Report on drama. Mandatory list of dramatic works

What is dramaturgy? The answer to this question will depend on the context in which the word was used. First of all, this is a type of literature intended for stage productions, implying the interaction of characters with the outside world, which is accompanied by an explanation from the author.

Dramaturgy also represents works that are built according to a single principle and laws.

Features of dramaturgy

The action should take place in the present time and develop rapidly in the same place. The viewer becomes a witness and must be in suspense and empathize with what is happening.
The production can cover a time period of several hours or even years. However, the action should not last more than a day on stage, as it is limited by the viewing capabilities of the audience.
Depending on the chronology of the work, a drama may consist of one or more acts. Thus, the literature of French classicism is usually represented by 5 acts, and Spanish drama is characterized by 2 acts.
All drama characters are divided into two groups - antagonists and protagonists (off-stage characters may also be present), and each act is a duel. But the author should not support anyone's side - the viewer can only guess from hints from the context of the work.

Drama Construction

A drama has a plot, plot, theme and intrigue.

The plot is a conflict, the relationship of characters with events, which, in turn, include several elements: exposition, plot, development of action, climax, decline of action, denouement and finale.
A plot is a series of interconnected real or fictional events in a time sequence. Both the plot and the plot are a narrative about events, but the plot represents only the fact of what happened, and the plot is a cause-and-effect relationship.
A theme is a series of events that form the basis of a dramatic work, which are united by one problem, that is, what the author wanted the viewer or reader to think about.
Dramatic suspense is the interaction of characters that influences the expected course of events in a story.

Elements of Drama

Exposition - a statement of the current state of affairs, which gives rise to the conflict.
The beginning is the initiation of a conflict or the prerequisites for its development.
Climax is the highest point of conflict.
The denouement is the coup or downfall of the main character.
The finale is a resolution of the conflict, which can end in three ways: the conflict is resolved and has a happy ending, the conflict is not resolved, or the conflict is resolved tragically - the death of the main character or any other conclusion of the hero from the work in the finale.

The question “what is dramaturgy” can now be answered with another definition - this is the theory and art of constructing a dramatic work. It must rely on the rules of plotting, have a plan and a main idea. But in the course of historical development, dramaturgy, genres (tragedy, comedy, drama), its elements and means of expression changed, which divided the history of dramaturgy into several cycles.

The Birth of Drama

For the first time, the origin of drama was evidenced by wall inscriptions and papyri in the era of Ancient Egypt, which also contained a plot, climax and denouement. The priests, who had knowledge about the deities, influenced the consciousness of the Egyptian people precisely thanks to myths.

The myth of Isis, Osiris and Horus represented a kind of Bible for the Egyptians. Dramaturgy further developed in Ancient Greece in the 5th-6th centuries BC. e. The genre of tragedy originated in ancient Greek drama. The plot of the tragedy was expressed in the opposition of a good and fair hero to evil. The finale ended with the tragic death of the main character and was supposed to cause strong emotions in the viewer for the deep cleansing of his soul. This phenomenon has a definition - catharsis.

The myths were dominated by military and political themes, since the tragedians of that time themselves participated in wars more than once. The dramaturgy of Ancient Greece is represented by the following famous writers: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. In addition to tragedy, the genre of comedy was also revived, in which Aristophanes made the main theme of peace. People are tired of wars and lawlessness of the authorities, therefore they demand a peaceful and calm life. Comedy originated from comic songs, which were sometimes even frivolous. Humanism and democracy were the main ideas in the work of comedians. The most famous tragedies of that time include the plays “The Persians” and “Prometheus Bound” by Aeschylus, “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles and “Medea” by Euripides.

On the development of drama in the 2nd-3rd century BC. e. influenced by ancient Roman playwrights: Plautus, Terence and Seneca. Plautus empathized with the lower strata of slave-owning society, ridiculed greedy moneylenders and traders, therefore, taking ancient Greek stories as a basis, he supplemented them with stories about the difficult life of ordinary citizens. His works contained many songs and jokes; the author was popular with his contemporaries and subsequently influenced European drama. Thus, Moliere took his famous comedy “Treasure” as a basis when writing his work “The Miser.”

Terence is a representative of a later generation. He does not focus on expressive means, but goes deeper into describing the psychological component of the characters’ character, and the themes for comedies are everyday and family conflicts between fathers and children. His famous play “Brothers” reflects this problem most clearly.

Another playwright who made a great contribution to the development of drama is Seneca. He was the tutor of Nero, Emperor of Rome, and occupied a high position with him. The playwright's tragedies always developed around the protagonist's revenge, which pushed him to commit terrible crimes. Historians explain this by the bloody outrages that took place at that time in the imperial palace. Seneca's work "Medea" later influenced Western European theater, but, unlike Euripides' "Medea", the queen is presented as a negative character, thirsting for revenge and not experiencing any emotions.

