Drama and Theatre (Semester V)

1. Sanskrit Theatre
Sanskrit Theatre is a part of Sanskrit literature, the classical literature of India,
which flourished from about 1500 BC to about 1100 AD. Sanskrit drama emerges in
fragments and short pieces beginning in the 1st Century AD and continuing to the 10th
Century AD. But in Sanskrit Dramas, Sanskrit was not the only language that was used.
Only the most elite characters in the plays – divine beings, kings and brahmans – speak
Sanskrit. Other characters such as soldiers, merchants, townspeople, etc. and nearly all
women, speak a variety of colloquial languages referred collectively as Prakrits.
Sanskrit Theatre, therefore, must have appealed to a relatively diverse audience. The
plays include so much Prakrit dialogue that the wider population of people who could
not access Sanskrit would have been able to follow the performances of Sanskrit
Dramas.
Sanskrit plays often concern the exploits of kings as heroes of history. Historical
figures of Sanskrit drama include mythical persons and the subjects of epic poetry.
Supernatural beings of several varieties play important roles in the stories of Sanskrit
drama. Important characters from Sanskrit drama also come from the middle class and
lower classes, including soldiers, merchants, kings, hermits and sages. Of the two
principle types of dramas, the Natka plays feature stories about kings and divine beings.
The Parakarana plays concern stories that revolve around middle-class characters.
Sanskrit drama is a combination of music, dialogue, gesticulation and imitation
and therefore it is highly actor-centred in nature. Even stage articles like bow, arrow
etc., were not carried on the stage. Actions like shooting, riding or getting up and down
was done through appropriate gesticulation. Presentation of wars, death or other
calamities were forbidden on the stage; instead they were reported. According to
Sanskrit dramatists’ realisation of rasa and happiness are the real end of the
performance. Because of this, with scarce exceptions, the three-hundred Sanskrit dramas
that have survived, end happily with conflicts comfortably resolved. Even Bhasa’s
Urubhangam that ends with the death of its protagonist does not enforce the nihilistic
worldview that tragedies in other languages depict.
 Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra
The Natyashastra is the only surviving definitive text on classical Sanskrit drama
written by Bharata and, according to scholars, dates as early as 200 BC and as late as
600 AD. Generally, the work is attributed to a single author named Bharata though we
know next to nothing of this individual’s identity- or even if ‘Bharata’ is a proper name
or an acronym or title. The Natyashastra is a book of theatrical practice and theory that
is much more interested in aesthetics than in psychology. Appearing early in the
tradition of classical Sanskrit drama, the Natyashastra’s primary interest is in the stylish
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possibilities of bodies moving on a stage. The theory of theatrical performance that the
Natyashastra promotes has become important to understanding all the arts. In India, one
can hardly assess the quality of a novel or a poem or a dance or a painting without using
the term ‘rasa’ which the text identifies as a touchstone of aesthetic experience. The
Natyashastra‘s primary concerns are not philosophical or theoretical; rather, the text
spends most of its time elucidating how theatre is done, from the construction of theatre
buildings, to the application of make-up, to the design and building of props, to arm
movement, foot movement, eye movement, with additional chapters on music and
audience appreciation. However, scholars have no conclusive evidence that whether the
classical Sanskrit dramas regarded the Natyashastra as a prescriptive text or not because
some dramas adhered to the elements mentioned in the Natyashastra but other dramas
also included things that the Natyashastra forbids. For instance, Bhasa’s Urubhangam
(The Broken Thigh), one of the Mahabharata plays, depicts the death of Duryodhana on
stage which is in direct violation of the Natyashastra’s prohibition of death on stage rule.
 Playwrights
The first recognized playwright of the genre was a Buddhist monk named Asvaghosa
who lived from the mid-first century AD to mid-second century AD but the plays we
have from him are incomplete. The first writer to develop fully formed plays was the
intellectual Bhasa. Plays written by Bhasa can be classified into two groups: The
Mahabharata plays and the Ramayana plays. Bhasa took specific instances from Indian
epics and myths and adapted them into plays. The Urubhanga and Karnabhara are two
of his most well-known plays and the only known tragic Sanskrit plays. Urubhanga
features Duryodhana, the antagonist of Mahabharata, as the hero and is shown repenting
his past as he lies with his thighs crushed, awaiting death. The Karnabhara ends with the
premonition of the sad end of Karna, another character from the epic Mahabharata.
Many influential playwrights followed Bhasa that contributed to Sanskrit theatre
such as Harsha, Bhavabuti, Visakhadatta but none have been as influential and
renowned as Kalidasa. Kalidasa is universally renowned as not only the greatest of the
Sanskrit dramatists but as one of the greatest Sanskrit poets. In a few lyric poems and
three plays Kalida’s extant work represents the height of artistry in classical Sanskrit
poetry and dramaturgy. Kalidasa’s work falls into two categories: Poems and Plays. The
Remembrance of Shakuntala or more commonly known as Shakuntala is the magnum
opus of Kalidasa that tells the story of King Dusyanta and a beautiful girl Shankuntala.
