The history of the drama

Abstract

Introduction: The desire to give expression to feelings and conceptions is inseperable from human nature. Man expresses his thoughts and emotions by gesture and speech and these expressions he soon learns to vary into song and dance. One form of expression is imitation. “To imitate,” says Aristotle, “is instinctive in man from his infancy; and from imitation all men naturally receive pleasure.” The assumption of character whether real or fictitious is therefore the earliest step towards the drama. Action implies an operation of the will and an execution of its resolutions. It implies a procedure from cause to result. Every imitation of action by action is a drama. After this step has been taken it only remains to assume a form regulated by literature. A drama should contain a unity of action and this unity of action means that everything in it should form a link in a single chain of cause and effect. At all periods of history the stage has been a mirror of the age and race in which it has written. Dramatic poets reproduce the life of men around them; exhibiting their aims, hopes, aspirations and passions in an abstract more intensely colored than the diffuse facts of daily experience. “The result obtained by the drama is twofold. On the one hand it is strictly local, national, true to the epoch of its origin and on the other hand it is a glass held up to nature reflecting what is permanent in man beneath the customs and costumes, the creeds and politics of an age or nation. It seems perfectly obvious and natural in the invention of dramatic art because man has a great disposition to mimicry.