Playwrights are affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the conditions under which they conceive and write, by their own socioeconomic status, by personal background, by religious or political position, and by their purpose in writing. The literary form of the play and its stylistic elements will be influenced by tradition, a received body of theory and dramatic criticism, as well as by the author’s innovative energy. Auxiliary theatre arts such as music and design also have their own controlling traditions and conventions, which the playwright must respect. The size and shape of the playhouse, the nature of its stage and equipment, and the type of relationship it encourages between actor and audience also determine the character of the writing. Not least, the audience’s cultural assumptions, holy or profane, local or international, social or political, may override all else in deciding the form and content of the drama. These are large considerations that can take the student of drama into areas of sociology, politics, social history, religion, literary criticism, philosophy and aesthetics, and beyond.
The role of theory
It is difficult to assess the influence of theory since theory usually is based on existing drama, rather than drama on theory. Philosophers, critics, and dramatists have attempted both to describe what happens and to prescribe what should happen in drama, but all their theories are affected by what they have seen and read.
Western theory
In Europe the earliest extant work of dramatic theory, the fragmentary Poetics of Aristotle (384–322 bce), chiefly reflecting his views on Greek tragedy and his favourite dramatist, Sophocles, is still relevant to an understanding of the elements of drama. Aristotle’s elliptical way of writing, however, encouraged different ages to place their own interpretation upon his statements and to take as prescriptive what many believe to have been meant only to be descriptive. There has been endless discussion of his concepts mimēsis (“imitation”), the impulse behind all the arts, and katharsis (“purgation,” “purification of emotion”), the proper end of tragedy, though these notions were conceived, in part, in answer to Plato’s attack on poiēsis (making) as an appeal to the irrational. That “character” is second in importance to “plot” is another of Aristotle’s concepts that may be understood with reference to the practice of the Greeks, but not more realistic drama, in which character psychology has a dominant importance. The concept in the Poetics that has most affected the composition of plays in later ages has been that of the so-called unities—that is, of time, place, and action. Aristotle was evidently describing what he observed—that a typical Greek tragedy had a single plot and action that lasts one day; he made no mention at all of unity of place. Neoclassical critics of the 17th century, however, codified these discussions into rules.
Considering the inconvenience of such rules and their final unimportance, one wonders at the extent of their influence. The Renaissance desire to follow the ancients and its enthusiasm for decorum and classification may explain it in part. Happily, the other classical work recognized at this time was Horace’s Art of Poetry (c. 24 bce), with its basic precept that poetry should offer pleasure and profit and teach by pleasing, a notion that has general validity to this day. Happily, too, the popular drama, which followed the tastes of its patrons, also exerted a liberating influence. Nevertheless, discussion about the supposed need for the unities continued throughout the 17th century (culminating in the French critic Nicolas Boileau’s Art of Poetry, originally published in 1674), particularly in France, where a master like Racine could translate the rules into a taut, intense theatrical experience. Only in Spain, where Lope de Vega published his New Art of Writing Plays (1609), written out of his experience with popular audiences, was a commonsense voice raised against the classical rules, particularly on behalf of the importance of comedy and its natural mixture with tragedy. In England both Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poetry (1595) and Ben Jonson in Timber (1640) merely attacked contemporary stage practice. Jonson, in certain prefaces, however, also developed a tested theory of comic characterization (the “humours”) that was to affect English comedy for a hundred years. The best of Neoclassical criticism in English is John Dryden’s Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay (1668). Dryden approached the rules with a refreshing honesty and argued all sides of the question; thus he questioned the function of the unities and accepted Shakespeare’s practice of mixing comedy and tragedy.
The lively imitation of nature came to be acknowledged as the primary business of the playwright and was confirmed by the authoritative voices of Samuel Johnson, who said in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765) that “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature,” and the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–69; Hamburg Dramaturgy) sought to accommodate Shakespeare to a new view of Aristotle. With the classical straitjacket removed, there was a release of dramatic energies in new directions. There were still local critical skirmishes, such as Jeremy Collier’s attack on the “immorality and profaneness of the English stage” in 1698; Goldoni’s attacks upon the already dying Italian commedia on behalf of greater realism; and Voltaire’s reactionary wish to return to the unities and to rhymed verse in French tragedy, which was challenged in turn by Denis Diderot’s call for a return to nature. But the way was open for the development of the middle-class drame bourgeois and the excursions of romanticism. Victor Hugo, in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827), capitalized on the new psychological romanticism of Goethe and Schiller as well as the popularity of the sentimental drame bourgeois in France and the growing admiration for Shakespeare; Hugo advocated truth to nature and a dramatic diversity that could yoke together the sublime and the grotesque. This view of what drama should be received support from Émile Zola in the preface to his play Thérèse Raquin (1873), in which he argued a theory of naturalism that called for the accurate observation of people controlled by their heredity and environment.
