Drama

The Nature of Drama

About drama
A piece of literary works , that are supposed to be PERFORMED, not to be read. A narrative art in which a playwright has learned to present a story. Stories are presented to give pleasure, to entertain, to ridicule (for example: in a country where the leader of the country corrupt and the people can do nothing, so the playwright shows the story, in which people ridicule the leader It will entertain the audience/the reader, because the audience/the reader is common people) Portrays a REAL LIFE, portrays Human Nature. That is why, the story must be the Range of Human Nature. Drama, like prose fiction utilizes PLOT and CHARACTERS, develops a THEME, arouses EMOTION or appeals to humor.

Plot is the sequence of incidents/events, of which a story is composed, presented in a significant order. Characters are the actors/the players. Characterization is the way the writer describes that characters (the personality of the character). a. Discursive Method: a method that the writer uses to describe the character by his own word. b. Dramatic Method: the way the writer describes the personality of the character through their dialogues. Sometimes the readers/the audiences know the personality of the characters from the dialogues. The dialogue we know that someone is friendly, kind, bad, evil etc. c. Contextual Method: the readers know the personality of the characters from another characters. For example: from gossiping. But sometimes it is reliable, for there is subjectivity. The audiences know the writers idea through the characters action/acting. How they (the actors) translate the writers idea MUCH depends on the actors. Theme is the underlying/central/control idea. For example: the function of truthfulness in life, sometimes life is bitter, but we must face it. Because drama is reflection of real life, the theme must be in The Range of Human Nature.

Because drama is written primarily to be performed, not to be read, it normally presents: Its action, through actors Its impact is direct, immediate and heightened by the actors skill. Spectators see what is done and hear what is said. The experience of the play is registered directly upon their senses. Where the work of prose fiction may tell us: - what a man looks like, in one paragraph, - how he moves or speaks, in a second, - what he said, in a third, - how his auditors respond, in a fourth, the acted PLAY, presents this material ALL AT ONCE. On a stage It can forcefully command the spectators attention. (the stage is lighted, the theater is dark, spectators almost literally pinned to the seats, there is nowhere they can go, there is nothing to look at). Unlike the fiction writer or the poet, the playwright is NOT DEPENDENT on the power of words alone. Before the audience The experience, it creates is a communal experience, and its impact is intensified.

The beginning of Drama

Drama is the most natural of arts, being based on one of the most fundamental of the human and animal facultiesthe faculty of imitation (faculty there is: any of the powers of the body and mind). It is through imitation that animals learn to fight, climb, hunt; it is through imitation that human children learn to talk and to perform a great number of complicated human functions. This imitative faculty or as we call it, Mimetic Faculty, make us all actors almost from the cradle. (Children play at being a doctors, kings and queens etc. this is acting, but it is not yet drama). It is believed that the first drama was not play, but a serious activity performed by grown men, expressing mans highest instinctthe religious instinct. We cannot learn about 1st drama without learning anthropology (the learning of primitive human society). There is a difference between human society and modern society in the way to control outside world (e.g. modern technologyscience). The primitive society, control outside world through magic, esp. sympathetic magic ( is a magic in which people believe that the image of person is in sympathy with the person himself; whatever happens to the image must also happen to the person).

Many people believe that the first drama was based on 4 things: the mimetic faculty the sympathetic magic a belief in gods a fear of star vision Supposing a primitive society has taken to agriculture where grows rice corn. Having no science, the members of such a society tend to think that the food is in the hands of certain natural forcesin other words gods. forces There is no science to teach them about the turning of the earth, the regular appearance of spring after winter. When winter comes it seems to them that the god of life has died, killed perhaps by the god of death. How the god of fertilitythe life-god, the corn-godbe brought to fertility lifecorn-god life again? Obviously by sympathetic magic.

And so come magical ceremonies. If a wax or wooden image represents a man, a man should represent a god. And so perhaps a member of the community pretends to be the life-god and another lifepretends to be the death-god. They fight and the life-god is skilled. deathlifeBut then, the life-god miraculously rises again, kills the winter-god, lifewinterdances over his corpse in triumph. Now, according to the law of sympathetic magic, what has magic, happened in mere representation must happen in fact. The real god of fertility must come back to life, and in fact, he does. The earth is fruitful again. Magic is triumphed. here you have acting, here you have a plot; action (fighting) leads to climax (death of the god) and the climax leads to a happy denouement resurrection. This is drama but also religious.

