DRAMATIC POETRY

What is Dramatic Poetry Dramatic poetry, also known as a dramatic poem, is an emotional piece of literature which includes a story which is recited or sung. It refers to the dramatic genre of poetry. Till the nineteenth century dramas were written in the form of verses. The definition of this piece of literature can be quoted as, 'a form of poetry where a story is narrated in the form of a lyrical ballad.' This kind of poetry has come from Sanskrit dramas and Greek tragedies. The method adopted in this form is that the story is usually narrated in the form of a recital or song. Soliloquy and dramatic monologues are the main instruments of this form of poetry. There are also many examples of dramatic poetry for children. They are written in such a manner that they can be easily understood, and enacted. The history of poetry can be traced back to the Shakespearean era, where different settings of a play were written in verse which would rhyme. The discourse of the story and characters of the play would be told in the form of poetry. Epic poetry is also one of these kinds, which can be mostly seen in Greek literature. Epics are usually narrations of deeds and events, usually heroic, of a particular country or culture. Plays were enacted on stage and dialogs delivered were in the poetic form. This technique could be seen in Greek plays, which were written in verse so that the lines could be easily memorized. This method was also adapted in the Renaissance theater, where modern free verse was used in combination with the ancient form of poetry. Types of Dramatic Poems  Dramatic Poetry  Dramatic poetry is essentially any poetic verse that is meant to be spoken as well as performed by actors in front of an audience. In early Greek drama, both comedies and tragedies were written in verse, as characters in these plays were usually gods or kings, who were expected to speak in a stylized and articulate manner befitting their station. Prior to the 19th century in the West, drama typically took the form of poetic verse. Playwrights such as William Shakespeare used verse as a medium that could communicate a more complex portrayal of a character's emotions and motivations than prose.

 Dramatic Verse  Dramatic verse can be found in any play or other form of dramatic work that is written in poetic form. Beyond its ancient Greek origins, dramatic verse was widely used in Britain during the Renaissance. Among the leading practitioners of this genre were English playwrights Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who innovated the form substantially by developing new techniques in both poetic form and dramatic structure. Since the 19th century, there has been a decline in the popularity of dramatic verse as audiences became more accustomed to the prose dramas of playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.  Dramatic Verse  Dramatic verse can be found in any play or other form of dramatic work that is written in poetic form. Beyond its ancient Greek origins, dramatic verse was widely used in Britain during the Renaissance. Among the leading practitioners of this genre were English playwrights Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who innovated the form substantially by developing new techniques in both poetic form and dramatic structure. Since the 19th century, there has been a decline in the popularity of dramatic verse as audiences became more accustomed to the prose dramas of playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.

  Closet Drama  Sometime around 1800 the closet drama became fashionable. Closet dramas were written in verse form, but were meant to be read aloud, not performed by actors. The leading writers who worked in this form were Lord Byron with "Don Juan" and Percy Bysshe Shelley with "Prometheus Unbound." The 19th century also saw the rise of opera, in which verses were set to music and sung instead of merely recited. Closet drama also faded in popularity in the 20th century. In his 1960 collection of essays, "A Voice From the Attic," Canadian writer Robertson Davies describes closet drama as the "dreariest of literature."  Dramatic Monologues  While a dramatic monologue is written in verse, it is different from a poetic soliloquy found within a play, in which a character delivers a monologue in verse form though the rest of the play may be written in prose. The dramatic monologue was one of the favored forms of 19th-century British poet Robert Browning, whose works in this genre include "The Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." In Browning's dramatic monologues, a single narrator recites the poem in its entirety, interacting with specific people who are known to the audience only from clues within the verse

TRAGEDY
What is Tragedy  a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure.  While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.  That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.  From its obscure origins in the theaters of Athens 2,500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Mller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.  A long line ofphilosopherswhich includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuzehave analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the tragic form.  In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic theatre.[ CLASSIFICATION of Tragedy  Roman tragedy