In the imperial era, tragedies are replaced by another genre - pantomime. This is a dance accompanied by music and singing, usually performed by one actor with his mouth taped. But even more popular were circus performances in amphitheaters - gladiator fights and chariot competitions, which led to the decline of morals and the collapse of the Roman Empire. For the first time, playwrights presented to the audience as closely as possible what dramaturgy is, but the theater was destroyed, and drama was revived again only after a half-millennium break in development.

Liturgical drama

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, drama was revived again only in the 9th century in church rituals and prayers. The church, in order to attract as many people as possible to worship and control the masses through the worship of God, introduces small spectacular performances, such as the resurrection of Jesus Christ or other biblical stories. This is how liturgical drama developed.

However, people gathered for the performances and were distracted from the service itself, as a result of which a semi-liturgical drama arose - the performances were moved to the porch and everyday stories began to be taken as a basis, based on biblical stories that were more understandable to the audience.

Revival of drama in Europe

Dramaturgy further developed during the Renaissance in the 14th-16th centuries, returning to the values of ancient culture. Stories from ancient Greek and Roman myths inspire Renaissance authors

It was in Italy that theater began to be revived, a professional approach to stage productions appeared, a musical genre of work such as opera was formed, comedy, tragedy and pastoral were revived - a genre of drama whose main theme was rural life. Comedy in its development gave two directions:

a scholarly comedy intended for a circle of educated people;
street comedy - improvisational theater of masks.

The most prominent representatives of Italian drama are Angelo Beolco ("Coquette", "Comedy without a title"), Giangiorgio Trissino ("Sofonisba") and Lodovico Ariosto ("Comedy of the Chest", "Orlando Furious").

English drama is strengthening the position of the theater of realism. Myths and mysteries are being replaced by a socio-philosophical understanding of life. The founder of Renaissance drama is considered to be the English playwright Christopher Marlowe (“Tamerlane”, “The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus”). The theater of realism was developed under William Shakespeare, who also supported humanistic ideas in his works - “Romeo and Juliet”, “King Lear”, “Othello”, “Hamlet”. The authors of this time listened to the wishes of the common people, and the favorite heroes of the plays were simpletons, moneylenders, warriors and courtesans, as well as modest heroines making self-sacrifice. The characters adapt to the plot, which conveys the realities of that time.

The period of the 17th-18th centuries is represented by the dramaturgy of the Baroque and Classical eras. Humanism as a direction fades into the background, and the hero feels lost. Baroque ideas separate God and man, that is, now man himself is left to influence his own destiny. The main direction of Baroque dramaturgy is mannerism (the impermanence of the world and the precarious position of man), which is inherent in the dramas “Fuente Ovejuna” and “The Star of Seville” by Lope de Vega and the works of Tirso de Molina - “The Seductress of Seville”, “The Pious Martha”.

Classicism is the opposite of baroque mainly in that it is based on realism. The main genre is tragedy. A favorite theme in the works of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine and Jean-Baptiste Moliere is the conflict of personal and civil interests, feelings and duty. Serving the state is the highest noble goal for a person. The tragedy “The Cid” brought enormous success to Pierre Corneille, and two plays by Jean Racine “Alexander the Great” and “Thebaid, or the Enemy Brothers” were written and staged on the advice of Moliere.

Moliere was the most popular playwright of the time and was under the patronage of the reigning lady and left behind 32 plays written in a variety of genres. The most significant of them are “Madman”, “Doctor in Love” and “Imaginary Patient”.

During the Enlightenment, three movements were developed: classicism, sentimentalism and rococo, which influenced the drama of 18th-century England, France, Germany and Italy. The injustice of the world towards ordinary people has become a major theme for playwrights. The upper classes share places with ordinary people. “Enlightenment theater” frees people from established prejudices and becomes not only entertainment, but also a school of morality for them. The bourgeois drama is gaining popularity (George Lylo "The Merchant of London" and Edward Moore "The Gambler"), which highlights the problems of the bourgeoisie, considering them as important as the problems of the royals.

Gothic dramaturgy was presented for the first time by John Gom in the tragedies “Douglas” and “Fatal Discovery,” whose themes were of a family and everyday nature. French dramaturgy was represented to a greater extent by the poet, historian and publicist Francois Voltaire (“Oedipus”, “The Death of Caesar”, “The Prodigal Son”). John Gay (The Beggar's Opera) and Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera) opened up new directions for comedy - moralizing and realistic. And Henry Fielding almost always criticized the English political system through satirical comedies (Love in Various Masks, The Coffee House Politician), theatrical parodies (Pasquin), farces and ballad operas (The Lottery, The Scheming Maid). , after which the law on theatrical censorship was introduced.

