Glossary of Dramatic Terms
Associated with the minimalist style and bleak worldview of twentieth-century plays of the post-World-War-Two period (especially those of Ionesco, Pinter, and, problematically, Beckett).
Such works seem set in a world stripped of faith in god or a rational cosmos, in which idealism has been lost, and in which human action and communication are futile. Absurdist characters are often portrayed as trapped in a pointless round of trivial, self-defeating acts of comical repetitiveness. For this reason, absurdism can verge on farce or black comedy. Connected with the shock and disillusionment that followed World War Two, absurdism was anticipated in parts of Büchner's Woyzeck (see Volume II) . See also existentialism.
The sections into which a play or other theatrical work have been divided, either by the playwright or by a later editor. Dividing plays into five acts became popular during the Renaissance, in imitation of Roman tragedy; modern works are sometimes divided into three acts.
See volume II, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, p108.
A reaction to the realism and socially reforming agendas of late-nineteenth-century art. Associated in the theatre chiefly with Oscar Wilde, aestheticism asserted art's freedom to be separate and different from ordinary life and from practical uses.
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.
A rhymed verse form based on six-beat measures, in which every second line rhymes with the one before. Alexandrines were used in French tragedy and comedy throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century. They require highly skilled actors for their proper delivery.
Also known by the German term verfremdungseffekt, it is a Russian concept popularized by Bertolt Brecht to refer to any technique used in the theatre to distance spectators from the performance to the point where they can view it critically and ask questions about it. To alienate a phenomenon is to "make it strange," to make it seem odd or surprising. Actors do this when they keep their character at a distance rather than merging with it, or when they deliver their lines as if in quotation marks; directors use the "A-effect" when they interrupt the action or call attention to its artificiality with music, slides, or lighting. The opposite of "to alienate" is "to naturalize." See also epic drama.
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.
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.
Accidentally or intentionally attributing people, things, ideas and events to historical periods in which they do not and could not possibly belong.
The desire, particularly in nineteenth-century theatre, to avoid anachronism by meticulously researching the clothing, décor, music, and architecture of various historical periods. Its goal is to ensure that the sets and costumes for a given play are accurate for the time and place in which the story is set.
The part of a stage that extends into the auditorium or audience beyond the proscenium arch; sometimes called a forestage or a thrust stage.
The creative and administrative head of a theatre company, responsible for selecting plays and determining the style and mandate of the troupe. Before the twentieth century, this role was sometimes taken by the playwright, as in Molière's case, or by the leading actor, as in dozens of "actor-managers" of the English theatre.
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.
The double-reeded pipe used on the ancient Greek stage as musical accompaniment for tragedy and comedy.
Spanish religious plays. See also Bible-cycle plays, carros, and mystery plays.
Medieval religious plays, usually performed outdoors, often on wheeled carts, dramatizing stories from the Bible. See also mystery play and pageant-wagons.
Humour based on death, horror, or any incongruously macabre subject matter.
The non-musical, verbal component of a musical (see musical theatre); in opera and operetta, the non-musical text is called the "libretto."
After the French Revolution, the largest theatre district in Paris, and for years the home of its illegitimate theatre. Sometimes called the "Boulevard of Crime" for its sensational true-crime stories and melodrama.
A stage set consisting of three contiguous walls and a ceiling, realistic floor coverings, light fixtures, and practical windows and doors through which actors make their entrances and exits as if into a real room or building (see realism). Developed in the nineteenth century, it is still used occasionally by scenographers today.
Roles written or adapted for female actors in which they portray men or dress in male attire; especially popular during the English Restoration and throughout the eighteenth century, when men's trousers, or breeches, were form-fitting and reached only to the knee.
A comical imitation of an existing work that affectionately ridicules its sillier qualities, usually through exaggeration, substitution, and incongruity. The term is also used, in an unrelated sense, for a twentieth-century genre of American variety entertainment featuring music, pairs of comedians, and a succession of female striptease acts.
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.
The wheeled parade floats on which religious plays were performed in Spain; similar mobile stages were called pageant-wagons in England.
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.
A poem performed by a singing, dancing chorus; one of the early genres of Greek poetry out of which drama developed. See also dithyramb.
