical channels, performing anything from circus skills to farcical plays for a mass audience. This form predates the oldest known plays and is exemplified today by commercial television. Theater as a mainstream public activity is most commonly literary drama performed at public theaters; it is usually commercial or else state supported for the general public. Greek tragedy, medieval morality plays, and contemporary Broadway theater all fall into this category. Theater as an elitist art form is most simply defined by its intended audience, a limited group with specialized tastes. This form ranges from the court performances of the Renaissance to modern avant-garde theater.
Elements of Theatrical Performance
A performance has only two essential elements: a performer and an audience. The performance may be pantomimed or may use language. The performer need not even be human—puppet drama has been popular throughout history, and mechanical or machine plays have been presented. A performance may be enhanced by costume, makeup, scenery, props, lighting, music, and special effects. These are used to help create the illusion of a different character, place, and time or to enhance the special quality of the performance and differentiate it from everyday experience.
Western Theater
Although the origins of Western theater are unknown, most theories point to a ritual origin in ancient and prehistoric rites and religious practices, because virtually all ritual contains theatrical elements. Different schools of thought attribute origins variously to ancient fertility rites, harvest festivals, shamanism, and similar sources.
Classical Theater
The earliest period in Western theatrical history is called classical, because it encompasses the drama and theater of the classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, and plays were written in Greek or Latin, the classical languages.
Greek Theater
The first evidence of dramatic literature dates from Greece in the 6th century BC, and the first extant piece of critical writing on the origin of theater is Aristotle's Poetics (about 330 BC). Aristotle claimed that Greek tragedy developed from dithyrambs—choral hymns in honor of the god Dionysus—which not only praised the god but often told a story. According to legend, Thespis, a choral leader of the 6th century BC, created drama when he assumed the part of the leading character in a dithyrambic story: He spoke and the chorus responded. From this it was but a small step to the addition of other actors and characters and the evolution of drama as an independent form, according to Aristotle. But the seemingly spontaneous development of highly sophisticated tragic drama with virtually no precedents is difficult to explain.
Greek tragedy flourished in the 5th century BC. Of the more than 1000 tragedies written during that century, only 31 remain, all by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The plays are highly formal, they are written in verse and consist of scenes (episodes) among characters (never more than three speaking characters in a scene) alternating with choral songs (odes). The stories are mostly drawn from myth or ancient history, although the focus is not on a simple retelling of a story (with which the poets often took liberties), but on a consideration of humanity's place in the world and the consequences of individual actions. Generally, little action occurred onstage and most events and information were related through dialogue and choral songs.
The plays were presented at festivals in honor of Dionysus, including the Great Dionysia at Athens, held in the spring; the Rural Dionysia, held in the winter; and the Lenaea, also held in the winter following the Rural Dionysia. The works of only three poets, selected in competition, were performed. In addition to three tragic plays (a trilogy) each poet had to present a satyr play—a farcical, often bawdy parody of the gods and their myths. Later, comedy, which developed in the mid-5th century BC, was also presented. The oldest extant comedies are by Aristophanes. They have a highly formal structure thought to be derived from ancient fertility rites. The humor consists of a mixture of satirical attacks on contemporary public figures, bawdy, scatological jokes, and seemingly sacrilegious parodies of the gods. By the 4th century BC comedy had supplanted tragedy as the dominant form.
As Greek culture spread in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, the topical, literary comedies and philosophical tragedies became inappropriate, and domestic comedy—called Middle and New Comedy—proliferated. Only one complete New Comedy survives—the Dyskolos (The Curmudgeon or The Misanthrope, 317 BC) by Menander. These plays are similar in plot and style to the situation comedies on television today. The plot hinges on a complication or situation revolving around love, family problems, money, or the like. The characters are stock—identifiable, simplified social types, such as a miserly father or a nagging mother-in-law.
The form of the Greek physical theater evolved over two centuries; interestingly, the permanent stone theaters that survive today as ruins were not built until the 4th century BC—that is, after the classical period of playwriting. The open-air theaters may have consisted of an orchestra—a flat circular area used for choral dances—a raised stage behind it for actors, and a roughly semicircular seating area built into a hillside around the orchestra, although modern scholars debate the layout of particular theaters. These theaters held 15,000 to 20,000 spectators. As the importance of actors grew and that of the chorus diminished, the stage became higher and encroached on the orchestra space.
The actors—all men—wore theatricalized versions of everyday dress, but, most important, they wore larger-than-life masks, which aided visibility and indicated the nature of the character to the audience. In the vast theaters, subtle gestures and facial expressions, upon which modern actors depend, would have been lost. Movement was apparently stately and formal, and the greatest emphasis was on the voice. Music accompanied the dances. An ancient Greek production was probably more akin to opera than to modern drama.
In keeping with its religious function, the theater was state supported, admission was free or nominal to everyone, and actors were highly regarded. Working at the same time were the mimes—male and female popular entertainers who plied their trade wherever an audience would toss a few coins.
Roman Theater
As the Roman Republic began to spread in the 4th century BC, it absorbed Greek territories and, naturally, Greek drama and theater architecture. Native Roman drama did not develop until the 3rd century BC. Although play production was originally associated with religious festivals, the spiritual nature of the events was soon lost; as the number of festivals increased, drama became primarily a secular entertainment. Not surprisingly, then, the most popular forms were comedy and the native Atellan farce. The great period of Roman playwriting began in the 2nd century BC and was dominated by the comedies of Plautus and Terence, which were adapted from Greek New Comedy. The plays generally involve domestic intrigue, although those of Terence have a moral value as well. Although the plays read much like contemporary comedies, in production one-third to two-thirds of the lines may have been sung.
Although Greek and Roman tragedies were performed during this period, the only extant tragedies, from the 1st century AD, are those of Seneca. They may have been closet dramas—plays written to be recited or simply read and not acted—because by the 1st century AD public interest was too limited to sustain tragedy. Seneca's plays were based on Greek myths but tended to emphasize supernatural elements, bloody violence, and obsessive passion. The content, form, and devices of Senecan tragedy—a five-act structure that included soliloquies and poetic speeches—became strongly influential in the Renaissance.
