25 comedy. With catastrophe all our doubts and uncertainties are gone and we are left
poised on the crest of certainty and finality. Like crisis the catastrophe or solution is the natural and logical outcome of what has gone before.
2.8 The Nature of Drama.
Drama derives from a Greek word meaning to do , to act. Theatre drives from a Greek word meaning to see, to view. These two ideas are doing and seeing or
complementary and define the area of the study of the drama in its largest sense, the sense that includes both the play and the performance of it. Those root ideas lie
behind a number of common pairings that repeatedly appear in dramatic criticism : play and performances, script, and production, text and staging, author and actor,
creation and interpretation, theory and practice. In short, the root ideas contain the essence and range of whole field of the study of the drama.
A well known definition is by the seventeenth century that the playwright and critic, Jhon Dryen, states : “ a play ought to be or a just and lively image of human
nature, reproducing the passions and humours, and the change of fortune to which it is subject for the delight and instruction of mankind.” As the different meaning between
drama and the art of theater Tennyson, 1967:1-3; A drama is the imitation of a complete action, adapted to the sympathetic attention of man ,developed in a
succession of continuously interesting related incident, acted and expressed by means of speech and the symbols in actualities and conditions of life.
The art of theatre is neither acting nor the play, it is not scene nor dance, but it contains of all the elements of which these things are composed: action which is the
very spirit of acting: words which are the body of the play: line color which are the very best of scene: rhythm which is the very essence of dance.
The common denominator of action in virtually all the definitions returns us
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26 both to the root meaning of the word drama and to the first and in many ways most
satisfying of all the theorist and critics of the drama as the Greek philosopher Aristotle who in the fourth century which set forth his idea on the drama in the poetics.
Action Readers of Aristotle generally agree that the essence of Aristotle’s definition of
the drama lies in his concept of “imitated human action “. Aristotle wrote the tragedy “ is the imitation of an action in the form of action “. Bt this His clearly was referring
to what any beginning students would think of as action : the actual movement and speech of persons performing a play, their “ acting out” situations on the stage. Indeed
if the specialist were asked to define drama he would probably offer a definition
resting largely on this kind of action, perhaps phrased somewhat like the following:
“ Drama is a story that people act out on a stage before spectators.” Such a fundamental view of action should not to be lost sight even at first it seems too
obvious to need mention. In the poetics, Aristotle concedes that the human action which is “ imitated” may be action that never actually occurred in the form which we
see it. The action as an indispensable elements of all drama; first as the movement, dialogue, and gesture of action of the stage; and second as the pattern of events that
their movements depict and make manifest to the audience, a pattern based on human life. This much should be clear.
Drama must center on an action by its nature, drama presents that action. We now come to another indispensable element in the definition of the drama as the idea of
imitation Tennyson,1967: 3-6.
Imitation Imitation , in the sense of the way in which the action is organized and
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27 presented, means more than purely literal copying. In such a case , the “ imitation “
must be imaginative and the most fantastic events and surrounding can still be accepted as “ human action “. This kind of interpreting of “ imitation” and action also
opens the door to the important element of thought drama.
In the ingredients of the drama is one way of approaching these means of realizing the drama is to examine the component parts of the play. Aristotle cited six
elements as essential to a play : plot, thought, character, diction, music and spectacle Tennyson, 1967: 6.
2.9 Types of Tragic Drama A. Greek Tragedy Classical Tragedy .