The development of English drama

 

A group of singers sing together accompanied by music. The song develops into dialogue and action. it is played by boys. they move from one place to another one The play is concerned with religion. to confirm their religion. is played around the church. the actors: the monks, the priests and the choirchoirboys. Such was the origin of the mystery. a. The mystery-play mysteryb. The Miracle-play Miraclec. The Morality-play Morality-

The mystery-play was the dramatic mysteryrepresentation of some important Biblical theme, such as the Nativity (the birth of Jesus Christ) or the Resurrection (the rising of Jesus from the tomb; the rising of all the dead on the Last Day). Priests took part in the plays, though it is not certain that they wrote them. The mystery-play mysteryproper centered-around the Crucifixion centeredand the Resurrection. (crucify: kill (somebody) by nailing him to a cross).

The miracle-play in such plays the theme miraclepassed from the Scriptural story (based on the Bible) to that of the lives of the Saints. The plots were much more varied, the characters nearer to human experience and the style rather more urbane. The morality-play registered a further moralityadvance. In such plays virtues and vices were presented on the stage. Abstractions such as Justice, Mercy, Gluttony (habit and practice of eating (and drinking) too much).

 It becomes secular (not concerned with spiritual or religious affairs) a pageant run on wheels. is displayed throughout the town. with/without scenery. costume: of grotesque and primitive sort. actors: amateur (members of various companies.  The noblemen builds a playhouse.

Renaissance


People in the 15th 16th C were bored with the Medieval Age and they turned to a rereading of the works of Greek and Roman Literature, to a re-examination of reClassical Learning (Greek Learning). This movement is called The Renaissance, that means: in a narrow sense: a rebirth of interest classical learning. in a broader sense: The Renaissance refers to Humanism, as a rebirth of individualism as a new freedom of thought and action. It is also called THE ELIZABETHAN AGE.

The Drama
The actors: no actresses. Womens roles are acted by boys who have a slender figure and usually with unchanged voice. costume--symbolical The theme: about royal family. Backgroundwars. The audience: consists of the nobility and the humble citizens. The plays: the works of Shakespeare (1564 1616) Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet etc. One of the well known Greek Literature is Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

The Puritan Agethe collapse of the Age drama Restoration Drama: - the actorsthere are actors and actors actresses - the themeno certain theme. Drama theme is just for amusement. - the audiencethe nobility only audience - the playSiege of Rhodes play (Davenant), Indian Queen (Howard)

Drama in The 18th Century



Fundamentally, there is no great differences between the Restoration and that in the 18th century. The audience audienceboth the nobility and the humble citizens. The playsShe Stop to Conquer plays (Goldsmith), The School for Scandal (Sheridan)

Modern Drama


After the Age of Decay, English Drama is much influenced by Hendrik Ibsen (1828 1906). He is a Norwegian and called The Father of Problem Plays. He teachesdrama must deal with human emotions, teaches with things near to ordinary men and women. So modern drama is drama of ideas, based on the contemporary social conditions. His worksThe Pillars of the Community, The Wild works Duck, Ghost, Hedda Gabler etc.

The Drama as Literature



With a theatre, a stage, actors, an audience, music, dance, pantomime, gesture, action, costume, setting to draw on in the creation of a unified play, the playwright is obviously composing a work of art with more than words. The playwright, however, uses words, and his product is thus a form of literature. A play exists on paper, before and after its performance; hence it can be read. Editors now supply the readers of early plays with a helpful initial information which compensates for the bareness of the original text. Increasingly in modern times the playwright knows that if his play makes a genuine impact in the theater, it will be read by a great number of people who follow the drama as readers whether they can be spectators or not

Playwrights have even become somewhat merciful to the reader in supplying more external guidance to the time, place, setting and characters. For example: Bernard Shaw expanded both descriptive and interpretive support of the dialogue in the versions of his plays published to be read. His preface, often added to after the play had been performed, draw the reader s attention to values in society and life. The playwright here has the opportunity to reach the reader with clues to the interpretation he hopes for. The entire force of the playwright s art has been directed toward making the reader perform the play on the stage-even, if the reader is well-enough stagewellinformed, on the particular kind of stage. The story will owe its vitality, finally, to our ability to relate with it in life. The reader may therefore read through the stage to reality or directly from the page to reality. Drama makes powerful condition; comments on human nature and the human condition; it reveals human truth arising out of characters under pressure of situation.

The Elements of Drama

 Dramatic ConventionsA play is manifestly not real but artificial Conventions representation of life. It asks from the audience an active adoption of the rules of the gamean acceptance of a good many dramatic conventions. game Within the play, unity is built upon the dramatic conventions. The Play StoryThe story base of a play may be original with the Story dramatist or borrowed from legend, history, or fiction. Greek and Elizabethan dramatist commonly took a story already well known. For example exampleJoan of Arc story has been used by Shaw in Saint Joan. Many stories are original invention of the playwright. He may draw on his own life experiences, his memories, his reaction to the kind of life led by the people in places he has known. He may invent the story to express the known. characters or to protest against their environment, Characters Charactersthat the basis of a play is its action. From Aristotle: The plot being an imitation of an action must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the parts-being such that, if any one of them is partsdisplaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. However, a good play does not give the impression that it is a plot being acted out but that it is a group of characters acting as they must.

