Barry - Dramatic Structure Shaping of Experience
Barry - Dramatic Structure Shaping of Experience
Barry - Dramatic Structure Shaping of Experience
TRENT UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
THE SHAPING OP EXPERIENCE
University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1970
DRAMATIC
STRUCTURE
THE SHAPING OF EXPERIENCE
Jacleson G. Barry
j
https://archive.org/details/dramaticstructurOOOObarr
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vm
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapters
I ASSUMPTIONS 16
TV ACTIONS 50
The Nature of Actions 50
The Significance of Actions 56
ix
CONTENTS
V IMPROVISATIONAL STRUCTURE 70
Beats 82
Act and Scene Division 86
IX ARISTOTLE 157
Appendixes
I THE CATEGORIES AND Hamlet 207
NOTES 229
INDEX 253
x
INTRODUCTION
1
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
2
Introduction
artist with a book which, however fine its theory, seems to have
nothing to do with what really happens on a stage.
It is inevitable that particular phases of the study will suffer
from the tight leash which must be kept on any general theoretical
investigation. This restriction has prevented a number of in¬
triguing explorations, such as a study of the bearing of recent
linguistic studies on the structure of drama.1 Yet it is necessary
to first define a general theory in which subsequent special studies
may eventually find a place.
For practicing artists of the theatre, critics, and writers of texts
on drama, the term and the concept “structure” are central in
their handling of dramatic materials, but existing definitions,
either explicit, in drama textbooks, or implicit, in the assumptions
which guide a playwright’s, a director’s, or a critic’s choices, are
vague or contradictory or both. In a survey of the field, Rene
Wellek commented, “It would be easy to collect hundreds of defi¬
nitions of ‘form’ and ‘structure’ from contemporary critics and
aestheticians and show that they contradict each other so radically
and basically that it may be best to abandon the terms.”2 No one,
however, including Mr. Wellek, seems willing to abandon them.
We inherit a field in which Aristotle’s suggestive idea that drama
is the imitation of an action continues to stimulate critics as dif¬
ferent as R. S. Crane and Francis Fergusson. Unfortunately, Aris¬
totle’s fragmentary treatise, despite the accumulated scholarship
up to and including the recent elucidations by G. F. Else,3 cannot
be made to yield a definition of either “action” or “imitation”
clear enough to satisfy contemporary aestheticians, although no
one can deny that Aristotle said something that everyone who
deals with drama must acknowledge, at least in its outlines.
Those who speak on dramatic structure today seem to fall
roughly into four camps: philosophers, literary critics, anthro¬
pologists, and practicing theatre men. The first three camps are
often hard to distinguish and may indeed be simultaneously occu¬
pied by one man with the sweeping interests of a Northrop Frye.4
3
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
4
Introduction
5
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
6
Introduction
7
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
8
Introduction
9
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
10
Introduction
not only from the sublime to the trite, but from the highly verbal
to the highly visual, from the elaborately formal to the freely im¬
provised. In an investigation into the nature of drama, certain
events low on the spectrum of artistic value can sometimes indi¬
cate more than the masterworks of literature. Just as biologists
searching out the nature of life often work with simple organisms
on the border of “life,” so I shall investigate, where it seems ap¬
propriate, such protodramas as spectacles, and acting class exer¬
cises, but I expect this knowledge to be used to illuminate the
great works of the medium, not to stand as mere commentary
upon the insignificant.
It might be valuable to include in this volume a section con¬
trasting the structures of film and drama. This would, of course,
complement the sections contrasting drama with poetry, narra¬
tive, and music. Arguments either that the film is dramatic or that
modern “mixed media” stage events are filmic could be cited in
support of an extension of the present subject matter. However,
the film is only just beginning to receive the kind of analytic at¬
tention which the other arts have had, and it would thus be im¬
practical to discuss it without first devoting an inappropriately
lengthy study to establishing its structural features.27
That, then, is the nature and scope of what will be referred to
here as “drama.” Structure is understood to mean the set of rela¬
tionships between the parts of a given whole.28 Although this
understanding of the term denies a physical nature to structure,
one popular image, the bare framework of girders outlining the
shape of a new skyscraper, may indicate the idea in question be¬
cause it strikingly articulates the organization of space and of
construction elements in a building, thus the relationship of its
parts: its structure. Of course the completed building will be a
whole made up of many systems, each with its own relationship
of parts (for instance, the structure of the electrical system), and
will also participate as a part of other, larger wholes such as the
total urban complex.
