Chapter 4: History of English Drama | history of english drama pdf
OBJECTIVE TEST [PAGE 137]
Objective Test | Q 1 | Page 137
Name any four periods of History of British Drama.
Solution:
The periods of History of British Drama are as follows:
- The Medieval Period
- The Renaissance Period
- The Restoration Period
- The Victorian Period
- The Modern Period
- The Postmodern Era.
Objective Test | Q 2 | Page 137
List the four elements of drama.
Solution:
The elements of drama are plot, characters, characterization, dialogue, stage directions, conflict, and theme.
Objective Test | Q 3 | Page 137
State a type of drama each from any four periods of history.
Solution:
The periods of the history of British Drama are each well known for their characteristic plays. These are of the following types:
- Medieval Period: Didactic plays, Mystery plays, Miracle plays, Cycle plays, Morality plays.
- Renaissance Period: Tragic – Comedy, Melancholy, Revenge plays.
- Restoration Period: Heroic drama, Pathetic drama, Restoration drama, Restoration comedy.
- Victorian Period: All types of plays.
- Modern Period: Stream of consciousness, Absurd plays, Poetic drama, Radio drama.
- Post-Modern Era: Almost all types of dramas, Kitchen sink drama.
Objective Test | Q 4 | Page 137
Compare the features of a comedy and tragedy.
Solution:
| Comedy | Tragedy | ||
| a. | Theme | A Comedy deals with lighter themes like happiness, fun, laughter, etc. | A Tragedy deals with the darker themes of pain, death, etc. |
| b. | Response | A Comedy seeks to evoke laughter. | A Tragedy seeks to induce emotions of pity and fear in the audience. |
| c. | Plot | A Comedy relies on unusual circumstances and witty dialogues. | In a Tragedy, the main character usually has a moral flaw that causes the central tragic event. |
Objective Test | Q 5 | Page 137
State the difference between poetry and drama.
Solution:
Drama is a medium of expression through performance based on a script. This script is written in the form of dialogues. On the other hand, poetry language is expressed in rhythm and metre.
Objective Test | Q 6 | Page 137
State the difference between drama and novel.
Solution:
Drama is a medium of expression through performance based on a script. While the script of a drama is written in the form of dialogues, a story or novel is written in a narrative form, i.e., in a manner that is similar to telling a story.
Objective Test | Q 7 | Page 137
Define drama.
Solution:
Drama is a creative work in verse or prose that aims to tell a story through action, costume, setting as well as dialogue and is typically performed in a theatre.
Objective Test | Q 8 | Page 137
Explain the term plot.
Solution:
The plot is the series of events that take place during the course of the play. It is like the plan or scheme of the play. It has a beginning, middle, and an end.
Objective Test | Q 9 | Page 137
Differentiate between characters and characterization.
Solution:
While the characters of a drama are the personalities that the actors must play, characterization refers to the understanding of the unique qualities of the actors and gaining insight into who they are, and establishing connections with them.
Objective Test | Q 10 | Page 137
Enlist a few reasons for watching a drama live on the stage.
Solution:
Some of the reasons for watching a drama live on stage are:
Each performance is unique: Unlike watching a movie on the screen, each performance differs from the next, even when the same play is being performed. This is because the emotions of the actors, their gestures, dialogue delivery, etc. can never be exactly the same for every performance.
The audience is a part of the performance: The reaction of the audience may directly influence the actors and as a result, they might change or modify their performance. Thus, the audience is a crucial part of each performance.
It is an experience in reality: Unlike a movie screen, everything that happens on stage seems more real. Because the performance unfolds before our very eyes, there is a greater connection to the characters and story as compared to watching it on a screen.
Every aspect is visible: In a live performance, the audience can choose to focus on whatever aspect of the drama that they like, no matter how minor. This is because the entire setting is visible to them at the same time, unlike a movie screen, in which the character or frame to be shown to the audience is predecided.
History of English Drama
‘How dramatic you are!’ is your response when a friend exaggerates
or overreacts. It means you are correctly using the adjective form of
the word ‘drama’. Drama is a performance which is essentially loud,
exaggerated and larger than life. It is an audio visual medium. The
audience sitting around, in front of, close to or in the last row of the
theatre, should be able to hear and see the actor on stage.
For example,
a stage whisper is far louder than a whisper in real life. This would be
an example of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. It can be defined as a
willingness to accept the unreal. It may also mean sacrifice of realism
and logic for the sake of enjoyment. The term was coined by the poet
and aesthetic philosopher Samuel T. Coleridge. The term often applies to
fictional works of the action, comedy, fantasy and horror genres. It refers
to the willingness of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium.
Drama is a medium of expression, whereby performers express themselves
artistically. The performance is based on a script which is in the form of
dialogues, whereas a story or a novel is written in the narrative form.
Poetry is language expressed in rhythm and metre. Drama is the specific
mode of fiction represented in performance. A play, opera, mime and ballet
are performed in a theatre, on radio or on television.
History of English Drama
A Short History of Drama
(I) Introduction to English drama (Theatre) : Drama has its origins in folk
theatre. We therefore cannot consider drama merely as a part of literature.
Words are the medium of literature as an art but drama is a multiple art
using words, scenic effects, music, gestures of the actors and the organising
talents of a producer. The dramatist must have players, a stage and an
audience.
The beginnings of drama in England are obscure. There is evidence
to believe that when the Romans were in England they established vast
amphitheatres for the production of plays but when the Romans departed
their theatre departed with them. Then there were minstrels. People enjoyed
their performances
. Gradually by the 10th century the ritual of the plays that
itself had something dramatic in it, got extended into the rudiments of a play.
Between the 13th and the 14th century drama started having themes which
were separated from religion. The words themselves were spoken in English,
a longer dramatic script came into use, and they were called Miracle plays.