The story is borrowed from the epic of Mahabharata.
 Conclusion
Therefore, Sanskrit theatre was one of the chief forms of entertainment for the
upper classes of Ancient India as well as the middle and lower classes as can be seen
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from the inclusion of Sanskrit as well as other Prakrit languages. Even though most of
the stories were adapted from epic, myths and legends, the playwrights were free to
improvise during their adaptation into plays. Even today, the popularity of Sanskrit
dramas has yet not faded and is being internationally recognized.
2. Greek Tragedy
Greek Tragedy was a form of drama that was invented in the territory of Athens
in the 6th Century BCE. First by content: a tragedy was a drama usually based on
traditional legend, set in a past that was already remote for the ancient Athenian
audience, although great events of recent history could also serve as the basis for Greek
tragedy. Tragedy was a specific kind of drama performed by actors no more than three
at a time and a chorus of twelve and later fifteen who danced, assisted by a player of
aulos, a reeded wind instrument. The actors used spoken verse for the most part mainly
the iambic trimeter while the chorus sang between scenes. The structure of these plays
was regular but flexible. First, the drama began with a prologue which could be a
monologue or a dialogue which always provided basic information about the setting and
initial situation. After the prologue, the chorus entered in the parados, a song in the
course of which the chorus identified itself because each chorus had a distinct identity
within the play. The episode is the ensuing scene; it is followed by a choral song or ode
known as the first stasimon. For the rest of the play, there is an alternation between
episodes and stasima, until the final scene called the Exodos; the epilogue or the final
scene. Songs had two main functions in Greek tragedy: it could serve to move the singers
slightly away from the immediate action, to a different plane on which the singers could
try to make sense of the action, or it could express emotions too powerful for ordinary
speech.
Tragedy also had defining characteristics beyond its formal features. Its main
characters were noble, although they might be disguised as beggars or enslaved.
Choruses could participate in the action by revealing secrets, however, could not stop
an act of violence and, therefore, often they were women, slaves or old men. The fates
of characters were taken seriously. The plots may end happily but the stakes are always
high. For instance, Euripides’ Ion has a happy ending, but only after Ion’s mother has
tries to killed him, and he has come close to killing her. The possibility of divine
intervention in the action also defines the imagined world in which tragedy takes place;
the world is controlled by the traditional gods of Greek mythology under the supreme
direction of Zeus.
 Aristotle’s Poetics
The Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Poetics is a filter through which Greek
tragedies are often scrutinized. Aristotle defines tragedy as ‘the imitation of an action
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 that is serious and also as having magnitude complete in itself’. Aristotle cared more
about the plot than anything else, and in looking at the emotional side of tragedy.
Aristotle defines the tragic emotions as pity and fear, and suggests that it is the task
of tragedy to ‘purge’ these emotions also known as ‘catharsis’. He believed that
viewing tragedies would relieve the audiences of the excessive pity and fear that they
experience. In order for a tragedy to arouse these feelings, the hero of a tragedy can
neither be all good or all evil but he must be someone the audience can identify with.
However, if he is superior in some way or ways, the tragic pleasure is intensified. His
disastrous end results from a mistaken action which in turn arises from a tragic flaw
or from a tragic error in judgement more popularly termed as ‘hamartia’. Often the
hamartia in Greek tragedies is ‘hubris’ which translates to ‘excessive pride’. This
hubris causes the hero to ignore a divine warning or to break a moral law. It has been
suggested that because the tragic hero’s suffering is greater than his offense, the
audience feels pity and fears for the fate of the hero because the audience members
perceive that they could have behaved similarly.
The most famous theory to examine Greek tragedies is the concept of Unities.
Even though Aristotle is credited with the theory, it has not been directly formulated
by the Greek philosopher although it has been derived from ‘Poetics’. He merely
states that a tragedy should have unity of action. During the Renaissance in 1570,
Lodovico Castelvetrano introduced the concept of three unities: unity of Time, place
and action. Unity of Time states the action within the play should take place within
24 hours to make it more realistic to the audience. Unity of Place said that the drama
should not change place and even if the scene changes it must not be too great a
distance. Unity of Action states that the plot must have a beginning, a middle, and an
end which makes the plot intelligible, coherent and individual. Unity of Action exists
when nothing included in the play can be omitted and nothing really pertinent to it
can be included.
 Playwrights
All the surviving complete Attic tragedies come to us under the names of
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides although most scholars believe that Aeschylus did
not compose Prometheus Bound but it may be his son Euphorion. All the surviving
complete plays and fragments of plays were composed for performance at Athenian
festivals of City Dionysia.
