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University of Madras
Syllabus with effect from 2020-2021
B.A English Literature
[2nd Year, 3rd Semester]
Background to English Literature-III
UNIT 1.2: DRAMA
Poetic Drama, Problem Play,
Cup- and -Saucer drama,
Well- made Play,
Expressionist Theatre
POETIC DRAMA:
The poetic drama is a great achievement
of the modern age. It is a mixture of high seriousness and colloquial element.
Poetic drama combines both the qualities of poetry and drama that give deep impact of dramatist’s emotions on the readers. In fact, poetry combined with drama increases seriousness in tragedy and actors feel comfortable to learn poetic dialogues. It is the combination of the tradition and the experiment and of the ancient and the new. It is symbolic and difficult. Its verse form is blank verse or free verse. This greatness of verse drama has now been well recognized because in this chaotic world, the poetic dramatist does not bring the characters near to us nor he tries to impress us but in fact, he attempts to make a great distance between us and realities of the world. He wishes to cut us away from our realistic world and deprive us from seeing the replica of the world on the stage to raise us to some unfamiliar associations which can be helpful in detaching the individual from his fellow and make us feel in him the flow of inner life.
The
poetry in verse drama is inherent in the structure of the play itself. Poetry
is not in any part of the play, in any one of its elements but all the elements
act in cooperation in the poetic drama. In the twentieth century, T. S Eliot
gave the theater a workable dramatic verse and has done more than any other
playwright of this century to get audience to accept this verse without
prejudice. There has been a great variety in the poetic drama of twentieth
century.
T.S.
Eliot has been the greatest shaping force in the literature of the twentieth
century in poetry, criticism, and drama. Long before he came forward with a
poetic play of his own, he had started defending poetic drama In The
Possibility of Poetic Drama, The Need For Poetic Drama, Aims of Poetic Drama
and Poetry and Drama he strongly advocated the cause of poetic drama. At one
point, comparing prose and verse as the media of drama, he conveyed his belief
that “poetry is the natural and complete medium of drama, that the prose play
is a kind of abstraction capable of giving you only a part of what the theatre
can give, and that the verse play is capable of something much more intense and
exciting.”
T.S. Eliot:
Eliot
propounded the theory of the poetic drama. It was he who established its
tradition in 20th century in poetry, criticism, and drama. The murder in the
Cathedral is his first full-length poetic play. The family Reunion, The
Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and the Elder Statesman are his other
important poetic plays. Through these plays he evolved a befitting poetic mode
of expression for the poetic drama. He discarded the use of traditional blank
verse. He carefully avoided any echo of Shakespeare. He explored the dramatic
possibility of verse and extended the scope of poetic drama.
At
one point, comparing prose and verse as the media of drama, he conveyed his
belief that “poetry is the natural and complete medium of drama, that the prose
play is a kind of abstraction capable of giving you only a part of what the
theatre can give, and that the verse play is capable of something much more
intense and exciting.”
The Chief Characteristics of Modern Poetic Drama:
The
poetic drama revived in England as a reaction to the realistic drama of Shaw
and Galsworthy.
The
protagonists of this movement wanted to introduce flavour, richness and poetry
in drama. Their work was the result of their dissatisfaction with the
intellectual drama in which everything proceeded logically.
They
held it was possible to produce plays rich and copious in words and at the same
time to give the reality which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive
and natural form.
The
poetic dramatists of the modern age thought that such plays dealing with the
profound and common interests of life and full of poetic speech would be
different from the intellectual plays of Ibsen and Shaw.
They
tried to exploit in the popular imagination of the British. The popularity of
the poetic drama depended more on poetic charm and strangeness than upon
dramatic power.
PROBLEM PLAY:
Also
called as Drama of Ideas or Propaganda Plays
The
term “Problem play” was coined by Sidney Grundy who used it in disparaging
sense for the intellectual drama of the nineties. G.B. Shaw defined it as “the
presentation in parable of the conflict between man’s will and his
environment”. The problem play is also called “the drama of ideas” because it
deals with themes like the problems of religion, of youth and age, of labour
and capital and sex. The characters of these plays seem constantly questing,
constantly restless and dissatisfied as compared to the characters of the
romantic drama. The Problem play continued to dominate in the early years of
the twentieth century also. Some writers like G.B. Shaw, Granville-Barker and
the like have made significant contributions to the Problem play.