11
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
12
Introduction
13
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
writers who fall under this rubric have investigated such subjects
as Brechtian drama, poetry, the novel, women’s fashions, and con¬
temporary myths. Generally, however, the French structuralist is
less affected by mathematics or philosophy than he is by studies
in the structure of language—especially those in the school of
Saussure—and by the ideas of anthropological structure put forth
by Claude Levi-Strauss.34
The ontology of dramatic structure—the question of whether
we actually discern a set of relations in things and events, or
whether we impose structure on them—lies at the periphery of this
study. The exigencies of keeping an analysis of dramatic structure
within manageable bounds dictate that we stop at the border of this
and such other philosophical problems as the “meaning” or “truth”
of a work of art. However, in all these delicate matters I have
attempted to proceed with an awareness of the theoretical depths
involved, so that at least the major positions I have taken may be
defensible. Full treatments of the philosophical questions, to com¬
plement the presentation here, may be found in most contempo¬
rary books on aesthetics, of which Monroe Beardsley’s Aesthetics:
Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism is a good example.35
Before I turn to the analysis of drama in the next chapter, I
must briefly discuss the general structure of time and space within
which a play takes place. A play as a theatrical experience begins
with the specific time of its performance. The ancient Greek
“curtain time” was dawn. For an audience of Shakespeare’s day,
the play occupied part of an afternoon, and the middle and lower
classes attended instead of, rather than after, work. In the early
nineteenth century, the appetite of the lower-class audiences was
for six hours of assorted melodrama. Our own experience of a
given drama is partly influenced by the knowledge that it will
occur after supper and in the conventional dramatic period of be¬
tween two and three hours, and an experienced playgoer will sense
roughly what can be done within the given time. He will have
a feeling for the beginning, when the play lies before him, the
14
Introduction
middle, and the end, when the playwright must start wrapping
things up.
The ordinary time span of a drama and the time of day at which
it is presented become part of the structure of the drama itself,
and our conceptions of these contrast not only with the historical
variants, but with such exceptions to the contemporary habit as
the famous “dinner break” schedule of O’Neill’s Strange Inter¬
lude (1928). But O’Neill’s experiments represent only a puffing
out of the conventional dramatic pattern. Today restless drama¬
tists are searching further afield for configurations of time which
may be more meaningful to our modern experience. The prize
fight (which may last fifteen rounds or a few seconds), festivals
lasting one or more days, rallies, and vigils have all been men¬
tioned as offering fresh time schemes to a new drama.
This rough structuring of our temporal dramatic experience is
paired to the rough structuring of our spacial experience by the
nature of the auditorium in which the play is presented. The mod¬
ern spectator is likely to be seated with from 500 to 1000 others
in a large, comparatively dark, ramped space facing a smaller
rectangular space that will probably be well lighted. This is only
one possible arrangement, supporting through historical accident
(or despite it) a concept of our image of action. This image can
be radically altered, as it has been in certain contemporary experi¬
ments where the performance may, for example, surround the
audience.36
Within the space of a stage and the time of a performance, how¬
ever they are arranged, the production team will articulate an
image of the possibilities for man’s use of that space and time, and
these may range, for instance, from the elaborately contrived use
of entrances, exits, and hiding places of a farce, to the processions
and soliloquies of Elizabethan staging, to the static arrangements
of a conversation piece.37
15
Chapter I
ASSUMPTIONS
16
Assumptions
months, into the one eventful day of Long Day’s Journey into
Night.1
But if a playwright changes that which he is representing, on
what does he base the decision that the new arrangement of the
incidents is better than the one which at least had the recommen¬
dation of being real? Further, an attempt at playwriting will reveal
another, more basic, challenge: why arrange a reproduction of
experience as a drama in the first place? Why not take from the
same ground of experience a series of sounds—say, an arrange¬
ment of the different automobile noises that drift through the
window during an afternoon?