Since Germany is the founder of romanticism, German drama received its greatest development in the 18th and 19th centuries. The main character of the works is an idealized creatively gifted personality, contrasted with the real world. F. Schelling had a great influence on the worldview of the romantics. Later, Gotthald Lessing published his work “Hamburg Drama,” where he criticizes classicism and promotes the ideas of Shakespeare’s educational realism. Johann Goethe and Friedrich Schiller create the Weimar Theater and improve the school of acting. The most prominent representatives of German drama are Heinrich von Kleist (“The Schroffenstein Family,” “Prince Friedrich of Homburg”) and Johann Ludwig Tieck (“Puss in Boots,” “The World Inside Out”).

The rise of drama in Russia

Russian drama began to actively develop back in the 18th century under the representative of classicism - A. P. Sumarokov, called the “father of the Russian theater”, whose tragedies (“Monsters”, “Narcissus”, “Guardian”, “Cuckold by Imagination”) were focused on the work of Moliere. But it was in the 19th century that this movement played an outstanding role in the history of culture.

Several genres developed in Russian dramas. These are tragedies by V. A. Ozerov (“Yaropolk and Oleg”, “Oedipus in Athens”, “Dimitri Donskoy”), which reflected socio-political problems relevant during the Napoleonic wars, satirical comedies by I. Krylov (“Mad Family”, “The Coffee Shop”) and educational dramas by A. Griboedov (“Woe from Wit”), N. Gogol (“The Inspector General”) and A. Pushkin (“Boris Godunov,” “Feast in the Time of Plague”).

In the second half of the 19th century, realism firmly established its position in Russian dramas, and A. Ostrovsky became the most prominent playwright of this trend. His work consisted of historical plays ("The Governor"), dramas ("The Thunderstorm"), satirical comedies ("Wolves and Sheep") and fairy tales. The main character of the works was a resourceful adventurer, merchant and provincial actor.

Features of the new direction

The period from the 19th to the 20th century introduces us to a new drama, which is naturalistic dramaturgy. Writers of this time sought to convey “real” life, showing the most unsightly aspects of the life of people of that time. A person’s actions were determined not only by his internal beliefs, but also by the surrounding circumstances that influenced them, so the main character of a work could be not just one person, but even a whole family or a separate problem or event.

The new drama represents several literary movements. They are all united by the playwrights’ attention to the character’s state of mind, a plausible rendering of reality, and an explanation of all human actions from a natural science point of view. It was Henrik Ibsen who is the founder of the new drama, and the influence of naturalism was most clearly manifested in his play “Ghosts”.

In the theatrical culture of the 20th century, 4 main directions began to develop - symbolism, expressionism, Dada and surrealism. All the founders of these directions in drama were united by the rejection of traditional culture and the search for new means of expression. Maeterlinck (“The Blind,” “Joan of Arc”) and Hofmannsthal (“The Fool and Death”), as representatives of symbolism, use death and the role of man in society as the main theme in their plays, and Hugo Ball, a representative of Dadaist drama, emphasized the meaninglessness of human existence and the complete denial of all beliefs. Surrealism is associated with the name of Andre Breton (“Please”), whose heroes are characterized by incoherent dialogues and self-destruction. Expressionist drama inherits romanticism, where the main character confronts the whole world. Representatives of this direction in drama were Gun Jost (“Young Man”, “The Hermit”), Arnolt Bronnen (“Revolt Against God”) and Frank Wedekind (“Pandora’s Box”).

Contemporary drama

At the turn of the 20th-21st centuries, modern dramaturgy lost its achieved positions and moved into a state of searching for new genres and means of expression. The direction of existentialism was formed in Russia, and then it developed in Germany and France.

Jean-Paul Sartre in his dramas (“Behind Closed Doors”, “Flies”) and other playwrights choose as the hero of their works a person who is constantly in thoughts of thoughtlessly living life. This fear makes him think about the imperfections of the world around him and change it.

Under the influence of Franz Kafka, the theater of the absurd arises, which denies realistic characters, and the works of playwrights are written in the form of repetitive dialogues, inconsistency of actions and the absence of cause-and-effect relationships. Russian drama chooses universal human values as its main theme. She defends human ideals and strives for beauty.