The Roman theater building, as that of Greece, developed after the period of classical writing had ended. In part, this happened because the Romans were afraid to offend one god by building a theater in honor of another. Only three theaters were constructed in the city of Rome. The use of the arch permitted the construction of freestanding theater buildings, as opposed to the Greek use of natural slopes and hillsides to support the seating area. Because the chorus had become insignificant, the orchestra was substantially reduced to a small semicircle. The large stage—about 24 to 30 m (about 80 to 100 ft) wide—was backed by an elaborate three-story facade with three doors; most Roman comedies are set on a street in front of three houses. As with Greek theater, scenery was minimal and suggestive.
By the 2nd century AD literary theater had declined in popularity and was replaced by spectacle and popular entertainment. Even the gladiatorial events were theatricalized with superficial plots, costumes, and settings. Partly because some Roman actors, especially the women, had licentious reputations, and partly because the mimes frequently satirized the Christians, among others, the emerging Christian church attacked the Roman theater, thereby contributing to its ultimate demise and to the lingering reputation of theater and actors as evil or immoral. With the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476, classical theater came to an end in the West; mainstream theatrical activity did not reemerge for more than 500 years. Only the popular entertainers, known as jongleurs and minstrels in the medieval world, survived and provided a thread of continuity.
Medieval Theater
Ironically, theater in the form of liturgical drama was reborn in Europe in the Roman Catholic church. As the church sought to extend its influence, it often adopted pagan and folk festivals, many of which had theatrical elements. By the 10th century the various church services provided possibilities for dramatic presentation; indeed, the Mass itself is not unlike a drama. Certain holidays were celebrated with theatrical activities, such as the procession to the church on Palm Sunday. The antiphonal, or responsive, songs of the Mass and the canonical hours suggested a type of dialogue. In the 9th century antiphonal embellishments known as tropes were being added to the complex musical elements of the Mass. An anonymous three-line Easter trope—a dialogue between the three Marys and the angels at the tomb of Christ—from about 925 is considered the origin of liturgical drama. By 970 a record of directions for this playlet had appeared, complete with costume elements and physical gestures.
Religious Drama—Miracle Plays
Over the next 200 years liturgical drama slowly evolved, with various stories from the Bible enacted by the clergy or by choirboys. At first, church vestments and existing architectural features of the church served as costume and setting, but soon more formal arrangements were devised. The bases of the physical staging were called the mansion and the platea. The mansion was a small scenic structure—a booth—that emblematically suggested a particular place such as the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, or heaven, and the platea was a neutral area in front of the mansion used by the performers to enact the scene.
As liturgical drama evolved, many thematically related Bible stories were presented sequentially, usually depicting scenes from the creation through the crucifixion. These plays are variously called Passion, miracle, or saint plays. Appropriate mansions were erected around the nave of the church, with heaven usually at the altar end and a Hellmouth—an elaborate monster's head with a gaping maw representing the entrance to hell—at the opposite end of the nave. Thus, all the scenes of the play were represented simultaneously, with the performers and spectators moving from one area of the church to another as the scenes demanded.
The plays obviously were episodic, spanning literally thousands of years, including widely separated locales, with temporal, spiritual, and allegorical settings. Unlike Greek tragedy, which was tightly focused to build to a cathartic climax, medieval drama did not always display conflict and tension. Its purpose was to dramatize the salvation of humankind.
Although the church encouraged early liturgical drama because of its didactic qualities, entertainment and spectacle became increasingly prevalent, and the church once again voiced misgivings about drama. Unwilling to relinquish the beneficial effects of theater, the church compromised by removing presentation of drama from the church building itself. The same physical arrangement was re-created in town-market squares. While the drama retained its religious content and intent, it became increasingly secular in its presentation. See also Miracle, Mystery, and Morality Plays.
Medieval Civic Drama
By the 14th century the production of plays was associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi and had evolved into cycles of as many as 40 plays; some scholars believe that the cycles, although similar to the liturgical dramas, are a separate development. They were produced by the community as a whole every four or five years. The productions might take from one or two days to a month to present. The production of each play was assigned to a trade guild, with an attempt to correlate the guild with the subject of the play—the boatwrights, for instance, might stage the play of Noah.
Because the performers were often illiterate amateurs, the plays tended to be written in an easily memorized doggerel type of verse; the playwrights are unknown. In keeping with the medieval world view, historical accuracy is often ignored, and logical cause and effect is not always present. Selective realism was employed in staging. The plays are filled with anachronisms and local and topical references; little thought was given to the realities of time and distance. Costumes and props were all contemporary. Whatever could be depicted realistically was—many instances were reported of actors nearly dying from too realistic crucifixions or hangings and of actors who portrayed devils being severely burned. On the other hand, the parting of the Red Sea might be indicated by the separation of a red cloth that would then be draped over the pursuing Egyptians to suggest the sea swallowing them. The free mixing of the real and the symbolic did not disturb medieval sensibilities. Spectacle and popular forms were employed wherever possible, and the Hellmouth was usually a tour de force of mechanical wizardry and pyrotechnics. Despite the religious content of the cycles, they seemed to be regarded in large part as entertainment.
Three major forms of staging were employed. Pageant wagons were most common in England. The former mansion became an elaborate rolling stage, somewhat like a small, modern-day parade float, that would move from place to place in the city. Spectators would assemble at each location; the participants would perform on the wagons and on a platea created on the street or with an adjoining platform. A variant of this method was used in Spain. In France, simultaneous staging was employed—several mansions would be erected side by side on a long, raised platform stage in front of an assembled audience. Finally, again in England, plays were sometimes staged "in the round"—in a circular area with mansions spaced about the circumference and the audience sitting or standing among the mansions.
