Theatre goes all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, who understood the importance of entertainment, drama, performance, recreation, and suspense to bring people together. Not coincidentally, Ancient Greece is also the origin of big stadium sporting events like the Olympics. Just as it is helpful to understand the basic rules of a sport in order to watch a game, it is necessary to understand the basic elements of a play in order to appreciate and analyze it.

The original rule-maker for dramatic literature was Aristotle. Every playwright whose work is studied in English 161 was aware of and influenced by Aristotle’s rules—even if the playwright’s goal was to break Aristotle’s rules. Whether the play your class is reading this semester was written in the 16th or the 21st century, it still will be useful to know what Aristotle’s rules are.

Aristotle: The OG of Theatre Studies

In his treatise on Drama—titled Poetics—Aristotle identifies Six Elements of Drama. They are:

Plot: the events that unfold on stage in the play

Character: those who unfold the plot

Thought: the messages or themes in the play

Diction: the script itself, the character’s lines and dialogue

Music: any component of sound—the spoken words, background music, songs, silences

Spectacle: any visual and kinetic component—blocking, dance, costumes, masks, makeup, set

Of these six elements, Aristotle said that the most important is plot.

Plot

The best tragic plots, according to Aristotle, are those that create catharsis for the audience when the playwright accomplished two things in their play: 1) crafting a feeling of suspense and 2) arousing sympathy for the characters. The goal was for the audience to be 1) engaged by plot twists and such and 2) able to care about the characters. Catharsis is the release of emotion that a well-written play produces in the audience.

In order to write a play that is believable and naturalistic, Aristotle said, plays should adhere to what are called the three unities. Unity of time, place, and action. Specifically, the rules that Aristotle set down dictated:

Unity of Time: All action in the play occurs within 24 hours.

This means that playwrights need to begin their plays in media res (in the middle of the action) and rely upon exposition (in which characters on stage recount important events that happened before the beginning of the play).

Unity of Place: All action in the play occurs in one location.

Unity of Action: There is only one main plot; there is no sub-plot.

Character

In his Poetics, Aristotle provided a definition of the tragic hero as having these three characteristics:

1. They are not evil or malicious. They experience misfortune, but not as a result of having committed a vile act.
2. They are virtuous, but not perfect.
3. They are “noble,” which Aristotle defined in elitist terms as meaning famous and rich. In Aristotle’s opinion, the tragic hero should be a princess or a king—someone who is highly renowned and prosperous.

The plays of Sophocles, who was considered the best author of Greek tragedies, align with this definition of tragic hero.

Protagonist and antagonist are other terms that are useful as an alternative to hero and villain. The protagonist is the character who wants something, who has a dream, whose story arc we follow throughout the play. The antagonist is the character who gets in the way of the protagonist’s goal, who blocks the process of the protagonist.

Many plays by Sophocles, and other playwrights, also feature foil characters. A foil character is meant to reflect another character, bringing out the other character’s attributes by comparison and contrast. The foil has to have enough similarities to make the difference(s) between the characters stand out. Typically, the foil character is a supporting or minor character in contrast to the hero.

Shakespeare: Breaking All the Rules

Shakespeare wrote during a time when some playwrights followed Aristotle’s rules to the letter. Shakespeare did not. Shakespeare broke most of Aristotle’s rules and revised others.

Shakespeare’s plays never adhere to the unities of time, place, and action. In Shakespeare’s case:

• No Shakespeare play takes place within 24 hours and several take place over many years.
• No Shakespeare play takes place in just one specific location. Most plays don’t even take place in just one country.
• Several Shakespeare plays include multiple plots. For instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has four plotlines.

Aristotle thought that plot was the most important of the Six Elements of Drama. But Shakespeare barely put any creative energy into the plots of his plays. Actually, Shakespeare lifted the plots of most of his plays from extant stories and history books.

Instead, in Shakespeare’s plays, the most important element of drama is character.

Shakespeare also tweaked the portrayal of the tragic hero that we see in Sophocles’ plays. In a Sophocles’ play, such as Antigone, a tragic hero has the following attributes:

• a preoccupation with death and the afterlife combined with a willingness to die for a great cause,
• purposeful disobedience of an authority figure,
• awareness of answering to a higher moral power than an earthly authority,
• demonstrating courage by overcoming fears and doubts,
• showing bravery by taking action, and
• choosing to act alone.

Shakespeare adds another component to this list, which is the hallmark of a Shakespearean tragic hero:

• engaging in self-debate in soliloquies.

