Ag¯on
Greek for contest or competition, from which we get prot-agon-ist, the first or main actor/character, as well as related words such as "agony," "antagonize," etc. In Greece, plays were originally performed in competition, for prizes.
Allegory
From the Greek for "speaking otherwise," allegories are generally didactic stories that consist of an accessible literal narrative that is meant to be taken symbolically as well. They often represent large-scale religious or political struggles in disguise. Allegorical characters frequently personify abstract values (Love, Charity, Greed, Big Business). Anima, the central figure in The Play of the Virtues , represents the human soul in general; see also Everyman.
Allusion
A more or less veiled reference, within one work of art, to the ideas, words, images or even simply to the existence of another work of art or to its creator.
Anachronism
Accidentally or intentionally attributing people, things, ideas and events to historical periods in which they do not and could not possibly belong.
Asides
Words delivered by actors to the audience, or by characters to themselves, which by convention are treated as if they were inaudible to the other characters on stage.
Aulos
The double-reeded pipe
used on the ancient Greek stage as musical accompaniment for tragedy and comedy.
Caricature
An exaggerated and simplified depiction of character; the reduction of a personality to one or two telling traits at the expense of all other nuances and contradictions.
Catharsis
The infamously obscure medical term used by Aristotle in his Poetics to describe the purpose of tragedy: to stimulate pity and fear in the audience, and then to bring about the purgation or purification (catharsis) of these and similar emotions. Since Aristotle, the term has been widely adopted to refer to the healthy and pleasurable effects of releasing strong emotions, not only by watching a play, but in life generally.
Choral Lyric
A poem performed by a singing, dancing chorus; one of the early genres of Greek poetry out of which drama developed. See also dithyramb.
Choral Speech
Text in a drama that is spoken simultaneously by a group of characters in a manner comparable to that of the ancient Greek chorus.
Chorus
Originally, the choir of singing, dancing, masked young men who performed in ancient Greek tragedy and comedy. Treated in tragedy as a "character" within the story, the chorus often represents aggrieved groups (old men, foreign slaves, victims of the plague). The chorus berates, implores, advises, harasses, pursues, and sometimes even helps and commiserates with the main characters, but mostly bears witness to their doings and sayings. In Old Comedy, the chorus serves at times as the mouthpiece for the poet. It gradually disappeared from tragedy and comedy, but many attempts have been made to revive some version of it, notably during the Italian and English Renaissance, under Weimar Classicism, and by such twentieth-century playwrights as Jean Anouilh, T.S. Eliot, and Michel Tremblay. The singing and dancing chorus appears today most commonly in musical theatre, opera, and operetta.
Comedy
A play written to induce joy or laughter in the audience. Unlike tragedy, which generally takes characters from a condition of prosperity to a state of destruction or loss, comedy usually begins with a problem, and ends with its happy resolution. Comedy ranges from laughing genres such as satire and comedy of manners, parody, farce and burlesque, to such weepy genres as sentimental and romantic comedy (see also situation comedy).
Convention
A device, technique, habit or practice that, through long usage, has come to be accepted as normal and expected regardless of how illogical or inappropriate it might otherwise seem. See, for example, asides.
Determinism
The idea that behaviour is shaped in advance, especially by the laws of heredity (genetics and the family) and environment (social and political factors). In contrast to a belief in personal agency, determinism implies that humans are not completely responsible for their actions. Determinism in drama is associated particularly with nineteenth-century writers such as Emile Zola, who argued against the moralism of melodrama, and for an objectively scientific study of humanity. See also Naturalism.
Dialectic Argument
A mode of thought, associated with Socrates and with the nineteenth-century philosophers Hegel and Marx, in which terms are understood to contain their opposites, so that each one, being partial and only half the truth, should be annulled into a higher synthesis. The opposite of binary thinking (right or wrong, on or off), a dialectical argument has three terms (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), and says "yes, but also…, and therefore…" Brecht's "alienation effect" was based on, and intended to induce, dialectic thinking.
Dialogue
Words spoken by actors, usually implying the exchange of language between two or more speakers.
Dithyramb
A type of poem sung and danced in ancient Greece to celebrate the wine-god, Dionysus, and from which tragedy seems in some sense to have emerged. Dithyrambs performed by 50 -member men's and boys' choirs competed for prizes during the Athenian theatre festivals (see also choral lyric).
