ENG212 - Part 2 : Plays Flashcards
Drama
The basic meaning of the Greek origin of the word is a thing done, or action.
According to Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), who analyzed the works of the Greek tragedians in the Poetics, drama is a REPRESENTATION OF MEN DOING THINGS.
Contemporary critic Keir Elam specifies that “the drama consists first and foremost precisely in this, an I addressing a you here and now” (139). Drama presupposes the existence of an audience.
As Eric
Bentley succinctly points out in The Life of the Drama, “the theatrical situation, reduced to a minimum, is that A impersonates B while C looks on” (150).
Dramatic playing
What is your concept of playing? What is its value?
1for interacting with the ENVIRONMENT
2of expressing and understanding EMOTION
3of working through and TESTING thoughts and ideas
4of relaxing and ENTERTAINING
What do you think are the defining characteristics of drama?
1Dramatic Form. Plays are not written in paragraphs like a novel or short story. …
2Setting and Staging. In addition to the dialogue, a script will also include stage directions. …
3Characters and Actors. …
4Plot.
Must drama be necessarily performed in a theatre?
“the drama consists first and foremost precisely in this, an I addressing a you here and now” (139). Drama presupposes the existence of an AUDIENCE.
To what extent is drama a community event?
According to Martin Esslin, drama is also a manifestation of humanity’s need for RITUAL AND SPECTACLE (10). Ritual is a collective experience through which a group identity is established or reinforced to promote a heightened level of social or religious consciousness. Ritual reminds the group of “its codes of conduct, its rules of social coexistence. All drama is therefore a political event: it either reasserts or undermines the code of conduct of a given society” (Esslin 29).
Is drama an important tool in education? How can it be used for educative purposes?
Drama is an important tool for preparing students to live and work in a world that is increasingly TEAM-ORIENTED rather than hierarchical. Drama also helps students develop TOLERANCE and EMPATHY. In order to play a role competently, an actor must be able to fully inhabit another’s soul.
Why do you go to see plays in the theatre?
we are made most uncomfortably aware of the personalities people present to each other through words and actions. Only in the silences between the words and in the disconnections in the action do we begin to perceive the reality that underlies the behaviour.
Playwright Bertolt Brecht believed that the function of the theatre should be to DISTURB members of the audience, to bring them to question their assumptions, and to engage their intellect, but not to provide satisfying answers. It is, of course, debatable that any of the great tragedians, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare and Racine, reassure audience members against anxiety and solitude, except in the sense that they SHARE AND PARTICIPATE in the injustices graphically dramatized on the stage.
Should drama be disturbing or entertaining?
It satisfies our need for justice. Safely distanced from us on the stage are the cruelties, complexities, and illogicalities of life, which are redressed or contextualized by the play. Wickedness may be punished, virtue rewarded, conflicts resolved, and a sense of life’s purpose and order can prevail
Do you consider drama a “shared experience”? With whom are you sharing this experience? What is the effect?
This communal function of drama is another important “use”: it provides a shared experience and in this way, it differs significantly from film, which operates in one direction only and is not affected by audience reaction. Because the actors on the stage are actually present and the audience is aware of their physical vulnerability, an emotional sharing can be established, not only between actors and audience, but also amongst the members of the audience, like a kind of complicity in the events.
The theatre also serves a wider community function. By presenting a microcosm of society, it helps the individual in the audience to see his or her own place in that society and to understand its stratification or homogeneity. This characteristic was especially true of Elizabethan theatre, which represented society at every level, both in the structure of the theatre itself and through the form and style of the play
Is the movie theatre or television an appropriate or effective medium for drama?
This communal function of drama is another important “use”: it provides a shared experience and in this way, it differs significantly from film, which operates in one direction only and is not affected by audience reaction. Because the actors on the stage are actually present and the audience is aware of their physical vulnerability, an emotional sharing can be established, not only between actors and audience, but also amongst the members of the audience, like a kind of complicity in the events.
dithyramb
a wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, especially one dedicated to Dionysus(God of wine and fertility).
a passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing.
tragedy
Tragedy, branch of drama that treats in a SERIOUS and dignified style the sorrowful or TERRIBLE events encountered or caused by a heroic individual
In The Life of the Drama, Eric Bentley makes several important points about the nature of tragedy:
Tragedy is a confrontation of reality, not an evasion. It is the “transcendence of disturbance.”
Tragedy is concerned with justice even while showing life’s fundamental injustices. Bentley sees this preoccupation as a desire to be justified; we all attempt to allay our anxieties and sense of guilt by proving to ourselves and others that we are innocent. But what tragedy shows is that the tragic hero is guilty, and we identify ourselves with this guilt.
