Section 1: Drama

1.1 Greek Drama: Origins and Forms

Western dramatic tradition begins in ancient Greece, where theatre grew from religious festivals honouring Dionysus. The City Dionysia in Athens was the principal festival at which tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays were performed in competition.

Structural Elements of Greek Tragedy

The Three Tragedians

Greek Comedy

Old Comedy (5th century BC): Aristophanes is the sole surviving writer. His plays are politically satirical, fantastical, and bawdy. Key works: The Clouds (satirises Socrates), The Birds, Lysistrata (women end the Peloponnesian War), The Frogs (Dionysus judges Aeschylus vs Euripides).

New Comedy (4th–3rd century BC): Menander is the key figure. Domestic, romantic plots with stock characters — the miserly father, the courtesan, the braggart soldier. Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence adapted these plots; they in turn influenced Elizabethan and Restoration comedy.

1.2 Roman Drama

Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD): His ten tragedies — including Thyestes, Medea, Phaedra, Hercules Furens, and Oedipus — were almost certainly written for reading, not performance. They are characterised by sensational violence (reported, not staged), rhetorical excess, the stoic preoccupation with passion and reason, and a five-act structure. Senecan tragedy profoundly influenced Renaissance English drama — the revenge tragedy, the ghost calling for vengeance, the tyrant figure, and the five-act structure all derive from Seneca.

Plautus (Miles Gloriosus, Menaechmi) and Terence (Andria, Phormio): Roman comic playwrights who adapted Greek New Comedy. Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is based on Plautus's Menaechmi.

1.3 Medieval Drama

Medieval drama in England developed from the liturgy of the Church and was performed in the vernacular from the 10th century onwards.

1.4 Renaissance Drama: Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre

The Theatre Industry

The first permanent public playhouse in London, The Theatre, was built by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576. The Globe (1599), built by the Chamberlain's Men from The Theatre's timbers, became Shakespeare's principal venue. The open-air structure held up to 3,000 spectators; the stage projected into the yard where the groundlings stood; the heavens (canopy) above the stage was painted with celestial imagery.

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)

Marlowe established blank verse as the medium of English tragedy — his "mighty line." Key plays and their concerns:

• Tamburlaine the Great I & II — Conquest and overreaching ambition
• Doctor Faustus — Knowledge, damnation, the Faust legend
• The Jew of Malta — Machiavellianism, race, religion
• Edward II — English history play; political tragedy
• Dido, Queen of Carthage — Early Ovidian work

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Shakespeare's 37 plays (38 if The Two Noble Kinsmen is counted) span four categories. His history plays dramatise English kings from John to Henry VIII. His comedies move from romantic confusion to festive resolution. His tragedies are the pinnacle of English drama.

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and the Comedy of Humours

Jonson's theory of comedy, derived from Galenic medicine, holds that each character is dominated by one "humour" (bodily fluid) that unbalances their personality, producing grotesque comic types. Key plays: Volpone (greed and deception), The Alchemist (imposture and greed), Bartholomew Fair (carnivalesque), Every Man in His Humour. Jonson also perfected the court masque with designer Inigo Jones.

Other Jacobean Dramatists

1.5 Restoration and 18th-Century Drama

The theatres, closed by the Puritans in 1642, reopened with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Two key changes: the introduction of female actors (previously boys played women's roles) and the indoor patent theatre with a picture-frame proscenium stage.

Restoration Comedy of Manners

Restoration comedy is characterised by witty, sexually sophisticated dialogue, the exposure of affectation, the rake hero, and the "proviso scene" in which lovers negotiate the terms of their relationship. Key playwrights and works:

• William Congreve — The Way of the World (Mirabell, Millamant); The Double Dealer
• William Wycherley — The Country Wife (Horner's impotence ruse); The Plain Dealer
• George Etherege — The Man of Mode (Dorimant, the ideal rake)
• John Vanbrugh — The Relapse; The Provoked Wife
• George Farquhar — The Beaux' Stratagem; The Recruiting Officer

18th-Century Drama

Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) attacked Restoration comedy. The 18th century saw a shift toward sentimental comedy (Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers) and domestic tragedy (George Lillo's The London Merchant). Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777) and The Rivals (1775) are the great anti-sentimental comedies of the century.