A
type of drama that was popularized by the Norwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen(1828-1906). He translates the English works and showed that the theatre
could be used for discussing the social and moral problems of real life in a
modern setting. The serious drama with its remote, far-off setting and the
romantic excesses were replaced by a sincere and realistic treatment of actual
English life.
Ibsen
and then Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker were the chief exponents of this
realistic drama of ideas. In problem plays, the situation faced by the
protagonist is put forward by the author as a representative instance of a
contemporary social problem; often the dramatist manages—by the use of a
character who speaks for the author, or by the evolution of the plot, or
both—to propose a solution to the problem which is at odds with prevailing
opinion. The issue may be the drastically inadequate autonomy, scope, and
dignity allotted to women in the middle-class nineteenth-century family (Henrik
Ibsen's A Doll's House, 1879); or the morality of prostitution, regarded as a
typical product of the economic arrangements in a capitalist society (George
Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1898); or the crisis in racial and
ethnic relations in present-day America (in numerous current dramas and films).
Drama
of Ideas or Problem plays can also be compared with ‘Social Conditions of
England Novels’ or ‘Industrial Novels’ simply for raising and projecting the
issues that were deeply affecting the society. "Drama of Ideas",
pioneered by George Bernard Shaw, is a type of discussion play in which the
clash of ideas and hostile ideologies reveals the most acute problems of social
and personal morality. In a Drama of Ideas there is a little action but
discussion. Characters are only the vehicles of ideas. The conflict which is
the essence of drama is reached through the opposing ideas of different
characters. The aim of Drama of Ideas is to educate people through
entertainment. Arms and the Man is an excellent example of the Drama of Ideas.
Here very little happens except discussion. The plot is built up with dynamic
and unconventional ideas regarding war and love. Shaw criticizes the romantic
notion of war and love prevailing in the contemporary society. Unlike the
conventional comedies, here characters are engaged in lengthy discussion and
thus bring out ideas contrary to each other. To Shaw, drama was pre-eminently a
medium for articulating his own ideas and philosophy. He enunciated the
philosophy of life force which he sought to disseminate through his dramas.
Thus Shavian plays are the vehicles for the transportation of ideas, however,
propagandizing they may be. Shaw wanted to cast his ideas through discussions.
Out of the discussions in the play Arms and the Man, Shaw breaks the idols of
love and war. A subtype of the modern problem play is the discussion play, in
which the social issue is not incorporated into a plot but expounded in the
give and take of a sustained debate among the characters. See Shaw's Getting
Married, and Act III of his Man and Superman; also his book on Ibsen's plays,
The Quintessence of lbsenism (1891).In a specialized application, the term
problem plays is sometimes applied to a group of Shakespeare's plays, also
called "bitter comedies"—especially Troilus and Cressida, Measure for
Measure, and All's Well That Well—which explore ignoble aspects of human
nature, and in which the resolution of the plot seems to many readers to be
problematic, in that it does not settle or solve, except superficially, the
moral problems raised in the play. By extension, the term came to be applied
also to other 11Shakespearean plays which explore the dark side of human
nature, or which seem to leave unresolved the issues that arise in the course
of the action.
Features of the Problem play:
1. More Interest in Characterization: New
psychological investigations increased the interest in character as distinct
from plot. e.g. in The Glass Menagerie the characters of Laura, Amanda and Tom
are depicted in great details.
2. Contemporary Life: The realistic drama
of the period aimed at impartial presentation of contemporary real life rather
than historical. In Bravely Fought the Queen and The Glass Menagerie we see the
presentation of the actual problems faced by the modern urban families.
3. New Themes: The concern of the Problem
play was primarily the upper class and its problems to begin with. But later on
it embraced the questions of the middle and the lower classes also.
4. Scientific treatment of love and sex:
With new investigations in the field of science and psychology the traditional
views about romantic love, of Victorian prudery were done away with Shaw for
instance, came out with the concept of “Life Force”.
5. Treatment of Class-war: The desire for
liberty in domestic and moral circles was paralleled by the desire for liberty
in social life.
6. Lack of Action (Inwardness): Being drama
of ideas, the modern plays tended to become more static. Inner conflict was
substituted for outer conflict and the drama became much quieter. In The Glass
Menagerie Amanda and Laura and Amanda and Tom engage themselves in long
discussions regarding the arrangements to be made to receive the gentleman
caller.