Presumably the playwright has a notion of drama which has
accrued from all the plays he has experienced, and, given this
pattern, it is possible to construct art works to fit it from the ma¬
terial of experience, almost as Sardou did with his dramatic for¬
mulas. But what if he did not have a notion (or tradition) of
drama? What could possibly lead him to select and arrange expe¬
rience in such a structure? Or, to take a more probable, related
question: given one form of drama, what principles allow for the
modifications which changing civilizations have made and will
make in the manner in which experience is imagined?
To answer these questions, and hence to lay a basis for the
meaningful discussion of dramatic structure, it is necessary to
sketch in what I believe to be the basis of the organization of
experience into art. The multitude of sense impressions, feelings,
and thoughts that constitute experience may be organized in a
number of different ways. As Eugene T. Gendlin says:
17
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
If we did not impose order we could not cope with our experience.
Before we can choose an ordering, we must make certain assump¬
tions about experience which, from a philosophical point of view,
cannot be strictly proved: for example, that sense impressions we
entertain correspond to objects “out there” in space. Many as¬
sumptions are less basic and some, such as the assumption that
the Earth is the center of the universe, have been disproved and
replaced with assumptions which better represent the available
data and opinions. It should be understood that the degree of
sophistication of the assumption is not at issue here. Primitive
rain dances based on naive assumptions about the causes of pre¬
cipitation do not suffer a loss of validity as art.
There are many representations or descriptions of reality—
those made by the physicist, the geometer, or the newspaper re¬
porter, for instance. Each may be said to see reality in his own
way—with his own assumptions about its basic nature—and each
may be said to be looking at different aspects of a many faceted
reality. It is not my task here to say how these representations are
derived or how accurately they describe what they describe.31 am
interested only in the representations of reality presented in drama,
and to a lesser extent the representations of reality in such other
arts as poetry, music, and narrative, since their different structures
may, by contrast, throw light on the arrangement of experience
in the dramatic form.
Assumptions are important to the idea of structure because the
kind of structure we impose upon reality to make a drama of it
will depend on how we see life. By the same token, the kind of
drama we prefer and, indeed, the degree of our appetite for drama
(instead of, say, painting, poetry, history, or sociology) will be
dictated by these conscious or unconscious views. People of the
same age and society often see life with more or less the same as¬
sumptions, which is why we do not need a different drama for
each of us. Different cultural periods usually entertain different
18
Assumptions
19
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
20
Assumptions
21
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
22
Assumptions
23
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
24
Chapter II
25
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
as the death and rebirth cycles, are popular among the anthro¬
pological critics. More elaborate shapes are found in “The Shape
of Shakespeare’s Plays” by Richard David: “Othello . . . has no
stops; it is one great springing curve. . . . King Lear is a double
curve.”3
The visual analogy is a convenient one, but it is an analogy
to dramatic structure; it does not describe that structure. No play
can have the form of a circle. The problem is similar to the one
which prompted Bergson to insist, in words which might well
apply to dramatic theory, that the nature of time does not ac¬
curately fit the spatial analogies by which it is commonly de¬
scribed. “Intensity, duration, voluntary determination, these are
the three ideas which had to be clarified by ridding them of all
they owe to the intrusion of the sensible world and, in a word, to
the obsession of the idea of space.”4
The surrender of spatial analogies—circular plots, rising and
falling action, and so forth—relinquishes the use of an apparently
indispensable formal apparatus which has supported innumerable
descriptive schemes, including Plato’s elaborate cosmology in the
Phaedo. Without it we must describe a play structure in terms of
groups of events. Certainly this seems much less formal than say¬
ing it has a circular shape.
