History of Drama

Primitive Theatre
We do not know exactly when people began acting out plays. What we do know is that all drama is
simply an imitation of actions or ideas, so many theories suggest that the first dramatic stories were
probably told by primitive tribes who would return from the hunt and reenact the events for the rest of
the tribe.
Over time, it may have become a ritual, and the performance might have taken place before the hunt. Like
most rituals, the shaman, the religious leader of the tribe, would have eventually overseen it, and it would
have become a sort of religious or spiritual celebration. This could have set the stage for theatre for the
next several hundred years.

Greek Theatre
And while we aren't quite sure where or how it all began, we do know that the Greeks embraced theatre
as a means to worship their mythical gods. In doing this, they transformed drama from a ritual into sort
of a ritual-drama and held festivals in honor of the Greek god of wine and fertility, Dionysus.
These early plays were performed by a group of men and boys called a chorus. The chorus worked as a
group to provide commentary on the action of the story. But even with the introduction of individual
actors, the chorus still remained in the background, acting as narrators providing insight to the action on
stage and the characters' thoughts.
In fact, there were very few people on stage in general, which meant that everyone had to play multiple
parts. The drama masks that so many of us associate with theatre were used for exactly this purpose. The
smiling comedy mask and the frowning tragedy mask were visual representations of Greek muses and
were used to enhance the songs and actions on stage.
With this development of drama, it's no surprise that many famous plays came from this time period.
Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides are all well-known playwrights from this time, though it is believed
that many of their works were never recovered.

The Middle Ages

Theatre continued to be popular through the fall of the Roman Empire. With the onset of the Middle
Ages from 500-1500 A.D., however, the Church had different views of the mythological gods and saw
theatre as evil. Most theatre was outlawed, and drama was only performed by traveling groups of actors.
Eventually, though, the Church saw the value of the ritualistic nature of drama, and began to reenact
short Bible stories during mass. Mystery plays were stories from the Bible. Miracle plays focused on
saints. Over time, these plays transformed into something known as morality plays. These plays
promoted a godly life, but they did not teach the Bible stories exclusively. Instead, the morality plays
worked as an allegory, which is a literary device where the characters or events represent or symbolize
other ideas and concepts.
Morality plays, which featured a hero who must overcome evil, were allegorical in nature. In the case of
the morality plays, the hero represented mankind. The other characters served as personifications of
many things, including the Seven Deadly Sins, death, virtues and even angels and demons - anything that
wanted to take over mankind's soul. In the end, the hero would choose the godly route.
An example of a 15th century English morality play is Everyman. In the play, God sends Death to strike
down the sinners who have forgotten him. Death finds the main character, Everyman, and tells him he is
to begin his journey from life to death. Everyman asks if he can bring someone with him, and Death
agrees. Unfortunately, Everyman cannot persuade any of his friends, who include Fellowship, Beauty,
Kindred, Worldly Goods, to go with him on his journey. Finally, Good Deeds says that she will go with him.
Together they go into the grave and ascend into heaven. The moral of this story is that good deeds will
help every man get into heaven. It is a subtle turn from the straight biblical stories, but it allowed for
more secular forms of drama during the Renaissance.

The Renaissance
You might already know the word Renaissance means 'rebirth'. In the case of drama, the Renaissance,
which lasted from approximately 1400-1700, was the rebirth of interest in theatre across Europe. In fact,
the Renaissance introduced many of the elements we still think of when we imagine a theatre: indoor
theatres, an arched stage, a curtain dropped between scenes, more elaborate set design. All of these
changes were implemented during the Renaissance. More importantly, however, the purpose of drama
transitioned from stories told by the Church to stories made primarily for entertainment for both royalty
and commoners.
Usually when we hear the word Renaissance, especially in conjunction with drama, we think of
Shakespeare's England. What most people don't know is the Renaissance actually began in Italy, where
music, song and dance were implemented into the plays produced in the new indoor theatres. From
there, the rebirth of the arts moved to other countries in Europe. The French imitated Italian theatre and
boasted the talent of playwrightMolière, whose plays poked fun at the people in important positions.
In Spain, they kept some of the religious dramas, but also began performing action-based plays. It wasn't
until later that the Renaissance was embraced in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and
continued through the reign of King James I and King Charles I. Theatre flourished during this time,
producing several great playwrights. These included Christopher Marlowe, who was known for writing
tragedies, and Ben Jonson, who was known for writing comedies. Of course, most well known of all
was William Shakespeare, who wrote both and is still popular today.