 Following the expansion of the Roman Republic (50927 BCE) into several Greek territories between 270240 BCE, Rome encountered Greek tragedy.From the later years of the republic and by means of the Roman Empire (27 BCE-476 CE), theatre spread west across Europe, around the Mediterranean and reached England. While Greek tragedy continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240 BCE marks the beginning of regular Roman drama. Livius Andronicus began to write Roman tragedies, thus creating some of the first important works of Roman literature. Five years later, Gnaeus Naevius also began to write tragedies (though he was more appreciated for his comedies). No complete early Roman tragedy survives, though it was highly regarded in its day; historians know of three other early tragic playwrights Quintus Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius Accius.  From the time of the empire, the tragedies of two playwrights surviveone is an unknown author, while the other is the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all of which are fabula crepidata (tragedies adapted from Greek originals); his Phaedra, for example, was based on Euripides' Hippolytus. Historians do not know who wrote the only extant example of the fabula praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects), Octavia, but in former times it was mistakenly attributed to Seneca due to his appearance as a character in the tragedy. Seneca's tragedies rework those of all three of the Athenian tragic playwrights whose work has survived. Probably meant to be recited at elite gatherings, they differ from the Greek versions in their long declamatory, narrative accounts of action, their obtrusive moralizing, and their bombastic rhetoric. They dwell on detailed accounts of horrible deeds and contain long reflective soliloquies. Though the gods rarely appear in these plays, ghosts and witches abound. Senecan tragedies explore ideas of revenge, the occult, the supernatural, suicide, blood and gore. The Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger (14841558), who knew both Latin and Greek, preferred Seneca to Euripides.

 Renaissance tragedy  Influence of Greek and Roman tragedy The classical Greek and Roman tragedy was largely forgotten in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the beginning of 16th century, and theatre in this period was dominated by mystery plays, morality plays,farces and miracle plays. As early as 1503 however, original language versions of Sophocles, Seneca, and Euripides, as well as comedic writers such as Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus were all available in Europe and the next forty years would see humanists and poets translating and adapting their tragedies. In the 1540s, the European university setting (and especially, from 1553 on, the Jesuit colleges) became host to a Neo-Latin theatre (in Latin) written by scholars. The influence of Seneca was particularly strong in its humanist tragedy. His playswith their ghosts, lyrical passages and rhetorical oratorybrought a concentration on rhetoric and language over dramatic action to many humanist tragedies. The most important sources for French tragic theatre in the Renaissance were the example of Seneca and the precepts of Horace and Aristotle (and contemporary commentaries by Julius Caesar Scaliger andLodovico Castelvetro), although plots were taken from classical authors such as Plutarch, Suetonius, etc., from the Bible, from contemporary events and from short story collections (Italian, French and Spanish). The Greek tragic authors (Sophocles and Euripides) would become increasingly important as models by the middle of the 17th century. Important models were also supplied by the Spanish Golden Age playwrightsPedro Caldern de la Barca, Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega, many of whose works were translated and adapted for the French stage

 Neo-classical tragedy  For much of the 17th century, Pierre Corneille, who made his mark on the world of tragedy with plays like Mede (1635) and Le Cid (1636), was the most successful writer of French tragedies. Corneille's tragedies were strangely un-tragic (his first version of Le Cid was even listed as a tragicomedy), for they had happy endings. In his theoretical works on theatre, Corneille redefined both comedy and tragedy around the following suppositions:

 The stagein both comedy and tragedyshould feature noble characters (this would eliminate many low-characters, typical of the farce, from Corneille's comedies). Noble characters should not be depicted as vile (reprehensible actions are generally due to non-noble characters in Corneille's plays).  Tragedy deals with affairs of the state (wars, dynastic marriages); comedy deals with love. For a work to be tragic, it need not have a tragic ending.  Bourgeois tragedy  Bourgeois tragedy (German: Brgerliches Trauerspiel) is a form that developed in 18th-century Europe. It was a fruit of the Enlightenment and the emergence of the bourgeois class and its ideals. It is characterized by the fact that its protagonists are ordinary citizens. The first true bourgeois tragedy was an English play, George Lillo's The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell, which was first performed in 1731. Usually, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Miss Sara Sampson, which was first produced in 1755, is said to be the earliest Brgerliches Trauerspiel in Germany.