Drama

• 1. Introduction

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  Drama names the world's oldest social art form, and the word itself carries the weight of everything it describes. It comes from the Greek for "deed" or "act," derived from the verb meaning "I do." Two masks - one laughing, one weeping - became the symbol of its oldest division: comedy and tragedy. Those masks have endured for roughly two and a half millennia, partly because they capture something true about what drama does. It holds the full range of human experience and asks an audience to witness it together.

  Before the word "drama" arrived in English, people called these works plays. The person who made them was a play-maker. The building that housed them was a play-house. That language was standard until William Shakespeare's era, when the Greek-rooted vocabulary slowly displaced it. What questions does that slow displacement raise? Where did this art form come from, and how did it travel across continents and centuries? Which playwrights broke it open, and which traditions grew in parallel, without borrowing from each other at all? The answer runs from a hillside theatre in Athens to mobile stages rolling through the villages of Assam.

• 2. The Greek Invention

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  Thespis is the name credited with one of the most consequential innovations in theatrical history. He introduced a single actor who speaks rather than sings, impersonates a character rather than speaking in his own person, and interacts with the chorus and its leader. That chorus, known by its leader the coryphaeus, had been a traditional feature of non-dramatic poetry long before drama as such existed. Thespis transformed the relationship between the single voice and the group.

  The theatrical culture of Athens produced three genres: tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. By the 5th century BC, these had been built into formal competitions held in honour of the god Dionysus, and those competitions carried their own bureaucracy. Records called didaskaliai date from 501 BC, when the satyr play was formally introduced. The competition for tragedies may have started as early as 534 BC. Each tragic dramatist was required to enter a tetralogy - three tragedies and a satyr play, though exceptions were recorded, as with Euripides' Alcestis in 438 BC. Comedy received its own official prize between 487 and 486 BC.

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and the later Menander are the five dramatists whose work has reached us in any substantial quantity. Aeschylus' The Persians is the oldest surviving drama in the Western tradition. It won first prize at the City Dionysia in 472 BC, by which point Aeschylus had already been writing plays for more than 25 years. Menander came from the late 4th century BC and represents what scholars call "new comedy," which followed "old comedy" in the 5th century and "middle comedy" in the 4th. That three-part classification points to how quickly the comic form evolved across a span of roughly two centuries.

• 3. Rome Adapts and Expands

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  Between 270 and 240 BC, the expanding Roman Republic absorbed several Greek territories and encountered Greek drama in the process. The year 240 BC marks the start of regular Roman drama as a distinct practice. Livius Andronicus wrote the first important works of Roman literature - tragedies and comedies - beginning that year. Five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also entered the field. Neither writer's plays have survived.

  Andronicus was most admired for his tragedies, and Naevius for his comedies, and their successors tended to follow one path or the other. That specialisation sharpened as the tradition matured. By the start of the 2nd century BC, drama was established enough in Rome that a guild of writers, the collegium poetarum, had been formally organised.

  The surviving Roman comedies belong to two writers: Plautus and Terence. Plautus wrote between 205 and 184 BC, and twenty of his comedies survive. He was known for his wit, his varied use of poetic meters, and his farces. Terence wrote all six of his comedies between 166 and 160 BC, and all six have survived. His plots were more complex - critics sometimes attacked him for combining several Greek originals into a single play - but his double-plots allowed a layered presentation of contrasting human behaviour. Both dramatists drew on Greek sources. Roman comic writers abolished the Greek choral divisions and added musical accompaniment to dialogue, ranging from one-third of the lines in Plautus to two-thirds in Terence. From the period of the empire, nine tragedies by the Stoic philosopher Seneca survive, all adapted from Greek originals. His Phaedra, for instance, was based on Euripides' Hippolytus.

• 4. The Medieval Stage

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  The earliest example of liturgical drama in the Western Middle Ages is the Easter trope Whom do you Seek?, known by its Latin name Quem-Quaeritis, dating to around 925. Two groups would sing responsively in Latin, without any impersonation of characters. By the 11th century, the form had spread to Russia, Scandinavia, and Italy, bypassing Islamic-era Spain.

  In the 10th century, Hrosvitha wrote six plays in Latin modeled on Terence's comedies, while directing them toward religious subjects. Her work holds a specific distinction: it is both the first drama known to have been written by a woman and the first identifiable Western drama of the post-Classical period. Hildegard of Bingen later composed a musical drama, Ordo Virtutum, around 1155.

  English trade guilds began performing vernacular mystery plays, organised into long cycles. Four complete cycles have survived: York with 48 plays, Chester with 24, Wakefield with 32, and the so-called N-Town cycle with 42. One of the Wakefield plays, The Second Shepherds' Play, tells the farcical story of a sheep-thief named Mak who tries to disguise the stolen animal as his newborn child asleep in a crib - the deception collapses when the shepherds are called to the Nativity of Jesus.