The fact that the structure of a play is sometimes identified with
an emotional pattern of response, and that usually this identi¬
fication is made in connection with a graph of rising and falling
action leads to another misconception. Because, for instance, the
peak of emotional excitement (the highest point of the graph) is
usually defined as the climax of the play, there follows an easy but
false equivalence between the line of the graph and the structure
of the play. Actually the emotional graph is only the result of
tracing the intensity of emotion stirred in the characters of the
drama, especially the protagonist, or of graphing the intensity of
emotion which the play induces in the audience.
Certainly the psychological constitution of audiences has some
26
The Basic Pattern of Events
27
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
28
The Basic Pattern of Events
29
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
30
The Basic Pattern of Events
31
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
King. The Chorus, elders of Thebes, see life, as the old often do,
with the benefit of hindsight and hence often in patterns. They
offer us:
32
The Basic Pattern of Events
33
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
34
The Basic Pattern of Events
35
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
36
The Basic Pattern of Events
57
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
ces S. Herskovits state: “To those who have had first-hand experi¬
ence with nonliterate peoples . . . the passages we quote from Jung
take on an air of fantasy.”20 In a more generous mood, they con¬
clude, however, that “the mystique of the archetype falls into that
large body of theoretical formulations that explains universals in
human behavior without the benefit of empirical proof.”21 Rudolf
Arnheim has also undertaken to displace the archetypal theory of
structures by endeavoring to show that dynamic properties in
simple geometric shapes lead to the “spontaneous perception of
symbolic meaning.”22
This is perhaps enough to show that our Basic Pattern of Events
is not coincidental with the Jungian archetype because: (1) no
claim is made (or denied) that any Basic Patterns of Events are
inherent in the structure of the brain, or even that they are pri¬
mordial or traditional—some patterns certainly are ancient, like
the birth-death-resurrection pattern, but other patterns, like the
wait for narcotics in Jack Gelber’s The Connection and Samuel
Beckett’s Endgame, are very recent and “special”; and (2) the
Basic Pattern of Events is precisely a pattern of events, a series
of happenings which seem to have some importance as collected
and ordered. The Basic Pattern of Events is not a symbol or core
of meanings like Frye’s sea or heath.
The Basic Pattern of Events does share with the archetypal
pattern of events the sense of existing prior to any specific instance
of itself. That is, we sense a pattern of events in our experience
before it is set down in any drama and as distinct from those
dramas which manifest it. These sensed patterns could be ver¬
balized in such general statements as “That which goes up must
come down” (surely general enough to qualify as an archetype),
yet the fact that we do make these generalizations hardly involves
a mystery deep enough to entail the usual archetypal theories.
In this chapter I have outlined a gross structural principle—the
Basic Pattern of Events—which describes what is sometimes (in¬
appropriately) called the “shape” of a play. There is, however, a
38
The Basic Pattern of Events
large step between the Basic Pattern of Events and the individual
actions which body it forth. It will be suggested that this area is
organized both by set patterns (such as the ordinary progression
of a day) and what will be called the improvisational structure,
essentially undetermined, moving always into the future one step
(one action) at a time. Thus we shall turn in Chapter III to some
of the intermediate patterns which organize the materials within
the Basic Pattern of Events.
39
Ckapter III
INTERMEDIATE PATTERNS
40
Intermediate Patterns
ing some large or small part of the play within the Basic Pattern
of Events. Thus such patterns as the meal-time chatter of Meg
and Petey, Goldberg’s jokes, and the party itself, including the
pattern of their game of blind man’s bluff, all organize larger or
smaller bits of the play within the Basic Pattern of Events, the
progressive destruction of a man’s mind.
Such patterns are impossible to catalogue; they spread through
the whole realm of living. They appeal most obviously to the
representational sense when, for example, a familiar pattern makes
us recognize the life around us in the life on stage. But the sig¬
nificance can go much deeper when the patterns used transcend
the reproduction of life to present an image of the patterned na¬
ture of our passage through time. The experienced playwright and
director will be aware, also, that these patterns can shape and
color the actors’ behavior in a scene, giving it purpose and direc¬
tion as, in Odets’ Awake and Sing, the characters, while pursuing
their more abstruse goals, gather for Sunday dinner, or play a
game of cards. Poor plays often ignore the help that well chosen
intermediate patterns offer and seem pallid and abstract as a
result. Great plays, from the Greeks on, are redolent with pro¬
cessions, prophecies, trials, and all the ritual elements which mark
our lives with specificity and excitement.