Text in a drama that is spoken simultaneously by a group of characters in a manner comparable to that of the ancient Greek 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.
A theatrical work not written in isolation by a single author but created jointly through the rehearsal process by a group of performers, with or without the help of a writer to record and synthesize their ideas.
Spanish "cape and sword" plays, popular during the seventeenth century. Often featuring macho heroes who must sacrifice their love to preserve their honour, such works combined comedy, violence, and adventure in a mix not unlike that of contemporary action films.
The oldest state-funded theatre company still in existence. The company was formed at the command of King Louis XIV in 1680, through the amalgamation of the two remaining French-language troupes in Paris, one of which was Molière's. Called the Comédie Française to distinguish it from the Italian company then resident in the capital (see commedia dell'arte), it was granted a monopoly on the performance of French drama. It is a symbol today of national conservatism.
Plays most closely associated with André Antoine's Théâtre Libre in late-nineteenth-century Paris. Comédies rosses featured sordid revelations of the depravity and bestiality of outwardly respectable but hypocritical upper- or middle-class characters.
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).
A type of comic play that flourished in the late seventeenth century in London, and elsewhere since, which bases its humour on the sexual and marital intrigues of "high society." It is sometimes contrasted with "comedy of character," as its satire is directed at the social habits and conventional hypocrisy of the whole leisured class. Also called Restoration Comedy; exemplified by the plays of Behn, Wycherley, and Congreve.
A species of partly masked, highly physical, and almost completely improvised comic performance that emerged in Renaissance Italy and remained popular all across Europe for the next three hundred years. Its name, which essentially means "professional acting," distinguishes it from the scholarly amateur theatre that emerged at the same time (commedia erudita). Its characters were few in number and always more or less the same (see stock characters), but some remain in use today: Harlequin, Pierrot, Pulchinella, and others. See also lazzi.
The theatre of the scholarly academies that flourished in Renaissance Italy. Its practitioners, who were "erudite" or well-read, wrote plays in imitation of Greek and Roman tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies, staged them in new experimental indoor theatres, and in the process invented many aspects of post-classical theatre: the proscenium arch, illusionistic, changeable scenery, theatrical lighting, pastoral drama, and opera.
Used to refer both to the members of a theatre-producing organization (including all creative and technical personnel), either travelling or resident in its own theatre building, and to the cast of an individual play.
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.
Name for the outdoor courtyard theatres of Spain during the Renaissance and beyond; similar in many ways to the public theatres of Elizabethan England.
The wearing of the clothing of the opposite sex, either on stage or in life, is typical of many single-gender theatrical traditions, such as those of ancient Greece and Shakespearean England, in which only men performed. See also breeches roles.
A modernist "anti-art" art movement initially associated with Zurich,Tristan Tzara, and the first World War, but which was also taken up by others elsewhere. Informed by a disgusted rejection of the civilization that produced that war, Dadaist artworks and cabaret-style performances attacked all the traditional values of European art by aggressively championing nonsense, randomness, vulgarity, and anarchy. Along with the Italian Futurists, Dada expanded the language of modern theatre with its use of noise, chaos, spontaneity, and with simultaneous, multi-media "happenings" in unconventional venues. See modernism.
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.
A local variation of a given spoken language, such as Cockney English or Cajun French.
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.
Words spoken by actors, usually implying the exchange of language between two or more speakers.
Dramatic performances intended to teach a particular moral, political, or religious lesson to the audience.
The individual or team responsible for interpreting, casting, and rehearsing a play, and for making creative decisions regarding its staging. Before the twentieth century, these functions were performed not by a person who specialized in direction but by the leading actor in a troupe or by the playwright. See also mise en scène.
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).
Giving an actor two (or more) parts to play within a given production.
An utterance meant to be heard in two ways, one innocently literal and the other obscene or sexually suggestive. It is an important technique in comedy, especially comedy of manners.
A position on stage near the audience and halfway between each side wing. In order to aid the perspective illusion of painted scenery, theatre stages used to be raked upwards, with the horizon-line higher at the back of the stage than at the front. To move "downstage" is therefore to come closer to the audience.
The art or principles of playwriting.