7. Symbolism: With increased inwardness it
became very difficult to express the almost inexpressible ideas, emotions,
instincts defined by the psychologists in ordinary direct words. In The Glass
menagerie, the unicorn and also the world of little glass animals is a symbol
in itself.
8. Social forces as dramatic personages:
With the increasing inwardness in drama, the tendency to make unseen forces
especially social forces the personages of their plays increased. This helped
in widening the scope of drama. With increased urbanization, the city life had
become quite artificial and men became emotionally and morally cut–off from
elemental conditions and impulses. This led the modern drama to be satiric of
this over civilized life.
9. Element of Propaganda: The problem play
is sometimes called “the propaganda play” for the obvious reason that its
intent is overtly didactic and propagandist. Ibsen, Shaw, Galsworthy have
written plays to direct attention of the public to social evils and wrong
attitudes. The Problem play not only presented the problems but also suggested
remedies for the problems.
Important Dramatists and their Works:
1. T.W. Robertson:Robertson showed the necessity of binding the words and actions in a realistic play and the inability of ordinary words in conveying the intended meaning. So he strengthened the habit of detailed stage directions begun in the Restoration period. He can also be considered the main inspiration to a host of new dramatists in the field of themes for the drama of ideas.
2. Sir Arthur W Pinero:Pinero’s reputation rests on plays like Mrs. Ebbsmith, Iris, Mid Channel. He is known for the construction of his plays. He made great improvement in the development of realistic dialogues that provided theatrical excitement. Though he tried to deal with the tragic form, he did not succeed.
3. Henry Arthur Jones:In his Problem plays he deals with the problems of man’s spiritual life. His masterpieces in this regard are The Triumph of the Philistines, Michael and His Lost Angel, He was a master craftsman and made advance in the field of dialogues.
John Galsworthy: He was a prominent artist who discussed the various problems of modern life in his works. Justice, Strife, Silver Box, Loyalties, The Mob and The Eldest Sonmare the plays focus attention one problem or the other of contemporary life.The problems of marriage, sex-relationships, labour disputes, law and administration, solitary confinement, caste or class prejudices are related in the context of society and social relationship. He presents the problems of the commonplace in a penetrating and realistic manner.
5. George Bernard Shaw: He is regarded as the greatest English dramatist after Shakespeare. Though he is regarded as a great dramatist, his plays are highly argumentative. There are long debates on socially relevant issues. He was an iconoclast and the spirit of revolt is very conspicuous. His plays are propagandist and truly reflect his preoccupation with the problems of life. His characters are the vehicles for his ideas. He fused fantasy and reality and constantly experimented with fresh dramatic devices. His famous plays are: Arms and the Man, Man and Superman, Saint Joan, Candida, The Apple Cart, Widower’s House, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Heartbreak House, Major Barbara and Getting Married.
6. Harley Granville-Barker: He wrote many significant naturalistic prose plays. The Marrying of Ann Leete, The Voysey Inheritance, Waste, The Madras House and The Secret Life. These are among his greatest plays. Each of these deals with a dominant social problem. He analyses the passions and sentiments of his characters. He always displays an interest in the inner life of his characters.
CUP AND SAUCER DRAMA:
Social
plays – known as ‘cup- and -saucer dramas’ – set in the characters’ living
rooms, became popular. The work of dramatists George Bernard Shaw and Oscar
Wilde was widely respected.
The playwright Tom William Robertson (1829 – 71) introduced a new kind of play onto the 19th century theatre scene. His pioneering 'problem plays' dealt with serious and sensitive issues of the day. Robertson's work was considered so revolutionary in style and subject that no established management would produce his plays. "Danger", said Effie Bancroft, "is better than dullness" and she went on to produce a string of successful and profitable hits by Robertson, such as Ours (1866), Caste (1867), Play (1868) and School (1869). Caste was about marriage across the class barrier and explored prejudices towards social mobility. People talked in normal language and dealt with 'ordinary' situations and the performers didn't 'act' but 'behaved' like their audience – they spoke, they didn't declaim.