Dramaturgy
The art or principles of playwriting.
Elegiac Metre
The Classical elegiac meter has two lines, making it a couplet: a line of dactylic hexameter, followed by a line of dactylic pentameter
Epic Drama
A term popularized by Bertolt Brecht (though invented by Erwin Piscator) to describe a style of theatrical storytelling that, for political reasons, pits itself against the conventional rules of dramaturgy as outlined by Aristotle, who distinguished "epic" from "dramatic" writing. Whereas traditional drama is supposed to make audiences empathize with the struggle of a single, psychologically self-contained protagonist, epic drama places characters against the backdrop of the largest possible historical and political context in order that their actions do not seem inevitable or determined by private "human nature," but instead are revealed as part of a public, man-made, and therefore alterable set of historical facts. To prevent spectators from lapsing into an unthinking emotional stupor, epic theatre uses short, episodic, self-contained scenes, multi-media projections, written text, and music to interrupt and "alienate" the action rather than to emphasize its emotions. See "alienation effect," epic poetry, and dialectic argument.
Epic Poetry
A form of oral verse, originally sung from memory to musical accompaniment by specialist bards, containing a vast panorama of human life in war and peace. The epics of ancient Greece, each tens of thousands of lines long, are known to us mainly through the works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The stories of humans and gods contained in such poems provided most of the narrative material of Athenian tragedy and the satyr play.
Epilogue
A short, topical, often comic poem appended the end of a play and delivered directly to the audience by a popular actor.
Episodic Plot
A play or literary work composed of a series of separate and to some degree interchangeable incidents (rather than of a single, unified, and continuously unfolding narrative) is said to have an episodic plot.
Farce
Sometimes classed as the "lowest" form of comedy. Its humour depends not on verbal wit, but on physicality and sight gags: pratfalls, beatings, peltings with pies, malfunctioning equipment, unpleasant surprises, and sudden necessities to hide in boxes and closets. However, most comedy contains some elements of farce, which requires highly skilled actors for its effects. Also called "slapstick" in honour of the double-shafted baton carried by Arlecchino in commedia dell'arte, which, when struck against another actor in a simulated beating, made a loud slap.
Forestage
See apron.
Furies
In the Oresteia trilogy, the spirits of vengeance. They were conceived in Greek mythology as underworld goddesses who punish murderers or incite the victim's surviving relatives to do so. Euphemistically called the Eumenides, "the kindly ones" (out of fear of offending them, as their cruelty was notorious), these frightful goddesses comprise the chorus of the final tragedy in Aeschylus's trilogy.
Iambic Dialogue
Speech in a poetic drama that, with its unstressed/stressed rhythm (or short/long accent), most closely approximates the rhythm of everyday speech. Iambics were first used in Greek poetry in abusive poems that attacked particular individuals.
Irony
A contrast between what is said and what is known. Some speakers use it intentionally, as when Socrates feigned ignorance of things he knew quite well, to draw out other "philosophers." By contrast, dramatic irony occurs when characters utter statements whose full meaning is not understood by them (although it is clear to those who hear it, such as the audience or the other characters on stage). Many of Oedipus's remarks, which are true in ways he does not yet grasp, exemplify dramatic irony. Tragic irony, on the other hand, is said to occur when events turn out in an opposite way to what was expected and desired, yet so strangely fittingly that, in retrospect, it seems as if this outcome should have been predicted or known all along (see tragedy, with its "reversal and recognition"). Some forms of satire may also rely on irony.
Make-up
Any substance, usually in liquid, cream or powder form, that is used to disguise, transform, age, or decorate an actor's face. It includes the white lead reportedly used by Thespis in the sixth century b.c.e., as well as the "pancake," "powder," and "grease-paint" of later periods. In theatre traditions that do not use masks, and where distances or artificial lighting can impair visibility, make-up is sometimes used for the practical purpose of helping the audience to see the actors' features.
Mask
Any removable and reusable material used to disguise, transform, obscure, or decorate all or part of an actor's face. Many Western theatre traditions use masks as a convention. Greek and Roman actors always wore full masks with large, gaping mouth-holes (except in mimes); Italian actors of the commedia dell'arte wore coloured leather half-masks that covered their eyes, nose and upper cheeks. With the return of non-realistic performance styles in the twentieth century, the use of masks has become widespread again.