Morality Plays
During this same period, folk plays, secular farces, and pastoral dramas emerged—again mostly by anonymous authors—and, of course, sundry popular entertainments persisted. All these influenced the evolution of the morality play in the 15th century. Although drawing on Christian theology for theme and characters, the moralities were unlike the cycles in that they did not depict episodes from the Bible, and were allegorical, self-contained dramas, usually performed by professionals such as the minstrels/jongleurs. The plays, such as Everyman, generally dealt with the individual's journey and conduct through life. The allegorical characters include such figures as Death, Gluttony, Good Deeds, and other vices and virtues. The plays are sometimes tedious reading for a modern audience—the rhyme scheme of the verse is often repetitive and singsong, the plays may be two to three times the length of a Shakespearean drama, and the moral appears obvious and patronizing—but the players interpolated music and action and exploited comic possibilities in many vice and demon roles to create a popular dramatic form.
Renaissance Theater
The Protestant Reformation in northern Europe put an end to most religious drama by the mid-16th century, and a new, dynamic secular drama developed in its place. Although the simple moralities and cycles seem a long way from the dramas of Shakespeare and Molière, the late medieval themes of humankind's struggle and adversity, the turn to secular and temporal concerns, and the reappearance of the comic and grotesque all contributed to the new drama. Moreover, the use of professional players in dramas gradually replaced the use of enthusiastic amateurs.
The Renaissance began at different times in different areas of Europe and was a slow process of change rather than a sudden shift in ideas and values. In theater, the Renaissance was an attempt to recreate classical drama. Because classical forms and production methods were imperfectly understood, and because the classical ideas were grafted onto contemporary practices and new technologies, Renaissance theater took on a totally new form with some classical characteristics. This form is generally known as neoclassicism.
Neoclassical Drama in Italy
Renaissance theater was first seen in Italy in the 15th century. The earliest plays were in Latin, but eventually they were written in the vernacular. They were based primarily on Roman models, although the dramatic theory was derived from the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics. This drama did not evolve naturally from religious or folk practices or even from existing dramatic forms; it was a purely academic pursuit. Thus, it lacked a certain vitality and often reads today as stilted, turgid literature. It was rarely performed in its own time, and then only by academic societies or for court festivals. But certain individual plays achieved some popular success, and a few, such as Niccolò Machiavelli's cynical farce Mandragola (The Mandrake, 1524), are still performed today. Regardless of the merits of individual plays, the forms and rules developed during this period shaped much European drama for several centuries.
The most important concept in Renaissance art was verisimilitude—the appearance of truth. This did not mean slavishly copying the real world, but rather eliminating the improbable and irrational while emphasizing the ideal, the proper moral order, and a sense of decorum. Thus, comedy and tragedy could not be combined, choruses and soliloquies were eliminated, good was rewarded, evil was punished, characters were depicted as ideal types rather than as idiosyncratic individuals, and so on. Most significant were the three unities: time, place, and action. Based on a passage in Aristotle, theoreticians created strict rules: A play could have only a single plot, must take place within a 24-hour period, and could occur only in one locale. The rationale was that a theater audience, knowing it had been sitting in one place for a limited time, would not believe a play that spanned several days or locations—such drama would defy verisimilitude and order. Adherence to such rules, rather than the response of an audience, was believed to determine the quality of a play. Although primarily formulated in Italy, these rules and ideals became most popular in France.
Scenic and architectural practices developed at this time have influenced theater production to the present day. Architecturally, an attempt was made to recreate the Roman stage. The early Italian theaters, however, were constructed in existing spaces such as palace halls or courtyards that were rectangular in shape. Scenically, the most important development was the discovery of perspective technique—painting on a flat surface to create the illusion of depth or space. This permitted the construction of stage scenery that created the illusion of a real place. The emblematic, selectively real scenography of the Middle Ages gave way to illusionism.
Although the law of the unities demanded a single setting, the practice developed of presenting lavish, allegorical scenes called intermezzi between each of the five acts of the drama. This required changeable scenery, and many methods were developed over the next centuries for shifting the scenery mechanically. To further enhance the illusion of the settings and to hide the stage machinery and stagehands, an architectural frame around the stage—the proscenium arch—was developed. The proscenium arch separated the space occupied by the spectators from the illusionistic world of the stage, framing the stage picture as well.
Creation of the Opera and the Opera House
The elaborate scenic displays and allegorical stories of the intermezzi, combined with the continuing attempts to recreate classical production, led to the creation of opera at the end of the 16th century. Although the earlier neoclassical drama had a limited audience, opera became popular. By the mid-1600s large opera houses were being built in Italy: Typically, they had a large scenic-proscenium stage, a horseshoe-shaped auditorium, and a profusion of boxes—cubicles arranged in tiers along the inner walls of the theaters to create private seating spaces. Sightlines from these boxes to the stage were generally poor, but the upper-class audiences came as much to be seen as to see.
Commedia dell'arte
While the elite were being entertained by neoclassical drama and spectacle, the general public was treated to commedia dell'arte, a vibrant, popular theater of improvisation. Emerging from various popular forms in the 16th century, troupes of commedia performers created stock characters such as Harlequin and Pantalone—exaggerations and stylizations of comic servants, foolish old men, lovers, lawyers and doctors, and the like. These characters, not unlike the Marx Brothers characters in 20th-century motion pictures, appeared in hundreds of plays derived from stark plots or scenarios. Each actor had standard speeches and bits of business known as lazzi. The scenarios provided outlines and indicated entrances, exits, and the focus of certain speeches. The performers would insert their lazzi into these circumstances as seemed appropriate and improvise the performance. Commedia characters spread throughout Europe, and troupes played not only in the streets but also in the noble courts. Commedia was at its peak from about 1550 to 1650 and influenced everything from Turkish puppet theater to the plays of Shakespeare and Molière.
