6.2–History of Drama

OTHELLO. Nor from mine own weak merits will I drawThe smallest fear or doubt of her revolt,

For she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago,

I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;

And on the proof, there is no more but this:

Away at once with love or jealousy. (3.3.218–223)^[4]

IAGO. As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser. What, man, there are ways to recover the General again! You are but now cast in his mood—a punishment more in policy than in malice, even so as one would beat his offenseless dog to affright an imperious lion. Sue to him again and he’s yours. (2.3.285–295)

Although both examples occur from the same play, they are formatted differently based on how they are written. Othello’s verse lines to Iago are shorter and determined by poetic considerations (in this case, the rules of iambic pentameter), whereas Iago’s prose lines to Cassio are limited by the space allotted on the page.

Knowing whether you’re dealing with verse or prose opens up interpretative possibilities and techniques.

Structure and Genre

Western plays are commonly divided into two types: comedy and tragedy. When pressed, most of us would identify comedy as something that makes us laugh whereas tragedy makes us cry. Comedies are the less serious, more approachable form whereas tragedies are more serious and lend themselves to critical acclaim. However, while these descriptions may hold true some of the time, “comedy” and “tragedy” may be more usefully defined as a set of narrative structures intended to evoke an au+dience response rather than a tone.

In his Poetics, a treatise on the structures of imaginative literature, Aristotle lays out several ground rules for what constitutes tragedy, and to a lesser extent comedy. Famously, he defines tragedy as

To summarize, Aristotle contends that a play is a play (as opposed to another form) because it possesses a closed narrative with a beginning, middle, and end; language that is pleasing and entertaining to its listeners; and actors actually performing the lines. Furthermore, Aristotle distinguishes tragedy from comedy with the emotions the audience feels while engaging with the play. Throughout a tragedy, the audience is meant to feel horror and sympathy for the tragic hero, but at the end, the audience purges these negative emotions and, ironically, feels better. For Aristotle, tragedy works because it follows an exceptional person who faces and accepts the repercussions of their actions, actions that are errors brought on by their personas as opposed to inadvertent mistakes. It is also worth noting that tragic protagonists are not exclusively male even for the ancient Greeks—Sophocles’ Antigone and Medea are two Greek examples of tragic heroines; other later plays include genderqueer, nonbinary, trans, and nongender protagonists. The close connection to a protagonist who starts in a superior position, regardless of whether that protagonist is a good or bad person, lets the audience live through the protagonist, feel their pain, and even hope and believe that things will work out for them.

The other major feature of tragedy is its inevitability. Good tragedy works not because the bad stuff was avoidable—it works because there was no way for that particular protagonist to avoid it. In the moment that a protagonist makes their tragic error, they could not have done otherwise without fundamentally altering their character. In some cultures, this inevitability is tied directly to fate or the divine (and sometimes both). In the Oedipus myth, several characters (including Oedipus himself) actively seek to avoid fulfilling the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. His birth parents abandon him, but he is rescued and raised by another couple. Once Oedipus learns of his prophecy, he immediately leaves his adopted parents (whom he believes are his birth parents) only to kill his birth father, save Thebes from a monster, and marry the recently widowed queen. Ironically, in seeking to avoid his fate, Oedipus ends up completely fulfilling it. Of course, fate does not always have to be divinely ordained or ordered by a prophecy. In the 2013 Twisted, a musical retelling of Disney’s animated film Aladdin from the perspective of Jafar in the vein of Wicked,^[6] the characters still complete the same story beats as the film. However, the perspective change from Aladdin as the point-of-view character to Jafar highlights the tragedy of a man attempting to do right but never really succeeding. Fate is just as unchangeable, but what makes it interesting is both where the fate comes from and how the character reacts to it.

Comedies, on the other hand, feature the protagonist (or ensemble) starting from a low point and needing to work upward. Moreover, rather than being a person worth admiring (and, in Aristotle’s case, of a higher social status), comedies focus on the common person. Let’s take, for example, the plot of the Shakespearean comedy Twelfth Night. In this play, the central characters start out in dire straits. Orsino is in love with a woman who refuses to return his ardor; Olivia is in mourning for her beloved brother; and Viola has just been shipwrecked in an unfamiliar location. By the end of the play, all three find love (Viola and Orsino plan to marry; Olivia and Viola’s identical twin brother Sebastian are already married by the time the play concludes) and find fulfillment in their lives.

In both comedy and tragedy, the audience should end up being surprised, even if they know that the ending is a comic or a tragic one. In many modern dramas, this surprise takes the form of a twist—a surprise that subverts the viewer’s expectations while still making sense within the rules of a story’s plot and universe. As Twelfth Night progresses, a major conflict that emerges is a love triangle among Orsino, Olivia, and Viola. Orsino is obsessed with Olivia; Olivia is enthralled by Viola (in disguise as the boy Cesario); and Viola (still in disguise) is in love with Orsino. To “solve” the conflict, Shakespeare includes a fourth character who just happens to look exactly like Viola and be the accepted gender for heteronormative coupling. While on the outside the resolution may seem forced, the play gets around this by laying the groundwork for Sebastian’s appearance before he even appears and gives him a close friendship (or one-sided romantic relationship) with another male character before he even meets Olivia.

Ultimately, the major takeaways from comedy and tragedy are that these are descriptive narrative categories that playwrights use to create stories. A play (at least the memorable ones) are rarely all tragic or all comedic.

Authorship

Authorship for drama is, for want of a better term, complicated. Traditionally, a play is attributed to the writer (or writers) of the script. For example, if you were to look up Othello on Google or in a library catalog, you would see that the author is William Shakespeare. Likewise, if you were to look up Harlem Duet, an adaptation of Othello, you would see that the author of that particular play is Djanet Sears. But the reality of creating a play is far more collaborative than single-author attribution implies.

Certain dramatic forms, such as musicals or opera, will provide authorship credit to both the writer of the music (the composer) and the writer of the lyrics (the librettist), though the composer usually is listed first. Other dramatic forms easily lent themselves to collaboration.

But what really complicates a play’s authorship is that, for the most part, plays are meant to be performed. Directors, actors, conductors, choreographers, set designers, costume designers, sound engineers, and others all have parts to play in creating a performance. It may be useful to think of a play’s authorship as akin to authorship in film (see Chapter 7: Film). In both film and drama—two performance-driven types of literature—authorship is a collaborative process with several individuals having a hand in decision-making.

When reading and writing about drama, authorship will first be determined whether you are primarily analyzing the playtext or a performance of the playtext. If you are analyzing the script, authorship will default to the recorded writer or writers of the script. In this sense, authorship goes to the individuals who wrote the words themselves, regardless of whether they’re drawing from another source like a myth or story. If you are analyzing a performance, you will likely attribute the script to the writer but the performance to either a particular company or director who made major decisions as to how the play would be performed.