Drama - Comedy

 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

1. 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 – quick-tempered

          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)