Sust the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you

o'erstep not the modesty of nature for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now was and is, to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature

HAMLET TO THE PLAYERS

Of all the literary genres, drama has the greatest potential to reach the emotions of an
audience The American dramatist Tennessee Williams under stood how easy it is for us to
disguise "from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings the sensibility of our own hearts"
as we are inexorably caught up in the ceaseless rush of events in our everyday lives In "The
Timeless World of a Play," an essay included in Williams's collection Where I Live (1978),
he wrote that

In a play, time is arrested in the sense of being confined. By a surt of legerdemain, events are
made to remam events, rather than being re duced so quickly to mere occurrencer The
audience can sit hack in a com forting dusk to watch a world which is flooded with light and
in which emotion and action have a dimension and dignity that they would like wise have in
real existence, if only the shattering intrusion of time could be locked out

About their lives people ought to remember that when they are finished, everything in them
will be contained in a marvelous state of repose which is the same as that which they
unconsciously admired in drama. The rush is temporary. The great and only possible dignuty
of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values by which to live as
steadfastly as if he too, like a character in a play, were immured against the corrupting rush of
time Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fierting in the great magic trick of human
existence.

Williams beheved that a hat he called "the created world of a play" gives pectators the
opportunity to escape from umes inevitable sense of imperma nence. Sitting in a theater, we
experience a special kind of repose which allows contemplation and produces the dimate in
which tragic importance is a pos suble thing," because plays it the tragic tradition offer us a
view of certain moral values in ve lent juxtaposition. Because we do not participate, except as
spectaton we can view them clearly, within the limits of our emotional equipment answer
their questions nor make any sign of being in them, nor do we have to compete with their
virtues not resist ther offenses All at once, for this reason, we are able to see them! Our hearts
are wrung by recognition and pity, so that the dusky shell of the audito rium where we are
gathered anonymously together is flooded with an almost liquid warmth of unchecked human
sympathies, relieved of self consciousness allowed to function

After poetry, drama is our second oldest literary form. To define drama as a play written to be
performed in a theater is true only for the earliest play Later works known as "closet dramas,"
written in the nineteenth century by such poets as Percy Bysshe Shelley and such playwrights
as Henrik Ibsen, meant to be performed in the solitary theater of the reader's mind. A play car
be considered a story told in dialogue, but even here there are exceptions modern playwright
Samuel Beckett wrote stories without dialogue for the stag intended to be mimed by a single
performer. Today millions of viewers wate works of drama television sitcoms, prime time
soap operas, and weekly net work dramatic series that were never intended to be performed in
a theater But for centuries drama meant a stage play, and it is this meaning of the word that
we primarily have in mind when we speak of drama as a literary gente

As Aristotle understood, action is the essence of drama. This is suggestee

in the origin of the word drama, which is the Greek verb dran, "to perform century after
drama flourished in Greece, Aristotle wrote the Poetics ( HC), a work in which he analyzed
the literary form used by Sophocles and other Greek dramatists. For Aristotle, a play was the
process of imitating s nificant action complete unto itself by means of language "made
sensuou attractive" and spoken by the persons involved in the action, not presente through
narrative Aristotle's definition of tragedy contained sex importa elements (1) plot or action,
the basic principle of drama, (2) characterizabe an almost equally important element. (3) the
thought or theme of the pla (4) verbal expression or dialogue. (5) visual adornment or stage
decoration and costumes and masks for the actors, and (6) song or music to accompany the
performers' words and movement

Because most plays are hiterary works meant to give an illusion of real through their
performance onstage, a playwright who has set actors in motion to tell a story cannot
interrupt the action, as in a work of fiction, to offer back ground information about the
characters or summarize events taking plas over a period of time, unless he introduces a
narrator at the begining of the play. Usually, the playwright gives the audience information
on the s through dialogue Playwrights can also suggest the developmenhof thear by the
physical behavior of the actors onstage and by changes in highting

or costumes When we think of the word drama we have in mind an illusion of realit invented
for a striking effect. To illustrate the relationship between the everyday life we live and the
life we see portrayed in the theater, the director Peter Brook described a simple exercise in
The Open Door (1993)

Ask any volunteer to walk from one side of a space to another Anyone can do this. The
clumsiest idiot cannot fail, he just has to walk He makes no effort and deserves no reward

Now ask him to try to imagine that he is holding a precious bowl in his hands and to walk
carefully so as not to spill a drop of its contents Here again anyone can accomplish the act of
imagination that this re quires and can move in a more or less convincing manner Yet your
vol unteer has made a special effort, so pethaps he deserves thanks and a five penny piece as
a reward for trying

Next ask him to imagine that as he walks the bowl slips from hus fingers and crashes to the
ground, spilling its contents Now he's in trouble. He tries to act and the worst kind of
artificial, amateur acting will take over his body, making the expression on his face "acted" in
other words, woefully unreal

To execute this apparently simple action so that it will appear as natural as just walking
demands all the skills of a highly professional. artistan idea has to be given flesh and blood
and emotional reality, it must go beyond imitation, so that an invented life is also a parallel
life. which at no level can be distinguished from the real thing. Now we can see why a true
actor is worth the enormous daily rate that film companies pay him for giving a plausible
impression of everyday life.

