A
brief history of
Drama
RITUAL DRAMA
Ritual drama is
distinguishable from other kinds of theatre in that it directs the attention of
the audience towards the inevitability and representative meaning of the action,
rather than towards the inner conflict of tragedy or the reassertion of outward
order after a comic inversion or intervention. Ritual drama is not so much an
identifiable form in that it has characteristic subject matter, plot line or
character; rather it is recognised as a quality or idea which exists within
another form, usually tragedy. Ritual drama, is a direct presentation of
inevitability, an affirmation of its necessity and rightness, as in The
Bacchae of Euripides (480-406 BC), John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) or J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904), where characterisation and action are
limited in development so that attention may centre on the working out of n
inescapable conclusion: the fall of Pentheus (tyrannical reason and temperance)
who defies the god, Dionysius (passion and spontaneity); the glorification of
Samson who overcomes temptations to regain a state of grace; and the
transcendence of Maurya who is reconciled to the inevitability of human
mortality. Pentheus does not show right understanding of his universe while
Samson and Maurya do, but the ideal of mastery in each case is affirmed,
accepted and surrendered to by the audience as a result of participating
imaginatively in the ritual performance.
Another case in point is J. P. Clark’s Ozidi
(1966), a drama based on longer dramatic poem taken from the oral tradition of
the Ijaw people of southeastern Nigeria. The original Ozidi saga is acted out as
a ritual drama once every twenty-five years and tells the story of a warrior who
was born after his father’s death and brought up to avenge the treachery of
his father’s murderers. The boy’s grandmother is a sorceress and with her
help he emerges as a powerful warrior who avenges his father, overcomes evil
monsters who threaten the countryside, and in the end even illness which would
have carried him away is outwitted and leave him in peace. There is another
strand to the story, emphasising the risk of overweening pride which must always
be held in check, but in general we cannot help but recognise the ritual basis
of the plot. The time-lapse between performances and the idea of a son born to
replace his father immediately suggests a cyclical view of life. Ozidi’s
progress is that of an archetypal culture hero, a model for every male in the
community. This particular Ritual drama as it is traditionally performed is
really a kind of dramatised epic and the shorter, more consciously shaped play
which J. P. Clark has fashioned from it retains just these characteristics. The
ideals and aspirations of that community are reaffirmed, accepted and
surrendered to by the audience.
In the same way that ritual
implications are usually incorporated with tragedy, either ritual or tragedy is
often fused with historical drama. Ritual drama is a kind of direct
presentation, while history plays are essentially a form of documentary, a
celebration of national life and
events rather than of myth cycles and inevitability. The action of history plays
was originally conceived as the objective presentation of actual events, a kind
of pageant or narrative, but as the form became fictionalised it gave way more
and more to the dominance of hero and theme.
Ola Rotimi’s Kurunmi
(1971) is a good case in point; it uses incidents from the civil war between
the Ajaiye and Ibadan peoples for a plot, but tends to search into the hero’s
character and exposes the forces of rivalry and jealously in Yorubaland at that
time, which contributed to the hero’s downfall, rather than to rely solely on
the history of events. Shakespeare’s Henry
IV, Part I (1598) is another good
example of historical drama. The facts of history, as the author knew them, are
somewhat altered to suit the dramatic construction, and the focus of interest is
directed to an examination of Prince Hal as a monarch-in-the-making rather than
to a mere retelling of the events or the presentation of a history lesson.
Character investigation and thematic concerns enliven an otherwise dull history
lesson and lend intellectual excitement by suggesting some larger truth about
human experience.
Ritual drama is equated with
direct representation of mythic action and history plays with narrative
documentaries, but the mainstream of literary drama as a fictionalised
representation of human experience is found in tragedy and comedy. These forms
are far more common than the others, and in fact often include or subsume them.
the names ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ derive from the Greek word tragos,
meaning goat, and komos, meaning
revel. In the case of tragedy, which developed from ritual of sacrifice, one
expects a tempered of action, while in comedy one expects a joyous experience, a
wild and life-affirming sequence of events.
