Drama & Tragedy: Words Made to Be Done

Read a short sentence aloud: "I never said she stole the money." Now say it again, leaning hard on a different word each time. With the stress on I, you are pointing the finger at someone else. On said, you are admitting you may have hinted it. On stole, she did something to the money, just not that. Seven words, seven different accusations, and the page prints all of them identically.

That gap is where drama lives. A novelist can tell you how the line was meant. A playwright cannot; somebody with a body and a voice has to decide, in front of an audience, with no chance to take it back. Almost everything a literature student learns about drama follows from that one fact: a script is an instruction for an event.

This piece walks through the tragedies and comedies of five civilisations and the ideas a graduate keeps from them. It is about drama as literature, which is how a literature degree meets it. For how screens tell stories, see The Shape of Every Story and the other pieces in Film & Story (10).

A script is an instruction for an event

A play differs from a poem or a novel in four ways a graduate stops noticing. It is public: a crowd laughs or goes silent together, and that shared reaction is part of the meaning. It is live: it runs at the speed of the performance, so no one can re-read a hard line. It is embodied: the actor's face can contradict the words. And it is underdetermined: the text leaves most decisions to the people who stage it.

The tradition's shorthand is that a play has text and performance, and the interesting questions live between them. Peter Brook began The Empty Space (1968) by claiming that theatre needs only a person crossing a bare space while someone else watches. Everything else, from sets to scripts, is an addition to that.

Athens: tragedy, comedy and the gap in what we know

Western drama begins at the City Dionysia, Athens's festival of the god Dionysus, where by tradition the first tragedy was staged in 534 BCE by Thespis (the later word thespian). Three tragedians competed each year; the audience was thousands of citizens, in daylight, in a theatre cut into a hillside. Plays were performed once, in competition. Most are lost: of the 70 to 90 plays attributed to Aeschylus, seven survive; of more than 120 by Sophocles, seven; of Euripides, nineteen, though one of them, Rhesus, is often thought not to be his. The oldest surviving tragedy is Aeschylus's The Persians, staged in 472 BCE.

Aristotle, writing his Poetics around 335 BCE, did the first systematic analysis of why tragedy works. His claim most graduates keep: plot comes first, character second. A tragedy is built around a reversal (the situation turns into its opposite) and a recognition (ignorance becomes knowledge), and the best plots make the two happen together. His standing example is Sophocles's Oedipus the King, probably first staged around 429 BCE, though that date is uncertain. The famous but slippery words hamartia (error or flaw) and catharsis (purification or release) are still argued over, and a graduate learns to say that scholars do not agree what he meant by either.

The trick of Greek tragedy is that the audience mostly knew the story. Nobody came to Athens wondering whether Oedipus had killed his father. The suspense is not what will happen but when the character finds out. Call the distance between what the audience knows and what the hero knows the knowledge gap; tragic irony is that gap, heard in the character's confident lines. Step through the play below. The scores are my own rough scale, to show the shape, not a measurement.

Comedy in Athens was a different animal. Aristophanes (about 446 to 386 BCE) wrote forty plays, of which eleven survive nearly complete. In Lysistrata (411 BCE) the women of Greece refuse sex until the men end the war. Old Comedy named living politicians and mocked them to their faces, and its chorus stepped forward to address the audience directly. A later generation, led by Menander, turned comedy toward households, mistaken identity and young lovers; through the Roman writers Plautus and Terence that line became the comedy of manners and, eventually, the sitcom. The point to keep: tragedy and comedy are not opposite moods but two ways of arranging the same human material, and each audience's culture decides what may be laughed at.

Sanskrit drama: the audience tastes a mood

India's theatre theory is older than Aristotle's, or at least contemporary with him. The Natyashastra, attributed to the sage Bharata, is a huge manual of the performing arts; scholars date its first complete form somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 CE, with estimates as wide as 500 BCE to 500 CE. Its central idea is rasa, literally "juice" or "taste". The performance does not give the audience an emotion to suffer; it gives them a refined essence of it to savour. The Natyashastra names eight rasas, and later theorists, most famously the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta around 1000 CE, argued for a ninth, peace (shanta).

Each rasa grows from a lasting mood (sthayi bhava) that the audience already carries. The idea matters because it gives a different answer from Aristotle to "what is a play for?". It is not a cleansing of pity and fear; it is aesthetic pleasure at a distance from your own affairs. When you weep at a Sanskrit play, Abhinavagupta's school said, you are not mourning a real person, so your sorrow becomes something you can enjoy.

The greatest Sanskrit playwright is Kalidasa, placed roughly in the 4th or 5th century CE (his life is unknown beyond what his works suggest). His Abhijnanashakuntalam, "Shakuntala and the Token of Recognition", reshapes a story from the Mahabharata: a king meets a hermit's daughter in a forest and marries her; a curse makes him forget her; only the sight of the ring he gave her restores his memory. It is a play about recognition, like Oedipus, but its recognition ends in reunion. Classical Sanskrit drama typically ends that way; its register runs from comic to heroic but avoids death on stage. Characters also speak different languages by rank: kings and priests in Sanskrit, women and servants in Prakrit, so a character's speech announces who they are. Sir William Jones's English translation of 1789 was the first Indian play rendered into a European language, and Goethe admired it.

Noh and kabuki: when the form is the message

Japan's Noh theatre took shape in the 14th century, and its great theorist was Zeami (about 1363 to 1443), who as a boy performed before the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and wrote treatises on acting. A Noh play is short and slow. A bare stage, a bridge for entrances, a chorus, drums and flute, and a lead actor in a mask. Many plays follow one pattern: a traveller, often a priest, meets a stranger at a place with a past; the stranger turns out to be a ghost, and dances the story of an old grief. Zeami's ideas of beauty and restraint (yūgen, a mysterious depth; hana, the actor's "flower") shaped Japanese aesthetics for centuries. Noh is the opposite of Greek spectacle: almost nothing happens, so the smallest tilt of the mask carries enormous weight.