Development of French Theater
Commedialike farce was popular in late-16th-century France and made it difficult for neoclassical drama to establish a foothold. No theater buildings existed in Paris at the time; hence roofed tennis courts were converted to theaters. The strong Italian influence in the French court led to the popular intermezzolike performances called ballets.
Neoclassical drama did not become common until the 1630s with the dramas of Pierre Corneille and, later, of Jean Baptiste Racine. Under the influence of Cardinal Richelieu, neoclassical tenets were strictly enforced, and Corneille's Le Cid (1636 or 1637), although enormously popular, was condemned by the French Academy for violating the proprieties of decorum and verisimilitude. Racine's plays successfully combine the formal beauties of neoclassical structure and verse with mythological subjects to create lofty, austere dramas.
Molière is considered France's greatest playwright. His plays are mostly commedia-influenced farces and comedies of manners—plays that satirize the customs of the upper classes—but they generally rise above their specific, contemporary targets and can be seen as observations on the flaws and limitations of humankind. A certain bitterness suffuses many of his dramas.
Molière was also the leading comic actor of his day, and he did much to alter the histrionic, bombastic style that then dominated French acting. He directed the members of his company, for whom he wrote specific roles in his plays, to speak in a more conversational manner and to move in a more restrained fashion. While he was successful in his own productions, the older grandiose style remained popular in France until the early 1800s. Within a few years of his death in 1673, Molière's company was combined in 1680 with the other dramatic troupes of Paris by order of Louis XIV into the Comédie Française—still in existence, and now the oldest national theater in the world. For the next century French theater was dominated by actors and produced little drama of note until the late 1700s. The quasi-legal fairground and boulevard theaters developed popular forms of theater during this time.
English Elizabethan and Restoration Drama
Renaissance drama developed in England during the reign of Elizabeth I in the latter part of the 16th century. Some academic neoclassical tragedies and comedies were being written and performed at the universities, but most Elizabethan poets tended to ignore neoclassicism or use it selectively. Unlike the Continental drama—self-consciously created and presented to an elitist audience—English drama drew on popular forms, a vital medieval theater, and the demands of a popular audience. Under the influence of England's changing political and economic status and the evolution of a fresh language, such playwrights as Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe gave birth to the epic, dynamic, unrestrained drama that culminated in the diverse and complex work of English theater's greatest genius, William Shakespeare.
The plays used a classical act and scene structure, employed verse (although often mixed with prose), borrowed theatrical devices from Seneca, Plautus, and the commedia dell'arte; freely intermingled tragedy, comedy, and pastoral; combined several plots; covered great expanses of time and space; mixed royalty with low-life characters; incorporated music, dance, and spectacle; and showed violence, battles, and especially blood. The subjects of tragedy tended to be historical rather than mythical, and the history was often used to make a contemporary point. The comedies were often pastoral, involving elements such as nymphs and magic. Subsequent English dramatists, notably Ben Jonson, adhered more strictly to neoclassical precepts.
Plays were presented during the warmer months in circular, open-air public theaters. The stage was a platform that thrust into the pit—a standing-room area for the lower-class spectators. Upper-class boxes were situated in three galleries around the theater. In the colder months plays were performed in so-called private indoor theaters for a more elite audience. The acting style for the early Elizabethan plays was heroic and exaggerated like the plays themselves, but by Shakespeare's time such actors as Richard Burbage were changing to a more restrained, natural style, as reflected in the famous speech to the players in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Scenery was minimal, consisting of little more than a few props or set pieces. The settings were probably created more vividly in the minds of the spectators by the suggestive, descriptive poetry of the plays.
After the death of Queen Elizabeth, the drama, reflecting the changing political and social atmosphere, became darker and more sinister in tone, while the comedies, notably those of Jonson, became cynical. An elaborate court theater, the masque, also developed. Similar to the Italian intermezzi and French ballets, masques presented allegorical stories—often tributes to the royal patron—in dance, music, and spectacle. Jonson was the primary writer of these events, and the architect Inigo Jones frequently designed the fantastic, Italian-style scenery and machinery.
In 1642 civil war erupted, and Parliament, under the influence of the Puritans, closed the theaters until 1660. During that time, most theater buildings were destroyed and with them most evidence of English Renaissance drama.
When production resumed after the Restoration, it catered to a small, elite group. Few new theaters were built; those that were constructed were based on Italian and French models. The Elizabethan thrust stage was retained but was combined with the Italian scenic stage and changeable perspective scenery. Women were allowed on the English stage for the first time since the Middle Ages. Plays now adhered loosely to neoclassical strictures. Although the tragedies of the period often seem stiff and academic to modern audiences, the witty, sophisticated, sexually suggestive comedies of manners of the period, especially those of William Congreve, still appeal to many.
Spain's Golden Age of Drama
Spanish Renaissance theater developed stylistically and physically much as did the Elizabethan, and flourished in the first half of the 17th century. Dominated by two prolific writers, Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón, most of the plays of the Golden Age are firmly rooted in Spanish concerns—such as personal honor and the divine right of kings—and serve both scholarly and popular interests. Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (1612-1614?) and Calderón's Life Is a Dream (1635) are two exceptions. Spanish theater did not continue to evolve in the way northern European theater did; after this period it was dominated once again by religious forms.
18th-Century Theater
The 18th-century theater in much of Europe was primarily an actors' theater. It was dominated by individual performers who had plays written for their particular talents; often, these actors rewrote classics to suit their tastes and abilities. Shakespeare's plays, especially, were often altered beyond recognition not only to suit particular actors but also to conform to neoclassical ideals. King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, for example, were given happy endings. But a reaction against neoclassicism and an increasing taste for sentiment also developed, largely because of the emergence of the middle class. Such playwrights as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing of Germany, Pierre de Marivaux of France, and George Lillo and Sir Richard Steele of England wrote dramas about middle- and lower-class characters in more or less realistic if oversimplified situations, in which goodness invariably triumphed. These plays were known variously as domestic drama, tearful comedy, or sentimental drama. Both in writing and production, increasing attention was given to realistic detail and historical accuracy, although these elements were not used with total consistency until the late 19th century.