The development of drama in literature is directly related to the course of historical events in the world. Playwrights from different countries, constantly under the impression of socio-political problems, often themselves led trends in art and thus influenced the masses. The heyday of drama came back in the era of the Roman Empire, Ancient Egypt and Greece, during the development of which the forms and elements of drama changed, and the theme for the works either introduced new problems into the plot, or returned to old problems from antiquity. And if the playwrights of the first millennia paid attention to the expressiveness of speech and the character of the hero, which is most clearly expressed in the work of the playwright of that time - Shakespeare, then representatives of the modern movement strengthened the role of atmosphere and subtext in their works. Based on the above, we can give a third answer to the question: what is dramaturgy? These are dramatic works united by one era, country or writer.

Dramatic works (other gr. action), like epic ones, recreate series of events, the actions of people and their relationships. Like the author of an epic work, the playwright is subject to the “law of developing action.” But there is no detailed narrative-descriptive image in the drama.

The actual author's speech here is auxiliary and episodic. These are lists of characters, sometimes accompanied by brief characteristics, indicating the time and place of action; descriptions of the stage situation at the beginning of acts and episodes, as well as comments on individual remarks of the characters and indications of their movements, gestures, facial expressions, intonations (remarks).

All this constitutes the secondary text of a dramatic work. Its main text is a chain of statements by the characters, their remarks and monologues.

Hence some limitations of the artistic possibilities of drama. A writer-playwright uses only part of the visual means that are available to the creator of a novel or epic, short story or story. And the characters of the characters are revealed in drama with less freedom and completeness than in epic. “I perceive drama,” noted T. Mann, “as the art of silhouette and I perceive only the person being told as a three-dimensional, integral, real and plastic image.”

At the same time, playwrights, unlike authors of epic works, are forced to limit themselves to the volume of verbal text that meets the needs of theatrical art. The time of the action depicted in the drama must fit into the strict time frame of the stage.

And the performance in the forms familiar to modern European theater lasts, as is known, no more than three to four hours. And this requires an appropriate size of the dramatic text.

The time of the events reproduced by the playwright during the stage episode is neither compressed nor stretched; characters in the drama exchange remarks without any noticeable time intervals, and their statements, as noted by K.S. Stanislavsky, form a continuous, continuous line.

If with the help of narration the action is captured as something in the past, then the chain of dialogues and monologues in the drama creates the illusion of the present time. Life here speaks as if on its own behalf: between what is depicted and the reader there is no intermediary narrator.

The action is recreated in drama with maximum immediacy. It flows as if before the reader’s eyes. “All narrative forms,” wrote F. Schiller, “transfer the present into the past; everything dramatic makes the past present.”

Drama is oriented towards the demands of the stage. And theater is a public, mass art. The performance directly affects many people, who seem to merge together in responses to what is happening in front of them.

The purpose of drama, according to Pushkin, is to act on the multitude, to engage their curiosity” and for this purpose to capture the “truth of passions”: “Drama was born in the square and was a popular entertainment. People, like children, demand entertainment and action. The drama presents him with unusual, strange incidents. People demand strong sensations. Laughter, pity and horror are the three strings of our imagination, shaken by dramatic art.”

The dramatic genre of literature is especially closely connected with the sphere of laughter, for the theater strengthened and developed in inextricable connection with mass celebrations, in an atmosphere of play and fun. “The comic genre is universal for antiquity,” noted O. M. Freidenberg.

The same can be said about theater and drama of other countries and eras. T. Mann was right when he called the “comedian instinct” “the fundamental basis of all dramatic skill.”

It is not surprising that drama gravitates toward an outwardly spectacular presentation of what is depicted. Her imagery turns out to be hyperbolic, catchy, theatrically bright. “The theater requires exaggerated broad lines both in voice, recitation, and in gestures,” wrote N. Boileau. And this property of stage art invariably leaves its mark on the behavior of the heroes of dramatic works.

“Like he acted out in the theater,” comments Bubnov (“At the Lower Depths” by Gorky) on the frenzied tirade of the desperate Kleshch, who, by unexpectedly intruding into the general conversation, gave it theatrical effect.

Significant (as a characteristic of the dramatic type of literature) are Tolstoy’s reproaches against W. Shakespeare for the abundance of hyperbole, which allegedly “violates the possibility of artistic impression.” “From the very first words,” he wrote about the tragedy “King Lear,” “one can see the exaggeration: the exaggeration of events, the exaggeration of feelings and the exaggeration of expressions.”

In his assessment of Shakespeare's work, L. Tolstoy was wrong, but the idea that the great English playwright was committed to theatrical hyperbole is completely fair. What has been said about “King Lear” can be applied with no less justification to ancient comedies and tragedies, dramatic works of classicism, to the plays of F. Schiller and V. Hugo, etc.

In the 19th-20th centuries, when the desire for everyday authenticity prevailed in literature, the conventions inherent in drama became less obvious, and they were often reduced to a minimum. The origins of this phenomenon are the so-called “philistine drama” of the 18th century, the creators and theorists of which were D. Diderot and G.E. Lessing.