One goes to the theatre to find life, but if there is no difference between life outside the
theatre and life inside, then theatre makes no sense. There's no point doing it. But if we
accept that life in the theatre is more visible, more vivid than on the outside, then we can see
that it is simultaneously the same thing and somewhat different

Plays are acts of make-believe acts in which the author, actors, stage technicians, and
audience are united in their participation in an imaginary world. This world onstage can
mimic "real life" in such plays as Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) with actors
and sets representing con temporary everyday reality, or it can project a view of our potential
experience as in a dream, in such poetic plays as William Shakespeare's Hamlet (c. 1600) or
Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1945).

As stories primarily told in dialogue, most plays in the classic repertoire fall into one of three
conventional categories tragedy, comedy, and tragicom edy. Broadly speaking, in tragedy the
story ends unhappily, usually in the death of the main character, as in Sophocles' Antigone (c
441 RC.) In comedy the story ends happily, often with a marriage symbolizing the
continuation of life and the resolution of the conflict, as in Shakespeare's The Tempest
(1611). In tragicomedy, a mixture of sad and happy events, the story's resolution can take
different forms, but the audience usually experiences the play as a posi tive statement, an
affirmation of life This category can be further subdivided in modern plays into dark comedy,
where the playwright's sardonic humor offers a frightening glimpse of the futility of life, and
farce, a short play that depends for its comic effect on exaggerated, improbable situations and
slap stick action. Dransa has coperenced many innovations in form and staging in the
Twentieth century, con while such practitioners as the contemporary Eng playwright Tom
Stuppard make fun of the increasing pace of our lives and invalization of our most cherished
institutions including the theater Dupe's Hamlet (1979) Stoppard created two short versons of
Shakespeare's Hamlet one that would take fifteen minutes to perform and a second briefer
encore version of the play streamlined for a production o chable-decker London bus. As short
as it is. Stoppard's encore version Hamlet as a farce see Conversations on Hamlet us Text and
Performanc p1621) still satisfies com definition of a playa performance by actors story told in
dalogue. Stoppard has edited Shakespeare's words so drastically that out familiarity with the
original Hamlet one of the most famous plays understanding the cut
Europeans trade fomit were performed in its complete version, it would If the test of Hamlage
Evers director makes sume cutisit the script he Neopard's version is so short that he seems to
be implying that contempora Stoppard's version is that they lack the time and the patience to
sit through the long clasic plays. But he also asumes that the tradition of European theater
long clasic plays The people who bought tickets when Stoppard's play wa still relevaron the
bus probably studied Shakespeare in school, where the might have become familiar with the
complicated plot of Hamlet through read

ing the play or a summary of it for an English class you are familiar with Shakespeare's play,
Stoppard's collapsed veruse will remind you of what has been cut The "encote" version of
Hamlet conveys none of the complexity of the hero's passionate character, none of the poetry
of his unforgettable soliloques, and none of the tragedy of his dilemma. The bizarre version is
meant to be only a faint, funny echo of the original

Stoppard wrote his farce for a specific theater company in England intending it to be seen and
heard as well as read. This adds another dimension to our experience of drama. When
performed in front of an audience, the test of a play is transmitted by the theatrical director,
the costume and set deups ers, the technical staff responsible for sound and lighting, and the
actors who make the play come alive. All these people work together to shape a play's
meaning for the audience.

Even on a red double-decker London bus, an actor interpreting Hamle as an aratocrat dressed
in luxurious black velves and silk ruffles will elicit adil ferent response to the hero's
personality and emotional situation than an actor who depicts Hamlet as a clown in a silly
wig and circus tights or as a scrufis lesther-jacketed, metal-studded biker or as a pajama-clad
patient recentis escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Actors have performed the role in all thes
costumes, and they are all at least in name Hamlet. Every time an act "plays him, or any other
character in a drama, there is the potential for inter preting the role differently

Because drama is a collaborative effort that tesults in a work performel on a stage in front of
an audience, we call a writer who creates plays a ple wright, suggesting a highly skilled
craftsperson or artisan scho makes son thing tangible. But the basic test of a play the author's
creation of dialoge and stage action and the description on the page of the setting and the
charac ters has a special significance. The text is the only aspect of the theater in which the
writer has the last word When we read a play, following the dialogue and the stage directions
makes us conscious of how the story might take on another life when performed on a stage or
in a film, but we are also aware as we follow the text that reading a play puts us into a special
relationship with the playwright. Like the writer, we have only words to fire our
imaginations, there are no actors, costumes, or sets

What endures is the play on the page. As Aristotle wrote about the pri macy of the text in the
Poetics, "The visual adornment of the dramatic persons can have a strong emotional effect
but is the least artistic element, the least con nected with the poetic art, in fact the force of
tragedy can be felt even without benefit of public performance and actors, while for the
production of the visual effect the property man's art is even more decisive than that of the
poet's"

For a play to survive beyond its ephemeral stage or film presentation, it needs a text. As
literature, the printed words on the page offer you several advantages. When you read a play
in addition to seeing it performed, you can understand the work better, especially if its
language or meaning is difficult to follow in the action onstage. From your seat in the theater
you cannot stop a play in the middle of a scene to tell the actor, "Wait, I didn't understand that
line. Please repeat it." As a reader, however, you have the luxury of being able to stop in the
midst of your reading to ponder the meaning of a line or to go over an entire scene that is not
immediately clear to you. Then in your own way you can become a player, an active
participant among the generations of readers responding to the play's story, characters,
language, structure, and deeper meaning or theme.