If you think about Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, and other Shakespearean tragic heroes, they all deliver soliloquies in which they are asking themselves questions and engaging in self-debate.

Diction

Tied with character as the most important Element of Drama—in Shakespeare’s plays—is diction. Although filled with plenty of music and spectacle, Renaissance stages had less elaborate sets and props compared to the Greeks. It is through diction—his incredible ability with language—that Shakespeare creates his characters. For some students, though, Shakespeare’s language can be the most intimidating element. See end of this section for a strategy for close-reading, analysis, interpreting Shakespeare.

Modern Playwrights: Revising Aristotle’s Rules

One of the most significant developments when it comes to modern playwrights is their redefinition of the “tragic hero” inherited from Aristotle, doing away with the idea that plays should only be about the nobility. Modern playwrights like Henrik Ibsen, who wrote The Doll’s House (1879), and George Bernard Shaw, author of Pygmalion (1913), reinterpreted the “noble” part of Aristotle’s definition of tragic hero, arguing that it should mean nobility of character. Under this new definition of hero, being “noble” comes to refer to inner-nobility rather than aristocratic rank. In Shaw’s play, for instance, the playwright made the hero of the play a poor girl named Eliza Doolittle who sells flowers on a street corner in London.

Plays like A Doll’s House are part of a trend toward Realism and Naturalism in Theatre History. Realistic and Naturalistic plays have the following attributes. They tend to:

• portray characters from bourgeois or working classes
• present themes that are focused on an important social issue
• offer plausible settings and plot (no fantasy or supernatural intervention)
• provide a snapshot of everyday life with no filter, and
• try to present dialect and speech that reflects real life

Interestingly, 19th-century plays usually reach into past traditions and embrace Aristotle’s unities—unity of time, place, and action—for the same reason the Ancient Greeks developed the unities: in an effort to make their plays seem plausible, believable, and life-like.

Later in the 20th century, we see another significant development: increased representation when it comes to diversity. In several of the 20th-century plays taught in ENGL 161 courses, the heroes – and indeed all of the characters in the play – are working-class and/or are people who had been unrepresented in mainstream theatre before the 20th century. Fences (1983), for instance, is a Pulitzer-prizewinning play about African Americans by an African-American playwright, August Wilson. The same can be said about Lorraine Hansberry’s Tony-nominated play Raisin in the Sun (1959)—the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman. Real Women Have Curves (1990) is a play about Latinas, some of whom are undocumented workers, written by a Latina playwright, Josefina Lopez, who was herself undocumented for several years when she first came to Los Angeles from Mexico.

While important changes happen with regard to the heroes and characters featured in 20th-century plays, many 20th-century playwrights still borrowed some aspects from Greek Theatre practices and the rules of Aristotle, particularly when it comes the rule of unity of location. For instance, both Fences and Real Women Have Curves are set in one location. In each case, the singularity of location is symbolic. The characters in Fences, Rose and Cory in particular, want so much to move and to allow their dreams to grow, but they are stuck, standing in place. Real Women Have Curves is set in a sewing factory that the undocumented Estella attempts to rent even though she cannot afford it, and the factory becomes both a safe haven and an oppressive hell; she keeps the door shut tight to hide from ICE, even in the sweltering heat that the factory steamer gives off. What a difference we see when comparing the cast of characters—five women—to an original Greek production of Antigone or when comparing the cast of characters in Fences to an original Elizabethan production of Othello. Both Antigone and Othello originally would have been performed by acting companies comprised entirely of white men.

When considering the historical changes in the plays’ scripts related to diction, we’ve gone from plays written as poetry, with stylized Greek chorus chants or Shakespearean blank verse, to plays that are written in an attempt to replicate real life and real speech. We’ll see this with regard to the topics and subject matter that characters talk about, their ability to weave in and out of English and other languages, such as Spanish, and the dialect and even sometimes profanity that they use.

At the same time, the new 20th-century tragic hero also retains similarities to the Shakespearean tragic hero. In Fences, Troy may be the character most inclined toward profanity, but he is also the character who has the most eloquent speeches. Like a Shakespearean tragic hero, Troy is the one who has the soliloquies in the play, facing down the character of Death, looking his fears of dying right in the face and taking action, just as the title character does time after time in Hamlet.

As with any naturalistic play, there is a significant focus on social inequities in modern and contemporary plays. These plays discuss and bring to light racism, xenophobia, sexism, and exploitation, and these playwrights, to a certain extent, call to account those who are responsible for these abuses.

Continue Reading: 22.4 Additional Strategies for Reading Plays