Tragedy presents a world in
which a different kind of distortion occurs and the return to normality is based
on punishment or expiation for the original inversion of
values, a sin against society or against the supernatural. Tragedy is
promarily interested in characters and those situations which act upon their
natures, ultimately destroying them. If, as in classical tragedy, the main
characters has been responsible for his or her sin, his punishment and death are
a satisfying confirmation of absolute morality, while his own stature as hero is
renewed and reasserted by the way he faces responsibility for what he has done
or its consequences. In tragedies that which is noblest in human nature is
redeemed and rendered imperishable, however fragile and prone to error that
nature may be, and the audience is reconciled to the inevitable downfall and
death of even the most heroic characters simply because the downfall is always
qualified, the heroic possibilities of human nature are reaffirmed. Acceptance
of the individual’s defeat at the hands of life experience is the object of
tragedy and that end or goal is directed towards the attitude or world-view of
the audiences.
Classical tragedy requires a hero of high political and social status as well as of moral distinction who is placed in a situation which acts upon an undiscovered flaw in his character and diminishes his moral stature. THe basis of heroic tragedy is the effect of situation on character and the investigation is generally more psychological than thematic. Recognition or confirmation of the flaw occurs at the climax of the play and the hero descends to his inevitable end as the action develops towards the ultimate catastrophe.
In Elizabethan or Renaissance
drama there were other kinds of heroic tragedy besides the straightfoward plays
of political revenge, ambition, etc,. and the distinguishing feature is subject
matter. Domestic tragedy –for example, Shakespeare’s Othello
(1605), Romeo and Juliet ( 1595)-
takes for subject matter some distortion and defeat in a world dominated by
romantic love, but more often the form was combined with other subgenres, such
as the history play or comedy. If in the classical tragedy there are characters
of first rank, in domestic tragedy we have lesser figures because the subject is
love or personal relationships.
Modern tragedy has characters
of quite bourgeois origins and even less than average pretensions. A more
fundamental difference between classical tragedy and one developed in late
Victorian times is that it is no longerthe effect of situation on character
which destroys the hero but rather those very heroic qualities of character are
inevitably defeated by social
evil and the predominance of debased human nature. Such an attitude
towards life is obviously related to the naturalistic view which held human
nature to be basically corrupt and denied the possibility of spiritual
or heroic development of personality.
As the modern period
advanced, all attempts to present heroic aspiration ceased and the
anti-hero became the main character of tragedy. It is a figure who has no
heroic qualities whatever, who in fact often embodies the opposite or contrary
characteristic. Rather than a person of high status, the anti-hero is usually of
below average achievement or even a conspicuous failure, a beggar or tramp.
Willy Loman in Arthur
Miller’s is a failed commercial traveler and family man who has been exploited
by an uncaring economic system. He is discarded in middle age without reason to
go on living, no meaning of his life but the bitterness of his failure and
victimisation.
The anti-hero is not always a
tragic figure, however, but also lends himself readily to a comic view of life,
such as the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot.
In general, comedy presents endless inversions of normal conduct; nothing is as it should be in a comic play. The expected thought or action never takes place, but its opposite or contrary almost always does. In the end there is generally a reassuring return to normality.
Renaissance
drama developed a number of love
situations into comic forms and also investigated the wider implications of
human folly and vice in a comedy character types known as the Comedy of Humours.
In restoration era, Comedy
of Manners was developed. We
find the urban middle classes presented and characters are representative types,
but the action centres on social conduct or comportment rather than personal
motivation. In Comedy of Manners situations and characters are often mocked and
ridiculed for their own sake, but with no particular thematic interest other
than general social satire.
(Taken from Taylor, Richard, UNDERSTANDING THE ELEMENTS OF LITERATURE, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981 )