DRAMA is a transliteration of the Greek bpaµa, which means a thing done ; theatre is a transliteration of the Greek OEaTpov, which means a seeing-place. The word audience, meaning those who listen, is derived from the Latin and therefore represents a later idea of play-going. From this use of two Greek words and one Latin a useful hint is given us as to the first dramatic values. Drama begins with action and spectacle ; the deed comes before the word, the dance before the dialogue, the play of body before the play of mind. The audience is subsequent to the spectators. The history of drama is largely a history of chang ing dramatic values. Gradually the presentation of thought be comes as important as the representation of emotion, which was the main element of theatrical origins. Nowadays a person who talks about the drama may actually be thinking of a literary form and of something that will be read and discussed but will rarely or never live up to the original meaning of its name and be "done." Modern drama includes work in which the discussion of ideas is the whole purpose of the play. Of the play it is some times permissible to observe that it is just as effective in book f orm as when "done." Indeed, in the first decade of the aoth century the drama of the intellectuals definitely revolted so far from the idea of "four boards and a passion" that Granville Barker could describe it in this way : "Plays grew so austerely intellectual that their performance seemed a profanation, and we saw the actors moving apologetically through their parts as if they had been told that they were rather vulgar people with no real right there at all." This was a paradoxical fate to befall the men of action in "the seeing-place," but those who read or listen to the political and philosophical discussions in Bernard Shaw's "metabiological pentateuch" Back to Methuselah will appreciate the point of this and realize how great is the change from the simple conception of a drama as a thing done to the later use of "the seeing-place" as a school-room for the continued in struction and entertainment of the adult who is hungry for ideas. If we are to find a definition of drama which will cover all theatrical manifestations from the wordless ritual and mummery of primitive man to the actionless dialectic of a modern philo sopher that definition will be so loose as to be almost useless. It is more profitable to ask and answer two simple questions about the thing which is done. They are : Why is it done, and how is it done? The Laws of Aristotle.—To the query "Why?" the answers fall into two main groups. It is possible to reply from a psycho logical or a historical point of view. It is also possible to combine the two kinds of reply. Such a combination is made in the Poetics of Aristotle. Owing to the classical domination over Western thought which has prevailed since the Renaissance, Aristotle's Poetics has had an enormous influence on academic views of drama. He laid down laws of drama in general and of various types of drama in particular. Horace presented the Aristotelian lore to Rome (whose theatre was almost entirely derivative from Greek models), and the French classicists carried on the tradition of a dramatic discipline expounded in Greek lecture-rooms as a small part of Aristotle's encyclopaedic survey of all human prob lems. So diligent was the pursuit of the classic ideal that Aris totle's hints about observing the three Unities of Time, Place and Action are incorporated and strengthened in the great French curriculum, being expanded and expounded by Chapelain, Riche lieu, Corneille and Boileau. A last echo of the Aristotelian authority was to be heard in the dramatic criticism of A. B. Walkley who used to complain of Bernard Shaw that he did not keep to the familiar classical rules. The critic was twitted in turn by Shaw for his obeisance to "the immortal Stagirite" (see Fanny's First Play, Introduction). During the first decades of the aoth century the revolt against classical authority in the art of the theatre was finally driven home.