WELL-MADE PLAY:
Well-made
play (French pièce bien faite) is a type of play, constructed according to
certain strict technical principles, that dominated the stages of Europe and
the United States for most of the 19th century and continued to exert influence
into the 20th.The technical formula of the well-made play, developed around
1825 by the French playwright Eugene Scribe, called for complex and highly
artificial plotting, a build-up of suspense, a climatic scene in which all
problems are resolved, and a happy ending.
Originating in France as the pièce bien faite, the well-made play is a
style of dramatic writing characterized by a meticulous, methodological
purposiveness of plotting. The logically precise construction of the well-made
play is typified by a number of conventions.
The
plot is most often based on a withheld secret—known to the audience but unknown
to the characters—which, when revealed at the climax, reverses the fortunes of
the play's hero. During the course of the play, the overall pattern of the
drama is reflected in the movement of the individual acts, in which a steadily
mounting suspense is achieved through the battle of wits between the hero and
the villain. The hero's fortune fluctuates during his conflict with the
adversary until finally, at the climax, the secret is revealed in an obligatory
scene (scène à faire) and the hero is benefitted in the final dénouement, or
resolution.
Writers and Works:
Drama was to involve the direct
observation of human behaviour; therefore, there was a thrust to use
contemporary settings and time periods, and it was to deal with everyday life
and problems as subjects. Conventional romantic conflicts were a staple subject
of such plays (for example, the problem of a pretty girl who must choose
between a wealthy, unscrupulous suitor and a poor but honest young man).
Suspense was created by misunderstandings between characters, mistaken
identities, secret information (the poor young man is really of noble birth),
lost or stolen documents, and similar contrivances. Later critics, such as
Émile Zola and George Bernard Shaw, denounced Scribe’s work and that of his
successor, Victorien Sardou, for exalting the mechanics of playmaking at the
expense of honest characterizations and serious content, but both playwrights
were enormously popular in their day.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
In
Norway, Henrik Ibsen is considered to be the father of modern realistic drama.
His plays attacked society’s values and dealt with unconventional subjects
within the form of the well-made play (causally related). Ibsen perfected the
well-made play formula; and by using a familiar formula made his plays, with a
very shocking subject matter, acceptable. He discarded soliloquies, asides,
etc. Exposition in the plays was motivated, there were causally related scenes,
inner psychological motivation was emphasized, the environment had an influence
on characters’ personalities, and all the things characters did and all of
things the characters used revealed their socio-economic milieu. He became a
model for later realistic writers. Among the subjects addressed by Ibsen in his
plays are: euthanasia, the role of women, war and business, and syphilis.
Some of Ibsen's Plays:
Ghosts—1881—dealt with the concept of
the sins of the father transferring to the son, resulting in syphilis.
Pillars of Society – 1877 – dealt with
war and business.
Hedda Gabbler – 1890 – a powerful woman
takes her life at the end of the play to get away from her boredom with
society.
A Doll’s House – 1879 – Nora leaves her
husband Torvald and her children at the end of the play; often considered
"the slam heard around the world," Nora’s action must have been very
shocking to the Victorian audience.
Later in life, Ibsen turned to more
symbolic and abstract dramas; but his "realism" affected others, and
helped lead to realistic theatre, which has become, despite variations and
rejections against it, the predominant form of theatre even today.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The
Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the leading
playwright of modern Britain, wrote frankly and satirically on political and
social topics such as class, war, feminism, and the Salvation Army, in plays
such as Arms and the Man (1894), Major Barbara (1905), and, most famously,
Pygmalion (1913). His work introduced the theater of ideas to the English
stage; where Ibsen turned melodrama into naturalism, Shaw parodied melodrama in
order to develop an intellectual comedy of manners. He made fun of societies
notion using for the purpose of educating and changing. His plays tended to
show the accepted attitude, then demolished that attitude while showing his own
solutions.
Some of Bernard Shaw’s Plays
Arms and the Man (1894) – about love and
war and honour.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession – prostitution.
Major Barbara (1905) – a munitions
manufacturer gives more to the world (jobs, etc.) while the Salvation Army only
prolongs of the status quo.
Pygmalion (1913) – shows the
transforming of a flower girl into a society woman, and exposes the phoniness
of society. The musical My Fair Lady was based on this play.