The main character in a plot is called the protagonist, his opponent is called the antagonist, or it is not a person, the antagonistic force. He (the player) may talk to the audience in (1) Soliloquies: characters are presented as speaking to themselvesthemselves-that is, they think out loud; (2) Asides: characters turn from the persons with whom they are conversing to speak directly to the audience, thus letting the audience know what they are really thinking or feeling as opposed to what they presented to be thinking or feeling. Plot the playwright orders and connects the events in a story to form a plot, a causal or motivated sequence of actions which introduce a conflict into the lives of a group of characters.

That conflict is the basis of a plotPerrine: plot Conflict is a clash of action, ideas, desires or will. . . conflict of person against person--characters may be person--characters pitted against some other person or group of persons . conflict of person against environmentthey may environment be in conflict with some external force (physical nature, society or fate). conflict of person against himself/herselfthey himself/herself may be in conflict with some elements in their own natures. The conflict may be physical, mental, emotional, or moral.

The common parts of plot are:



The exposition, or preliminary situation the exposition is all the information necessary for the reader to grasp the initial situation, to be able to go on with the play. The exposition must be clear: who are those people, where are they, when is it, who is speaking to whom about what? The inciting or exciting force or challenge the inciting force is the first part of the exposition which is dynamic that is, which contains a challenge, threat, or danger to have the condition of the protagonist as first glimpsed. The characteristic most exciting force have in common is that they confront the main characters or protagonist with a situation he will not accept without resistance. The threat maybe from an enemy or rival, from the protagonist s past, from another aspect of the protagonist s nature, from any source that arouses his will.

The rising action, or complicationthe rising action, sometimes called the complication because it ties the preliminary situation into a knot, consists of the actions taken by the protagonist and by the forces against him. The rising action usually consists of incident in pairs, a move and a countermove, the countermove producing the next move. Or each action is a consequence of the antecedent action and becomes in turn an antecedent for another consequence. The diversity of the forces that can be made to operate in a dramatic conflict, and of the dramatic effects that arise from the kind and order of the incidents, is so great that no rules can be offered except that the sequence should arise in intensity and finally resolve itself within the potential of the situation and characters.

 The climax, or turning point (sometimes preceded by the crisis, which make the direction of the turn final). The climax, or turning point, is the event that determines how the conflict will end favorably or unfavorably for the protagonist. The denouement, resolution, or (in tragedy) catastrophe. The denouement or catastrophe presents the outcome, dispose of subplots, and gives a glimpse of a new, stable situation.

Dialogue and action

 We have said above that a character in a play appears made-up madefor his part and at once starts talking and acting. The talking is the dialogue, the language resource of the playwright. The talking is not only the matter of delivery of the dialogue, but the entire accompanying movement, gesture, pantomime, and stage business.  Dialogue itself is a sense, a form of action, and the talking and the accompanying action are so integrated or fused that they seem one.  Dramatic dialogue is artfully concentrated, selected and heightened for economy and intensity. The demands upon it in a play are many and various; it must explain, anticipate and with the help of action execute the play story, but its existence, even with the support of dramatic conventions, depends upon its seeming to be natural speech of particular characters.

 Speech is characteristic-voice, enunciation (ucapan), pronunciation, accent, dialect, speech rate, vocabulary range (variasi kata)-all these and more attributes of speech daily tell us things about everyone we listen to. Speech is both characteristic and Dialogue is supported constantly by its physical accompaniment, action by movement, and in the total scene, by the setting or scenery. Characters welcome callers, speed parting guest, answer telephones, pass tea-cups, lose tempers, draw swords, swing fists, talking all the while. Stage business, as it is called, is an active accompaniment of and supplement to the dialogue. It may set out the speeches or overwhelm them in calculated violence and confusion, but a careful fusing of action and dialogue is the joint preoccupation of playwright, director and actor.

Meaning in Drama


The meaning, or theme, of a play-that truth about human life, nature, or playexperience the playwright has founded his play story upon and adhered to in selecting and rejecting the psychology, language and actions of his characterscharacters-is sometimes stated, phrased, or explicitly dramatized in the play. The theme of a play is often a basic truism (kebenaran yang tidak dapat disangkal lagi/mendasar) about human natures knowledge of itself and of the ordering of that moral world which is possible to it. conflicts and their resolutions as precipitated between men and women, love and hate, tradition and revolt, desire and duty, passion and law, stick close to our wisdom about ourselves and our universe. The final meaning of a play, however, is the product of total impression. In this sense, theme is structural; it is led up to (prepare, introduce) and affirmed by the interaction upon the reader of all the elements of the play. A play often stage its final conclusion about human life; if it does not, such a conclusion will be implicitly formulated by the reader.