From such sources came the subsequent intellectual approach of Ibsen and Chekhov and a new freedom for such seminal innovators of the 20th century as Luigi Pirandello, with his teasing mixtures of absurdist laughter and psychological shock; Bertolt Brecht, deliberately breaking the illusion of the stage; and Antonin Artaud, advocating a theatre that should be “cruel” to its audience, employing all and any devices that lie to hand. The modern dramatist may be grateful to be no longer hidebound by theory and yet also regret, paradoxically, that contemporary theatre lacks those artificial limits within which an artifact of more certain efficiency can be wrought.
Eastern theory
Asian theatre has always had such limits, but with neither the body of theory nor the pattern of rebellion and reaction found in the West. The Sanskrit drama of India, however, throughout its recorded existence has had the supreme authority of the Natya-shastra, ascribed to Bharata (1st century bce–3rd century ce), an exhaustive compendium of rules for all the performing arts but particularly for the sacred art of drama with its auxiliary arts of dance and music. Not only does the Natya-shastra identify many varieties of gesture and movement, but it also describes the multiple patterns that drama can assume, similar to a modern treatise on musical form. Every conceivable aspect of a play is treated, from the choice of metre in poetry to the range of moods a play can achieve, but perhaps its primary importance lies in its justification of the aesthetic of Indian drama as a vehicle of religious enlightenment.
In Japan the most celebrated of early Noh writers, Zeami Motokiyo, writing at the turn of the 15th century, left an influential collection of essays and notes to his son about his practice, and his deep knowledge of Zen Buddhism infused the Noh drama with ideals for the art that have persisted. Religious serenity of mind (yūgen), conveyed through an exquisite elegance in a performance of high seriousness, is at the heart of Zeami’s theory of dramatic art. Three centuries later the outstanding dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon built equally substantial foundations for the Japanese puppet theatre, later known as Bunraku. His heroic plays for this theatre established an unassailable dramatic tradition of depicting an idealized life inspired by a rigid code of honour and expressed with extravagant ceremony and fervent lyricism. At the same time, in another vein, his pathetic “domestic” plays of middle-class life and the suicides of lovers established a comparatively realistic mode for Japanese drama, which strikingly extended the range of both Bunraku and Kabuki. Today these forms, together with the more aristocratic and intellectual Noh, constitute a classical theatre based on practice rather than on theory. They may be superseded as a result of the invasion of Western drama, but in their perfection they are unlikely to change. The Yuan drama of China was similarly based upon a slowly evolved body of laws and conventions derived from practice, for, like Kabuki, this too was essentially an actors’ theatre, and practice rather than theory accounts for its development.
The role of music and dance
The Sanskrit treatise Natya-shastra suggests that drama had its origin in the art of dance, and any survey of Western theatre, too, must recognize a comparable debt to music in the classical Greek drama, which is believed to have sprung from celebratory singing to Dionysus. Similarly, the drama of the medieval church began with the chanted liturgies of the Roman mass. In the professional playhouses of the Renaissance and after, only rarely is music absent: Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the comedies, are rich with song (see Sidebar: Music in Shakespeare’s plays), and the skill with which he pursues dramatic ends with musical help is a study in itself. Molière conceived most of his plays as comedy-ballets, and much of his verbal style derives directly from the balletic qualities of the commedia. The popularity of opera in the 18th century led variously to John Gay’s prototype for satirical ballad-opera, The Beggar’s Opera (1728), the opera buffa in Italy, and the opéra comique in France. The development of these forms, however, resulted in the belittling of the written drama, with the notable exception of the parodistic wit of W.S. Gilbert at the turn of the 20th century. It is worth noting, however, that the most successful modern “musicals” lean heavily on their literary sources. Two of the strongest influences on contemporary theatre are those of Brecht, who believed that a dialectical theatre should employ music not merely as a background embellishment but as an equal voice with the actor’s, and of Artaud, who argued that the theatre experience should subordinate the literary text to mime, music, and spectacle. Since it is evident that drama often involves a balance of the arts, an understanding of their interrelationships is proper to a study of dramatic literature.