The first of the great tragedian poets was Aeschylus. Because the plays were
submitted in fours (three tragedies and a satyr play) Aeschylus often carries on a theme
between plays creating sequels. One such trilogy is Agamemnon, The Libation Bearer
and The Furies known collectively as the Oresteia. Aeschylus described his own work

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as ‘morsels from the feast of Homer’. He wrote over 70 plays out of which only six or
seven survive.
The second poet was Sophocles. He added a third actor to the proceedings of the
play which originally was limited to two. This allowed for more sophistication in terms
of plot. His most famous work is Antigone in which the lead character pays the ultimate
price for burying her brother against the wishes of King Kreon of Thebes. Other works
include Oedipus the King and Oedipus a Colonus but he wrote more than 100 plays, of
which seven survive.
The last of the classic tragedy poets was Euripides who was known for his clever
dialogues, fine choral lyrics and certain realism in his text and stage presentation. He
liked to pose awkward and though-provoking questions through his plays which is why
he was popular with the public but won only a few festival competitions. Out of around
90 plays only 19 survive and the most famous of these is Media – where Jason, of the
Golden Fleece fame, abandons the title character for the daughter of the King of Corinth,
Media which leads to Media killing her own children in revenge.
 Conclusion
Greek tragedy is an important subgenre of Greek drama that was tremendously
popular and whose structure was shaped by Aristotle’s Poetics whose influence can
be felt in the later periods of drama and theatre as well as in the modern times.
3. Senecan Tragedy
Senecan tragedy refers to a set of ancient Roman tragedies out of which ten exist.
Nine of those ten tragedies are believed to be written by the Roman playwright Lucius
Annaeus Seneca. The group of plays includes Hercules Furens, Medea, Troades,
Phaedra, Agamemnon, Oedipus, Hercules Oetacus, Phoenissae and Thyestes. They
dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies.
Though gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches are commonplace. In fact,
Seneca chose the most sensational subjects such as the horrid banquet of Thyestes, the
murder of Agamemnon by his faithless wife, Hercules murdering his family, etc.
Therefore, it can be seen that Senecan tragedies explored the ideas of revenge, occult,
supernatural, suicide, blood and gore. All these themes are particularly present in the
play Medea where Medea angered by her faithless husband, Jason of Argonaut’s
marriage to Creusa – the daughter of King Creon – Medea, being a witch, calls upon the
dark powers of the underworld to help with her revenge against Jason. The story ends
with Creusa and King Creon being burned alive and Medea, with the purpose of hurting
Jason even more, murders the two sons Medea and Jason had together during their
marriage.

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  Influence of Senecan Tragedies
In the 16th century the popularity of Seneca’s tragedy was immense and exercised
a great influence on medieval playwrights who used them as models for literary
imitation. There was a considerable vogue in Italy for Senecan Tragedy. The same
movement in France had its effect on Buchanan’s Latin plays and on the plays of Jodelle
and Garnier, and both the Italian and French fashion influenced English drama during
the Elizabethan period. Senecan tragedies started being performed in Universities by
students enthralled by the play’s crude and melodramatic nature. The first and complete
English edition of Seneca’s plays appeared in 1581 under the title ‘Tenne Tragedies’
and the Elizabethan dramatists found Seneca’s themes of bloodthirsty revenge more
congenial to English taste than their Greek originals.
The Tragedy of Gorboduc (1561) written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas
Norton were one of the first tragedies written in English whose structure and themes
were modelled after the Senecan tragedies. The structure of dividing tragedies in five
acts and the introduction of the Chorus, as in Gorboduc, was adopted by and can be
witnessed in many earlier plays such as The Misfortunes of Arthur, Catiline and later
pays during the height of Elizabeth such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Titus Andronicus.
Both of these Shakespeare’s plays resound the influence of Senecan tragedies with the
blood, revenge-theme, long soliloquies, its division into five acts and a corpse-laden
climax. Titus Andronicus is especially known for its excessively violent nature with
more rape, blood, and death (even cannibalism) than in any of the Shakespeare’s other
plays. Along with Shakespeare, Seneca’s influence can also be seen in plays during the
Jacobean period – The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, Tis Pity She’s a Whore and
many more.
The influence of Senecan Tragedy on the drama since its translation into
English can felt as far as the twentieth century either directly or indirectly. In this way,
starting from the Elizabethan period till the more contemporary period Seneca has
infiltrated theatre from multiple angle; although not always acknowledged, his work
remains a touchstone for creative practitioners seeking to represent the unrepresentable.
4. Structure of Elizabethan Theatre
Elizabethan theatre refers to the theatre of England between 1550 to 1603 when
Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. This is the time during which plays by playwright
like William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe were flourishing. Theatre was the chief
source of entertainment not only during the Elizabethan period but as well as for the
most part of the Renaissance period.
