DRAMA

Drama as Literature
• Drama has much in common with the
other genre of literature. Like fiction,
it focuses on one or a few
characters. It is like poetry because
both genres develop situation
through speech.
• But unlike both fiction, drama is
literature designed for impersonating
by people-actors-for the benefit and
delight of other people-an audience
• Drama is unique genre because it
can be presented and discussed
both as literature-drama itself- and
as performance- the production of
plays in the theatre.
The Major Elements of
Drama
• Text
• Language
• Characters
• Structure
• Point of View
• Tone
• Theme or Meaning
 The Text
The text of a play is in effect a plan for
bringing the play into action on the
stage. The most notable features of the
text are dialogue, monologue, and stage
direction
1. Dialogue is the conversation of two or
more characters.
2. Monologue is spoken by a single
character who is usually alone on stage.
3. Stage directions are the playwright’s
instructions about facial and vocal
expression, movement and action,
gesture and ‘body language’, stage
appearance, lighting, and similar
matters.
Language, Imagery, and
Style
• Characters use language to reveal
intimate details about their lives and
their deepest thoughts- their loves,
hatred, hopes, and plans.
• Dramatists employ wide-ranging
connotation, metaphors and symbols
that acquire many layers of meaning.
• Dramatist also make sure that the
words of their characters fit the
circumstances, the time, and the
place of the play.
• In addition, Dramatists employ
accents, dialects, idiom, jargon, and
clichés to indicate character traits.
 Characters
• Characters are persons the
playwright creates to embody the
play’s action, ideas, and attitudes.
• The major quality of characters in
drama is that they become alive
through speech and action. To
understand them, we must listen
to their words and watch and
interpret how they react both to
their circumstances and to the
characters around them.
 The most major dramatic
characters
 Protagonist (the first or leading struggler or
actor), usually the central character, is
opposed by the Antagonist (the one who
struggle against)
 Drama also presents both Round and Flat
characters. The Round Characters profits
from experience and undergoes a
development in awareness, insight,
understanding, moral capacity, and ability to
make decisions. The Flat, static, fixed, and
unchanging characters does not undergo any
change or growth
Structure/PLOT
• The way a play is arranged or laid
out is its structure.
• There are FOUR basic stages of
structure: (1) exposition or
introduction, (2) complication and
development, (3) crisis or climax,
and (4) dénouement/resolution, or
catastrophe.
• In nineteenth century, Gustav
Freytag visualized this pattern as a
pyramid called Freytag Pyramid
Freytag Pyramid

2 4

1 5
1. exposition or introduction,
2. complication and development,
3. crisis or climax,
4. dénouement, resolution, or
catastrophe.

NOTE :
1. The Exposition or Introduction brings
out everything we need to know to
understand and follow what is to
happen in the play (the play’s
background, characters, situations,
and conflicts).
2. The complication and development mark
the onset of the play’s major conflicts.
IN the second stage, also called the
rising action, we see the beginning of
difficulties that seem overwhelming and
insoluble.
3. The crisis or climax is the culmination of
the play’s conflicts and complications-
the intense moments of decision. In the
third stage, all the converging
circumstances compel the hero or
heroine to recognize what needs to be
done to resolve the play’s major
conflicts.
4. The falling action is a time of
avoidance and delay.

5. The denouement is the end,

the logical outcome of what
has gone before. The function
of the denouement is to end
complication and conflicts, not
to create new one.
Point of View

• In Drama, point of view refers to

play’s perspective or focus-the
way in which dramatists direct
attention to the play’s
characters and their concerns
• The dramatist can also keep
characters and issues in our
minds by causing other
characters to speak about
 Tone or Atmosphere
• Authors of play convey tone using
vocal ranges, stage gestures,
silence, intensives stares, and
shifting glances for creating
moods and controlling attitudes.
Symbolism and Allegory
• The meaning of a symbol
extends beyond its surface
meaning.
• There are two kinds of symbols:
cultural and universal symbols.
• When a play offers consistent
and sustained symbols that
refer to general human
experiences, that the play can
be constructed as an allegory.
Theme
• Subject and theme are the complex
of ideas presented by the dramatist.
• The aspects of humanity a
playwright explore constitute the
play’s subject. Play’s can be about
love, religion, hatred, war, ambition,
death, envy, or anything else that is
part of the human condition.
• The ideas that the play dramatizes
make up the play’s theme or
meaning. A play might explore the
idea that love will always find a way
or that marriage can be destructive,
etc.
PERFORMANCE
The Unique aspect of Drama

Performance makes a play

immediate, exciting, and
powerful. The elements of
performance are the actors, the
directors and the producers, the
stage, sets or scenery, lighting,
costumes and make up, and the
audience.
 The elements of Performance
1. Actors bring the play to our eyes and
ears. They are trained and experienced
to exert their intelligence, emotion,
imaginations, voices, and bodies to
bring their roles into our presence.
2. The director and the producer create
and support the play’s production. All
aspect of performance are shaped and
supervised by them. The producer, the
one with money, is responsible for
financing and arranging the production.
The director cooperates closely with
the actors and guides them in
speaking, responding, standing, and
moving in ways that are consistent
with his or her vision of the play.
 ...
• The Stage is the location of both
speech and action.
• Sets (scenery) create the play’s
location and appearance. Most
productions use sets/scenery to
establish the action in place and time,
to underscore the ideas of the director,
and to determine the level of reality of
the production.
• Lighting creates clarity, emphasis, and
mood. Lighting become integral
element of set designs, especially
when the dramatist uses a scrim ( a
curtain that becomes transparent
when illuminated from behind), which
permits great variety in the portrayal of
scenes and great rapidly in scene
...
• Costumes and Makeup establish the nature
and appearance of the actors. Costumes and
makeup help the audience understand a
play’s time period together with the
occupation, mental outlooks, and
socioeconomic conditions of the characters.
• The audience responds to the performance
and helps to shape it. To be complete, plays
require an interaction of actors and audience.
The audience’s reaction (laughter, gasps,
applause) provide instant feedback to the
actors and thus continually influence the
delivery and pace of the performance. There
is intermediary between the audience and the
stage action-no narrator, as in prose fiction,
and no speaker, as in poetry.
Drama From Ancient Times to Our
Own
Tragedy, Comedy, and Additional Form

• There are 4 forms of drama: tragedy,

comedy, tragicomedy, and melodrama.
• Tragedy was born in Greece in the fifth
century B.C. It is an imitation of an action
that is serious, complete in itself, and of a
certain magnitude; in a language
embellished with each kind of artistry cast
in the form of drama, not narrative;
accomplishing through incidents that
arouse pity and fear the purgation of these
emotions (Aristotle). Tragedy involves
events which climax in unhappy disaster.
 ...
• Comedy deals with events which
inevitably find some sort of pleasing or
happy resolution. Its subject matter is
essentially light, the hero in comedy
overcomes impediments-and usually in
an entertaining, humorous way, and full
of cheerful optimism.
• Tragicomedy is the combination of
tragedy and comedy. The combination
of two basic emotion of human being is
the central of tragicomedy.
• Melodrama, essentially comes from
opera, which dialogues are sung and
accompanied by music.