Topic 4 of 6 · Form 5
Drama, including Shakespeare
Plays are written for performance: consider staging, audience response, stage directions, dialogue, soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony, and the use of space, lighting and sound.
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Dramatic form
Plays are written for performance: consider staging, audience response, stage directions, dialogue, soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony, and the use of space, lighting and sound.
Tragedy
Aristotle's ideas: the tragic hero, hamartia (tragic flaw or error), peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition) and catharsis (purging of pity and fear). Shakespeare's tragedies (e.g. Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Hamlet) explore ambition, jealousy, power and justice.
Comedy and satire
Comedy often ends in reconciliation or marriage; satire exposes folly and corruption. African drama frequently uses satire to criticise post-independence leadership and social ills.
Shakespeare's language
Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) for noble characters; prose for comic or lower-status characters, or for madness; rhyming couplets to close scenes; imagery patterns (blood, darkness, disease).
African drama
Influences of ritual, storytelling, song and dance; theatre for development; themes of tradition and change, power and resistance.
Contexts
The Elizabethan and Jacobean worldview (divine right of kings, the Great Chain of Being) and modern productions that reinterpret plays.
Check yourself
- What is hamartia?
- Why might Shakespeare switch from verse to prose?
- What is catharsis?
Show answers
- The tragic flaw or error that leads to the hero's downfall.
- To mark lower-status or comic characters, informal moments, or a character's mental collapse.
- The release of pity and fear the audience experiences in tragedy.
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