The silent representation of an action through physical mimicry and gestures only.
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.
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.
A short, topical, often comic poem appended the end of a play and delivered directly to the audience by a popular actor.
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.
A kind of philosophy in which the meaning of human life is derived from the actual experience of the living individual. First detectable in the anti-systematic thinking of Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, existentialism came to be associated with the playwrights, novelists, and philosophers of post-World-War-Two France (especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus). The existential worldview, in which life is assumed to have no essential or pre-existing meanings other than those we personally choose to endow it with, can produce an absurdist sensibility (see absurdism).
An influential art movement of the early twentieth century, c.1907–1920s (see modernism). Associated with Germany, it was strongly visual in orientation; indeed, some of its pioneers in drama were visual artists (Kandinsky, Kokoschka). It aimed to give external expression to internal psychological states, usually of an extreme, nightmarish, or otherwise violent kind. Expressionist characters are often tormented by a hostile, overly mechanized, dehumanizing urban environment. Their paranoid or fearsome inner visions are represented visually on stage through distorted perspectives and uncanny colours, menacing lighting, unrealistic and exaggerated costumes, and confusing discontinuities of time and space. Expressionist plays can have a tendency to allegory.
An old and traditionally oral story, often assumed to be suitable only for children, in which the ordinary laws of nature are superseded by fantasy and the fulfillment of wishes. Fairytales are often surprisingly violent and typically composed of conventional elements such as handsome princes and sleeping beauties, enchanted forests, talking animals, wicked mothers and witches, and trials or enchanted objects that come in threes. Fairytale characters often use magic or guile to defeat rivals, marry a rich monarch, and live happily ever after.
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.
A large-format printed version of a manuscript, often used in connection with Shakespeare's plays. After Shakespeare's death, two of his former partners in the King's Company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, collected thirty-six of his plays (excluding Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen) and in 1623 published the collection in a volume that has since been called the First Folio. "Folio" refers to the size obtained when a sheet of paper of standard size is folded once, making two leaves or four pages, which can then be sewn together along the fold to make a book. When the sheet is folded twice—creating four leaves or eight pages—it is called a " quarto."
See apron.
The production of plays and performance pieces outside or "on the margins" of mainstream theatre institutions.
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.
Used in several senses to refer to an upper balcony in a theatre. In the Elizabethan public theatre, musicians sat in a "musicians' gallery" above the stage; indoor London theatre auditoriums of the next few centuries were divided intp pit, boxes, and gallery, the last being the uppermost and least expensive seats. To "play to the gallery" is to pitch the level of one's performance to (what was assumed to be) the least discerning members of the audience, originally servants of those sitting below.
A form of theatrical entertainment popular in England in the eighteenth century, consisting of English versions of the stock characters of Italian commedia dell'arte. See also pantomime.
A dramatic re-imagining of real people and events drawn from the annals of the past. Shakespeare and Schiller are considered among the greatest writers of history plays; Büchner and Strindberg are also noted for them. From time to time, such works have played important roles in the establishment of a nation's self-image and founding myths. Some degree of anachronism tends to be considered acceptable in historical dramas.
A play emphasizing laughter; used in the context of eighteenth-century theatre in contrast with sentimental comedy. (Sentimental comedy was meant to induce "a joy too exquisite for laughter." Advanced by writers such as Richard Steele in the early eighteenth century, it was a wholesome, anti-aristocratic, middle-class alternative to the sex-and-adultery comedy of the Restoration.)
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.
A historical term, now often used in quotation marks, to describe the many types of musical, variety, spectacular, and non-literary entertainment that exist alongside, or are seen as imperiling the survival of, more elevated and challenging forms. It derives from the monopolistic laws that regulated English and French theatre until the mid-nineteenth century, and which gave "licenses" to one or two companies only, along with protection from competition from other upstart enterprises. Known for their literary drama, serious opera and ballet, such theatres were called the legitimate houses; all others, technically illegal and therefore "illegitimate," avoided prosecution by steering clear of regular or classical plays, sometimes inventing new genres in the process (see, for example, melodrama).
