What is Drama?

What is Drama?

Drama is a type literature usually written to be performed.

people often make a distinction between drama, which concerns the written text, or script for the performance, and theatre which concerns the performance of this script.

Many of the most honored and influential works of literature around the world have been dramas.

They begin with the classical Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Eripides and continue with the plays of such major dramatists as William Shakespeare in England Moliere in France Johann Wolfgang in Germany.

Characterstics of Drama

Most types of literature including novels, short stories and poems are written to be read, usually in silence by a solitary reader.

Although works of drama called plays are also read in this manner , they are created primarily to be presented in public by a group of performers, each of whome pretended to be one of the characters in the story the play is telling .

Older plays, such as those written by the Greeks or Shakespeare, consist almost etirely of the words spoken by theese characters .

More recent plays usually contains nonspoken material that tells the actors when to enter or leave the performance space gives suggestions about how to speak their dialogue , and describe their cosumes or their physical surroundings on stage .

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who laid the foundations for the critical study of drama, divided the elements of drama into plot character , thought language and spectacle.

Aristotle considered plot the basic story and how it is told the most important of these, and this is indeed typically the case

However almost all dramas use all of these elements to some extent , telling a story by means of the interactions of characters, who express their thoughts through language within a particular visual setting .

The balance of these elements, however, varies from play to play.

During some periods and in some traditions many or most plays emphasize some element other than plot .

Numerous plays emphasize a particular character or relationship between characters, as does Shakespearre’s Hamlet.

Such plays are especially poplar because audiences have always been interested in seeing their favourite actors interpret such demanding rules.

Related topics and what our site supported
host your files, protect your hosting files and some topics of English literature like novel and civilization