Here we must see the place of these intermediate patterns in
the analytic picture being developed. The play as a whole is
shaped by the Basic Pattern of Events. This is the most general
and most inclusive structural force at work. At the other extreme
stand the individual single units of which the play is composed,
the immediate actions. In rough analogy this would correspond to
the simple drawn outline of a house—an abstract indication of
over-all shape—and the individual concrete bricks which in com¬
bination will fill up this outline. The actions (bricks) do not con¬
stitute a structure because structure is the relationship among
units, and the decision to designate the action as smallest “indi-
41
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
42
Intermediate Patterns
43
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
But, while man has been conditioned ever since his ap¬
pearance in the world, and is constituted in all his physiolog¬
ical structure to obey and respond to a “cosmic rhythm”
(bound obviously to breathing, to cardiac pulsation, to the
mysterious rhythms of the universe, alternating like day and
night, the tides, the months, etc.) it is probable that only
in our era has he found himself in contact with mechanical
rhythms which interfere profoundly with his interior
rhythms.4
44
Intermediate Patterns
45
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
basis for the theory of the scene a faire, which in Picnic means
that Hal and Madge must have their scene together. As John
Gassner explains it:
46
Intermediate Patterns
47
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
45
Intermediate Patterns
eluding the charming speech in As You Like It, “For your brother
and my sister no sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked
but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed
but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason
but they sought the remedy.” (V.ii.35-40)8 Some patterns, such
as prologue and epilogue devices and the play-within-a-play, are
metapatterns, derived from the literal nature of the process of
presenting a drama.
I have not attempted a rigorous and exhaustive classification
and description of all the set patterns that, within the Basic Pat¬
tern of Events, organize parts of plays.91 have, however, tried to
suggest the sources and uses such patterns have. Since the ex¬
amples of intermediate patterns could be expanded enormously—
without any appreciably greater clarification of the principles
involved—it seems appropriate to turn now to the basic building
blocks in our structures, the immediate unit actions.
49
Chapter IV
ACTIONS
50
Actions
51
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
52
Actions
53
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
54
Actions
55
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
56
Actions
57
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
58
Actions
59
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
60
Actions
61
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
62
Actions
63
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
Despite the confusion resulting from the fact that Mrs. Langer
sometimes refers to drama as virtual history and sometimes as
virtual future, I think it is clear, at least in the passage just quoted,
that she sees the drama as looking to time ahead which, as Mrs.
Langer sees it, is “virtual,” or illusionary (on the analogy of
virtual images in optics, such as rainbows and mirages).27 Be¬
cause Mrs. Langer is committed to a doctrine in which only the
organic whole of a work of art has meaning, she runs into a prob¬
lem in drama, where the work is not given all at once. This forces
her to overextend the amount of “virtual future” contained in any
one action or group of actions until, as she says, “a whole, in¬
divisible piece of virtual history is implicit in it.” This unfor¬
tunate and unnecessary pressure distorts a valid insight into a
mystical belief.
But, of course, there is the hint of future in each action. It need
not be a mystical presence, however, and a further look at the
student actions exercises can point to the concrete evidences of
the future in each dramatic moment. These evidences must come
from the strong sense of purpose that Stanislavsky insisted is nec¬
essary to make an action significant. The classroom audience at
an actions exercise can tell from the care the student takes with
the action “to comb your hair” the importance of the situation for
which he or she is preparing. They can tell from the general atti¬
tude of the performer whether the situation is expected to be a
pleasure or a duty, and from the degree of haste, how close the
64
Actions
65
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
66
Actions
67
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
68
Actions
69
Chapter V
IMPROVISATIONAL STRUCTURE
70
Improvisational Structure
71
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
72
lmprovisational Structure
73
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
74
Improvisational Structure
75
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
thoughts from which this question came (“I am his kinsman and
his subject”), and from his next speech we know where it is head¬
ing (“He hath honor’d me of late”). Yet the wheel of drama does
not progress by itself, and Macbeth’s mental progression needs
the impetus of Lady Macbeth’s prodding.