Later, these religious dramas were the Morality plays in which characters
were abstract vices and virtues. These were allegories.
(II) Elizabethan and Restoration drama (Theatre) : These Secular Morality
plays have direct links with Elizabethan plays. The Renaissance imposed a
learned tradition, classical in depth with themes of education, general moral
problems and secular politics. The plays had nothing to do with religion.
There were examples of both, comedy and tragedy. Thomas Kyd, Christopher
Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the prime dramatists of this era. It
was Kyd who discovered how easily blank verse might be converted into a
useful theatrical medium which Shakespeare used brilliantly in all his plays.
Tragedy developed in the hands of Kyd and Marlowe. Comedy had also
proceeded beyond rustic humour.
But by the nineties of the 16th century, the
theatre in England was fully established but complicated conditions governed
the activities of the dramatist.
The public theatre of the 16th century differed in many important ways
from the modern theatre. It was open to sky, without artificial lighting,
the stage was a raised platform with the recess at the back supported by
pillars. There was no curtain and the main platform could be surrounded on
three sides by the audience. Around the theatre there were galleries.
In the
17th century the enclosed theatre gained importance. There was increasing
attention to scenic device as theatre became private.
Shakespearean era came into existence in the 16th century to the public
theatre. He wrote for the contemporary theatre, manipulating the Elizabethan
stage with great resource and invention. But the genius of Shakespeare should
not allow the rest of the drama of his age to be obscured. Contemporary
132
to him was Ben Johnson, a classicist, a moralist and a reformer of drama.
In comedy, Johnson’s genius is found at its best and his influence was
considerable. The Restoration dramatists leaned strongly upon him.
Closing of theatres by the Puritans in 1642 brought this greatest of all
periods in the history of English drama to an end. With the Civil wars
no theatre existed between 1642 to 1660.
The next phase which appeared
after the Restoration produced a very different kind of dramatic literature.
Dramatists like Chapman, Thomas Middleton, Webster and Dekker were at
the forefront.
When Charles II came back with the Restoration of 1660, the theatres
were reopened. The Restoration comedy achieved its peculiar excellence.
Drama developed into class drama with upper-class ethos. It lasted beyond
this period into the first decade of the 18th century. Comedy in the early 18th
century declined into sentimentalism.
It became Comedy of Manners. George
Etherege was its most important exponent. From such depths the drama
was rescued by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan. With Sheridan,
something of the brilliance of restoration dialogue returned into comedy but
with more genial atmosphere. The characters were firmly presented with
clarity, reminiscent of Johnson but with no depth in Sheridan’s world, no
new interpretation of human nature. In this he was nearer to Oscar Wilde
than to Johnson.
(III) Modern drama (Theatre) : The modern theatre with its picture frame stage,
its actresses taking female parts, its moveable scenery designed to create a
visual image of the locale of each scene and its artificial light was developed
during the Restoration period. There is clear influence of France on theatre,
the audience and the themes.
The drama of the early 19th century was on the whole on the way
to decline for many reasons. The theatre was home, mainly to irregular
spectacle, melodrama and farce.
A simple external reason can be found in
the monopoly held by the two houses, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, for
the performance of serious drama. The audiences which gathered to the 19th
century theatre had not the intelligence or the imagination of the Elizabethan
audience. The danger in the 19th century theatre was that, above all, it was
unrelated to the life of the time. The changes in the structure of society
had so modified the human personality itself that a new interpretation was
essential.
Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist of the 19th century, dominates the
realistic drama.
He developed modernist, realist, social and psychological
dramas like The Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. They
are far more subtle in stagecraft and profound in thought than anything in
the modern English theatre. But it was only George Bernard Shaw who
133
was deeply influenced and affected by Ibsen’s innovative contributions and
experimentation. He was the most brilliant playwrights of his times. He alone
had understood the greatness of Ibsen and he was determined that his own
plays should also be a vehicle for ideas.
The responsibility of elevation of
the English drama to the brilliance of the Norwegian, fell with Oscar Wilde
and G. B. Shaw in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The 20th century showed a talent in the drama with which the 19th
century could not compete. H. Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, St. John
Ervine were some of the playwrights who explored contemporary problems.
St. John Ervine had been associated with a group of Irish dramatists whose
work was normally produced in the Abbey theatre in Dublin.
Much that is
best in the modern drama in English developed from this movement. One of
its originators was Lady Gregory with W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge. They
were the most important dramatists of this Irish revival who used a sense
of tragic irony, a violent species of humour and a rich and highly flavoured
language.
T.S. Eliot experimented with Greek tragedy in the early forties of the
20th century. Other dramatists of the modern era, John Osborne, wrote on
people who grew up after the Second World War. Kingsley Amis wrote
about frustrated, anti-establishment young people. Osborne’s Look Back in
Anger brought a new vitality to the theatre scene. It was more a cultural
phenomenon than the work of literature. Other important playwrights of the
modern era include Anton Chekhov, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Harold
Pinter.
IV) Indian drama
(Theatre) :
Earliest seeds of modern Indian Drama can be found in the Sanskrit Drama
from the first century A.D. Mahabhasya by Patanjali provides a feasible date
for the beginning of theatre in India. The major source of evidence is ‘A
Treatise on Theatre’ (NatyaShastra) by Bharat Muni is the most complete
work of dramatology in the ancient world. It gives mythological account of
the origin of theatre. Modern Indian drama, however, has influences from
all over the world, as well as Sanskrit and Urdu traditions
History of English Drama.
4.1 history of english drama mcq
4.1 history of english drama summary
history of english drama pdf
history of english drama notes
4.1 history of english drama brainstorming
history of english drama objective test
state a type of drama each from any four periods of history.
differentiate between characters and