1.6 19th-Century and Modern Drama

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) and Realism

Ibsen's prose plays established the conventions of modern realistic drama: the well-made play structure, social and psychological problems, the retrospective method (present action unlocking past secrets), and the destruction of illusions. Key plays: A Doll's House (1879) — Nora's departure; Hedda Gabler (1890); Ghosts (1881) — hereditary disease as social metaphor; The Wild Duck; Rosmersholm; The Master Builder.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) — Wit, Aestheticism, and the Drama of Ideas

Wilde's plays occupy a distinctive position between Restoration comedy of manners and modern social drama. His comedies — Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) — deploy epigrammatic wit to expose the hypocrisies of Victorian society. Earnest in particular uses the comedy of double identity and the absurdity of class convention to reveal how little substance underlies social respectability. His one tragedy, Salomé (1891, written in French), is a Symbolist work in the tradition of Maeterlinck.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

Shaw's plays are debates in dramatic form — the "drama of ideas." He inverts romantic conventions and exposes bourgeois complacency. Key plays: Arms and the Man (1894); Major Barbara (1905); Heartbreak House (1919); Saint Joan (1923); Man and Superman (1903) — the Life Force and Don Juan in Hell. Shaw won the Nobel Prize in 1925.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)

Chekhov pioneered the drama of inaction and indirection — what is not said carries as much weight as what is. "Nothing happens" on the surface while emotional lives are destroyed underneath. Key plays: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1900), The Cherry Orchard (1904). Key techniques: subtext, the indirect method, symbolic objects (the cherry orchard, the seagull), ensemble character with no clear protagonist.

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) and Epic Theatre

Brecht's Epic Theatre opposes Aristotelian "dramatic theatre" (catharsis, identification, illusion). The goal is not emotional immersion but critical thinking — the audience must not forget they are watching a play.

Theatre of the Absurd

Coined by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961). These plays dramatise the absurdity of human existence in a universe without inherent meaning, using formal disruption (plotlessness, circular structure, breakdown of language) to express the condition they describe.

American Drama

Modern British Drama

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) at the Royal Court Theatre launched the "Angry Young Men" movement — Jimmy Porter's tirade against the Establishment defined working-class realism on the British stage. Arnold Wesker (Roots, Chips with Everything), Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), and John Arden followed.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) recasts Hamlet from the perspective of its minor characters — existentialist comedy meeting Beckettian absurdism. Other key works: Arcadia, Travesties, The Real Thing.

Caryl Churchill (Top Girls, Cloud Nine, Serious Money) deploys non-linear form, cross-gender casting, and dialectical structure to explore feminism and capitalism.

1.7 Indian Drama in English

Indian drama in English ranges from nationalist and mythological drama in the early 20th century to contemporary postcolonial theatre.

1.8 Drama, Language, and Social Hierarchy

A recurring concern in drama across periods is the relationship between language and social power — how speech marks class, caste, and worth. This is explicit in Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), where Professor Higgins transforms a Cockney flower girl into an apparent duchess entirely through phonetics, exposing the arbitrariness of the class system. The same anxiety surfaces in Osborne's Jimmy Porter, whose educated speech cannot unlock the class doors that remain closed to him, and in the American Dream plays where the right words — the right "pitch" — become survival strategies.

This theme connects to a deeper question explored in the Victoria Institutions series The Hidden Architect of Human Worth: how feudal languages encode social hierarchy invisibly into every pronoun and address form, shaping who can speak to whom and in what register. For students studying drama as a social form, this dimension — the way a play's dialogue itself encodes power relations — is worth exploring beyond what the standard NET textbooks offer.

1.9 Key Dramatic Terms for NET