Works of the greatest Russian playwrights of the 19th century. and the beginning of the 20th century - A.N. Ostrovsky, A.P. Chekhov and M. Gorky - they are distinguished by the authenticity of the life forms they recreate. But even when the Playwrights focused on verisimilitude, plot, psychological and actual speech hyperboles were preserved.

Theatrical conventions made themselves felt even in Chekhov’s dramaturgy, which showed the maximum limit of “life-likeness.” Let's take a closer look at the final scene of Three Sisters. One young woman, ten or fifteen minutes ago, broke up with her loved one, probably forever. Another five minutes ago found out about the death of her fiancé. And so they, together with the elder, third sister, sum up the moral and philosophical results of the past, reflecting to the sounds of a military march about the fate of their generation, about the future of humanity.

It is hardly possible to imagine this happening in reality. But we don’t notice the implausibility of the ending of “Three Sisters”, since we are accustomed to the fact that drama significantly changes the forms of people’s life.

The above convinces us of the validity of A. S. Pushkin’s judgment (from his already cited article) that “the very essence of dramatic art excludes verisimilitude”; “When reading a poem or a novel, we can often forget ourselves and believe that the incident described is not fiction, but the truth.

In an ode, in an elegy, we can think that the poet depicted his real feelings, in real circumstances. But where is the credibility in a building divided into two parts, one of which is filled with spectators who have agreed?

The most important role in dramatic works belongs to the conventions of verbal self-disclosure of heroes, whose dialogues and monologues, often filled with aphorisms and maxims, turn out to be much more extensive and effective than those remarks that could be uttered in a similar situation in life.

Conventional remarks are “to the side”, which do not seem to exist for other characters on stage, but are clearly audible to the audience, as well as monologues pronounced by the characters alone, alone with themselves, which are a purely stage technique for bringing out inner speech (there are many such monologues as in ancient tragedies and in modern dramaturgy).

The playwright, setting up a kind of experiment, shows how a person would speak if in the spoken words he expressed his moods with maximum completeness and brightness. And speech in a dramatic work often takes on similarities with artistic, lyrical or oratorical speech: the characters here tend to express themselves like improvisers-poets or masters of public speaking.

Therefore, Hegel was partly right when he viewed drama as a synthesis of the epic principle (eventfulness) and the lyrical principle (speech expression).

Drama has, as it were, two lives in art: theatrical and literary. Constituting the dramatic basis of performances, existing in their composition, a dramatic work is also perceived by the reading public.

But this was not always the case. The emancipation of drama from the stage was carried out gradually - over a number of centuries and was completed relatively recently: in the 18th-19th centuries. World-significant examples of drama (from antiquity to the 17th century) at the time of their creation were practically not recognized as literary works: they existed only as part of the performing arts.

Neither W. Shakespeare nor J.B. Moliere were perceived by their contemporaries as writers. A decisive role in strengthening the idea of drama as a work intended not only for stage production, but also for reading, was played by the “discovery” of Shakespeare as a great dramatic poet in the second half of the 18th century.

In the 19th century (especially in its first half) the literary merits of the drama were often placed above the stage ones. Thus, Goethe believed that “Shakespeare’s works are not for the eyes of the body,” and Griboyedov called his desire to hear the verses of “Woe from Wit” from the stage “childish.”

The so-called Lesedrama (drama for reading), created with a focus primarily on perception in reading, has become widespread. Such are Goethe's Faust, Byron's dramatic works, Pushkin's small tragedies, Turgenev's dramas, about which the author remarked: “My plays, unsatisfactory on stage, may be of some interest in reading.”

There are no fundamental differences between Lesedrama and a play that is intended by the author for stage production. Dramas created for reading are often potentially stage plays. And the theater (including modern) persistently searches and sometimes finds the keys to them, evidence of which is the successful productions of Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” (primarily the famous pre-revolutionary performance of the Art Theater) and numerous (although not always successful) stage readings Pushkin's small tragedies in the 20th century.

The old truth remains in force: the most important, main purpose of drama is the stage. “Only during stage performance,” noted A. N. Ostrovsky, “the author’s dramatic invention receives a completely finished form and produces exactly that moral action, the achievement of which the author set himself the goal.”

The creation of a performance based on a dramatic work is associated with its creative completion: the actors create intonational and plastic drawings of the roles they play, the artist designs the stage space, the director develops the mise-en-scène. In this regard, the concept of the play changes somewhat (more attention is paid to some of its aspects, less attention to others), and is often specified and enriched: the stage production introduces new semantic shades into the drama.