19th-Century Theater
Throughout the 18th century certain philosophical and artistic ideas evolved that eventually coalesced, about the start of the 19th century, into a movement known as romanticism.
Romantic Theater
In its purest form, romanticism concentrated on the spiritual, which would allow humankind to transcend the limitations of the physical world and body and find an ideal truth. Subject matter was drawn from nature and "natural man" (such as the supposedly untouched Native American). Perhaps one of the best examples of romantic drama is Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) by the German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Based on the classic legend of the man who sells his soul to the devil, this play of epic proportions depicts humankind's attempt to master all knowledge and power in its constant struggle with the universe.
The romantics focused on emotion rather than rationality, drew their examples from a study of the real world rather than the ideal, and glorified the idea of the artist as a mad genius unfettered by rules. Romanticism thus gave rise to a vast array of dramatic literature and production that was often undisciplined and that often substituted emotional manipulation for substantial ideas.
Romanticism first appeared in Germany, a country with little native theater other than rustic farces before the 18th century. By the 1820s romanticism dominated the theater of most of Europe. Many of the ideas and practices of romanticism were evident in the late-18th-century Sturm und Drang movement of Germany led by Goethe and the dramatist Friedrich Schiller. These plays had no single style but were generally strongly emotional, and in their experimentation with form laid the groundwork for the rejection of neoclassicism.
The plays of the French playwright René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt paved the way for French romanticism, which had previously been known only in the acting of François Joseph Talma in the first decades of the 19th century. Victor Hugo's Hernani (1830) is considered the first French romantic drama.
Melodrama
The same forces that led to romanticism also led, in combination with various popular forms, to the development of melodrama, the most pervasive dramatic genre of the 19th century. Because it conjures up images of mustache-twirling villains and heroines tied to railroad tracks, and because as literature it is disdained by most critics, melodrama is generally ridiculed or ignored. Yet it is unquestionably the most popular drama ever produced; it provides a vehicle for spectacular scenic effects and powerful acting; and it provides the basis for today's popular although critically disdained theater—television. The word melodrama has two meanings: a mixing of tragedy and comedy (mixed drama), and drama accompanied by music. The latter definition can be applied easily to most movie and television production, in which characters are identified by themes, and audience emotions are manipulated through music.
The leading exponent of the form was the German playwright August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue, the most popular playwright in the world in the 19th century. His more than 200 plays were translated, adapted, or imitated in virtually every Western country. Almost as popular was the prolific French playwright Pixérécourt .
Melodramas are usually in three acts instead of the classical five; plots revolve around the conflict between a virtuous protagonist and an evil villain; the hero overcomes a series of seemingly insurmountable difficulties before triumphing; the plots are often contrived, build to a series of climactic moments, and include many reversals of fate; major events often include such spectacular elements as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, horse chases, or battles, all graphically depicted onstage. The combination of simple plot, clearly delineated characters, strong emotional values, spectacle, and moral tone made melodrama enormously popular, creating, perhaps, the largest audience in theater history.
Bourgeois Drama
Through the first quarter of the 19th century, both melodrama and romanticism tended to be somewhat exotic, focusing on historical or extraordinary events while idealizing or oversimplifying characterization. By the 1830s in England, however, the stylistic elements and characteristics of both turned toward contemporary life and domestic matters and seemingly serious thematic concerns. The plays of writers such as Douglas William Jerrold, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and later, Dion Boucicault were labeled as domestic melodrama, gentlemanly melodrama, or bourgeois drama. Emphasis was shifted from spectacle and sensation to the recreation of local color and domestic detail. This required new staging practices that laid the groundwork for much modern stagecraft. The box set came into vogue—a setting depicting three walls of a room with the implication that the audience was observing through an imaginary fourth wall. Three-dimensional furniture replaced the painted representations used previously. Because the sets were no longer mere background, the performers acted as if they were in the real environment of the setting, seemingly unaware of audience's presence. Bits of business developed—instead of assuming a pose and reciting lines, actors created realistic actions, appropriate for the character and situation. More and more attention was paid to accuracy and consistency in costume and setting. Playwrights too paid more attention to realistic detail.
As plays found a larger audience, economic practices altered. Where once actors were part of a repertory company that might perform dozens of plays in continuous rotation over the course of a season, the long run now became more popular. Actors were hired for a single production, to play as many consecutive performances as an audience would pay for.
The Well-Made Play
The French equivalent of the bourgeois drama was the so-called well-made play, a form popularized by A. Eugène Scribe and carried on by his follower Victorien Sardou. Similar to melodrama, the well-made play had a highly crafted formula, or structure. The specifics of each play varied, but the structure or plot outline remained basically the same: a careful exposition; a series of incidents leading to a climax; the skillful use of dramatic devices such as reversals, hidden information, important props—a letter, for example, falls into the wrong hands and must be retrieved—and contrived suspense. The well-made-play formula provided the basis for much of later 19th-century drama. Alexandre Dumas fils and Émile Augier, for example, wrote "thesis plays," which attempted to deal with contemporary social problems.
Naturalism and Social Criticism
By the mid-19th century the interest in realistic detail, psychological motivation for characters, and concern for social problems led to naturalism in drama. Turning to science for inspiration, the naturalists felt that the goal of art, like that of science, should be the betterment of life. Dramatists and players should, like scientists, objectively observe and depict the real world. Influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin, the naturalists believed that heredity and environment are at the root of all human actions and that the drama should illustrate this. The romantic concern for spiritual values was abandoned. The leading naturalist was the French writer Émile Zola, who compared the playwright to a physician who must expose disease in order to cure it—the drama therefore had to bring social ills into the open.
The result of this was drama that focused on the seamier elements of society rather than on the beautiful or ideal. Naturalists sought, in the words of the French playwright Jean Jullien, to present a "slice of life, put on the stage with art." Ideally, a naturalist play had no beginning, middle, or end or any sort of dramatic contrivance. In practice, of course, incidents were selected and shaped for dramatic effect.
