Drama is a word of Greek origin meaning "action" and referring to a performance on the stage in which actors act out the events and characters of a story. A dramatic work is usually called a play, but if you want to specify what type of drama it is, you can call it a comedy, a. tragedy, a farce or tragicomedy or other names. As wel1 as a play, drama usually involves

• a playwright or dramatist, that is, the author of the play;
• a stage, that is, the area in a playhouse or theatre where the play is performed;
• an audience, that is, the people who go to the theatre to watch the performance.

Watching a live performance, while sitting in a playhouse with a crowd of other spectators, is the best way of appreciating any play.

Whenever you read a play, if you have no chance of seeing it performed, you should try to create a mental image of its performance In order to help you, we shall try to make you familiar with some basic dramatic conventions, that is, established ways of writing plays which have been used so often that they have become typical of the genre.

Today a play can be performed not on1y in a theatre hut also on the radio or on media TV The use of these two mass media has made drama easy accessible to the vast majority. The cinema has also contributed to the popularity of drama by offering memorable fi1m versions of some of the most important works in the history of British theatre.

Dramatic texts usually come in the form of plays of varying length. As in fiction, a play usually tells a story. But the dramatic techniques used for organizing a story in a plot are very different from those used in fiction. Here are some basic structural conventions used in writing drama.

FEATURES OF A PLAY

Plays are normally divided into major units called Acts, which are sometimes subdivided into Scenes. A scene usually shows a sequence of actions which happen in the same setting, that is, in the same place and in the same period of time. Modern plays may have one or two or three acts, whereas in the past, in the time of Shakespeare, for example, they had as many as five acts.

A play traditionally tells a story which is organised by the playwright/dramatist in a plot. The plot contains the same events as the story but it may present them in a different chronological order. The story is slightly different from the plot because it consists of the main events arranged in chronological order. It can be quickly summarised.

The order in which scenes and situations are arranged usually serves the purpose of creating dramatic tension, suspense and climax in order to capture the audience’s attention. They are essential ingredients of a thriller.

Before the actual text begins, you can usually find a list of the characters in the play headed either with the self-explanatory word Characters or with Cast. The characters of a play can be main/major characters or minor characters according to the importance of their role in the story. They may be well-rounded characters, and show the complexity of human psychology, or flat characters, based on only one or two aspects of personality which never change throughout the play, or stock characters, and represent human types such as the beautiful and virtuous heroine or the handsome and courageous hero in a traditional love story.

Plays develop through direct speech, usually in the form of a dialogue between the characters but occasionally in the form of a soliloquy when a character is alone on stage and utters his/her thoughts out loud.

Plays usually include stage directions, where the dramatist intervenes to give instructions for the play’s production. You can easily recognise stage directions because they are written in italics to distinguish them from the characters’ speeches.

The aim of drama is not to re-create the world of nature but to offer a different model of our world.

Comedy is a major form of drama of which the following general definition can be given: "a play in which the principal characters ordinarily begin in a state of opposition to one another or to their world – often both. By the end of the play, their opposition is replaced by harmony" (Scholes and Klaus). The main purpose of comedy is to amuse people and its main traits are: humour, comic plot and flat characters.

Comic plot consists in a sequence of difficult, intricate or improbable situations in which the main characters find themselves in trouble. But problems are always overcome and the end is always happy. Love and variations on this theme are the most frequent subject matter of comedies. The events of a comic plot follow one another at such a fast pace that the audience has no time to wonder at the improbability of the story. They accept it as a convention of comedy and enjoy the play.

Humour is the essence of comedy; it can take many forms on the stage, from the subtly amusing to the hilarious. This is what makes people laugh. It is often based on the privileged position of the audience when they know more than the characters on stage.

Let us examine these different kinds of humour in detail:

Verbal humour: Puns are also often used in comedy based on verbal humour. A pun is a play on words which have the same sound but different spellings and meanings. Alternatively, it can be an amusing use of a word or phrase which has a double meaning. This form of ambiguity, intrinsic to a pun, lends itself to comic effect.

Behavioural humour derives from the fact that a character’s behaviour is unexpected and seems absurd in the given context on the stage.

Situational humour which is based on the audience’s knowledge of an essential aspect of the situation which is unknown to some characters on the stage – e. g., a double identity or a mistaken identity, an intrigue or a deception.

In comedy, characters are not usually developed in depth. They are usually flat characters because the witty dialogue and the skilful handling of comic situations are more important than the observation or development of a character’s personality. Characters can represent human types, such as the miser or the coquette. They can portray socia1 types, such as the unspoiled peasant or the snobbish aristocrat. They can be the stock characters frequently found in comedies, such as the clever servant or the bossy wife. Whatever they are, they usually remain unchanged throughout the play.

Tragedy is the major form of drama besides comedy. It can be defined as a play in which "the hero and his world begin in a condition of harmony which disintegrates, leaving him, by the end of the play, in a state of isolation" (Scholes and Klaus).

Tragic plots and tragic heroes and heroines have specific features of their own which are typical of Shakespearean plays but can be extended to cover tragedies by other playwrights as well.

A tragic plot is more linear than a comic plot. From the introductory situation it rises to a climax, which is the highest point in the protagonist’s fortunes, followed by a reversal of fortune – the point of crisis – which leads to the final catastrophe.

Tragic heroes and heroines in traditional drama are above ordinary people because of their social rank and strong personality. As a consequence, their suffering is also much greater than common people could bear. Their catastrophe is decreed by fate and is often started by a fatal flaw. For example, In the case of Romeo and Juliet’s tragic story, the protagonists are an innocent couple who are doomed from the very beginning by a malignant fate. In the case of Macbeth, ’ambition’ is the fatal flaw that drives him and his wife towards their doom. Their final fall brings down other people as well.

Soliloquy, as well as dialogue, is used in tragedy to carry the plot forward and reveal a character’s complex personality. The language of tragedy is heightened in order to give appropriate expression to a content not normally found in everyday life. Shakespearean heroes usually speak in blank verse, which consists of unrhymed (= blank) lines of iambic pentameters (= five iambs or iambic feet) and is the closest of all verse forms to the natural rhythms of English speech.

TRAGIC PLOT

In dramatic tradition, tragedy mostly revolves round one central character who presents a complex portrait of a human being and uses a dignified manner of speech to express human suffering. A. C. Bradley, a Shakespearean scholar, has identified the following features in the tragic hero or heroine of Shakespeare’s plays. They can be extended to cover tragedies by other playwrights as well. The tragic hero or heroine...