Romanticism and Realism

Theatre remained popular with a few minor changes after the Renaissance and during the Reformation,
when women began acting on stage. By the 1800s, however, Romanticism, which began in Germany,
began to influence the content of scripts written for the stage. The typical romantic play focused on a
hero who was fighting against an unjust society to maintain his rights as a human being. These plays
embraced nature and the supernatural.
The most popular of these was the melodrama, a play where the hero always succeeds. There was usually
a battle of good and evil, complete with special effects, like train crashes, horse races and earthquakes. It
was during the Romantic period that German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote Faust, and
French playwright Alexandre Dumas, produced scripts for the novels The Three Musketeers and The Count
of Monte Cristo.
The Modern Drama
From the time of the Renaissance on, theatre seemed to be striving for total realism, or at least for the
illusion of reality. As it reached that goal in the late 19th century, a large, antirealistic reaction erupted.
Many attempted to suggest that there were other alternatives to realism. They felt that the Naturalism
could not adequately present truth, that greater truths can only be found in the spiritual or subconscious.
Others were upset that theatre was only being used as a form of entertainment.
The originator of many antirealist ideas was the German opera composer Richard Wagner. He believed
that the job of the playwright/composer was to create myths. Furthermore, Wagner was unhappy with
the lack of unity among the individual arts that constituted the drama. He proposed the
Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total art work", in which all dramatic elements are unified, preferably under the
control of a single artistic creator.
Wagner was also responsible for reforming theatre architecture and dramatic presentation with his
Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, Germany, completed in 1876. The stage of this theatre was similar to other
19th-century stages even if better equipped, but in the auditorium Wagner removed the boxes and
balconies and put in a fan-shaped seating area on a sloped floor, giving an equal view of the stage to all
spectators. Just before a performance the auditorium lights dimmed to total darkness-then a radical
innovation.
Expressionist Drama
The Expressionist movement was popular in the 1910s and 1920s, largely in Germany. It explored the
more violent, grotesque aspects of the human psyche, creating a nightmare world onstage. Scenography,
distortion and exaggeration and a suggestive use of light and shadow typify Expressionism. Stock types
replaced individualized characters or allegorical figures, much as in the morality plays, and plots often
revolved around the salvation of humankind.
Other movements of the first half of the century, such as Futurism, and Surrealism, sought to bring new
artistic and scientific ideas into theatre.
Ensemble Theatre
Perhaps the most significant development influenced by Artaud was the ensemble theatre movement of
the 1960s. Ensemble theatres abandoned the written text in favor of productions created by an ensemble
of actors. The productions, which generally evolved out of months of work, relied heavily on physical
movement, nonspecific language and sound, and often-unusual arrangements of space.
Absurdist Theatre
The most popular and influential nonrealistic genre of the 20th century was absurdism. Absurdist
dramatists saw, in the words of the Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco, "man as lost in the
world, all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless. Absurdist drama tends to eliminate much of the
cause-and-effect relationship among incidents, reduce language to a game and minimize its
communicative power, reduce characters to archetypes, make place nonspecific, and view the world as
alienating and incomprehensible. Absurdism was at its peak in the 1950s, but continued to influence
drama through the 1970s. The American playwright Edward Albee's early dramas were classified as
absurd because of the seemingly illogical or irrational elements that defined his characters' world of
actions. Absurdists explain that their plays were realistic because they resemble the everyday world in
which only fragments of unexplained activity and dialogue are seen and heard.
Contemporary Drama
Although pure Naturalism was never very popular after World War I, drama in a realist style continued to
dominate the commercial theatre, especially in the United States. Even there, however, psychological
realism seemed to be the goal, and nonrealistic scenic and dramatic devices were employed to achieve
this end. The plays of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, for instance, use memory scenes, dream
sequences, purely symbolic characters, projections, and the like.
European drama was not much influenced by psychological realism but was more concerned with plays
of ideas, as evidenced in the works of the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, the French playwrights Jean
Anouilh and Jean Giraudoux, and the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode. In England in the 1950s
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) became a rallying point for the postwar "angry young men"; a
Vietnam trilogy of the early 1970s, by the American playwright David Rabe, expressed the anger and
frustration of many towards the war in Vietnam. Under the influence of Brecht, many postwar German
playwrights wrote documentary dramas that, based on historical incidents, explored the moral
obligations of individuals to themselves and to society. An example is The Deputy (1963), by Rolf
Hochhuth, which deals with Pope Pius XII's silence during World War II.
Many playwrights of the 1960s and 1970s-Sam Shepard in the United States, Peter Handke in Austria,
Tom Stoppard in England-built plays around language: language as a game, language as sound, language
as a barrier, language as a reflection of society. In their plays, dialogue frequently cannot be read simply
as a rational exchange of information. Many playwrights also mirrored society's frustration with a
seemingly uncontrollable, self-destructive world.
In Europe in the 1970s, new playwriting was largely overshadowed by theatricalist productions, which
generally took classical plays and reinterpreted them, often in bold new scenographic spectacles,
expressing ideas more through action and the use of space than through language.
In the late 1970s a return to Naturalism in drama paralleled the art movement known as Photorealism,
where little action occurs, the focus is on mundane characters and events, and language is fragmentary-
much like everyday conversation. The settings are indistinguishable from reality. The intense focus on
seemingly meaningless fragments of reality creates an absurdist, nightmarish quality.
In all lands where the drama flourishes, the only constant factor today is what has always been constant:
change. The most significant writers are still those who seek to redefine the basic premises of the art of
drama.
Theatre Type Notes
Primitive Theatre

Greek Theatre

The Middle Ages

The Renaissance
Romanticism and
Realism

The Modern
Drama

Expressionist
Drama

Ensemble Theatre

Absurdist Theatre

Contemporary
Drama
1. For what purpose did the ancient Greeks use drama?
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2. Define the following terms:
mystery play:
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miracle play:
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morality play:
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3. How did drama change with the “rebirth” of the arts during the Renaissance?
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4. What is a melodrama?
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5. What are some of the big changes that drama underwent after the 1800s?
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6. Explain which kind of drama stands out to you as interesting and why.
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