The seemingly spontaneous invention of dramatic dialogue and/or a dramatic plot by actors without the assistance of a written text. All performers must generally be able do this in short bursts—to cover a mistake on stage, or to plumb the depths of a character during rehearsals. But improvisation is also a highly specialized art form with its own rules and conventions. The actors of the commedia dell'arte tradition, who could extemporize on stage for hours on the basis of only a bare-bones scenario posted backstage, were said to be expert in it.
A short and often comical play or other entertainment performed between the acts of a longer or more serious work, particularly during the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
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.
French for "play," as in a game; used in the titles of some French dramas (although not in the sense of "a theatrical play" in general, which is une pièce).
Italian for "turn" or "trick." Used of the comical gags, jokes, acrobatics, and stock gestures for which the servant characters of the commedia dell'arte were famous. Whenever the actors ran dry in their improvisation, Arlecchino or one of the other zanni (comic servants) would jump-start the action, drawing on a pre-perfected repertoire of tumbles, flips, beatings or other (usually physical) stage business.
Historically, a state-licensed and legally protected monopoly theatre; metaphorically, by extension, the "high art" theatre world. See illegitimate theatre.
A play or playlet based on the text of the Catholic religious service that is performed as part of the service itself, originally staged in Latin by clerics, and eventually in various vernaculars. They were first documented in the tenth century, when Benedictine monks used gestures to act out the lines of the Easter Mass known as the "Quem Quaeritis" trope—a section of sung text depicting an exchange between an angel and the Marys who are looking for Jesus' body at the sepulchre. Over the next three centuries, such illustrations of key moments of the church service blossomed into semi-autonomous plays. Liturgical drama declined after the Reformation, but it can still be found today in some places, especially in Spain and South America.
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.
Used in the Medieval period in some types of religious plays to describe the various locations represented as part of the outdoor set (see passion play and miracle play). For a piece about the Passion of Christ, for example, structures would be built to depict such locales as Heaven, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Limbo, and Hell. Often elaborately decorated and equipped with sophisticated special-effects machines, such mansions were simultaneously visible throughout the play; the action advanced not through set changes but through the movement of actors from one mansion to the next.
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.
Spectacular entertainments performed at royal courts as part of special celebrations such as weddings and feast-days, chiefly during the Renaissance. Consisting of music, dance, technical wizardry, and extravagantly opulent costumes, masques celebrated the virtues of the reigning monarch in terms, images, and allegories drawn from Classical mythology. Members of the royal family and their entourage took part by joining in the dancing or allowing themselves to be carried aloft on "clouds" animated by hidden machines. In England, Ben Jonson provided the poetry for famous masques created in collaboration with architect and scenographer Inigo Jones.
A type of storytelling that emerged in France and Germany in the wake of the French Revolution, and that is marked by many features of that event: a clear division of characters into the poor, weak, and good hero on one hand, often a child, woman, mute or slave; and a rich, powerful, and evil villain on the other, who schemes to exploit or harm the victim, but who is triumphantly overthrown at the last possible minute, usually in a sensational fire, fight, avalanche, or other violent cataclysm. Literally "music-drama," melodrama originally used background music throughout the action, much like film soundtracks do, to emphasize the characters' emotions, warn of approaching danger, and shape the spectator's emotional response (especially at the ends of acts and scenes, when actors assumed particularly pathetic or frightening postures and held them, frozen, in tableaux). Melodrama was the most popular narrative genre in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. It still retains its popularity today, but it has long since left the theatre, taking up residence in the Hollywood film.
A type of musical variety entertainment consisting of racist burlesques of African-American performance styles. Hugely popular in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century, minstrel shows were generally performed by white singers in "blackface" (black make-up with highlights applied to emphasize the lips and eyes), and were based on grotesquely exaggerated stereotypes. Minstrelsy developed elaborate conventions and achieved such wide mainstream acceptance that it attracted contributions from respectable composers, such as Stephen Foster. There were even some instances in which African-American performers themselves adopted blackface and caricature-based mannerisms in order to appeal to popular taste. Long after minstrelsy's racist foundations were themselves recognized and denounced, variations on the minstrel show continued to appear, for example on British television (the BBC's "Black and White Minstrel Show" ran from 1958 to 1978).