Drama.—Aristotle gave both a brief historical explanation of the rise of Greek drama from ritual choruses and a psychological interpretation of the dramatic impulse. Of the latter he said (Poetics, 4). "Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation." That is true. Man is a natural mimic as birds and beasts have been bef ore him, and anthropologists who examine the origin of drama and seek all manner of esoteric causes for acting are seriously mistaken if they omit to allow also for the simple impulse to dress up and play at "let's pretend." But, however much the world's first player may have enjoyed his primitive masquerade or mischievous apeing of a neighbour, as soon as the fun becomes regularized in a ritual a great change occurs. We soon discover that acting has become immensely serious and is directed by prudential considerations. Possibly the first "thing done" was done for a joke, as Aristotle suggested when he cited the universal delight in works of imitation. But, undeniably, when the things done became seasonal rites, they were carried on for serious and sacred purposes. The idea of going to the play as a form of relaxation or holiday treat belongs to the civilized and not to the primitive state. It is true that as early as Roman times Terence, an adroit adapter of the Greek New Comedy, complained of the rivalry of jugglers and rope walkers in the Roman entertainment market, which shows how far the secular notion of playgoing had prevailed over the primeval concept of dramatic ritual. Comedy had naturally lost its re ligious significance before tragedy. But the essential fact about early drama, both comic and tragic, is that, all over the world, the primitive peoples have regarded it as a utility and an obliga tion. It is only after civilization has firmly established itself that the atmosphere of a religious service no longer surrounds the thing mimed and is replaced by the less strenuous air of an entertainment for an idle occasion. Thus the development of drama presents us with a double change. On the one hand physical action directed towards an emotional climax is no longer the supreme quality of drama, since the mind insists that the mental march may be movement of the dramatic kind ; on the other hand secularization sets in and what had been in its infancy a propitia tion of gods and heroes becomes in its mellower years a popular show and source of mundane merriments and excitements. Drama did quite literally begin with song and dance and the most popular form of drama to-day is still mainly compact of song and dance. But the difference in purpose and temper of the old dithyramb as offered to the gods and the new musical comedy "number" as projected at the stalls and gallery is, by its very immensity, indicative of a change that is fundamental. But by no means is the change final, since it is continually the object of theatrical reformers to recapture the drama for the exalted social purposes towards which, in other circumstances, its child hood was directed.
It is not necessary to dis cuss at this point the rival theories as to the origin of dramatic rites. These theories fall into two main groups. It is claimed by one party that the song and dance from which drama sprang were a celebration of the life-force in the natural world and that the traditional dramatic conflict is a repetition or a restatement of the old battle between the New Year and the Old which is fought out with ubiquitous regularity in the f olk-lore of races. The other party, of which Prof. Ridgeway was an active and important protagonist, surveyed the primitive folk dances and mummings of the world and found the significant common factor to be a tomb-ritual. The "thing done" was inspired by a wish to honour the great departed and to help him to immortality in order that he might, from his place of influence in the next world, continue to guide and protect his kinsmen and his tribesmen in this world. There is much evidence which both parties can fruit fully exploit. For the believers in a vegetation-cult there are the old mummers' plays which have survived in many countries and in which a slaying of Age or Winter and a resurrection of Youth or Spring are constant features. For the other side there appears in the witness-box the constant presence of the mask which is traditionally associated with the impersonation of departed spirits. The world-wide researches of anthropology have, as Ridgeway demonstrated in his collection of far-flung testimony, proved a continual connection of early mimings, dances and choruses with the sites of tombs and occasions of remembrances. One cause of drama is certainly to be found in that pursuit of immortality which has been the devouring passion of man from his first rough struggles for existence down to the ceaseless quest of civilized thought into human origins and human destiny. Acting in the first form was a species of prayer. You imitate a thing in order that the gods may take the hint and do likewise. You leap round the growing corn that the corn may also leap in a large fertility; you pour oit water as a sign to the god who controls the rain; you act the hero rising from the tomb or portray his sufferings and services that he may be strengthened in his immortality and pass on some of his grace and greatness and succour to mortals here below. From such ritual an art of drama was developed, from that art an entertainment.
Thus, what we must conceive, if we wish to understand the vigour and variety of drama in the light of its history, is a birth in holy places. The performer was no playboy, but a priest or servant of the priests. He was also a social worker engaged, as much as any prelate or politician, in saving the tribe. By sympathetic magic he might prevail for the common good ; by his persuasive arts the sun might shine and the rain might fall in their proper seasons. Dionysos, to give the fertility-god his Greek name, might leap amid the leapers and pour out his power in appropriate response to the dithyramb or vigorous incantation of his cult. Or else the rite at the tomb might save from a black oblivion the vanished leader and keep him in ghostly power to help the tribe amid its difficulties and dangers. So we pass from Dionysos, the god, to the Greek Dionysia, the festival for which the tragedian wrote, and so out on to that winding highway of secular art and amusement whose final tributaries and turnings are Broadway and Drury lane.