Emergence of the Director
Naturalism was also largely responsible for the emergence of the modern director. Although every production throughout theater history was organized and unified by someone, the idea of a director who interprets the text, creates an acting style, suggests scenery and costumes, and gives the production a cohesive style is a modern one. Through much of drama history the director was the playwright. During the 18th and early 19th centuries the director was often the leading actor of the company—the actor-manager. The increasing dependence on an array of special effects and scenery, the desire for historical accuracy, the appearance of playwrights who were not actively involved in production, and the necessity of interpreting psychological aspects of character all brought about the need for a director. Duke George II of Saxe-Meiningen, who presided over the players in his ducal theater in Meiningen, Germany, is generally regarded as the first director. His autocratic style was a model for several generations of directors. The first naturalistic director in France was André Antoine, whose intimate Théâtre Libre produced many new naturalistic plays. Antoine attempted to create realistic detail in all his settings and directed his actors to behave onstage as they would in a real room.
Psychological Realism
Just as drama was moving toward increasing realism in its depiction of the external world, the pioneering 19th-century study of psychology led to increasing realism in the psychological motivation of characters. Late-19th-century playwrights developed three-dimensional characters placed in realistic settings and situations. The leading playwrights of this style were the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and the Swedish author August Strindberg, often considered the founders of modern drama. Their plays deal with such social problems as sexually transmitted disease, the sanctity of marriage, and women's rights, but they are also convincingly motivated studies of individuals. In their hands the naturalistic drama became increasingly introspective. The Irish-born writer George Bernard Shaw was influenced by Ibsen but more in the area of social commentary than in psychological realism.
Russian Drama
Russian drama began to develop in the late 18th century. The leading playwrights, such as Alexander Ostrovsky and Nikolay Gogol, were always somewhat realistic in style, but naturalism became dominant at the end of the 19th century with the plays of Leo Tolstoy and Maksim Gorki. Anton Chekhov, although more accurately labeled a symbolist, has certain naturalistic characteristics in his writings and was frequently interpreted as a naturalist. Konstantin Stanislavski, a director who modeled himself at first after the duke of Saxe-Meiningen, founded in 1898 the Moscow Art Theater with Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko for the production of naturalistic drama. They had particular success with the works of Chekhov. Stanislavski soon realized that real furniture and costumes were insufficient, and that a style of acting was needed that would allow performers to feel and project real emotions. His study led to a system, known as the Stanislavski method, that is still the basis of much actor training today.
Popular Entertainment
Alongside the serious, literary drama existed, of course, popular forms in the boulevard theaters of Paris, the London music halls, and the American vaudeville houses. Most of these emphasized variety entertainment—a mixture of music, dance, circus acts, and short comic plays. The interest in fantasy and spectacle was satisfied by pantomime, extravaganza, and burlesque—in its original form meaning travesty, not the striptease of more recent times. In 1866 in New York City several popular forms were brought together in a production called The Black Crook, generally considered the first musical comedy.
20th-Century Theater
From the time of the Renaissance on, theater seemed to be striving for total realism, or at least for the illusion of reality. As it reached that goal in the late 19th century, a multifaceted, antirealistic reaction erupted.
Avant-Garde Precursors of Modern Theater
Many movements, generally lumped together as the avant-garde, attempted to suggest alternatives to the realistic drama and production. The various theoreticians felt that naturalism presented only superficial and thus limited or surface reality—that a greater truth or reality could be found in the spiritual or the unconscious. Others felt that theater had lost touch with its origins and had no meaning for modern society other than as a form of entertainment. Paralleling modern art movements, they turned to symbol, abstraction, and ritual in an attempt to revitalize the theater. Although realism continues to be dominant in contemporary theater, its earlier functions are now better served by television and film.
The originator of many antirealist ideas was the German opera composer Richard Wagner. He believed that the job of the playwright/composer was to create myths. In so doing, Wagner felt, the creator of drama was portraying an ideal world in which the audience shared a communal experience, perhaps as the ancients had done. He sought to depict the "soul state," or inner being, of characters rather than their superficial, realistic aspects. Furthermore, Wagner was unhappy with the lack of unity among the individual arts that constituted the drama. He proposed the Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total art work," in which all dramatic elements are unified, preferably under the control of a single artistic creator.
Wagner was also responsible for reforming theater architecture and dramatic presentation with his Festival Theater at Bayreuth, Germany, completed in 1876. The stage of this theater was similar to other 19th-century stages even if better equipped, but in the auditorium Wagner removed the boxes and balconies and put in a fan-shaped seating area on a sloped floor, giving an equal view of the stage to all spectators. Just before a performance the auditorium lights dimmed to total darkness—then a radical innovation.
Symbolist Drama
Wagner's ideas were first adopted by the symbolist movement in France in the 1880s. The symbolists called for "detheatricalizing" the theater, meaning stripping away all the technological and scenic encumbrances of the 19th century and replacing them with a spirituality that was to come from the text and the acting. The texts were laden with symbolic imagery not easily construed—rather they were suggestive. The general mood of the plays was slow and dreamlike. The intention was to evoke an unconscious response rather than an intellectual one and to depict the nonrational aspects of characters and events. The symbolist plays of Maurice Maeterlinck of Belgium and Paul Claudel of France, popular in the 1890s and early 20th century, are seldom performed today. Strong symbolist elements can be found, however, in the plays of Chekhov and the late works of Ibsen and Strindberg. Symbolist influences are also evident in the works of such later playwrights as the Americans Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and the Englishman Harold Pinter, propounder of "theater of silence."
Also influenced by Wagner and the symbolists were the Swiss scenic theorist Adolphe Appia and the English designer Edward Henry Gordon Craig, whose turn-of-the-century innovations shaped much of 20th-century scenic and lighting design. They both reacted against the realistic painted settings of the day, proposing instead suggestive or abstract settings that would create, through light and scenic elements, more of a mood or feeling than an illusion of a real place.
