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EARLY AMERICAN DRAMA

SEMESTER FOUR
(Tuesday, March 16th 2010)

I. THE NATURE OF DRAMA

Drama is different from fiction and most poetry in one essential way: it is
meant to be performed. Some theorists of drama argue that a play is incomplete
until it is performed. According to the critic Bernard BECKERMAN, in Dynamics of
Drama : “A play is a mere skeleton, performance fleshes out the bones”.

When you read a play, you miss qualities the playwright intended as a part of
the play. For one thing, you miss the audience, whose physical presence and
reactions to the performance & your perception of the play.

II. THE ELEMENTS OF DRAMA

Aristotle structured drama into six elements: plot, character, thought, diction,
music, and spectacle.

These elements must be mastered as a basic vocabulary for analyzing

dramatic structure.

The first element, the plot, is a complex one which includes theses eleven
aspects which are involved in the construction of the play: exposition, discovery,
point of attack, foreshadowing, complication, climax, crisis, and denouement, unity of
time, unity of place and unity of action.

Most often, theses aspects of the plot are not separated entities. For example,
the climax and the crisis may occur at the same time, or exposition may be used for
foreshadowing. Nevertheless these plot materials may be identified in most plays.
Plot is the chief part of drama. Aristotle gave his primacy when he said plot is “the
life and soul of tragedy”. Plot doesn’t mean a mere story. It is the formal aspect of
the play in the sense that it gives the play its form. Plot is to the playwright what
composition is to the painter and composer. It is to the ordered arrangement of the
parts which are causally* and logically related.

A play is not a chronological series of items like a time table. Just as a motion
picture editor arranges a meaningful sequence of film clips by relating each frame to
every other one, so, in a similar way the playwright composes his events and builds
the structure of his play.

Early American Drama – Course of Mr. BEGEDOU Komi – Semester 4

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A play is composed of divisions called acts which in turn to be divided into

scenes.

a) Exposition

When the curtain rises on a play, the dramatist faces the problem of capturing
his audience’s attention and providing the spectator with the necessary
background so that he can understand the subsequent action. He must know
who the characters are, what their relationship between one another is, what
motivates them and usually he needs some notions of their environment.
Playwrights use a variety of expository devices. They have choruses,
soliloquies, prologues,…

Early American Drama – Course of Mr. BEGEDOU Komi – Semester 4

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