At the same time, the principle of faithful reading of literature is of paramount importance for the theater. The director and actors are called upon to convey the staged work to the audience as fully as possible. Fidelity of stage reading occurs when the director and actors deeply comprehend a dramatic work in its main content, genre, and style features.

Stage productions (as well as film adaptations) are legitimate only in cases where there is agreement (even relative) of the director and actors with the range of ideas of the writer-playwright, when stage performers are carefully attentive to the meaning of the work staged, to the features of its genre, the features of its style and to the text itself.

In the classical aesthetics of the 18th-19th centuries, in particular in Hegel and Belinsky, drama (primarily the genre of tragedy) was considered as the highest form of literary creativity: as the “crown of poetry.”

A whole series of artistic eras actually showed themselves primarily in dramatic art. Aeschylus and Sophocles during the heyday of ancient culture, Moliere, Racine and Corneille at the time of classicism had no equal among the authors of epic works.

Goethe's work is significant in this regard. All literary genres were accessible to the great German writer, and he crowned his life in art with the creation of a dramatic work - the immortal Faust.

In past centuries (until the 18th century), drama not only successfully competed with epic, but also often became the leading form of artistic reproduction of life in space and time.

This is due to a number of reasons. Firstly, theatrical art played a huge role, accessible (unlike handwritten and printed books) to the widest strata of society. Secondly, the properties of dramatic works (depiction of characters with clearly defined features, reproduction of human passions, attraction to pathos and the grotesque) in “pre-realistic” eras fully corresponded to general literary and general artistic trends.

And although in the XIX-XX centuries. The socio-psychological novel, a genre of epic literature, has moved to the forefront of literature; dramatic works still have a place of honor.

V.E. Khalizev Theory of literature. 1999

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Pushkin, Tynyanov Yuri Nikolaevich. Yuri Nikolaevich Tynyanov (1894-1943) - an outstanding prose writer and literary critic - looked like Pushkin, which he had been told about since his student years. Who knows, maybe it was this similarity that helped...

Drama - (ancient Greek action, action) is one of the literary movements. Drama as a type of literature, in contrast to lyrics and like epic, drama reproduces, first of all, the world external to the author - actions, relationships between people, conflicts. Unlike the epic, it has not a narrative, but a dialogical form. As a rule, there are no internal monologues, author's characteristics of characters and direct author's comments of the person depicted. In Aristotle's Poetics, drama is described as the imitation of action through action and not through telling. This provision is still not outdated. Dramatic works are characterized by acute conflict situations that prompt characters to verbal and physical actions. The author's speech can sometimes be in the drama, but it is of an auxiliary nature. Sometimes the author briefly comments on the remarks of his characters, points out their gestures and intonation.

Drama is closely related to theatrical art and must meet the needs of the theater.

Drama is seen as the crown of literary creativity. Examples of drama are the play “The Thunderstorm” by Ostrovsky and “At the Bottom” by Gorkov.

We need to talk about dramatic genres, not forgetting that drama itself is a genre that arose at the intersection of literature and theater. It is impossible to analyze them separately from each other. We have already talked about drama enough, however, we have not yet given the meaning of drama as a theatrical performance.

In order for any work to be called a drama, it must at least contain a conflict or a conflict situation. Conflict has the right to be both comical and tragic. Often drama contains a lot of both. This is probably why it is often interpreted in specialized literature as an intermediate genre.

Drama can be psychological (both on stage and in literature), social, philosophical, based on everyday or historical conflict, and a combination of the above types is also often found, this will be especially typical for literary drama. Drama can also be national, for example, Spanish drama can be distinguished - it is sometimes also called the “drama of honor” or “the comedy of the cloak and sword”, here everything entirely depends on what kind of conflict is developed in the drama. Drama genres can only appear in literature. There really aren't too many of them:

Play (a narrative in prose or poetic form, in which the characters, the author, and stage directions appear)

Comedy

Sideshow

Tragedy

Burlesque

Chronicle (historical, psychological, retrospective)

Scenario

Dramatic prose differs from ordinary prose primarily in that it contains many constantly changing events, with a large number of characters, much larger than, say, in an ordinary story, although the volume of the narrative may be the same. It is believed that the reader is able to remember no more than 5-7 active characters; drama often violates this law; the reader of a dramatic work always has the opportunity to look at the flyleaf and see who exactly the hero is that he completely forgot about.

Drama(Ancient Greek δρμα - deed, action) - one of the three types of literature, along with epic and lyric poetry, belongs simultaneously to two types of art: literature and theater. Intended for play on stage, drama formally differs from epic and lyric poetry in that the text in it is presented in the form of characters’ remarks and author’s remarks and, as a rule, is divided into actions and phenomena. Drama in one way or another includes any literary work constructed in a dialogical form, including comedy, tragedy, drama (as a genre), farce, vaudeville, etc.