A pervasive conflict in tragedy is the conflict between ethics and self-interest, which is often manifested as love versus honour.
The characters of tragedy are complex and ambiguous; their greatest strengths, rather than their weaknesses, may be their undoing.
Tragedy is concerned with extremes, with obsessive and monstrous passions.
Tragedy confronts death and by doing so, affirms life. It brings us to the extremity of human suffering and endurance; in Garcia Lorca’s words, it brings us to “the dark root of the scream.”
Tragedy does not try to rationalize the universe, but it acknowledges the limits of reason and dramatizes the mystery, the unknowable.
Tragedy gives rise to a feeling of awe, the result of the acceptance of fear, and to the feeling of compassion, a wider, more generous and selfless kind of pity.
Courage is manifested in the transcendence of suffering through the acceptance of the mystery of life, and wisdom is gained in the process; however, any degree of self-knowledge is usually won at a terrible price.
catharsis
emptying of emotions
Comedy
Comedy is the imitation of the actions of characters of a lower type who exhibit a defect or rigidness which is not painful or destructive. The defect tends to be generalized; that is, it represents a prevalent WEAKNESS IN MAN as a social creature, rather than a flaw peculiar to the individual.
Comedy has a broader view of humanity than does tragedy. It assumes a social norm for human conduct and measures the character against that norm. Comedy values custom, social harmony, and a balancing of individual freedom with community order. If the individual DEPARTS FROM SOCIAL NORMS, he becomes the target for laughter. Comedy, then, is critical and reformative, more than it is derisive, and it is usually characterized by a degree of sympathy and tolerance. Although there may be a threat of disaster, it is always averted by fortunate chance. Comedy is about SURVIVING, but at the same time, it dramatizes the inherent problems of living.
The structure of comedy hinges on REVERSAL AND SURPRISE, whereas in tragedy there is a remorselessly inevitable working out of events until the final catastrophe.
Finally, comedy shows us ourselves by DEFLATING PRETENSION, the false posturing which is an evasion of self-awareness. There are many instances of role-playing, mistaken and assumed identities, and gender switching in comedy, but in the end, each actor is unmasked.
Tragi-Comedy
Tragi-comedy, then, is a peculiarly modern form, which achieves its effects more from the way in which it is played than from structure:
1The ending may be either comic or tragic, but the issues of the play are left essentially UNRESOLVED.
2The comedy tends to intensify the tragedy and vice-versa.
3The tone is pervasively IRONIC, which means it can be serious and absurd at the same time.
4The characters are neither heroes nor villains, but they display a MIXTURE of human frailties and strengths.
5The audience’s expectations are rarely confirmed: tragi-comedy questions conventional assumptions and attitudes.
archetype
a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology.
“mythological archetypes of good and evil”
When a character assumes only one or a few human idiosyncrasies, then it is typical, a stock character
What do you consider the most important element of drama?
1) Plot - Most important - the soul and story
2) Character
3) Diction Speech
4) Thought - Moral purpose
5) Music
6) Spectacle - what makes it memorable
How important is the element of spectacle? Can a play be effective on a bare stage?
Make sure your content is memorable.
Why does Desdemona fall in love with Othello?
She says she fell in love with him because of the stories he told her about his adventures as a military man. She loves him for his “qualities,” such as courage and honor.
Is the destruction of their love presented as inevitable in the play?
Two significant moments point toward the inevitability of Desdemona’s death.
1) The first comes in Act III, scene iii, after Othello has evaded Desdemona’s attempts to designate a time to dine with Cassio. Once Desdemona exits, Othello utters to himself: “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (III.iii.). Here, Othello indicates the nature of his affection: either he loves her intensely and feels protective, or else he feels scorned and succumbs to an emotional “chaos.”
2) Another moment that foreshadows Desdemona’s death comes in Act IV, scene iii, when she sings for Emilia a song called “Willow” about a lover who becomes mad, foreshadowing Othello’s madness. Desdemona says her mother’s maid died while singing the song, further foreshadowing that Desdemona will soon die as well. She misremembers one line, singing “Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve.” This misremembered line foreshadows Desdemona’s dying words, in which she attempts to take the blame for her own murder. Following her mistress’s death, Emilia recalls the song and asks, with the clarity of hindsight, “What did thy song bode, lady?” (V.ii.).
What motivates Iago in respect to his determination to destroy their relationship?
he explains it at the end of Act I, when he’s alone on stage:
… I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets
He has done my office …
Iago believes Othello slept with his wife. That’s an extremely common reason for one man to hate another–maybe the most common reason.
