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What is Drama?
1. Character: a person represented in an imagined plot, whether narrated or acted out, but also to the unique qualities that make up a personality.
Stage Direction: the appearance, manners, and movement of someone speaking the lines assigned to any one character.
Protagonist vs Antagonist
Hero or Heroine vs Villain
Minor characters or supporting roles
Foil: a character designed to bring out qualities in another character by contrast.
2. Plot and Structure
Plot: Five Stages(Exposition, Rising Action, Inciting Incident, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution)
3. Stages, Sets, and Setting
Stages
Modern Stages:
the Proscenium Stage: a room with the wall missing between us and it.
Thrust Stage: the audience sits around three sides of the major acting area.
Arena Stage: the audience sits all the way around the acting area and players make their entrances and their exits through the auditorium.
Greek Theater:
Amphitheatre: the audience sat on a raised semicircle of seats.
Orchestra: halfway around a circular area used primarily for dancing by the chorus.
Skene or Stage House: representing the palace or temple before which the action took place.
Shakespeare's Stage: a rectangular area built inside one end of a large enclosure like a circular walled-in yard; the audience stood on the ground or sat in stacked balconies around three sides of the principal acting area (rather like a thrust stage). There were additional acting areas on either side of this stage, as well as a recessed area at its back and an upper acting area. A trap door in the stage floor was used for occasional effects.
Globe Theatre in Southwark, London.
Setting: Usually the audience is asked to imagine that the featured section of the auditorium is actually a particular place somewhere else.
In ancient Greek drama, the play's setting never changes.
In Shakespeare’s theater, The acting arena does not represent a single specific place but assumes a temporary identity according to the characters who inhabit it, their costumes, and their speeches...As a theater audience, we must surmise from the costumes and dialogue that the acting area has now become a royal court; when we read the play, the stage directions give us a cue that the place has changed.
In a modern play, there are likely to be several changes of scene, each marked by the lowering of the curtain or the darkening of the stage while different sets and props are arranged. Sets (the design, decoration, and scenery) and props (articles or objects used on stage) vary greatly in modern productions of plays written in any period.
The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities represent a prescriptive theory of dramatic tragedy that was introduced in Italy in the 16th century and was influential for three centuries:
1. unity of action: a tragedy should have one principal action.
2. unity of time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours.
3. unity of place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location.
Unities in Aristotle's Poetics
Tragedy, then is a process of imitating an action which has serious implications, is complete, and possesses magnitude. ˇ A poetic imitation, then, ought to be unified in the same way as a single imitation in any other mimetic field, by having a single object: since the plot is an imitation of an action, the latter ought to be both unified and complete, and the component events ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible extra difference is not really a part of the whole.
Well then, epic poetry followed in the wake of tragedy up to the point of being a (1) good-sized (2) imitation (3) in verse (4) of people who are to be taken seriously; but in its having its verse unmixed with any other and being narrative in character, there they differ. Further, so far as its length is concerned tragedy tries as hard as it can to exist during a single daylight period, or to vary but little, while the epic is not limited in its time and so differs in that respect.
4. Tone, Language, and Symbol
Tone in drama: The actor must infer from the written language just how to read a line, what tone of voice to use. The choice of tone must be a negotiation between the words of the playwright and the interpretation and skill of the actor or reader.
Ironies in drama:
Dramatic irony: a character’'s perception is contradicted by what the audience knows.
Situational irony: a character’s (and the audience’s) expectations about what will happen are contradicted by what actually does happen.
Verbal inony: a statement implies a meaning quite different from its obvious, literal meaning.
All aspects of poetry appear in drama as well: monologue, meter, figures of speech, allusions(references to other works of literature)
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