The text Studying Drama written by Michael Patterson deals with the question how drama as a literary genre really works and with its development from its origins in Ancient Greece till nowadays. At the beginning of the text Patterson exemplifies the general characteristics of a play. In a play environment and setting are not described directly to the reader like in a novel those informations are given via stage directions. A drama is always intended to be performed on a stage and characters communicate in dialogues.
Furthermore Patterson explains that the origins of drama lie in Ancient Greece, where the verb dran meant to do/act/perform and the Greek noun theatron can be translated with a place of viewing. The term play is normally connected to children who also act out roles recreating their imaginations by situations they have encoutered in real life. Here theatre/drama is seen as a world of making believe, where actors wear costumes, perform roles and pretend things which emanate from an author`s mind.
Patterson constitutes childrens`s play as a natural impulse with a functional value, where they prepair themselves for their adult existence. After that the author discusses the aspect that drama can be understood as an experience of transcendence. People involve themselves with the willingness to play at being someone else, which stands for a great common ground of humanity. Now Patterson leads to the point in what ways drama differs from poetry and narrative fiction. He explains that poetry and prose offer the feeling of transcendence as well but that these genres are always reported as tough they would lie in the past.
By reading a novel for example the reader is mostly confronted with a sense of distance, as if the emotion was already experienced or the action was already complete. Drama in contrast communicates a sense of action in the present. Even if a person knows a play well he is still able to enter the plot, feeling the tension and experiencing events as they really happen. Drama is the genre of present-tense. As a further aspect Patterson focuses on the objectivity of drama.
In contrast to drama, lyric and poetry express individual and subjunctive emotions of the writer, written from the point of view of a character or a fixed narrator, whereas a drama writer can contradict himself in public and is able to put his identity in each character but also to give them an own voice. Therefore establishment of writer`s own opinion gets difficult. Afterwards Patterson comes back to the point that a play is usually intended to be enacted, therefore concentration of time is persued. In extreme this could mean that stage time equals real time.
The opposite of concentration is time compression; hereby for example events of a whole day are presented as if they happened in a matter of minutes. A novel usually ranges over a longer period of time, changing location is possible. Drama is intended to be performed with a high level of realism and a defined location. Poetry and fiction are conceived to be enjoyed by the reader alone; he decides what he likes to read by his individual choice. Plays can be enjoyed as pure literature as well, but its full potential is first achieved when it is presented on stage.
But there are much more difficulties in seeing a play staged than reading a novel at home. For performing a place (building) is needed, performers and audience need to assemble at the same time. Drama is intended to take place in public and therefore drama can be constituted as the most public of all the arts. Moreover drama can have other functions than delighting people. It can get to a threat to oppressive regimes, as happend in the German Democratic Republic, where theatre provided a political forum for democratic debate and as a consequence caused collapse of Communist regime.
Patterson clarifies that a play poses greater danger to the status quo than hundreds of isolated individuals reading poems and novles at a non-pubic place. Furthermore the author informs the reader about Aristotle`s theory of drama which is the origin of all dramatic theories. Aristotle wanted to jusitifiy drama in terms of its purposefullness. In Ancient Greece watching a drama was inseparably connected with the idea of catharsis. This was understood as a medical term, a purgation of soul. By watching a tragedy spectator should feel pity for the hero`s downfall and fear for its outcome.
Thereby purgation, flushing out the bad juices of the body, takes place. When these emotions are flushed out, people can leave theatre less pitying and less fearful. So Aristotle was the first and most famous who tried to justyfie drama as being socially useful though not going into great detail. Further on Aristotle developed some ideas about nature of drama. He defined tragedy as serious drama where an action is immitated (mimesis) and reprocuction of reality on stage takes place, though an exact photographic copy is out of question. Action is an important fact referring to nature of drama.
Plays are about important individuals, usually a character lies at the centre of a drama, who is revealed and determined by events of the play. As a consequence characters proceed from action. Aristotle also listed the components of drama: Plot, Character, Dialogue, Meaning, Music and Performance, he suggested that in contrast to epic, the action of a play should be single and taking place between twentyfour hours. Hence drama tends towards a greater concentration of incident and time. The Greek philosopher divided drama into three unities (action, time and place).
In addition to that Patterson takes a nearer description of several components of drama. The plot hast to be differenciatated from mere story, because the story can be seen as raw material that the playwright shapes into a plot by using historical subjects on stage for example. Admittedly complexity of historical events needs to be simplified that a good dramatic plot can be constituted as a carefully a shaped version of a story. In Aristotle`s concept of drama a play must have beginning, middle and end. Because history is all middle (has no beginning or end in common sense) a point to begin the play has to be chosen.
This intruductiorary part of a play is called exposition. The playwright can create a formal prologue or establish the starting point by a short scene, possibly played by characters which have no further importance to the play. A quick recital of the background which is used for instance in more modern plays is also possilble. History does not contain neat engings as well. In traditional drama everthing aspires to a sense of completeness (death, marriage). A tragic death stands for this finality although often a good character who points forward to a more hopeful future appears.
A serious modern play ends without a definite outcome and the sense of finality is harder to achieve in realistic drama than in more poetic forms, because life in fact does not yield clear endings. The character is another component of drama. Patterson underlines that characters in a drama are revealed through action; they are introduced by what they say or do and are judged by the audience. The fact that characters can be determined by a particular situation they only have a very little existence outside drama. A novel in contrast provides the reader with background information or allows him speculating about characters` past lives.