Monologue
Used to refer to text that is spoken by an actor on stage alone, or to the audience, but not to another character. Can also be used in the sense of "a long uninterrupted speech."
New Comedy
A type of comic play that flourished in ancient Greece from the fourth century b.c.e., particularly under such playwrights as Menander. It was later imported into Rome, where its plots and characters were reworked in Latin. Replacing Old Comedy after Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War, it focused on private, everyday domestic situations involving parent-child disharmony, money, neighbours, and parental obstacles to love and marriage. Its young lovers, bad-tempered parents, scheming slaves, and golden-hearted prostitutes quickly achieved the status of stock characters. Also known as situation comedy.
Old Comedy
The type of dramatic satire practiced in fifth-century Athens and equated today with the works of Aristophanes (see Frogs in this volume). The genre is known for its fantastical and unrealistic episodic plots, its frequent use of animal choruses (frogs, birds, wasps, horse-mounted knights), and particularly for its brilliant verbal wit, free obscenity, and fearless attacks on living Athenian politicians and other public figures (e.g., Euripides and Socrates). See also chorus.
Orchestra
Literally, "the dancing place." In the ancient world it was the lower, flat, circular surface-area of the outdoor theatre where the chorus danced and sang. It was also used by fiftymember choirs in the performance of dithyrambs, which were danced in a circular formation. As the dancing chorus disappeared from drama, the orchestra shrank to a semi-circle below a raised stage; over the centuries, it was eventually given over to musicians. The term is mainly used in the theatre today to refer to this orchestra-pit, or to the ground-floor seats of the auditorium, also called the parterre or stalls.
Panathenaia
"All-Athenian," a large ancient Greek summer festival featuring contests, prizes, and religious rituals, specializing in the competitive recitation of epic poetry.
Pantomime
Originally a genre of virtuoso solo performance invented by the ancient Romans. It is usually used today to refer to a type of spectacular entertainment that emerged in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century, featuring commedia dell'arte characters, magical special-effects wizardry, music, dance, and fantastical episodic plots. It remained very popular into the nineteenth century, when it picked up certain features of melodrama and developed into the form it usually takes today, the "Christmas Panto," which involves some audience participation, often of children. Also used in the sense of "to enact silently," or mime (see dumb-show).
Parody
A comic play or other work in which an institution, phenomenon, person, or artistic genre is ridiculed, usually through exaggeration, debasement, substitution, and incongruity. Unlike burlesque, which tends to target a specific work and imitate its tone, style, or oddities perfectly and even affectionately, parody is loose, general, and critical.
Pastoral Drama
A type of play invented during the Renaissance by members of Italian scholarly academies in an attempt to revive the satyr play of ancient Greece (see commedia erudita). Filtering the lusty, drunken goat-men, ecstatic maenads, and rustic settings of the satyr play though their Christian worldview, such writers created a new theatrical genre in which innocent shepherds, nymphs, and shepherdesses gambol in an idealized natural landscape free from the pressures of city life and the corruptions of civilization.
Plot
Not to be confused with the "story," the plot of a play or other literary work is the precise arrangement of incidents used to tell the story. The same story can give rise to countless plots, depending on the point at which the writer chooses to begin (at Oedipus's birth? or on the last day of his reign?), what he or she chooses to dramatize (the wedding night of Oedipus and Jocasta? the murder of Hamlet's father?), and how he chooses to bring the events about (a messenger? a lost letter? an epiphany? a gun-battle?).
Proagon
Greek for "pre-contest." It refers to the point in the Athenian theatre festivals at which playwrights appeared before the public with their actors to advertise their upcoming play, functioning like the "trailer" of contemporary movies in generating audience interest. At first performed outdoors, such events came to be held in the Odeon, or music-hall. See ag¯on.
Proscenium
A Latin architectural term derived from the Greek proskenion, the front-most section of the theatre building (sk¯en¯e) as it developed in the post-Classical, Hellenistic period. During the Renaissance, when theatres were built indoors, artificial lighting, perspective painting, and changeable scenery were adopted in scenography. To hide the scene-shifting equipment and lighting instruments from view of the spectators, a single archway was constructed at the front of the acting area. (The first proscenium of this type was built for the Teatro Farnese in 1618.) Stages on which a pictorial illusion is created with the help of a three- or four-sided border or frame are called "proscenium arch," or "picture-frame" theatres, and they reached their heyday during the nineteenth century, the age of realism.