Since ancient times, it has existed in folklore or literary form among various peoples; The ancient Greeks, ancient Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and American Indians created their own dramatic traditions independently of each other.

Literally translated from ancient Greek, drama means “action.”

The specificity of drama as a literary genre lies in the special organization of artistic speech: unlike epic, there is no narration in drama and the direct speech of the characters, their dialogues and monologues acquires paramount importance.

Dramatic works are intended for production on stage; this determines the specific features of drama:

lack of narrative-descriptive image;
“auxiliary” of the author’s speech (remarks);
the main text of a dramatic work is presented in the form of replicas of the characters (monologue and dialogue);
drama as a type of literature does not have such a variety of artistic and visual means as epic: speech and action are the main means of creating the image of a hero;
the volume of text and time of action is limited by the stage;
The requirements of stage art also dictate such a feature of drama as a certain exaggeration (hyperbolization): “exaggeration of events, exaggeration of feelings and exaggeration of expressions” (L.N. Tolstoy) - in other words, theatrical showiness, increased expressiveness; the viewer of the play feels the conventionality of what is happening, which was very well said by A.S. Pushkin: “the very essence of dramatic art excludes verisimilitude... when reading a poem, a novel, we can often forget ourselves and believe that the incident described is not fiction, but the truth. In an ode, in an elegy, we can think that the poet depicted his real feelings, in real circumstances. But where is the credibility in a building divided into two parts, one of which is filled with spectators who agreed etc.

The traditional plot outline for any dramatic work is:

EXPOSITION - presentation of heroes

TIE - collision

ACTION DEVELOPMENT - a set of scenes, development of an idea

CLIMAX - the apogee of the conflict

INTERCLOSURE

History of drama

The beginnings of drama are in primitive poetry, in which the later elements of lyricism, epic and drama merged in connection with music and facial movements. Earlier than among other peoples, drama as a special type of poetry was formed among the Hindus and Greeks.

Greek drama, developing serious religious-mythological plots (tragedy) and funny ones drawn from modern life (comedy), reaches high perfection and in the 16th century is a model for European drama, which until that time had artlessly treated religious and secular narrative plots (mysteries, school dramas and sideshows, fastnachtspiel, sottises).

French playwrights, imitating the Greek ones, strictly adhered to certain provisions that were considered unchangeable for the aesthetic dignity of drama, such as: unity of time and place; the duration of the episode depicted on stage should not exceed a day; the action must take place in the same place; the drama should develop correctly in 3-5 acts, from the beginning (clarification of the initial position and characters of the characters) through the middle vicissitudes (changes of positions and relationships) to the denouement (usually a catastrophe); the number of characters is very limited (usually from 3 to 5); these are exclusively the highest representatives of society (kings, queens, princes and princesses) and their closest servants-confidants, who are introduced onto the stage for the convenience of conducting dialogue and delivering remarks. These are the main features of French classical drama (Cornel, Racine).

The rigor of the requirements of the classical style was no longer observed in comedies (Molière, Lope de Vega, Beaumarchais), which gradually moved from convention to the depiction of ordinary life (genre). Free from classical conventions, Shakespeare's work opened up new paths for drama. The end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries were marked by the appearance of romantic and national dramas: Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Hugo, Kleist, Grabbe.

In the second half of the 19th century, realism took over in European drama (Dumas the son, Ogier, Sardou, Palieron, Ibsen, Sudermann, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Beyerlein).

In the last quarter of the 19th century, under the influence of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, symbolism began to take over the European stage (Hauptmann, Przybyszewski, Bar, D'Annunzio, Hofmannsthal).

Types of Drama

Tragedy is a genre of fiction intended to be staged in which the plot leads the characters to a catastrophic outcome. The tragedy is marked by stern seriousness, depicts reality in the most pointed way, as a clot of internal contradictions, reveals the deepest conflicts of reality in an extremely tense and rich form, acquiring the meaning of an artistic symbol. Most tragedies are written in verse. The works are often filled with pathos. The opposite genre is comedy.
Drama (psychological, criminal, existential) is a literary (dramatic), stage and cinematic genre. It became especially widespread in the literature of the 18th-21st centuries, gradually displacing another genre of drama - tragedy, contrasting it with a predominantly everyday plot and a style closer to everyday reality. With the emergence of cinema, it also moved into this art form, becoming one of its most widespread genres (see the corresponding category).

Dramas typically depict specifically the private life of a person and his social conflicts. At the same time, the emphasis is often placed on universal human contradictions, embodied in the behavior and actions of specific characters.