A type of medieval religious drama based on material drawn from stories and legends about the lives, works, suffering, and martyrdom of Christian saints. Also called a saint's play.
French expression, literally meaning "the putting on stage," which has been adopted in other languages to describe the sum total of creative choices made in the staging of a play. Because these are nowadays usually made by a director, mise en scène can be used interchangeably with "direction," but the French term conveys a greater sense of the artistry involved, particularly with respect to the visual, stylistic, and conceptual aspects of a production that are not explicitly covered by the English term.
A widespread movement in Western culture, datable perhaps to the Paris Exposition of 1889, which sought to sever all ties with the past and invent new modes of art, thought, and life that were consistent with (what was believed to be) an unprecedented new age of machines, speed, new possibility, and change. Like the unadorned steel of the Eiffel Tower, like the architectural adage that "form follows function," like Futurist symphonies written for typewriter and vacuum cleaner, modernism rejected all ornamental beauty, challenged all recognizable artistic conventions, and tried to reinvent painting, music, theatre, architecture, and other arts from scratch. Modernist sub-movements, such as Symbolism, Futurism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, advanced their own styles; but they all shared a desire to use artistic materials—light, colour, sound, space, time, bodies—in boldly new ways. From the early 1970s, the austerity and radicalism of modernism was rejected by many artists in favour of postmodernism.
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."
A type of religious drama that flourished in the Middle Ages, usually cast in the form of an allegory, and intended to teach a clear moral lesson to the audience. Everyman is one of the most famous of all morality plays.
The practice of disguising oneself in costume and, with other mummers, going door to door to entertain one's neighbours, usually in connection with an ancient seasonal festival or holiday. Modern-day Halloween approximates the practices of the earliest known mummers, who seem to have been common in England in the Middle Ages.
Virtually all theatre, in all periods and places, features music. But the term "musical theatre" refers to a specific, often American genre of entertainment that dominated the commercial theatre districts of New York, London, and other cities through the twentieth century. Divided into songs, dances, and unsung spoken sections, and frequently featuring large dancing choruses, musicals can be hard to distinguish from some kinds of opera and operetta; but whereas the vocal parts of opera can usually be handled only by professional musicians, musical theatre scores are generally intended for actors (who happen to be able to sing). Very great musicals will tend to "cross over" and be taken into the repertoires of serious opera companies eventually.
A type of religious drama popular in the Middle Ages, based on narrative material taken from the Old and New Testaments. In England, mystery plays, also called Bible-cycle plays, were performed by the members of trade and craft guilds in the streets of market towns, often on Corpus Christi day. See pageant-wagons, carros, and autos sacramentales.
The term used by Emile Zola in the late nineteenth century to describe a new, scientific method of novel-writing and playwriting. Influenced by medical science—and a few naturalist playwrights were actually doctors—Naturalism aimed to diagnose human crimes and evils as dispassionately as a doctor would a disease. Like specimens in an experiment, Naturalist characters are placed within specific biological, political, and social conditions, conditions that are often referred to collectively as "heredity" and "environment." The goal is to observe, as objectively and unmoralistically as possible, what kind of behaviour results (see determinism). Naturalist works can be grim in tone and detailed in their realism, often focusing on the ugly or "pathological" side of life (suicide, infanticide, poverty, venereal disease, prostitution).
The principles, rules, and conventions of writing plays according to the precepts and ideals of neoclassicism. Often based on the so-called unities of time, place, and action.
Literally the "new classicism," the aesthetic style in drama and other art forms that dominated high culture in Europe through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in some places into the nineteenth century, or until it was swept away by Romanticism. Its subject matter was often taken from Greek and Roman myth and history; but more important than its subject matter was its style , which was based on a selective and often downright false image of the ancient world. It valued order, reason, clarity, and moderation; it rejected strong contrasts in tone, as well as, usually, the supernatural and anything that cannot be rationally motivated within the plot of a play (such as the appearance of gods, witches, or a dancing chorus). Racine's Phèdre is considered one of the most perfectly realized neoclassical dramas. See also unities.
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.
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.
