Definition:
Drama presents
fiction or fact in a form that could be acted before an audience not read in
private. A play has a plot, characters, dialogue and atmosphere, and an outlook
on life.
Basil Worsfold
defines Drama in “Judgement in Literature”, “Drama is a composite art, in which
the author, the actor, and the stage manager all combine to produce the total
effect”
Structure:
A play requires
five phases:
1. Exposition explains the circumstances or situation from which
the action is to take its course
2.
Complication
or Rising Action progresses
the action and reveals the conflict.
3.
Climax
is the action that
takes a turn for the better or worse - the central conflict is addressed in a way that cannot be undone.
4.
Denouement
or Falling Action unravels
the complication
5. ReSolution/Catastrophe
decides the fate
of its characters based on the climax
- Kinds of Drama
Drama is broadly divided into
Tragedy and Comedy. Tragedy deals with the dark side of life and aims at
inspiring the audience with pity and awe. Comedy deals with the light side of
life, and aims at evoking laughter.
Comedy:
Comedy
arouses and vicariously satisfies the human instinct for mischief. The playing
of tricks on unsuspecting victims, whether by other characters or quirks of
chance or both, recurs continually in comedy. The tendency to derive delight
from watching characters who come to find situations difficult and
problematical. A situation which to a comic character seems dangerous but which
implies no great threat to the audience or humanity in general, is a typical
comic situation. Comedy in itself is thus neither morally useful nor immoral.
Types of Comedy
1. Romantic
comedy:
It
represents the course of love that does
not run smooth yet overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union.
Eg.
Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), the source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It
(1599).
2. Satiric
comedy:
It
ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines or else attacks
deviations from the accepted social order by making ridiculous the violators of
its standards of morals or manners. The early master of satiric comedy was the
Greek Aristophanes, c. 450–c. 385 BC, whose plays mocked political,
philosophical, and literary matters of his age. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben
Jonson wrote satiric or (as it is sometimes called) “corrective comedy.”
Eg.
Ben Jonson’s Volpone and The
Alchemist
3. The
comedy of manners:
It
deals with the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated
upper-class society. It relies for comic effect in large part on the wit and
sparkle of the dialogue—often in the form of repartee, a witty conversational
give-and-take. It constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match, violations of
social standards and decorum by would-be wits, jealous husbands, conniving
rivals, and foppish dandies.
Eg.
William Congreve’s The Way of the World and William Wycherley’s The
Country Wife
4. Farce:
It
is designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter—“belly laughs,” It
employs highly exaggerated or caricatured types of characters, puts them into
improbable and ludicrous situations.
Eg.
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
High comedy, as described by George Meredith in a
classic essay The Idea of Comedy (1877), evokes “intellectual
laughter”—thoughtful laughter from spectators who remain emotionally detached
from the action—at the spectacle of folly, pretentiousness, and incongruity in
human behaviour. Meredith finds its highest form within the comedy of manners,
in the combats of wit identified as the “love duels” eg. Benedick and Beatrice
in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (1598–99) and Mirabell and
Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700).
Low comedy, at the other extreme, has little or no
intellectual appeal but undertakes to arouse laughter by jokes, or “gags,” and
by slapstick humour.
5. Comedy
of Humours:
A
type of comedy developed by Ben Jonson, the Elizabethan playwright, based on
the ancient physiological theory of the “four humours”. The humours were held
to be the four primary fluids—blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and
melancholy (or black bile)—whose “temperament” (mixture) was held to determine
a person’s both physical condition and type of character. An imbalance of one
or another humour in temperament was said to produce four kinds of
disposition.
Sanguine
– optimistic
Phlegm - sluggish
Choler –
Meloncholy- dejected
Eg.
Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1600)
6. Sentimental
Comedy:
A
middle-class reaction against what had come to be considered the immorality of
situation and indecency of dialogue in the courtly Restoration comedy resulted
in the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century. It replaced the tough
amorality and the comic or satiric representation of aristocratic sexual
license in Restoration comedy.
Eg.
Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722) and Richard Cumberland’s The
West Indian (1771)
