Unit 1: Literary Terms Pertaining to Drama

I. Orientation: Drama as a Composite Art

Drama is the only literary genre written to be completed by bodies in space. Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE) already treats it as an imitation of action "not by narration but by persons acting," and that single distinction — enactment rather than telling — generates every term in this unit. A dramatic text is a score for performance: incomplete on the page, realised only in the theatre, and therefore governed by conventions of time, space, and audience awareness that no novel needs.

• Mimesis through action: Drama imitates praxis (action) directly; the narrator is dissolved into characters who speak in their own voices, so the reader has no mediating authorial commentary.
• Aristotle's six parts: plot (mythos), character (ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), song (melos), spectacle (opsis) — ranked in that order of importance, with plot as "the soul of tragedy."
• Dual existence: the text has a literary life (dialogue, stage directions, structure) and a theatrical life (acting, set, lighting, audience response). Terms like monologue belong to the first; epic theatre legislates for both.
• The convention of the fourth wall: the invisible plane through which the audience watches a supposedly sealed world. Naturalism assumes it; Brecht demolishes it.
• Compression: dramatic time is selective. The neoclassical "three unities" (action, time, place) formalised this; modern drama abandons the rule but keeps the pressure.
• Dialogue as the primary medium: exposition, conflict, and character must be carried by speech and silence, not description — hence the load placed on devices such as irony and soliloquy.

II. Drama and Play — Text, Genre, and Performance

A. Definition and Shared Ground

Both words name the same cultural object from different angles: drama names the kind, play names the individual thing.

• Etymology: drama from Greek dran, "to do, to act"; play from Old English plega, "game, sport, exercise." One stresses action, the other stresses the ludic, framed event.
• Overlap: Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) is a play, and it is also drama — the terms are not opposed, only differently scaled.

B. Define and Distinguish Between Drama and Play

The distinction is one of genre versus artefact, and of literary category versus staged event.

1. Drama — the genre and the mode
   • Category term: names one of the three great literary kinds alongside poetry and prose fiction; hence "Elizabethan drama," "Absurdist drama," never "Elizabethan play" as a period label.
   • Includes the non-theatrical: radio drama, closet drama such as Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820), written to be read rather than staged.
   • Names the quality of conflict: "the drama of the scene" refers to tension itself, an abstract noun usage a play cannot take.
2. Play — the single completed work for performance
   • Countable artefact: one can own three plays; one cannot own three dramas in the same sense.
   • Implies staging and audience: a play is "put on," "cast," "revived"; the word carries the playhouse, the playbill, and the playwright with it.
   • Not automatically literary: an improvised farce or a pantomime is a play but is rarely studied as drama.

• Working formula: drama = the art form and its literary study; play = one text-plus-performance unit within it. All plays are drama; not all drama takes the form of a play (dramatic monologue, screen drama).

III. Types of Drama

A. Basis of Classification

Types are distinguished by the outcome of the plot, the social rank of the protagonist, and the audience response sought (Aristotle's catharsis of "pity and fear" versus laughter).

B. Types of Drama

• Tragedy: a serious action ending in the protagonist's death or ruin, driven by hamartia (error of judgement) and often hubris, moving through peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition). Oedipus Rex; Hamlet.
  • Domestic/modern tragedy: shifts the hero from king to salesman — Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), argued in "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949).
• Comedy: light in tone, ends in reconciliation, usually marriage; obstacles are social rather than fatal.
  • Romantic comedy: love tested and rewarded — As You Like It.
  • Comedy of manners: satire of upper-class affectation through wit — Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
  • Comedy of humours: character built on a single dominant trait — Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598).
  • Farce: improbable situation, mistaken identity, physical business; plot over character.
• Tragicomedy: mingles the two, or averts a tragic outcome; Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale; Chekhov subtitled The Cherry Orchard (1904) "a comedy" though it ends in dispossession.
• Melodrama: sensational incident, sharply moral polarity of hero and villain, emotional appeal over psychological probability; dominant on the nineteenth-century stage.
• History play / chronicle play: dramatises recorded national events — Shakespeare's Richard II.
• Masque: courtly Renaissance spectacle of music, dance, allegory and elaborate machines, often by Jonson with Inigo Jones's designs.
• Problem play: takes a contested social issue as its subject and argues it through the plot — Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) on prostitution and economics.
• Theatre of the Absurd: Martin Esslin's term (1961) for drama whose form embodies a meaningless universe — circular plot, degraded language, Waiting for Godot (1953).
• Closet drama: written for reading, not staging; Byron's Manfred (1817).