And it makes sense that a man who believes he’s been cuckolded might, as revenge, try to make the man who cuckolded him believe his wife was unfaithful.
In an earlier speech, Iago says that Othello, his commanding officer, passed him over for promotion, in favor of another man, Cassio.
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine,
… That never set a squadron in the field,
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster … had the election:
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds
Christian and heathen, must be be-lee’d and calm’d
By debitor and creditor: this counter-caster,
He, in good time, must his lieutenant be,
And I–God bless the mark!–his Moorship’s ancient.
So, as far as Iago is concerned, Othello passed him over for promotion (in favor of a much less worthy man) and cuckolded him.
Morality Play
The morality play is a genre that evolved in the late Medieval period to teach Christian morals through an allegorical story of a sinner’s journey to repentance and redemption.
In some respects, Othello is a form of Morality Play, with a personification of vice or the devil (Iago) contending with virtue or a good angel (Desdemona) for Othello’s heart and soul. Essentially Iago wants to bring Othello to a point of self-damnation
What atmosphere is immediately established in the play? Othello
The atmosphere of conflict is quickly heightened in the first scene, as Iago prods Roderigo to make public the “matter” that so galls him: the clandestine meeting of Othello and Desdemona at a local inn, the “Sagittary” (the astrological sign for Sagittarius, is, not coincidently, that of the centaur, a mythological creature with the upper body of a man and the lower body of a horse, another symbol of lust). Iago compares this travesty of social order to a fire that rages unchecked through a city: the private deed will have public consequences as, indeed, the rest of the play bears out.
Morality Play
The morality play is a genre that evolved in the late Medieval period to teach CHRISTIAN MORALS through an allegorical story of a sinner’s journey to repentance and redemption.
In some respects, Othello is a form of Morality Play, with a personification of vice or the devil (Iago) contending with virtue or a good angel (Desdemona) for Othello’s heart and soul. Essentially Iago wants to bring Othello to a point of self-damnation
What is the significance of Cyprus as an island midway between the Christian and Turkish forces?
Desdemona abandons the relative stability of her home in Venice to follow Othello to a very unstable environment: the island of Cyprus, which is threatened by the Turks. Although there remain vestiges of Venetian order, these are precarious and threatened by their “opposite”: the anarchy and violence supposedly embodied in the Turks. Shakespeare constructs the Turks as the antithesis of social and political harmony. They are infidels or unbelievers because they are not Christian. They personify the worst in human nature.
What is the significance of Cyprus as an island midway between the Christian and Turkish forces?
Desdemona abandons the relative stability of her home in Venice to follow Othello to a very unstable environment: the island of Cyprus, which is threatened by the Turks. Although there remain vestiges of Venetian order, these are precarious and threatened by their “opposite”: the anarchy and violence supposedly embodied in the Turks. Shakespeare constructs the Turks as the antithesis of social and political harmony. They are infidels or unbelievers because they are not Christian. They personify the worst in human nature.
How does the first scene of Act 2 foreshadow the disasters to follow?
There are many instances of such tragic foreshadowing early in the play: Brabantio’s exclamation that his daughter is “dead” to him (1.3.59); Desdemona calling Iago a “profane and liberal counselor” (2.1.161–62); Othello rejoicing in their extreme happiness:
O my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death. (2.1.182–84)
How does Iago’s opinion of women help to determine his plot against Othello?
Since he has an entirely cynical view of human nature, as is reflected in the riddles he tells to Desdemona and Emilia, he is convinced that a loving, trusting marriage is impossible and that any marriage can be corrupted. In other words, he can only see in others his own corrupt nature.
How does Othello characterize himself in his speech to the Senate?
Othello is a trusting, honest person who expects that his own good character, if embodied clearly and earnestly, will save him from others’ prejudice.
How credible is his protestation that he is “rude in speech,” i.e., that he cannot speak eloquently? Why would he make such a claim?
This is the speech of a man who, despite what he says even in this speech, is not “rude in speech.” He knows his audience, knows their status and education, and crafts his message accordingly.
What is the effect of Othello’s stories on Desdemona? On the Senate? On Brabantio? What might the effect be on an audience?
The duke is persuaded by Othello’s tale, dismissing Brabanzio’s claim by remarking that the story probably would win his own daughter.
Is Iago a personification of evil?
He is the spirit of negation in the play: he turns good into bad, hope into despair, trust into suspicion, bravery into cowardice, and honour into ignominy. Although a plausible motivation is provided for his activities, it cannot account for his obsession to destroy Othello. In contemporary psychological terms, he could be considered a psychopath, a human incarnation of evil