Also known as "light opera." A theatrical work that is mostly sung and intended to be performed by professional singers. Associated with the works of Franz Lehar and Johann Strauss II, operetta differs from opera in three ways: it features longer unsung spoken scenes, tends to treat lighter, frothier subjects, and uses less challenging and more popular musical idioms. See also musical theatre.
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.
Wheeled and elaborately decorated parade floats used as mobile stages in England for the performance of Bible-cycle plays, or mystery plays. They were sometimes built on two levels, with trap doors and mechanical devices for raising angels or thrones up to heaven. Actors drew them through the streets of market towns along a prearranged route, either by hand or horse, stopping intermittently at fixed performance locations to enact their portion of the Biblical narrative. Many wagons were stored through the year in covered sheds and brought out on Corpus Christi day.
"All-Athenian," a large ancient Greek summer festival featuring contests, prizes, and religious rituals, specializing in the competitive recitation of epic poetry.
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).
A short story told to illustrate a moral principle. It differs from allegory in being shorter and simpler: parables do not generally function on two levels simultaneously.
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.
A type of late medieval religious drama based on episodes from the life of Christ as related in the New Testament, similar to the saint's play or miracle play insofar as it dramatizes the persecution, suffering, and death of a martyr revered by Christians. Sometimes staged over many days, usually on an outdoor mansion set featuring Heaven on the left and a prominent and spectacularly equipped Hell Mouth on the right.
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.
The power, as exercised by an individual, to originate and carry out his or her desires from sources within the self, free from or against the determinism of external forces.
A writer or creator of plays who is engaged by a theatre company to work within their midst for a period of time, either for the purpose of nurturing a young talent, or of gaining prestige from association with an established writer, and usually in the hope that he or she will produce new work for the company to perform.
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?).
Plays that employ symbolism, metaphor, and heightened language to a degree normally associated with poetry, but that are written in prose rather than verse.
A movement in art and culture during the last quarter of the twentieth century named for its rejection of modernism. Characterized by its re-embrace of tradition, postmodern art incorporates styles and conventions from previous historical periods, usually in eclectic combinations that reveal new aspects of each one. Noted for its playfulness and ironic detachment (see irony), postmodernism has been accused of lacking political seriousness; but its tendency to bring different media, periods, and cultural values into contact with one another (Western and Eastern theatre traditions, puppets and live actors, classical sculptures and computers, etc.) suggests that it is committed to seeing the world "globally" and resisting the domination of imagery and ideas by any one group or ideology.
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.
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.
The central character in a drama or other literary work; see ag¯on.
Refers to the size of a published book created from sheets of paper that have been folded twice. When sewn together along the second fold and ripped along the first, eight pages are produced. In the case of Shakespeare, the word is used of certain printed copies of his plays that appeared during his lifetime, usually in "bootleg" versions (see by contrast the folio edition). Before the advent of copyright laws, publication of plays during the author's life was strongly resisted, as this would have made the works available to rival companies. When such plays did appear, usually against the wishes of the playwright, they often did so in badly corrupted versions. For example, the first edition of Hamlet (1603) is believed to be a reconstruction of the play from memory by the actor who played Marcellus. Much of the text seems merely paraphrased, but the stage directions are probably authentic. The second edition of Hamlet (1604) is more reliable. These two editions of the play are known as the First and Second Quarto (or Q1 and Q2).
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.
Used to refer either, in general, to the sum total of plays that are considered stage-worthy at a given time, or to the particular list of plays that can be readied for performance by an individual theatre company (or performer).
A system of scheduling plays non-consecutively by alternating them with other plays from a company's current repertoire. The repertory or "rep" system is very rare in North American commercial theatre.
A genre of witty and sexually uninhibited drama associated with the London theatres in the decades after 1660, when King Charles II was "restored" to the English throne. It was known for its pungent satire, obsession with the habits of the upper classes, and cynical depiction of human customs, particularly the institution of marriage. Also see comedy of manners.
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.
A dreamlike genre of fiction or storytelling in which the ordinary laws of nature are suspended, in which statues come to life, shipwrecked men emerge from the sea unharmed, and troubled or broken worlds are magically healed at the end, often by daughters, and often in pastoral settings.