Kabuki is its popular cousin, loud where Noh is quiet. Tradition credits Izumo no Okuni, a shrine dancer, with its start in Kyoto in 1603. It began with women performers; the shogunate banned women from the stage in 1629, and kabuki became an all-male art, with specialist actors (onnagata) playing women. It has revolving stages, a runway through the audience, and frozen poses that stop the action for a gasp. Alongside it grew the puppet theatre now called bunraku, and its finest writer, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653 to 1725), wrote The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703), one of the first plays about ordinary townspeople rather than warriors and gods. The lesson from Japan: the form is part of the meaning. Slow stillness and fast spectacle are not decoration but different theories of what an audience should feel.

Shakespeare and Lope de Vega: verse for a crowd

London and Madrid solved the same problem a generation apart: how to write for a paying public that wanted everything at once. Shakespeare's company built the Globe in 1599; he wrote about thirty-seven plays, mostly in blank verse, unrhymed lines of ten syllables in an up-down beat (iambic pentameter), with prose for clowns and plain talk. The beat is the audience's pulse: close to the rhythm of English speech, easy for an actor to carry and for a crowd to follow. Test the beat yourself.

Spain's Lope de Vega (1562 to 1635) made the other great answer. His Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609) defended a theatre that mixed tragic and comic, compressed the action into three acts, and tuned its verse forms to the mood of each scene. He joked that when he sat down to write, he locked the ancient rules away with six keys. His output is staggering. By his own count he had written 1,500 plays by 1632; scholars reckon that about 450 survive. Fuenteovejuna (written around 1612 to 1614) dramatises a real revolt of 1476, in which villagers killed an abusive commander. When the investigating judge tortures them to name the killer, every villager gives the same answer: the whole town did it. The play has a collective hero, a very different idea of tragedy and justice from Oedipus's solitary fall.

Ibsen, Beckett, Soyinka: breaking the frame

By the 19th century, the stage had become a box with one side removed. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, published and premiered in Copenhagen in December 1879, took the box literally: a respectable living room, ordinary prose, a marriage observed as if through the missing "fourth wall". Its ending, in which Nora leaves her husband and children, shocked audiences enough that for the German premiere Ibsen was pressed into writing an alternative ending. Realism's discovery: the ordinary can be tragic, and the argument in a kitchen can carry the weight a king's death once did.

Samuel Beckett broke the frame the other way. Waiting for Godot was written in French in 1948 and 1949 and premiered in Paris in January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Two men wait by a tree for someone who does not come; "tragicomedy" is Beckett's own subtitle. In Aristotle's terms there is no plot to speak of, yet the audience is gripped, because the play is staged waiting, and waiting is what an audience does. Critics later grouped such work as the Theatre of the Absurd. Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969.

Wole Soyinka, born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1934, became in 1986 the first African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Death and the King's Horseman (written during his exile in the 1970s) builds on a real episode from colonial Oyo: by Yoruba custom, a king's horseman is meant to die after the king, to ease his passage. A British district officer intervenes to stop it, and the horseman's hesitation lets the cosmic order fail. Soyinka insisted in his preface that the play is not a simple "clash of cultures"; the tragedy lies in the horseman's own wavering, and it draws on Yoruba ritual and Greek tragic form at once. This is the strongest single answer to anyone who thinks tragedy is only Greek.

What a graduate just sees

• A script is an instruction for an event; the same line supports many performances, and good directors choose.
• Greek tragedy runs on a knowledge gap: the audience knows what the hero does not, and suspense is waiting for the hero to catch up.
• Plot, not character, is the spine of a tragedy, and the strongest plots make recognition and reversal arrive together.
• A Sanskrit audience was given a distilled mood to savour (rasa), not an emotion to be purged, and most classical Sanskrit plays end in reunion.
• In Noh and kabuki the form (stillness, masks, poses, all-male casts) is part of the meaning, not packaging.
• Blank verse is the audience's pulse: a ten-syllable beat close to speech, and prose appears when the register changes.
• Plays carry their audience in their design: a collective hero (Lope) or an invisible wall (Ibsen) is a statement about who is watching.
• Tragedy is not Greek property: Soyinka, Kalidasa and Chikamatsu each found their own version.

Where it shows up next

• The Novel (35/32): every novelist after Richardson borrowed dialogue, scene and soliloquy from the stage; the argument over how to show a mind begins in drama.
• Modern, Postcolonial & Contemporary Literature (35/33): Soyinka and Beckett sit inside that story, and modernist plays broke the same frames modernist fiction did.
• Literary Theory & Criticism (35/34): Aristotle's Poetics is the oldest critical text in the Western tradition, and rasa theory is one of its great rivals.
• In the world: every TV drama's cliffhanger, every courtroom speech and every stand-up set inherits the dramatic habits above; so do film (see 10 Film & Story) and any presentation that has to hold a room.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Oscar Brockett and Franklin Hildy, History of the Theatre (Pearson). The standard survey, with Asian traditions alongside the European.
• 📘 Anthology. The Norton Anthology of Drama, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton Garner Jr. and Martin Puchner (W. W. Norton). Plays from Greece, India, Japan and beyond in one set; widely assigned.
• 📘 Gentler. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1968). A short, lively book on what makes live theatre different.
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21L.009 Shakespeare (Spring 2004): several plays read through different critical lenses, with syllabus and assignments.