The concept of “drama as a genre” (different from the concept of “drama as a type of literature”) is known in Russian literary criticism. Thus, B.V. Tomashevsky writes:

In the 18th century quantity<драматических>genres are increasing. Along with strict theatrical genres, lower, “fair” genres are put forward: Italian slapstick comedy, vaudeville, parody, etc. These genres are the sources of modern farce, grotesque, operetta, miniatures. Comedy splits, distinguishing itself as “drama,” that is, a play with modern everyday themes, but without the specific “comic” situation (“philistine tragedy” or “tearful comedy”).<...>Drama decisively displaces other genres in the 19th century, in harmony with the evolution of the psychological and everyday novel.

On the other hand, drama as a genre in the history of literature is divided into several separate modifications:

Thus, the 18th century was the time of bourgeois drama (G. Lillo, D. Diderot, P.-O. Beaumarchais, G. E. Lessing, early F. Schiller).
In the 19th century, realistic and naturalistic drama began to develop (A. N. Ostrovsky, G. Ibsen, G. Hauptmann, A. Strindberg, A. P. Chekhov).
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, symbolist drama developed (M. Maeterlinck).
In the 20th century - surrealist drama, expressionist drama (F. Werfel, W. Hasenclever), absurdist drama (S. Beckett, E. Ionesco, E. Albee, V. Gombrowicz), etc.

Many playwrights of the 19th and 20th centuries used the word “drama” to designate the genre of their stage works.

Drama in verse is the same thing, only in poetic form.
Melodrama is a genre of fiction, theatrical art and cinema, the works of which reveal the spiritual and sensory world of heroes in especially vivid emotional circumstances based on contrasts: good and evil, love and hate, etc.
Hierodrama - in Old Order France (second half of the 18th century) the name of vocal compositions for two or more voices on biblical subjects.
Unlike the oratorio and mystery plays, the hierodramas used not the words of Latin psalms, but the texts of modern French poets, and they were performed not in churches, but at spiritual concerts in the Tuileries Palace.
In particular, “The Sacrifice of Abraham” (music by Cambini) and in 1783 “Samson” were presented to the words of Voltaire in 1780. Under the impression of the revolution, Desaugiers composed his cantata “Hierodrama”.
Mystery is one of the genres of European medieval theater associated with religion.
The plot of the mystery was usually taken from the Bible or Gospel and interspersed with various everyday comic scenes. From the middle of the 15th century, the mysteries began to increase in volume. The Mystery of the Acts of the Apostles contains more than 60,000 verses, and its performance in Bourges in 1536 lasted, according to evidence, 40 days.
If in Italy the mystery died naturally, then in a number of other countries it was prohibited during the Counter-Reformation; in particular, in France - on November 17, 1548, by order of the Parisian parliament; in Protestant England in 1672, the mystery was banned by the Bishop of Chester, and three years later the ban was repeated by the Archbishop of York. In Catholic Spain, mystery plays continued until the middle of the 18th century, they were composed by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderon de la Barca, Pedro; It was only in 1756 that they were officially banned by decree of Charles III.
Comedy is a genre of fiction characterized by a humorous or satirical approach, as well as a type of drama in which the moment of effective conflict or struggle between antagonistic characters is specifically resolved.
Aristotle defined comedy as “imitation of the worst people, but not in all their depravity, but in a funny way” (“Poetics”, Chapter V). The earliest surviving comedies were created in Ancient Athens and were written by Aristophanes.
Distinguish sitcom And comedy of characters.
Sitcom (situation comedy, situational comedy) is a comedy in which the source of humor is events and circumstances.
Comedy of characters (comedy of manners) - a comedy in which the source of the funny is the inner essence of the characters (morals), funny and ugly one-sidedness, an exaggerated trait or passion (vice, flaw). Very often, a comedy of manners is a satirical comedy that makes fun of all these human qualities.
Vaudeville- a comedy play with couplet songs and dances, as well as a genre of dramatic art. In Russia, the prototype of vaudeville was a small comic opera of the late 17th century, which remained in the repertoire of the Russian theater by the beginning of the 19th century.
Farce- a comedy of light content with purely external comic techniques.
In the Middle Ages, farce was also called a type of folk theater and literature, widespread in the XIV-XVI centuries in Western European countries. Having matured within the mystery, farce gained its independence in the 15th century, and in the next century it became the dominant genre in theater and literature. The techniques of farcical buffoonery were preserved in circus clowning.
The main element of the farce was not conscious political satire, but a relaxed and carefree depiction of urban life with all its scandalous incidents, obscenity, rudeness and fun. The French farce often varied the theme of a scandal between spouses.
In modern Russian, a farce is usually called profanation, an imitation of a process, for example, a trial.