During the early part of the 16th century, there were two distinct types of theatre
in England: one was represented by small groups of professional actors who performed
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in halls, inns, or marketplaces. The location of a play was established by the words and
gestures of the actors. The significant achievement of the Elizabethan stage was
connected with these professional acting groups. During the second half of the 16th
century, as they became successful, the acting troupes no longer needed to perform in
temporary venues because in 1576, Charles Burbage built the first theatre named “The
Theatre”. The architecture of “The Theatre” was designed as a construction which was
similar to a small Roman amphitheatre – the Elizabethan amphitheatre. After that “The
Globe”, “The Fortune”, “The Rose”, “Red Bull”, “The Hope”, to name a few, were built.
Because London authorities considered actors – and theatre goers – as unsavoury,
all these theatres were built outside city limits to avoid prosecution by them and in 1596
the authorities in London banned theatre within city limits. The structure of the
Elizabethan theatre itself was round or polygonal. Although the theatre as a whole was
unroofed, the stage was protected by a roof, supported by two pillars. These could serve
(by an act of imagination) as trees behind which actors might pretend to conceal
themselves. The yard was surrounded by three tiers of galleries. Audience could see the
performance by standing or sitting in galleries. Spectators, depending on how much
money they had, could either stand in the yard, which may have sloped toward the stage,
sit on benches in the galleries that went around the greater part of the walls, sit in one of
the private boxes, or sit on a stool on the stage proper. This rounded structure created a
sense of intimacy between the actors and the audience. A performance was probably
uninterrupted by intermissions or by long pauses for the changing of scenery; a group
of characters leaves the stage, another enters, and if the locale has changed the new
characters somehow (mostly through dialogue) let the audience know.
The importance of this type of theatre was its flexibility. In some ways it was
similar to earlier attempts to reconstruct the scaenae frons of the Romans; it had the
facade and the entrance doors. The Elizabethan theatre differed in that it had a main
platform, an inner stage, and an upper stage level that made movement possible in all
directions instead of simply along the length of a narrow stage.
5. Poetic Drama
In poetic drama, the dialogue of a play is written in verse. Usually in English blank
verse is employed for this purpose. The roots of poetic drama can be traced as far as
Ancient Greek where plays by Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus were the vogue not
only during their respective times but also later during the neoclassical period. On the
other hand, English poetic drama had its heyday during the Elizabethan age. The
University Wits, in general, and Marlowe and Shakespeare, in particular contributed to
the growth and development of poetic drama.

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 Shakespeare perfected the genre of poetic drama through his tragedies such as
‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’, ‘Macbeth’ and his tragicomedies like ‘The Winter’s tale’,
‘Cymbeline’ and ‘The Tempest’ which are particularly notable for their poetic
excellence. William Shakespeare took drama to such poetic heights that none of his
successors could continue it with the same spirit and vigour. There was considerable
decline in the quality and quantity of poetic drama after Shakespeare’s age. The only
play that comes close to Shakespeare’s in its poetic genius is Webster’s The Duchess of
Malfi. It is generally considered that poetic drama died a natural death with Shakespeare.
However, this death is not attributed to the lack of attempts of the later poets and
dramatists to write poetic drama. The Romantic as well as the Victorian poets attempted
poetic drama during the 18th and 19th century. Notably Keats’s ‘Otho the Great’ (1819)
and ‘King Stephen’ (1819) along with P.B. Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (1820) and
‘Hellas’ (1821) were exceptional attempts at this but as Matthew Arnold points out that
although masters at verse, they lacked the “architectonics” of drama.
During the 20th century, efforts by T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry did temporarily
breathe life into of poetic drama. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” was the first great
play of this genre focusing on the life and eventual assassination of Archbishop Thomas
Becket. The next play, “The Family Reunion”, Eliot selects a secular story with a
modern setting and characters dealing with the theme of sin and expiation. The verse is
flexible and transparent successfully retaining its remarkable poetic composition. In the
plays that follow “The Family Reunion”, such as “The Cocktail Party”, “The Elder
Statesman”, etc., Eliot dealt with similar themes which was also the subject of much of
his poetry.
Despite the best efforts of Eliot, Fry, Yeats and many other poets, the new verse
drama, lost its momentum and at the same time it was overtaken by newer movements
such as Absurd drama in the mid-1950s and the socially conscious plays by John
Osborne. Naturalism, too, was a bitter critic of poetic drama because it made Eliot and
Fry’s appear stilted and artificial. Therefore, even though poetic drama was resurrected
during the mid-20th century and even if it did produce some successful plays, the
movement, under the leadership of mainly Eliot and Fry and others such as Yeats, Auden
and Bottomley, to name a few, fell out of fashion.
Barkat Dhanji

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