Protagonist
The central character in a drama or other literary work; see ag¯on.
Realism
The attempt to so faithfully duplicate the appearance of the real world in art that viewers might conceivably be fooled into accepting the imitation for the thing itself. In the theatre, realism usually refers to a style of production perfected in the nineteenth century, when vast expense and labour were devoted to achieving the kinds of all-consuming illusions that today are more commonly associated with movies. Because the theatre's technical equipment, and the audience, must be hidden from view to achieve such illusions, theatrical realism is often associated with darkened auditoriums and picture-frame or proscenium-arch stages.
Role-Playing
The pretended adoption of the identity or function of another person. All acting, of course, is a type of role-playing. The impersonation of others is a common theme in drama and appears within the plots of countless plays.
Satire
A humorous play or other work in which people, attitudes, or types of behaviour are ridiculed for the purpose of correcting their blameworthy qualities. Satirists differ from other types of comic writers in that they are often morally outraged by the follies and vices they depict. Of all types of comedy, satire is the most critical. It can also, paradoxically, be the most subtle, for satirists may mask their fury with humour so effectively that they can seem to be condoning the faults they abhor. Satire often makes use of irony and frequently targets politicians and other public figures. For this reason, satire tends to flourish in liberal societies where free speech is prized. See also Old Comedy and comedy of manners.
Satyr Play
Ancient Athenian genre of comical drama, usually a mythological burlesque, which was performed by a singing and dancing chorus dressed in satyr costume (a furry loincloth to which a goat's tail and artificial penis were attached, plus a mask depicting an ugly snubbed nose, high forehead, and goat's ears). In Greek myth, satyrs were the drunken, randy, rabblerousing attendants of Dionysus, in whose honour all theatre was performed in ancient Greece. Satyr plays were staged as part of the Greek tragic tetralogy, either as the first or the last play of the four. See also pastoral drama.
Scenography
Also called "set design" or "stage design," scenography is often preferred today as a term to describe the visual and spatial aspects of a theatrical production. This is because many artists working in the theatre do not design only the sets, but also the costumes and sometimes even the lighting, too, for a unified effect. Scenography also implies that the creation of a beautiful and functional environment on stage is a specialized art form, not merely a variant of other types of design.
Score
The musical text of an opera, operetta, or musical, as written by a composer, containing parts for singers and musicians.
Set Design
See scenography.
Sk¯en¯e
Greek for "scene house." Referred to the covered, indoor portion of the Theatre of Dionysus in ancient Athens that was used by the actors for entrances, exits, and changes of costumes and masks. The sk¯en¯e also housed the theatre's special-effects machinery. In fifth-century tragedy, the scene house generally represented a palace or temple with its large central doors. In later centuries, scene buildings were constructed with new architectural features such as multiple openings and rows of pillars for receiving painted scenery; in such Hellenistic theatres, the sk¯en¯e was expanded and divided into an upper and a lower stage (or proskenion; see proscenium).
Sound-scape
Named by analogy with "landscape," a sound-scape is the totality of sound-effects, ambient noises and music used by a sound-designer or director as the aural background for a production.
Stage Design
See scenography.
Stage Directions
The written but unspoken parts of a play text, sometimes provided by the playwright and sometimes by later editors, that describe gestures, stage action, or technical effects (set changes, music cues, etc.). It was very rare until the nineteenth century, when detailed staging instructions became routine. With the rise of the director in the twentieth century, the freedom of theatre artists to determine the stage action for themselves has been energetically asserted, and for this reason stage directions are considered nonessential parts of the play by many theatre practitioners today.
Stichomythia
One of the meters of Greek dramatic poetry, used for the rapid exchange of short lines of dialogue between two speakers, approximating the effect of a witness under crossexamination. Of all Greek verse forms, it is the most definitive of drama and most strongly contrasted with its long monologue passages, which remain closer to earlier forms of epic poetry and choral lyric. See also iambic dialogue.