In 1896 a symbolist theater in Paris produced Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi, for its time a shocking, bizarre play. Modeled vaguely on Macbeth, the play depicts puppetlike characters in a world devoid of decency. The play is filled with scatological humor and language. It was perhaps most significant for its shock value and its destruction of virtually all contemporaneous theatrical norms and taboos. Ubu roi freed the theater for exploration in any direction the author wished to go. It also served as the model and inspiration for future avant-garde dramatic movements and the absurdist drama of the 1950s.
Expressionist Drama
The expressionist movement was popular in the 1910s and 1920s, largely in Germany. It explored the more violent, grotesque aspects of the human psyche, creating a nightmare world onstage. Scenographically, expressionism is typified by distortion and exaggeration and a suggestive use of light and shadow. The plays, by writers such as Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller, were episodic and employed staccatolike language and intense imagery. Individualized characters were replaced by stock types or allegorical figures, much as in the morality plays, and plots often revolved around the salvation of humankind. O'Neill was strongly influenced by both Strindberg and the expressionists; he employed many of their techniques in some of his plays, such as Emperor Jones and Strange Interlude, to explore the psyches of his characters.
Other movements of the first half of the century, such as futurism, Dada, and surrealism, sought to bring new artistic and scientific ideas into theater.
Bertolt Brecht
The German playwright and theoretician Bertolt Brecht also reacted against the realistic drama. Brecht felt that drama could instruct and change society; therefore, it should be political. He believed that effective theater should bring the audience to the point of decision and action. To accomplish this, he wrote what he called epic—as opposed to narrative—dramas that continuously emphasized the theatrical aspects; the audience was thus constantly reminded that it was in a theater and could therefore make rational judgments about the material presented. He called this Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect," or "distancing effect"). The use of a bare stage, exposed lighting and scenic equipment, short scenes, juxtaposition of "reality" with the theatrical presentation—techniques fairly common today—are largely the result of Brecht's influence. Nonetheless, some critics maintain that even his most highly regarded plays—for example, Mother Courage and Her Children (1941) and The Threepenny Opera (1928, with music by Kurt Weill)—do not conform entirely to his theories.
Antonin Artaud
Contemporary with Brecht was the French theoretician Antonin Artaud, whose collection of essays, The Theater and Its Double (1938, translated 1958), had one of the most profound influences on post-World War II Western theater. Artaud perceived society as sick and in need of healing. Rejecting psychological drama, he sought instead a religious, communal theatrical experience that would bring about this healing. He compared his concept of "pure" theater to the plague in its ability to destroy old forms and allow something new and transformed to emerge. Drawing on his imperfect understanding of certain forms of Oriental theater and primitive ritual, he called for a new language of the theater, a so-called theater of cruelty. This would jolt spectators by minimizing or eliminating spoken words, using, instead, pure sounds, gestures, and movements and redefining the boundary between actors and spectators. Because Artaud's writings are so ambiguous, and because he provided virtually no concrete examples, his theories gave rise to many, often opposing, forms of theater.
Ensemble Theater
Perhaps the most significant development influenced by Artaud was the ensemble theater movement of the 1960s. Exemplified by the Polish Laboratory Theater of Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook's Theater of Cruelty Workshop, Théâtre du Soleil, the French workers' cooperative formed by Ariane Mnouchkine, and the Open Theater, led by Joseph Chaikin, ensemble theaters abandoned the written text in favor of productions created by an ensemble of actors. The productions, which generally evolved out of months of work, relied heavily on physical movement, nonspecific language and sound, and often unusual arrangements of space. Probably the most important production influenced by this movement was the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Marat/Sade, by the German playwright Peter Weiss. Although the play did employ relatively conventional dialogue and action (strongly influenced by Brechtian ideas), the production style employed many techniques that were taken from Artaudian-ensemble training.
Absurdist Theater
The most popular and influential nonrealistic genre of the 20th century was absurdism. Spiritually (if not directly) descended from the plays of Jarry, the Dadaists, and the surrealists, and influenced by the existential theories of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, absurdist dramatists saw, in the words of the Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco, "man as lost in the world, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless." Best exemplified by Ionesco's Rhinoceros (1959) and the Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), absurdist drama tends to eliminate much of the cause-and-effect relationship among incidents, reduce language to a game and minimize its communicative power, reduce characters to archetypes, make place nonspecific, and view the world as alienating and incomprehensible.
Absurdism was at its peak in the 1950s, but continued to influence drama through the 1970s. The American playwright Edward Albee's early dramas were classified as absurd because of the seemingly illogical or irrational elements that defined his characters' world of actions. Pinter was also classed with the absurdists. His plays, such as The Homecoming (1964), seem dark, impenetrable, and absurd. Pinter explained, however, that they are realistic because they resemble the everyday world in which only fragments of unexplained activity and dialogue are seen and heard.
Contemporary Drama
Although pure naturalism was never very popular after World War I, drama in a realist style continued to dominate the commercial theater, especially in the United States. Even there, however, psychological realism seemed to be the goal, and nonrealistic scenic and dramatic devices were employed to achieve this end. The plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, for instance, use memory scenes, dream sequences, purely symbolic characters, projections, and the like. Even O'Neill's later works—ostensibly realistic plays such as Long Day's Journey into Night (produced 1956)—incorporate poetic dialogue and a carefully orchestrated background of sounds to soften the hard-edged realism. Scenery was almost always suggestive rather than realistic. European drama was not much influenced by psychological realism but was more concerned with plays of ideas, as evidenced in the works of the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, the French playwrights Jean Anouilh and Jean Giraudoux, and the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode.
