The Anatomy of Drama (Routledge Revivals)

Marjorie Boulton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317936138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This title, first published in 1960, is intended primarily to increase the understanding of drama among those who do not have easy access to the live theatre and who, therefore, study plays mainly in print. The author's emphasis is on Shakespeare, but most forms of drama receive some attention. A lucid and lively study of the techniques of plot, dialogue and characterization will help the reader to a deeper appreciated of the problems and successes of the dramatist.

Part One

Conventions

I. Literature that Walks

Snug:	You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?
Bottom:	Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Sc. 1.

THERE is an enormous difference between a play and any other form of literature. A play is not really a piece of literature for reading. A true play is three-dimensional; it is literature that walks and talks before our eyes. It is not intended that the eye shall perceive marks on paper and the imagination turn them into sights, sounds and actions; the text of the play is meant to be translated into sights, sounds and actions which occur literally and physically on a stage. Though in fact plays are often read in silence, if we are to study drama at all intelligently we must always keep this in mind.

Some visual imagination was needed by the spectator of a Shakespeare play in the Shakespearian theatre:

And so our scene must to the battle fly;

Where—O for pity,—we shall much disgrace,

With four or five most vile and ragged foils,

Right ill dispos’d in brawl ridiculous,

The name of Agincourt. Yet sit and see;

Minding true things by what their mockeries be,

Henry V, Prologue to Act V

Beautiful language was used to suggest sunrise, nightfall or noon where nowadays lighting effects would be used:

Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

Macbeth, Act III, Sc. 2

The modern dramatist usually gives instructions for detailed scenery and the kind of visual imagination demanded by the early theatre is nowadays demanded chiefly by the radio drama, in which the words, perhaps with a few sound effects, again have to do all the work.

However, no play makes the same demands on our visual imagination as any novel, descriptive or narrative poem, or short story. The actions and conversations take place before our very eyes; or, if there are actions in the play so violent or distressing that they cannot be represented on the stage, they can be described by characters who are present on the stage and show all the appropriate signs of horror and revulsion. Even this is more violent in emotional impact than the experience of merely reading a description in the third person.

To see a play is, for most people, a more exciting and memorable experience than to read a novel.

The concentration and intensity of emotion is caused by our actually seeing and hearing the events represented; but the special character of drama also lays considerable limitations upon it. In a way it is the form of literary art most restricted by conventions. The conventions are of two kinds: those that make for the intensity and concentration of drama, the violent impact; and those that protect the audience from too violent an experience or that are enforced by mere physical possibility. The former are by far the more interesting from the point of view of literary criticism, but the student of drama needs the knowledge of both in order to appreciate dramatic technique to the full.

While anything that can be represented on the stage can be conveyed to an audience with much greater intensity than by any other literary means, not everything that is material for literature can be material for drama, for not everything can be represented on the stage. Physical possibility plays a part in this. The first and most important of these physical limitations is that the drama must deal with human affairs exclusively, because it is to be performed by human beings. This may not sound like a major restriction; but when we think of the part played by landscape in the novels of Thomas Hardy, the non-human personalities of H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, the animal characters in Virginia Woolf’s Flush, Colette’s La Chatte or Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, or the sea in the novels of Conrad, we realize that it is a very real limitation on the subject matter. It is possible to represent a landscape by means of painted cloth, and stage landscapes are often so beautiful as to add considerably to the emotional effect of the play; but it is not possible to give a landscape life and personality by this means. The sea can be represented; even moving waves can be shown by mechanical devices; and sometimes real water has been used in a theatre; but a dramatization of Conrad’s Typhoon would be beyond the resources of even the most lavishly equipped modern theatre. Comic animals can appear in pantomime and serious animals in such allegorical plays as Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird or Čapek’s The Insect Play; but a real cat or dog among human beings cannot well have an important part. Live animals have been used on the stage; there was even a play produced in 1814, The Dog of Mon-targis, in which a dog was the chief character; horses, doves and sparrows have appeared in the theatre; but these freaks of production have usually been spectacular rather than truly dramatic. In Alex Comfort’s fine novel The Power House and in H. G. Wells’s short story The Lord of the Dynamos, a moving machine is so important as to have personality; this, too, is almost impossible in drama, though it might be practicable in experimental radio drama.

Moreover, very little can be shown on the stage that cannot be represented by physically normal adults. Nothing much further from the physically normal than the hump of Richard III or the blindness and lameness of Sydney in Somerset Maugham’s For Services Rendered is possible on the stage. The giants and dwarfs of romance have no place on the legitimate stage, simply because real giants and dwarfs do not train as actors, since their opportunities would be very limited. Extreme deformities or injuries and revolting disease cannot be shown on the stage as they would shock the spectators too much, although they could usually be simulated quite well by make-up.

There are many fine novels on the theme of childhood, but talented child actors are rare and the employment of children on the stage is rightly subject to stringent control. The technique of good acting takes so long to learn that it is almost impossible to have, say, Juliet adequately represented by an actress of fourteen, which is Juliet’s age according to Shakespeare. Unfortunately, too, the public is so fond of children on stage and screen that, as with musical prodigies, a child actor arouses a kind of enthusiasm that has little to do with dramatic art.

The good actor has to have a sound constitution and quite considerable powers of endurance, for the life is strenuous; but the drama is restricted by the physical capacities of normally healthy people.

The possibilities of drama are also limited by the intractability of material objects. H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man has been filmed, using trick photography; but it could never be successfully dramatized on the stage as we know it. The miracles that can be represented on the stage, the physical catastrophes that can occur, are few. It is also necessary to remember that not everything that can somehow be represented on the stage can be made convincing. Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit has a ghost as a principal character; this can be given an illusion of reality by the skilled use of make-up and lighting effects; people can appear or disappear by means of trapdoors specially designed for stage use; brief flight is possible by the use of wires; but the playwright has to remember that there comes a point in such mechanical tricks when the audience is so interested in ‘how it is done’ that all dramatic illusion disappears. More spectacular special effects a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Contents
• Part One Conventions
• Part Two Study for Examinations
• X. The Types of Drama
• XI. Relating Drama to History
• XII. The Uselessness and Use of Notes
• Part Three Drama as Living Experience
• XIII. Interpretation as an Aid to Study
• XIV. Drama is Natural
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index