COURSE :Introduction To Literature

DEPARTMENT : ENGLISH

PROFESSOR : WATERS

Lecture1 : Drama

View the Power Point Presentation of the Lecture

Welcome to the drama unit. Alfred Hitchcock says that drama is life with the dull bits cut so it’ll be interesting to see if you feel that way after this unit is over. Literature and we’ve looked at poetry, we’ve looked at fiction and today we’re gonna look at drama. Well drama is like fiction in that it utilizes plot and characters just like fiction does, just like short stories and novels, it develops a theme, it arouses emotion in the audience just like fiction does in a reader or it appeals to humor. Drama like poetry and fiction can either be escapist in nature or interpretive in nature. Drama is unlike fiction and poetry in that it’s presented on a stage and because drama is presented on a stage imagination is required to see what isn’t there. Events that are depicted must be of a size appropriate for a stage setting. Now none of what I’m telling you is something that is new to you because you know that when you go to see a play that when you see someone behaving like a horse, they’re there to represent a horse and so it’s your imagination that allows you to believe that okay that’s a horse on the stage and not a person or you know if they have some prop on the stage that’s supposed to represent something then you know that that’s a symbolic thing and everything so imagination is required and on a stage that’s a challenge a lot of times because you have to have props that fit on a stage and a stages vary in size but none of them are large enough to really encompass the entire thing so you’ve got to have an imagination to kind of understand what should be on the stage. If drama is presented before an audience and this is important because when you’re reading, reading is an interaction between you and the book or the text and the person who wrote it but with drama it’s presented before an audience so it presents kind of a communal feeling and it’s something that intensifies the impact of the play or it can intensify the impact of the play. Drama is an in the moment experience and unlike reading a book you can’t go back to the chapter before it. It’s in the moment and they’re presented live and there are no rewinds so it’s unique too because it’s never the same twice. My children have been in several plays and they will tell you that if they are in a play for a week long performance each day or each night that they perform that play something happens that’s a little bit different so it’s unique because it’s never the same way twice. There are two types of drama two main types of drama there are little sub-categories that go along with this but there are too main types and I’m going to tell you about these. These are the two most basic and basically what tragedy does or is, is it emphasizes human greatness or freedom. It depicts the differences in human nature. When we were in the fiction unit I talked a lot about the characters that are dynamic that are presented with a situation or an adversity or something in their lives that is unsettling or causes them to grow. They choose to grow from that experience now that’s sort of what tragedy emphasizes. It either emphasizes that the characters are static and they didn’t grow or that they’re dynamic and that they did grow because of their experiences and a tragedy you know like it sounds usually is you know there’s a disaster at the end like Hamlet Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the end everybody’s dead practically so that’s a tragedy. Now you can have what’s called a tragic-comedy and Shakespeare does a lot of these. So a tragic-comedy is like a combination between the tragedy and the comedy. The comedy it doesn’t mean that it’s ha ha funny it means that it exposes human folly. It exposes human absurdities and it shows human weaknesses whereas tragedy shows the strength of humans, comedy shows the weaknesses. I’ll just write that there for you shows human weakness. So kept that in mind when you’re reading the assignments that I gave you that they may be a combination of the two. Now here’s the vocabulary terms that you need to know. Dramatic irony is when the audience sees what the character doesn’t. Oops I have two e’s hold on. I can’t stand to have it if it’s not spelled right audience sees what the character doesn’t. A subplot is a second plotline that is fully complete in and of itself underneath the first one interesting my handwriting is getting worse as we go. Let’s get a smaller little line there and it enhances the main plot. My handwriting is generally not this bad but it’s sort of like signing my name at Wal-Mart when I check out with a credit card. It never looks like my handwriting. I don’t know how the banks can reconcile that but that’s okay. Conventions these are like the usual methods the standard methods that are used in presenting action in a play and these are usually recognizable by the audience and the audience is willing to accept them. Now for hamartia. Hamartia is a character flaw that brings the character down and you can have hamartia even in fiction. Hubris is an excessive pride in the character and a lot of times the excessive pride is the hamartia that is the character’s flaw that brings about the downfall. Those are some vocabulary terms that you need to know. I also need to draw for you the exposition and this is the same one that we did in fiction. Let’s see we’ll call this the we’ll just say a chart so there’s the exposition which is the beginning of the play when we find out what’s going on kind of give some background a set up of who’s who and then we have rising action and we have the climax of the play and we have falling action and then we have denouement which denouement is the French word for resolution or end. So all of your plays are going to follow that pattern. How drama is like poetry, drama draws upon all the resources of language including verse and much drama actually is poetry an example of that would be Shakespeare’s plays. Drama as present through actors and when we’re reading or watching a play we need to consider the following things. A play presents action through the actors so it’s direct, immediate, and enhanced or ruined by the actor’s skills. The facial expressions, the body language, the speech tones, etc. all of those can heighten the impact of the play. So the elements of drama is that it’s similar to fiction and poetry, it’s limited by its nature to objective point of view but there are two techniques that alter that and those would be soliloquy and an aside and a soliloquy is simply when the character talks to himself and we get to hear what he has to say so we get insight into what the character is thinking and feeling because the character’s talking to himself. Hamlet does this when does his to be or not to be soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play. An aside is when the character turns and talks to the audience, turns to the audience and talks to them. So these two both let the audience know exactly what the character’s thinking. These are used fairly sparingly in theatre because it’s an interruption of the action so they’re used sparingly. Drama is presented through actors on a stage and before an audience. Ah and that’s where I was supposed to put those. So a soliloquy again is when the character talks to himself Hamlet and an aside when the character talks to talks directly to the audience. Okay what is a playwright? A playwright is a person who writes plays well yeah a person who writes plays. Playwright is actually an Anglo-Saxon term for a workman or craftsman. That’s the end of our drama unit and I hope that you will enjoy reading the plays that I’ve assigned for you.