Drama

Abstract

Many social human pleasures and needs, such as religious and secular rituals, vivid story-telling, charades, dances, mimicry, organised entertainments at feasts, tournaments (the medieval equivalent of modern football) and processions, have something of the drama in them and affect the drama. The drama proper has a narrower definition. First, it is an action ‘about’ something else than itself, that is, it ‘imitates’ or symbolises some other action. Secondly, it involves actors as ‘characters’, that is, it depends on impersonation by one person of someone, or some ‘thing’, else. Thirdly, it is played to an audience who are to some degree detached, though their sympathies must be involved. Fourthly, it is based on words. (Mime, or dumb-show, therefore, is not truly drama.) In most cases the words, though memorised by actors, will be a written (or, of course, printed) text because that is how we know of them historically, but also because, though the drama is essentially an oral form, it needs to be fixed in the firmness and density of literacy to give it literary value. ‘Ad libbing’ is possible but by definition transitory.