Concept of character has evolved considerably in history of drama. The earliest form of characters where chorus leaders who provided an individual voice to responses from a chorus. In former times it was not allowed that more than one character appeared on stage at once. When that rule was relaxed there were extending possibilities of dramatic interaction with portrays of extreme types. In times of Greek drama and during Medieval periods characters remained generalized figures with little psychological nuance but with beginning of Renaissance a new psychological complexity of dramatic characters and complex individuals arose.
Those rounded characters as they are still most familiar to us today lead Bertold Brecht to experiment with so called flat characters. Dramatic characters of today are mostly presented in naturalistic mode not only determined by dramatic situation but products of heredity and environment, so that a drama of today gets more and more close to a novel where a speculation about a characters` existence outside the play is possible. The theory of Konstantin Stanislavski, a well known theatre director, pleaded for seeking out given circumstances of a character that the actor can approach a role from clues in the text or by his own imagination.
So providing a full biographical background for a character, by a conscious investigation of its psychological motivation becomes possible. Stanislavski`s aim is rounding out dramatic roles that might otherwise be flat (There are no small parts, only small actors, compare page 57, line 14). Today people emphasise on psychological characterisation by discussing critics about nature of drama and flaws in characters. The new kind of character is a character without past or any of the given circumstances, a character who refuses to reveal its own background.
Playwrights develop characters freed of accidents of individuality who can more easily become representatives of human condition (non-naturalistic characters). In contrast to that realistic characters offer the opportunity that people can match their behaviour against their own. Afterwards Patterson leads to the next component of drama, the dialogue. He explains that all serious drama in Western Europe was written in verse until eighteenth century and that the same linguistic register maintained in all dialogues of classical/neoclassical drama.
It was William Shakespeare who mixed up dialogue by using blank verse and often moved from poetry to prose. Later on playwrights little by little tried to imitate everyday speech in their stage dialogues (authentic dialogues), even though that is only an impression because conversations on stage are still logically developed sequences. Performance is also an important component. The written text should be seen as basis for performance. Reading a drama is always more accessible than seeing it on stage because difficult passages can be reread and directorial interventions are out of question. Physical setting is one of performances` main areas.
Here characters appear and the manner in which the lines are delivered becomes obvious. Theatrical signs can be found in each element of performance, the study of these signs is called semiotics. Stage directions give an indication of where the action is set. For example Shakespeare was writing for a bare stage, was free to roam but at the end of nineteenth century audience demanded more authentic settings; so more and more plays were written for one location that an elaborately authentic set could be constructed. Making drama more expressive, stage scenery was created by lightning and also sound effects became more important.
In semiotic analysis one distinguishes between icon, index and symbol. An icon is a thing for what it is (Patterson uses the example of the Christmas tree in Henrik Ibsen`s Nora- A Doll`s House). The index points about the environment of that icon, a symbol represents a particular situation (the dishevelled tree as a symbol for disharmony). Lightening may make statements about action of a play, characters` appearance, gestures or moves might tell something about the inner feelings of a character or reveal characters` actual thoughts. Soliloquies were primarily used for deceitful characters.
In realistic dialogue soliloquies became impossible because people normally do not talk to themselves. Gestures and moves became more important when meaning of realistic plays began to depend on sympathetic performances. Now Patterson focuses on interpretation which is the most important component communicating to an audience. A resultant problem is that plays which are not performed very often could easily be misunderstood because it gets difficult confuting a bizarre staging for example. As a next main aspect Patterson informs the reader about the different dramatic genres.
A tragedy involves death, better said the deaths of several individuals, no recovery is possible. A false step, not a compulsory evil act but a very foolish one, whose consequences are out of all proportion to the cause, leads the hero to catastrophe. Overconfidence (hubris) will invariably be punished by downfall (nemesis). The world is seen as an ordered place where events are not governed by chance and defiance as a magnificent value in human society. In drama of Middle Ages tragedy as a literary genre does not appear.
First with the new humanism of Renaissance the sense of a great figure who refuses to conform, taking the easy way out, accept his fate and finally plunges himself and others into tragic downfall was rediscovered. Patterson emphasises if the figures avoid their tragedies that they then lose our respect. During time tragedy became less important because changes of moral values in society like loss of religious face, loss of a sense of human individuality and loss of admiration for great heroic figures for example. That development already began in eighteenth century when bourgeois tragedies came up.
Here tragic events are put into middle-class/working-class background. Patterson underlines that those tragedies could be easily avoided by throwing a sum of money onto the stage whereas no gifts of money can save the classical ancient heroes (compare page 63, lines four to 8). Nowadays a play may generate pathos towards the victim so that a mixed sense of admiration and horror is not created. Comedy is a more populist genre with a plot about every-day-figures from common life. Its origins lie in fertility festivals, story in most cases turns around two lovers who find their path to happiness blocked by a figure with some power over them.
Finally the blocking figure is removed or his attitude has changed, lovers can come together and celebrate a happy ending together with the audience. As a consequence a comedy derives much more closely from the social context in which it is written and therefore possesses the universal impact of tragedy. Moreover Patterson mentions that a play with comic structure may also occasionally develop seriousness of theme that it is no longer regarded as comedy. Black comedy caused reversal of classical comedy. In traditional comedy society was secure and laughter was generated by those individuals who stepped beyond social norms.
In tragi-comedy the serious is blended with the comic, a permanent play between tension, laughter and pain. Moreover Patterson differentiates between humoristic and satiric black comedy: A humorist includes himself and the follies of all humankind in his laughter and sees life as the biggest joke of alls whereas a satirist points at others and laughs at their follies. At the end of his text Patterson points out that a tragi-comedy does not represent a dilution of conventional genres, rather a strengthening to demands of contemporary society.