IV. Epic Theatre

A. Definition and Principle

Epic theatre is Bertolt Brecht's anti-illusionist practice (formulated from the late 1920s, theorised in "Short Organum for the Theatre," 1949), which replaces emotional identification with critical judgement so that the audience sees society as changeable.

• Against the "dramatic" theatre: Brecht's own contrast sets plot against narrative, "involves the spectator in an action" against "makes him an observer," "feeling" against "argument."
• Historical materialism: human nature is shown as socially produced, therefore alterable. The stage asks not "what happens next" but "why does it happen this way."

B. Techniques and Devices

• Verfremdungseffekt (alienation / estrangement effect): making the familiar strange so it can be examined — actors demonstrating rather than becoming their characters, speaking in the third person in rehearsal.
• Gestus: a single crystallised gesture or attitude that exposes a social relation — Mother Courage haggling over the price while her son is executed.
• Episodic structure: self-contained scenes each with its own centre, so the outcome is not suspense but comparison; titles or placards announce the content in advance.
• Songs and direct address: interruption of the action to comment on it — "What Keeps Mankind Alive?" in The Threepenny Opera (1928).
• Visible apparatus: exposed lighting rigs, half-curtain, on-stage costume changes, projections — the theatre admits it is a theatre.
• Key plays: Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), The Life of Galileo (1938–39), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944–45).
• Antecedents and afterlife: Piscator's political documentary staging, Chinese opera conventions; later Brechtian practice in Bond, Fugard, Dario Fo, and Caryl Churchill.

V. Monologue

A. Definition

A monologue is an extended, uninterrupted speech by a single character; its dramatic function is to give access to matter dialogue cannot carry — interiority, retrospect, or persuasion at length.

B. Types and Function

1. Soliloquy — speech alone
   • Convention: the character is unaccompanied (or believes so) and thinks aloud; the audience overhears. Hamlet's "To be, or not to be."
   • Function: reveals motive, deliberation, and self-division; supplies information no other character possesses.
2. Monologue proper — speech before others
   • Convention: other characters are present and silent; the speech is directed at them. Antony's oration over Caesar's body.
   • Function: persuasion, narration of off-stage events, exposure of the speaker's rhetoric.

• Aside: a brief remark to the audience or one character, unheard by the rest — a miniature of the same convention.
• Dramatic monologue: a poetic form (Browning's "My Last Duchess," 1842) with an implied listener and a self-betraying speaker; dramatic in technique, not staged drama.
• Interior monologue: unstructured flow of thought, adapted to the stage in Krapp's Last Tape (1958), where the tape recorder makes the past a second voice.
• Monodrama: an entire play for one performer, such as Beckett's Not I (1972).

VI. Irony

A. Definition and Mechanism

Irony is a gap between what is said or expected and what is meant or occurs; on stage it depends on the audience holding knowledge that a character lacks.

Irony = (what the character believes / says)  ≠  (what the audience knows / what is)
        gap perceived by audience → tension, pathos, or comedy

B. Types of Irony in Drama

• Verbal irony: the speaker's words mean the opposite of their surface sense; sustained and hostile, it becomes sarcasm. Antony's repeated "Brutus is an honourable man."
• Dramatic irony (tragic irony): the audience knows what the character does not. Oedipus vows to hunt the murderer of Laius, who is himself; Duncan calls Macbeth's castle a place of "pleasant seat."
• Situational irony: an outcome inverts what the action prepared us for — the Absurdists' favoured mode, where Godot's non-arrival is the event.
• Cosmic irony: fate or the gods appear to mock human intention, as in the oracle that Oedipus fulfils by fleeing it.
• Structural irony: a naive or unreliable perspective sustained across the whole work, so every statement is doubled.
• Socratic irony: professed ignorance used to expose an interlocutor, the source of the term's Greek root eironeia, "dissimulation."

C. Dramatic Value

• Generates suspense without surprise: the audience waits for knowledge to arrive rather than for facts to be revealed, which is why the Greek myths could be restaged endlessly.
• Creates pathos: the gap measures the character's vulnerability, as when Lear says "I am a man / More sinn'd against than sinning."
• Enables critique: irony lets a play say two things at once, which is why it survives censorship and why Brecht's placards, announcing outcomes in advance, convert irony from a shock into an instrument of analysis.