Along such lines as these the many replies must be made to the question "Why is there drama, why is there a thing done?" Naturally the answers will vary according to the particular cir cumstances of time and place. Civilizations make drama accord ing to their needs and develop it according to their capacities. To the second question "How?" the answers will be equally numerous and various. Drama may be purely communal or purely individual, poetical or prosaic, acted by individuals and by teams or presented through the medium of the puppet or the marionette. Here it borders on ballet, there it borrows from the library. Its literary form will be found to be conditioned by the particular stage or platform for which it was written and the particular social object at which it was originally aimed. There are no inclusive theatrical formulae. Nor can a simple definition be found by use of the word "imitation." Many of the earliest forms of drama and some of the later are not representative in the sense that the players are trying to mimic the life they know. Instead of copying they are creating and their performance is a statement and not a simulation. It is true that some kind of imitation remains, but it is imitation tempered by traditional symbolism. The Greek actor, to take the most obvious instance, did not try to imitate a man; he attempted to present something larger than life. Accordingly he wore a mask, propped himself up on buskins, and was padded out to superhuman size. This made realistic acting, as we understand it, impossible, but created a suitable mouthpiece for the superb rhetoric of Greek tragedy and also assisted the atmosphere of religious ceremonial in which the play was produced. Similarly in the mystery plays of the middle ages the actor often wore the conventional symbol of his part as though that sufficed. The symbol announced what could not be imitated. A gilt beard, for example, was the traditional decoration of St. Peter, just as in the circus we may know the clown by his colour long before he has begun his antics. The clown is an actor, but he is not, in any close sense of the word, an imitator. He works in his own world of fancy free. The history of the theatre has contained every kind of presentation and representation from the purely fantastic and symbolic to the actualities of our modern stage on which producers will lavish infinities of care in order to get a trifling detail "correct," i.e., as closely imitative of life as possible.
Accordingly, as our eyes range up and down the whole cycle of "things done," from the vast ritual of the resurrection-play of Osiris, the god-hero of Egypt, to the loth century comedy with its cynical chatter and realistic cocktails and cigarettes, we find it difficult indeed to lay down boundaries and to make exclusive or inclusive definitions. Af ter the broad casting of plays had become a popular practice one could not even insist that drama must be a thing seen, and from its very beginning the silent mummery, the thing seen but not heard, has been an essential form of the theatre. But, if we rule out broadcasting, we can say that drama consists of emotions and opinions and occur rences presented in three dimensions with more or less approach to imitation by human agency. (It is true that one medium may be the marionette but that is controlled by the human hand and mind.) There may be as much or as little music, as much or as little scene, and as much or as little mechanical aid as the circumstance offers. The acting company may be a civic com munity, as in a pageant, or a single individual, like a modern re citer or the first Greek uroKpirqs who answered the chorus and so originated dialogue. A great amount of human ingenuity has been wasted on laying down rules for drama as though it were a small and single thing. But such law-giving either ends in academic and abstract formulae which are belied by the history and practice of the stage or else makes classifications which are so vague as to be valueless. The much discussed "dramatic conflict" is itself a widely inclusive term since the conflict may be of the mind as well as of the body; argument is simply mental action. In short, as we come to survey the various dramas of the various nations and cultures, we can only conclude that the techniques of drama are as widely divergent as the racial tend encies and individual qualities of mankind and that to lay down lists of rules and to impose conditions is only a vanity of the academic brain, against which all the diversity of performance stands in a complete and crushing defiance. (I. BR.)
