Drama

1. Drama

2. What Is Drama? A drama is a story enacted onstage for a live audience.

3. What Is Drama? • Origins of Drama • The word drama comes from the Greek verb dram, which means “to do.” • The earliest known plays . . . • were written around the fifth century B.C. • produced for festivals to honor Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility

4. -Many people assume that the first drama was based on four things: the mimetic faculty , sympathetic magic, a belief in gods, and a fear of starvation. • 1-Dram is the most natural of the arts, being based on one of the most fundamental of the human and animal faculties- the faculty of imitation. • -The mimetic faculty makes us all actors from the cradle. • 2-Magic:the primitive human societies learned to control the outside world through magic: inscriptions, a charm, prayer, or an invocation of spirits. • -The most important kind of magic was sympathetic magic.

5. -Fertility myths: the living time and dead time. The contest bet. The god of life & the god of death. -If a wax image represents a man, a man should represent a god: actors representing gods ,the plot depicting the merciless contest bet. gods. The climax is the death of the god of life , and the dénouement is his resurrection that would consequently bring about fertility. This is drama , but it is also religion.

6. Tragedy A tragedy is a play that ends unhappily. • Most classic Greek tragedies deal with serious, universal themes such as right and wrong justice and injustice life and death • Tragedies pit human limitations against the larger forces of destiny.

7. Tragedy The protagonist of most classical tragedies is a tragic hero. This hero pride • is noble and in many ways admirable rebelliousness • has a tragic flaw, a personal failing that leads to a tragic end jealousy

8. Greek Tragedy • Tragedy comes from tragos, the Greek word for a goat: fertility. • -The first tragedies were mere dances around sacrificial goat. • The great Greek dramatists-Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides-wrote religious drama geared towards portraying the moral relation bet. Gods and men , having always an instructive moral purpose

9. Oedipus: disease, famine. Parricide& incest. Gods are just: suicide of his mother& self inflected blindness are means of expiating his crime. • Pity& fear. • Purgation. • Milton:' calm of mind, all passion spent'. • Catharsis: Aristotle said that the function of tragedy was purgation of the feelings through the arousing of pity and terror.

10. Oedipus: disease, famine. Parricide& incest. Gods are just: suicide of his mother& self inflected blindness are means of expiating his crime. • Pity& fear. • Purgation. • Milton:' calm of mind, all passion spent'. • Catharsis: Aristotle said that the function of tragedy was purgation of the feelings through the arousing of pity and terror.

11. Greek vs Shakespearian Tragedy • Greek tragedy: no free will, the gods are in control of a man's destiny. • Shakespearian hero: Choiced, has free will.Example:Othello&Hamlet. • Greek tragedies have so little influence on English drama because of the immense difference bet. the Greek view of life and the Christian one: fate vs free will.

12. Comedy A comedy is a play that ends happily. The plot usually centers on a romantic conflict. boy wins girl boy loses girl boy meets girl • Comedy comes from the Greek komos, meaning a revel, the sort of rough country party which honored the god Dionysus(god of vegetation).

13. Roman drama assumed more influence on English drama, particularly Seneca:the gods may have the monopoly of power but not of virtue. • Greek and Roman comedies: • The main purpose of classical comedy is to make us laugh at the follies of mankind and correct those follies in ourselves.

14. Dramatic unities: • One admirable thing about the Greek tragic dramatists is their sense of form. • The traditional unities of Greek drama-one plot(action), one day(time).Renaissance dramatists dded a third unity , that of place. Shakespeare emerged to violate all these unities.

15. The End