Six Elements of Well Made Play:
·
Plot
based on a secret known to audience but withheld from certain characters
·
Revelation
of secret in climactic scene unmasks fraudulent character
·
Good
fortune of suffering hero restored
·
Pattern
of increasingly intense action and suspense prepared by exposition and assisted
by sudden and contrived entrances and exits, letters, other devices
·
Series
of ups and down in hero’s fortunes, caused by his conflict with an adversary
·
Reversal
and obligatory scene marking respectively the lowest and highest point in
hero’s adventures and caused by revelation of secrets
·
Central
misunderstanding which is obvious to audience but withheld from character
EXPRESSIONIST DRAMA:
Expressionism
in the theatre arose out of the same impulse to rebel against the materialist
values of the older middle-class generation that gave rise to both the
reformist Naturalist theatre and the aestheticist Symbolist theatre.
The
forerunners of Expressionism are generally accepted to be the German actor and
playwright Frank Wedekind, who criticized the reformist Ibsenite movement for
failing to attack the morality of bourgeois society, and Strindberg. Wedekind
sought in his plays to expose what lay beneath the surface of gentility and
decorum; in the process, he often introduced roles that served more as emblems
than as realistic characters.
There
was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th century German theatre
of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other
notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge, Walter Hasenclever,
Hans Henny Jahnn, and Arnolt Bronnen. They looked back to Swedish playwright
August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind as precursors
of their dramaturgical experiments.
Strindberg’s
early plays are usually included in the Naturalist repertoire. After a period
of personal crisis between 1894 and 1897, the form of Strindberg’s plays
disintegrated into dream visions or confessional monodramas in which everything
is seen through the eyes of the single protagonist. The single focus of these
plays was taken over by the Expressionists, as was the use of stereotyped
characters—the Son, the Stranger, etc.
In
addition to Wedekind and Strindberg, the Austrian painter and writer Oskar
Kokoschka must be mentioned; in fact, some authorities would date Kokoschka’s
plays as the first truly Expressionist drama. Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer, the
Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theatre, which
opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna.
His
later plays Sphinx and Strawman (1911), and The Burning Bush (1913), seem to
take Strindberg’s painful depictions of the destructive relationships between
the sexes and liberate them from any dependence on articulate speech. The plays
are episodic and have no clear narrative. They are constructed out of violent
visual images. Kokoschka is not remotely concerned with giving any sign or
resemblance of surface reality whatsoever. In his view, the theatre, like
painting, should communicate through “a language of images, visible or tangible
signs, graspable reflections of experience and knowing.” In this, Kokoschka was
the first to break completely with the literary tradition and to assert that
the theatre communicates ultimately through a visual language.
The
extreme simplification of characters to mythic types, choral effects,
declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity would become characteristic of
later Expressionist plays.
The
first full-length Expressionist play was The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which
was published in 1914 and first performed in 1916. In the 1920s, Expressionism
enjoyed a brief period of popularity in the theatre of the United States,
including plays by Eugene O'Neill (The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones and The
Great God Brown), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal), Lajos Egri (Rapid Transit) and
Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine). Martin Esslin notices the decline in the mere
representation of surficial reality as it could never convey the whole truth.
Kurt Pinthus put it thus: “in art the process of realization does not proceed
from the outside to the inside, but from the inside outwards; the point is: the
inner reality must be helped to realize itself through the means of the spirit”.
The
Expressionist drama tried to project this reality to the audience. The tendency
is thus of a monodrama where the other characters become the projections of the
protagonist’s own personality or merely the mode for conveying his musing with
himself. In such drama the hero uses self-declarations to proclaim his
suffering to the audience. According to Esslin this type of Expressionist drama
becomes “a theatre of cries, a theatre of ecstasy, or at least frenzied
intensity”.
Tennessee
Williams’ classic play, The Glass Menagerie, was an extension of the
expressionism that came out of Europe in the early 20th century. In essence,
Expressionism interprets the world through the artist’s internal, subjective
lens, not as an objective reflection of reality.
The
expressionist movement was marked by certain characteristics: a rejection of
realism in favor of dreamlike states; non-linear, often disjointed structures;
a utilization of imagery and symbolism in the place of naturalism; a focus on
abstract concepts and ideas. Artists in this movement paid witness to the
alienation of the individual which they saw as a main characteristic of modern
life. Expressionism conveys angst in the knowledge that our spiritual needs
will not be met through modern societal constructs. It rails against the
dehumanization of man in the modern, urban landscape.
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