PART 2

教师进入What Is Drama讲解:

Q1: What is drama?

A1: Drama is a genre of literature or style of writing, in which the words are mainly dialogue. People talking is the basic dramatic action; Drama is also a play that can be performed for theatre, radio or even television. These plays are usually written out as a script that is read and performed by the actors but not the audience.

Q2: As a genre of literature, drama shares some connections with other forms of literature. Think about how does drama relate to poems, stories or fictions?

A2: Like a poem, drama is overheard rather than being addressed to a reader; like fiction, drama is concerned with plot and character.

Q3: Some say that drama is a special kind of fiction. Think about the differences between fiction and drama, and explain in what way is drama a special fiction?

Hint: Fiction is also concerned with plot and character, however, a fiction needs to be narrated rather than being acted out; Drama is more public because it is written to be performed and witnessed.

Q4: What is the essential quality of drama and how do you explain it?

A4: The essential quality of drama is interaction since it uses words to create action through the dialogue of characters talking to one another rather than to the reader.

Q5: According to what Aristotle said about drama and the definition we have covered, try to list the basic elements of drama.

A5: Professor J M. Manly saw three necessary elements in drama: (1) a story (2) told in action (3) by actors who impersonate the characters of the story. Though the origin of theater seems to be a riddle, “performing” or “acting” has been existing as a spontaneous action throughout human history.

Dionysus is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in ancient Greek religion and myth. Wine played an important role in Greek culture, and the cult of Dionysus was the main religious focus for its unrestrained consumption. His worship became firmly established in the seventh century BC. He may have been worshipped as early as c. 1500–1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks; traces of Dionysian-type cult have also been found in ancient Minoan Crete. His origins are uncertain, and his cults took many forms; some are described by ancient sources as Thracian, others as Greek. In some cults, he arrives from the east, as an Asiatic foreigner; in others, from Ethiopia in the South. He is a god of epiphany, "the god that comes", and his "foreignness" as an arriving outsider-god may be inherent and essential to his cults. He is a major, popular figure of Greek mythology and religion, becoming increasingly important over time, and included in some lists of the twelve Olympians, as the last of their number, and the only god born from a mortal mother. His festivals were the driving force behind the development of Greek theatre.

Q6: How did drama come into being?

A6: Ancient Egyptians and Persians held rites to commemorate birth, death, or renewal of soil. The dramatic form in those rites embodied the order of human life and echoed the rise and fall of the Nile. In ancient Greece epics about gods and men, attributed to Homer (between the 9th and 8th century BC), were sung by single musicians at first, but were later supplemented with dialogues and narrated through both singing and acting. Hundreds of years after Homer, Greeks started to have whole-day celebrations at theaters where men paid tribute to the gods in communal enactments of myths of redemptive sacrifice and orgiastic abandon.

Q7: Drama began with pagan religious rites in Greece. It evolved from certain religious ceremonies. There are three independent origins of drama-- Greek tragedy, Greek comedy, and medieval drama. Read the textbook and see what does each origin deal with in ancient time?

A7: It is generally believed that Greek tragedy developed from certain Dionysian rites dealing with life and death, while Greek comedy arose from the Dionysian rites which dealt with the theme fertility. And medieval drama came out of rites commemorating the birth and the resurrection of Christ.

Q8: What is tragedy?

A8: The word “tragedy” seems to mean a “goat-song,” and may reflect Dionysian death and resurrection ceremonies in which the goat was the sacrificial animal. Tragedy describes the fall from prosperity to adversity of a great individual because he has transgressed against the great moral principles which govern the universe. In his adversity he comes to understand himself and the situation, blessed with enlightenment even though he may be dying.

Oedipus, prosperous and happy at the beginning of the play, believes that he can save his city, that he can control Fate. He did it once before, when he fled from Corinth to avoid carrying out the oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. But Oedipus is wrong, for Fate will carry the day. While traveling the unwittingly fulfills the oracle. Later, realizing the truth of his birth, he stabs out his eyes and goes into exile with his daughter Antegone as guide. At the end of the play he understands. His final appearance radiates a serene and dignified resignation to his destiny, an enlightenment gained at a terrible price.

Medieval drama in Western Europe, developed from the ritual of the Christian Church, became a new form about the ninth and following centuries. Then came mystery plays dramatizing familiar Biblical events, and morality plays, which flourished specially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and lived on into the Renaissance.

On the medieval stage there was the anonymous morality drama Everyman at the end of 15th century. In the Renaissance English Theatre there were Shakespeare’s tragedies such as Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and his comedies such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night.

Q9: Summarize the whole history of drama.

A9: Twice in the history of Europe, drama has sprung forth as a put of worship: when in ancient Greece, plays were performed on feast days, and when in the Christian Church of the Middle Ages, a play was introduced as an adjunct to the Easter mass with the enactment of the meeting between the three Marys and the angel at Jusus's empty tomb. The whole history of drama, then, is a distinct evolution away from religious celebration toward popular entertainment.

Drama as Performance

Q10: As we have learned from the previous part that the three necessary elements in drama are a story, action or performance and actors, what are some of the elements that drama as performance may include?

Hint: Drama, as in a play, is meant to be performed on a stage in front of an audience at the theatre. It also refers to the script which is the selection and arrangement of language. Therefore, elements of drama should also include theatre, audience, playwright, and scripts or words.

Q11: Compared with fiction, what are some of the most distinct features that drama has?

A11: (1) Drama is theatre. What the dramatist writes is a performable script. Theatre is always more than mere language, and true theatre can become manifest only in performance;(2) It is the joint product of many arts, of which direction, acting, and stage design are the most important; (3) Dramatic effects are stage effects. Plays appeal directly to our auditory and visionary senses. The dramatic experience, characterized by movement, directness, concreteness, is one of the urgent immediacy, of watching and listening to human destinies in the making which the novelist or the poet can evoke only by being dramatic; (4) The nature of the presentation of a play determines that once a performance begins, the point of view cannot be changed. We are sitting in the same seat in the same theatre during an entire performance of a play, looking always in the same direction at the same stage; (5) The plots need to unfold more quickly than in a novel.

Q12: What role does a playwright play in the production of drama?

A12: Apart from creating scripts, a playwright sometimes has to revise parts of his writings in accordance with the perspectives of the director he chooses for the production.

Q13: What should audience do when watching a play?

Hint: The audience of a play is a group of people seated together in a theatre. Watching a play is collective behavior; individuals become members of a community whose responses affect each other. The actor-audience rapport depends not only on the actors being skilled but also on the audience being perceptive. Professional actors feel more keenly inspired by a lively, appreciative audience than by a dull, lethargic one. A good audience helps draw the best from performers on stage.