  Morality plays emerged as a distinct form around 1400 and flourished into the early Elizabethan era. Everyman deployed characters named Good Deeds, Knowledge, and Strength to stage the conflict between virtue and vice. The Castle of Perseverance, dated roughly between 1400 and 1425, followed an archetypal figure's entire life from birth to death. Horestes, from around 1567, wove together the classical Orestes story with a figure from the medieval allegorical tradition and alternated comic, slapstick scenes with serious tragic ones - placing it among the earliest examples of an English revenge play.

• 5. Restoration and Its Comedy

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  Public theatre in England was banned under the Puritan regime. When the theatres reopened in 1660 with the Restoration of Charles II, English drama entered a period of determined extravagance. Restoration comedy, which ran from 1660 to 1710, became known for sexual explicitness, urban wit, topical writing, and plots drawn freely from French, Spanish, Jacobean, and Caroline sources, as well as from classical Greek and Roman comedy.

  The genre reached its first peak in the mid-1670s with a cluster of aristocratic comedies. John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege wrote what are now called the "hard" comedies - frank celebrations of an aristocratic lifestyle organised around sexual competition. Etherege's The Man of Mode from 1676 modeled its rakish lead on the real-life figure of the Earl of Rochester. Wycherley's The Country Wife from 1675, with its notorious china scene built on sustained double meanings, became the play most often cited when critics charged the whole genre with obscenity.

  Aphra Behn's achievement in the 1680s stands apart as an important exception to the lean years that followed the first peak. She was the first professional female playwright in English theatre.

  A second, briefer wave arrived in the mid-1690s, aimed at a wider and more socially diverse audience. William Congreve and John Vanbrugh wrote comedies with a softer tone and more recognisable human characters. Congreve's The Way of the World, which premiered in 1700 at a much-anticipated all-star production, received only moderate enthusiasm from the audience. Vanbrugh's The Relapse from 1696 was admired for its throwaway wit and for the characterisation of Lord Foppington. Public taste was already shifting toward respectability, and the comedy of sex and wit was giving way to sentimental comedy and exemplary moral drama before the playwrights themselves had moved on.

• 6. Modern Stages and Global Forms

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  Henrik Ibsen of Norway and Bertolt Brecht of Germany are described as the pivotal figures of modern drama, each inspiring traditions of imitation that shaped many of the greatest playwrights of the era that followed them. Ibsen's work has been described in terms of the tradition of liberal tragedy; Brecht's has been aligned with an historicised comedy. Both incorporated formal experimentation, meta-theatricality, and social critique in ways that marked a break from the conventions that preceded them.

  The list of other important modern playwrights in the source is long: it includes Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Caryl Churchill, among many others.

  In a different development, Richard Wagner reshaped opera in the 19th century. In his view, the music in the operas of his time overshadowed the dramatic elements in a way that broke faith with classical Greek drama's original integration of dialogue, dance, and song. Wagner responded by creating what he called "music dramas," works designed to treat music and drama as equals.

  Japanese No drama, which developed in the 14th and 15th centuries, combined drama, music, and dance into a single aesthetic experience. Performers were generally male, and performance techniques were often passed from father to son. No drama was supported by military commanders, some of whom maintained their own troupes and performed themselves. Its comic counterpart, Kyogen, concentrated on dialogue over music. Kabuki drama developed later, from the 17th century onward.

  In India, Assamese mobile theatre, known as Bhramyoman, takes the entire production on the road, with all equipment and even the stage carried by the troupe itself. This allows performances to reach remote villages. The industry is estimated to be worth a hundred million, and its pioneers include Achyut Lahkar and Brajanath Sarma.

• 7. Sanskrit and Indian Traditions

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  The earliest surviving fragments of Sanskrit drama date from the 1st century AD, though the major theoretical text, A Treatise on Theatre - known as the Natyashastra - has an uncertain date, with estimates ranging from 200 BC to 200 AD. It is attributed to Bharata Muni and is described as the most complete work of dramaturgy in the ancient world. It covers acting, dance, music, dramatic construction, architecture, costuming, make-up, props, the organisation of companies, the audience, and competitions.

  The grammar treatise Mahabhashya by Patanjali from 140 BC provides a feasible early reference to what may have been the seeds of Sanskrit drama, though the ancient Vedic hymns, dating from between 1500 and 1000 BC, contain no clear indication of theatrical practice.

  Famous early Sanskrit playwrights named in the source include Bhasa, Kalidasa, Sudraka, Asvaghosa, and Emperor Harsha. Kalidasa's works include Urvashi, Won by Valour and The Recognition of Shakuntala; the latter, in English translation, influenced Goethe's Faust, written between 1808 and 1832. Sudraka is associated with The Little Clay Cart. Emperor Harsha wrote Nagananda, Ratnavali, and Priyadarsika.

  Rabindranath Tagore is identified as a pioneering modern Indian playwright. His plays, written in Bengali, explored nationalism, identity, spiritualism, and material greed. They include Chitra in 1892, The King of the Dark Chamber in 1910, The Post Office in 1913, and Red Oleander in 1924. Girish Karnad used history and mythology to examine contemporary questions, producing works including Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Taledanda, and Naga-Mandala. Winifred Ward, working in the United States in the early 1900s, established the first academic use of drama for children in Evanston, Illinois, and is considered the founder of creative drama in education.