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Dramatic
poetry |
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Until the
nineteenth century, drama was commoly written in verse.
Characters in the first Greek
plays were gods,
kings and heroes, from whom dignified expression was expected.
Later playwrights also preferred verse because this lifted
so readily into a poetry
by which the deeper realities of human nature could be explored.
Indeed, whatever the period, given only intelligence and experience
from actors and audience, verse was the better medium, providing
a wider, richer and more sensitive portrayal of character,
emotion and motivation than could be achieved in prose. |
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Dramatic poetry: history |
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Much
of dramatic
poetry belongs to the literary canon.
Verse is the medium of plays by Aeschylus,
Sophocles,
Euripides,
Aristophanes,
Menander,
Terence,
Plautus,
Seneca,
Marlow,
Shakespeare,
Lope de Vega, Caldéron,
Corneille,
Racine, Molière,
Dryden,
Lessing,
Goethe,
Musset,
Hugo,
Dumas,
Byron,
Browning,
Tennyson,
Pushkin, Ibsen,
Claudel,
Yeats,
Hauptman,
Brecht,
Eliot
—and many others, particularly in non-European
languages.
Equally wide-ranging are the verse
forms: the classical
meters of Greek
playwrights, the iambic
senarius or trochaic
septenarius of Latin
playwrights,
Shakespearean blank
verse, French alexandrine,
Spanish redondilla
and sonnet,
heroic
couplets, Claudel's
versicles, and so forth, down to contemporary melanges
of verse, free
verse and rhythmic prose.
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Dramatic poetry in the 20th century |
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The
20th century record is an astonishing one. Writers
in English who have tried their hand at verse plays include
James
Elroy Fletcher, Lascelles
Abercrombie, Lawrence
Binyon, John
Drinkwater, John
Masefield, T.S.
Eliot, Christopher
Fry, Anne
Ridler, Norman
Nicholson, Arthur
Miller, Tennessee
Williams, E.E.
Cummings, Richard
Eberhart, Archibald
MacLeish, Wallace
Stevens, Albert
Albee and William
Carlos Williams. Only plays by Eliot,
MacLeish,
Albee and Tennessee
Williams have enjoyed much of a commercial success, though
good verse has appeared in many librettos and translations
(Anne
Ridler, Ronald
Duncan and Richard
Wilber being the best known). |
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Dramatic poetry today |
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The
sporadic run of verse plays on the London stage, hardly
exciting, did not survive the '60s assault on
the Establishment by Osborn,
Tynan
and others. Nonetheless, socially-committed playwrights
like Caryl
Churchill, David
Edgar, Charles
Wood and Steven
Berkoff have interlarded verse with their polemics,
and more serious dramatic verse appears in British Commonwealth
playwrights like Douglas
Stewart, Ray
Mathew, Derek
Walcott, and Wole
Soyinka. Important influences on the contemporary
stage are Samuel
Becket and Bertold
Brecht, and both employed music, songs and a pared-down
prose that approaches free verse.
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