Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English

- Introduction to the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English
- Előszó
- Contents
- Part 1 What is English Studies?
  - 1. What is a university? A proseminary
  - 2. Paradigms and paradigm shifts
  - 3. What is English Studies? English as a university subject
  - 4. Ideology, criticism, history
  - 5. Registers of Culture
  - 6. Canon formation and alternative reading practices
- Part 2 Fields of English Studies. Language, Literature, Culture, and Critical Approaches
  - 1. Preliminary problems: definitions, scientific expectations
  - 2. Ontological problems: the way literature exists
    - Semiotics
    - Literary communication
    - Language and Critical Thinking
    - The Language of the Sciences and the Language of Literature
  - 3. Methodological problems: the way we understand texts
    - Meaning and context
    - The Process of Interpretation
  - 4. The Theory of Genres
    - Genres and Their Historical Changes
    - Genre-generating Factors and Historical Changes
  - 5. Poetry and Figurative Language
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 1
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
      - IV Fourth level of meaning
  - 6. Narrative Fiction
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 2
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
      - III Third level of meaning
  - 7. Drama
    - Exercise in Interpretation / 3
      - I First level of meaning
      - II Second level of meaning
  - Self test I
  - 8. Literature, Culture, and the Reading Subject: An Overview of Major Trends in Literary and Cultural Theory
    - I Preliminaries
    - II Formal critical trends: from the authorial intention to the close reading of the text (1st shift)
    - III Contextual aproaches: from text to context
    - The critique of structuralism
  - Self test II
  - 9. Critical Literature Consulted and Recommended
  - 10. Appendix

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# 7. Drama

We will now turn to the study of the third main kind of literature, drama, which represents the most objective attitude to the represented world, an attempt to hide the personal perspective, the presence of a narrator or a speaking self. Of course, the dramatic text is also written by an author, a playwright, but on the surface it appears to be an objective, direct recording of the speeches of human beings, without any subjective filtering or focalization.

In order to understand the way a dramatic text works, first we need to have an understanding of the origins, the antecedents of drama.

The origins of drama go back to the most archaic activities of humankind: ritual acts, games of make-belief, imitative action. Dramas originally were texts written for live, communal performances, and they developed from ancient fertility rituals.

Primitive human tribes and agricultural communities were very much dependent on the cycle of nature and the natural renewal, rebirth of the land. Without rebirth, without spring there is no summer, no autumn, no harvest, and thus, no food, which leads to the death of the people. These communities wanted to make sure that the renewal of nature will commence after winter, and they wanted to manipulate the supernatural powers to make sure to maintain the cycle of nature. They made ritual offerings and acted out rituals for this reason: ritual sacrifices to please the gods, and ritual feasts and festivities to give thanks to the gods. The two basic kinds of drama, tragedy and comedy developed out of these two ancient fertility rituals. Death, sacrifice, waste of values, downward directionality, and disintegration: these are the main themes of tragedy, and they can all be traced back to the ritual fertility sacrifice. Rebirth, reintegration, celebration, and upward directionality: these are the main themes of comedy, which have their roots in the ritual fertility feast.

The acts of rituals were after a while enriched with role-playing, for example, the community acted out the combat between winter and spring, to make sure that winter is going to lose in the universal cycle of seasons as well. Role-playing developed throughout the centuries, and the roles and acts preformed in front of the community started to reflect on the current problems and situation of the people, their beliefs, their relation to the supernatural forces, and their enemies. This is how conflict and role-playing performed for the community developed gradually into dramatic performance, which later gave rise to dramatic texts specifically written for these communal events.

Drama as an artistic form, as a kind of literature, means fiction designed to be acted out. In drama we have a direct presentation of a possible world through enactment and dialogue, without intermediate comment, filter, without focalization. In this way, when we study drama as representation, we realize that the dramatic text is a script for performance, and it has to be actualized, brought into existence in the live performance of the theatre, in front of the live audience. Later on, after the 17th century, dramas were also written specifically to be read – these are called closet dramas (they were originally designed for an upper-class audience to be read in their reading “closets”), but, compared to the history of drama, this is a relatively late development.

Reading drama gives a special challenge to the reader of literature. Since the text is designed for the stage, it only contains the dialogues and speeches of characters, and it is full of blank holes, lack of information, with minimal description only available in the speeches. In the theatre, the director and the theatrical group will decide how to actualize this text on the stage, and they fill in the gaps and holes. However, when we read the drama, we have to become directors in our interpretive imagination, and we have to create a hypothetical staging in our mind. This is a serious task for our imagination, but it also gives us great freedom of interpretation at the same time: the same dramatic scene can be imagined in many different ways in our imaginative staging.

When we read a drama, for the understanding of the possible worlds represented in the text it is often indispensable to know the kind of theatre and the kind of representational logic of the stage for which the text was intended. Otherwise, many parts will make no sense to us, since the playwright could be sure that the theatrical company will employ the techniques, gestures, set stage scenery, iconographic clichés that were available on the particular stage for which the play was intended. For example, Shakespeare wrote his plays for the special stage of the English Renaissance emblematic theatre, where the members of the audience were ready to understand everything on the stage on several symbolical levels of meaning, the characters were often more allegorical than psychologically real, and the stage represented the layered structure of the entire universe. If we do not know that the trapdoor in the centre of the stage represents the entrance to the underworld, if we are not ready to search for symbolical meanings even in little stage objects, if we insist on mimetic verisimilitude when we try to understand the acts, the passions or the suffering of the characters, then we might get very confused because these plays were designed for a different kind of theatrical horizon of expectations.

## Task / groupwork

Hamlet in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, jumps into the grave of his former sweetheart Ophelia (represented by the trapdoor centre-stage), and starts fighting with her brother Laertes.

Lavinia in Titus Andronicus is brutally mutilated by her father Titus’s enemies: she is raped, her hands are lopped off and her tongue is torn out, and then she is left alone. Nevertheless, she does not die, and continues to act as a central character throughout the second half of the tragedy.

How can you understand these scenes on the stage of Shakespeare’s theatre, which was very different from the realistic stages of our modern theatrical tradition?

When we compare drama to the other literary forms, we realize that the special attribute of the dramatic text is that it uses words to create action through the dialogue of characters in a situation which is just happening. The dramatic text always concentrates on the here and now of an action, it intensifies the referentiality of the text, and for this purpose it uses a special capacity of language called deixis. Deictic language draws the attention to the here and now of the speech act (here, there, now, look, see, etc.).

The main modes of drama

tragedy | comedy | romance | satire | tragicomedy | absurd
dominant patterns of experience | essential values of nature and the world | naturalistic, uncomfortable representation of the world which resists patterns | the human condition has no sense or organizing pattern
complex characters | types, stock characters | characters are shown to be both black and white | characters are often reduced to the minimum
disintegrative: the problems of the human being and society lead to catastrophe | integrative: the human being and society can solve problems | human goodness, optimism | critique of social morals and manners | no clear-cut moral judgments, mixed patterns | failure of communication and meaning creation
death | rebirth | happy vision of society | dark vision of society | genres start fusing, and no essential principles or values hold any longer
Autumn | Spring | Summer | Winter

## Review questions

1. What are the ritual origins of drama?

2. Why is it a great interpretive challenge to read a drama designed for the stage?

3. What is the deictic capacity of language?

4. What is the function of the narrator in drama?

5. What are the main differences between the four basic types of drama?

6. How is today’s theatre different from the theatre of Shakespeare’s time?

7. What is the function of presence in dramatic literature?

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