In England in the 1950s John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) became a rallying point for the postwar "angry young men"; a Vietnam trilogy of the early 1970s, by the American playwright David Rabe, expressed the anger and frustration of many toward the war in Vietnam. Under the influence of Brecht, many postwar German playwrights wrote documentary dramas that, based on historical incidents, explored the moral obligations of individuals to themselves and to society. An example is The Deputy (1963), by Rolf Hochhuth, which deals with Pope Pius XII's silence during World War II.
Many playwrights of the 1960s and 1970s—Sam Shepard in the United States, Peter Handke in Austria, Tom Stoppard in England—built plays around language: language as a game, language as sound, language as a barrier, language as a reflection of society. In their plays, dialogue frequently cannot be read simply as a rational exchange of information. Many playwrights also mirrored society's frustration with a seemingly uncontrollable, self-destructive world.
In Europe in the 1970s, new playwriting was largely overshadowed by theatricalist productions, which generally took classical plays and reinterpreted them, often in bold new scenographic spectacles, expressing ideas more through action and the use of space than through language.
In the late 1970s a return to naturalism in drama paralleled the art movement known as photorealism. Typified by such plays as American Buffalo (1976) by David Mamet, little action occurs, the focus is on mundane characters and events, and language is fragmentary—much like everyday conversation. The settings are indistinguishable from reality. The intense focus on seemingly meaningless fragments of reality creates an absurdist, nightmarish quality.
By the mid-1980s theater in much of the Western world seemed to be in a temporary period of stasis. Desire to experiment with new forms and ideas, as had existed for most of the post-World War II era, seemed to be lacking.
Musical Theater
Most traditional forms of popular entertainment have been subsumed by television in the course of the past 30 years. Of the popular forms, only the musical seems to have flourished. In the 1920s musicals were transformed from a loosely connected series of songs, dances, and comic sketches to a story, sometimes serious, told through dialogue, song, and dance. The form was perfected in the 1940s by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. By the 1960s much of the spectacle had gone out of musicals and they became more serious, even somber. In the late 1970s, however, possibly as a result of increasing economic and political problems (from which audiences wanted to escape), lavish musicals returned (many of them revivals) with the emphasis on song, dance, and light comedy. The trend toward spectacle continued into the 1980s with the musicals of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, including the Broadway productions of Cats (1982) and Phantom of the Opera (1988). A countertrend was also evident, as musicals such as Dreamgirls (1981) and Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George (1984) brought a new, more thought-provoking dimension to the form.
Eastern Theater
All branches of Eastern theater—the drama of India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia—have certain characteristics in common that clearly distinguish them from post-Renaissance western theater. Asian theater is presentational—the idea of naturalistic representation is alien to Eastern art. Although the dramas of specific countries vary, in general they are unified works of art—a realization of Wagner's total theater—that blend literature, dance, music, and spectacle.
Actor training, generally a long and arduous process, emphasizes dance, physical dexterity, and vocal skills rather than psychological interpretation. Costume and makeup tend to be elaborate, with all colors, images, and elements having specific meanings. Masks or masklike makeup are common. The stylization extends to movement—everyday actions are transformed into dancelike or symbolic gesture. Scenery too is stylized—the no stage of Japan, for instance, has architectural and scenic elements that are meaningful and unchanging regardless of the play. Peking opera has a vocabulary of action conventions: A long journey is indicated by circling the stage; an actor running across the stage with four pieces of cloth represents the wind, and the like. No attempt is made to disguise the theatricality of the event—visible stagehands bring props and scenery on- and offstage.
From the audience standpoint, the theater is participatory—the audience does not actually take part in the performance, but attendance is more like a shared experience. Attitudes and expectations can differ from those of Western spectators. The performances are often long, and the spectators come and go, eating, talking, and watching only their favorite moments. Here the solemnity of the Western theatergoer is missing.
Eastern theater, like other aspects of Eastern culture, was discovered by the West in the late 19th century. It influenced the ideas of acting, writing, and staging of the symbolists; of Strindberg, Brecht, and Artaud; of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold; of the German director Max Reinhardt; and of many others.
Indian and Southeast Asian Drama
Indian Sanskrit drama flourished in the 4th and 5th centuries. The complex, epic dramas are structured around nine rasas, or moods, rather than characters, because the plays are concerned primarily with spiritual matters. They use stories, however, drawn from the great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The stages were elaborately decorated, but no representational scenery was used. Movements of every part of the body, vocal delivery, and song were all strictly codified. Puppet, folk, and dance drama, especially the kathakali, have also been popular at various times in Indian history. See Indian Dance.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, puppet drama is dominant, notably the wayang kulit, or shadow puppets, of Java. In some places puppets are so highly regarded that actors study how to move like puppets.
Chinese Drama
Chinese drama began to flourish in the 14th century and was a highly literary drama with strict conventions. Since the 19th century, however, it has been dominated by Peking opera. Peking opera emphasizes acting, singing, dancing, and acrobatics over the literary text. In fact, a performance is more accurately described as a collection of excerpts from various literary works combined with acrobatic display. The action tends to be obscure, and the emphasis is on the skill of the actors. The stage is a bare platform with a few necessary pieces of furniture; actions are stylized; roles are codified; makeup is elaborate and grotesque; colors are symbolic. Under the Communist government, the subject matter has changed, but the style has been more or less retained.
Japanese Drama
The Japanese theater is probably the most complex in the East. Its two best-known genres are no and kabuki. No, Japan's classical theater, is a highly stylized, extremely controlled dance-music-drama that attempts to evoke a particular mood through the retelling of an incident or story. It is closely related to Zen Buddhism. No was at its peak in the 15th century. Kabuki dates from the 17th century and is more popular in style and content. Other genres are a sophisticated dance theater called bugaku and a doll or puppet theater called bunraku, in which the nearly life-size puppets are manipulated by onstage attendants. All forms rely on ritual, dance, and tradition. They are elegant and beautiful, emphasizing values totally unlike those of Western theater. See Japanese Drama.
See also Broadcasting, Radio and Television; Music, Theatrical; Musical; Theater Production.