Stock Characters
Personality types in dramatic literature that recur so often that their particular collection of character traits, their professions, and sometimes even their names and costumes have become fixed. Some genres of theatre consist almost entirely of stock characters, such as the commedia dell'arte. Since this convention is much more typical of comedy than tragedy, great comic actors will often devote their entire careers to perfecting, developing, and even radically reinterpreting one of these stock characters, which are sometimes called "masks," in honour of the masked improvisers of the Italian comedy tradition. See also caricature, New Comedy, and situation comedy.
Subplot
A secondary narrative embedded within the main one that usually comments on, contrasts with, or in some other way illuminates the primary line of action in a play or other literary work. Subplots usually mirror the events related in the main plot, except transposed to a different and often lower social plane or tone.
Symbolism
The use of signs, visible images, or other sensuous effects to represent invisible or intangible ideas.
Theatron
Greek word for theatre, literally "the viewing place."
Tragedy
A Greek word believed to mean "song of the goat-singers" (see satyr play and dithyramb). Originating in the sixth century b.c.e., tragedy is the oldest dramatic genre and remains for many the "highest" form of poetry. Our knowledge of it derives mainly from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as from the little we know about the manner of its performance (see ag¯on, chorus, mask, orchestra, sk¯en¯e, and tragic tetralogy). Our understanding of it has also been shaped by Aristotle, whose description of Athenian tragedy in his Poetics remains a touchstone for tragic theory and practice to this day. According to Aristotle, tragedy is the imitation of an organically unified, serious action in which the plot, or arrangement of incidents, elicits the audience's pity and fear and then effects a catharsis, or purgation, of these and similar emotions. Tragic plots generally take the protagonist from a condition of good fortune to bad, often to his or her destruction, involve mental and/or physical suffering, and ideally take place within families, usually of a socially elevated or prominent type (royal families, for example). In Aristotle's view the most effective tragic plots also involve a simultaneous "reversal and recognition," a moment when the character's fortune turns for the worse, and when he or she is suddenly able to grasp a truth that was unavailable before. Tragedy has been reconceived by every subsequent age that has practiced it, beginning in the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, it was reinvented according to the principles of neoclassicism; in the eighteenth according to those of the Enlightenment ("middle-class" or "bourgeois tragedy"). Romanticism in turn created its own tragic forms, often inspired by Shakespeare. Notable re-thinkings of tragedy in the modern age include Arthur Miller's essay "Tragedy and the Common Man." See also working-class tragedy.
Tragic Tetralogy
A four-part tragedy. Mostly associated with the (non-comic) plays of Athens in the fifth-century b.c.e., it consisted of one satyr play and three tragedies written on related themes. Another famous tragic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung, was written in the nineteenth century by composer Richard Wagner. This four-part "music drama," created in imitation of Greek tragedy, is based on the heroes and gods of Germanic myth.
Tragi-Comedy
A genre of drama in which many elements of tragedy are present, but which generally has a happy end. Corneille's The Cid is an excellent example of this genre, which was sometimes preferred to straight tragedy under neoclassicism. See Fuenteovejuna.
Unities [of action, time and place]
A doctrine invented by the theorists of neoclassicism, who considered "the three unities" an essential rule of proper tragedy. It stipulates that the plot, the span of time it represents, and the amount of physical terrain it covers must together approximate the true unity of real space/time conditions (i.e., the single location and continuous two-hour time-period that prevails on stage during performance, during which one can realistically represent only so much action and no more). The concept was based on a misreading of Aristotle and was soon ridiculed almost out of existence by writers such as G.E. Lessing and Samuel Johnson. But it did succeed in determining the form taken by tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also ensured that the un-unified plays of Shakespeare would remain beneath the contempt of many for over a hundred years. Despite the unities' poor grounding in ancient theatre practice and the rigidity with which their (mostly French) advocates enforced them, the unities remain a useful concept in drama. Works of theatrical realism and Naturalism, for example, tend to observe them instinctively.
Word-Scenery
The use of language alone, when spoken by actors on stage, to convey the locations depicted in a play without the help of sets, lighting, or other theatrical effects. It is typical of bare-stage traditions such as those of Shakespeare. Superb examples of the effectiveness of word-scenery can be found in Shakespeare's Prologue to Henry V.
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