A widespread movement in art and culture, beginning in the later eighteenth century, that aimed to throw off the shackles of neoclassicism. Rejecting all rules and rational principles, Romantic art emphasized feeling, stark contrasts, extreme or abnormal psychological states, as well as the inner world of dreams, fantasies, and the supernatural. Natural and untutored "genius" was prized over technical mastery, untamed and "sublime" nature over civilization. Some Romantic poets did produce works for the stage, such as Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Shelley, but Romanticism in the theatre more often took the form of violently emotional acting, particularly the kind made famous by Edmund Kean. Romanticism also manifested itself throughout nineteenth-century theatre in melodrama and Gothic plays, with their intense villains, brooding heroes, spooky vampires, and dark medieval castles.
See miracle play.
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.
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.
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.
The musical text of an opera, operetta, or musical, as written by a composer, containing parts for singers and musicians.
The written text used in the making of a movie. It describes the sequence of shots and camera angles that will be used in the telling of the story, as well as what the characters do and say. Screenplays are often based on pre-existing stage-plays and novels.
See scenography.
Humorous play or other performed story concerning everyday domestic trials and tribulations within families and/or between friends and neighbours. Love, marriage, wealth, and family or neighbourhood harmony are usually the focus of sitcoms. The jokes are generated by awkward or complex situations involving false assumptions, mistaken identities, and attempts to trick others out of money, prestige, or lovers. Sitcoms often feature stock characters such as the braggart, the parasite, the clever servant, the stupid servant, the violent cook, and so on. See also New Comedy and convention.
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).
Dramas, usually from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that focused on specific topical and controversial issues such as prostitution, slum landlordism, venereal disease, and other malaises of modern society. Associated with Shaw and Ibsen in particular, and often closely related to the plays of Naturalism.
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.
See scenography.
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.
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.
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.
German for "Storm and Stress." A literary movement that took its name from the title of an F.M. von Klinger play of 1776, and which was one of the earliest manifestations of Romanticism. It is associated particularly with the work of Goethe and Schiller.
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.
One of the many influential schools within modernism. Like realism, to which it obviously refers, surrealism incorporates elements of the true appearance of life and nature; but unlike realism, it combines these elements according to a logic more typical of dreams than of waking life. Isolated aspects of surrealist art may create powerful illusions of reality, but the effect of the whole is to disturb or question our sense of reality rather than to confirm it.
The use of signs, visible images, or other sensuous effects to represent invisible or intangible ideas.
A movement based in late-nineteenth-century Paris in which playwrights, following the lead of Symbolist poets and painters, tried to convey invisible emotional or spiritual truths through a careful orchestration of atmosphere and symbolism. Most of the works of the Symbolist theatre were presented at either Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art or Aurélien Lugné-Poë's Théâtre de l'Oeuvre .
Plural of tableau, French for painting or picture. It is used in drama to refer to a visually pleasing and emotionally compelling arrangement of actors' bodies on stage. First recommended for wide use by theorist and playwright Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century, such consciously contrived stage pictures did gain prominence in the centuries that followed, particularly in melodrama, which often called for them in the stage directions.
Greek word for theatre, literally "the viewing place."
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.
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.
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.
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.
In theatrical contexts, used to describe a ramp or raked hallway under the seats of the auditorium that allows spectators to ascend to their seats, or actors to the playing area, from below. The ancient Romans, who built their poured-concrete theatres on flat ground rather than nestled into naturally occurring hillsides, were the first to use "voms."
The style of playwriting, acting, and scenography associated with the Weimar Court Theatre during the late eighteenth century, when Schiller and Goethe were playwrights-in-residence and artistic directors there. Following their Sturm und Drang periods, both adopted an approach to writing and staging plays that was noted for its greater fidelity to Classical Greek culture than was common in neoclassicism. See also antiquarianism.
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.
A tragedy whose protagonist is drawn from the "proletarian" or working class. The genre does not appear until the nineteenth century (see Büchner's Woyzeck in Volume II), and it is based on an implicit rejection of the traditional, Aristotelian assumption that only the "best" of a society's citizens were suitable for serious dramatic treatment.
The process of developing and improving a play through a collaboration between a playwright and a group of theatre artists, with the goal of producing a script deemed ready for performance.