Hearing Macbeth’s presumably ingenuous question, Lady Mac¬
beth presses him further to make him drop his play of innocence
and face with her the keen reality of the plot. “Know you not he
has?” Macbeth’s mental progression brings him now to a decision
pressed on by Lady Macbeth’s appearance and her relentless
calling him to account. He takes the control of his life back to
himself. “We will proceed no further in this business.” He will
stop the horrible movement which is carrying him at a pace he
cannot control into evil for which he has no appetite. This speech
arises directly from the situation, which must always be under¬
stood as moving and progressing.
In a proper drama, time’s winged chariot is always at the back
of the characters, whether it seems to be flying too fast or drag¬
ging unconscionably, as in Waiting for Godot. In our example, the
last speech is the precise sum of all that has gone before. It could
not have happened earlier, nor could it happen later. Indeed,
Macbeth’s soliloquy in the next scene (“Is this a dagger which I
see before me?”) is in a changed frame of mind, although it
too carries the sum of all that has gone before, including this re¬
luctance to perpetrate the deed. This dependence on the change
and accident of progressing time, including the progression of
dialogue with another person—the trial and adjustment of pur¬
pose—is precisely the quality of drama and the basis of the im-
provisational structure.
The specific nature of this quality needs to be examined further,
however, for it transcends what can appear in a printed script. It
depends upon the full and lively circumstances of presentation on
the stage. Macbeth’s speech above (“We will proceed no further
in this business.”) springs not just from previous printed speeches
76
Improvisalional Structure
77
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
78
Improvisational Structure
79
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
80
lmprovisational Structure
81
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
stirred the classical air. In Chekov’s plays, on the other hand, his
characters move in an oppressive and absorbing present which
precludes any meaningful pattern for their lives and gives the
(superficial) impression of plotlessness. No play, however, can
dispense altogether with either the structure of retrospectively
seen patterns or of progressing improvisation. This is the source
of the dilemma of Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which
the characters both know their fate and must endlessly play it out
“as if for the first time.” Even the radical improvisations of chance
theatre, destroying any sense of teleology by destroying any
meaningful connection between events, in retrospect produce a
pattern—though it might take a statistician rather than a neo¬
classic poet to see it.
The playwright intuitively recognizes that no play can dispense
altogether with either of the two structural forces. A compromise
must be made, and as this compromise tends to favor the impro-
visational force, hostile critics condemn it as formless and vague;
as the compromise favors the set pattern, hostile critics call it
still and lifeless. The image of time in drama cannot avoid the
conflict of the reality it mirrors, and structures of myth, theme,
repetition, death and rebirth, or, simply, boy gets girl must stretch
with the accidents of progressing time which they enclose, because
if improvisational structure compounds the nitty gritty of our
theatrical experience, it also materializes the abstraction of a
hero’s fall.
BEATS
The improvisational structure leading from action to action does
not form one unbroken line from the beginning to the end of the
drama, or even from the beginning to the end of an act. The
human being is not so precise. Instead, drama—and the life it
reflects—seems to move toward its purposes in changing directions
and at various speeds. When the purpose is changed, a beat is said
to have closed. The analytic unit of drama called a “beat” is thus
82
lmprovisational Structure
Mary: Why did the boys stay in the dining room, I won¬
der? Cathleen must be waiting to clear the table.
Tyrone: (Jokingly but with an undercurrent of resent¬
ment.) It’s a secret confab they don’t want me to hear, I
suppose. I’ll bet they’re cooking up some new scheme to
touch the Old Man.
(She is silent on this, keeping her head turned toward their
voices. Her hands appear on the table top, moving restlessly.
He lights his cigar and sits down in the rocker at right of
table, which is his chair, and puffs contentedly.) There’s
nothing like the first after-breakfast cigar, if its a good one,
and this new lot have the right mellow flavor. They’re a great
bargain, too. I got them dead cheap. It was McGuire who
put me on to them.8
83
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
in any section of a play, for example, the first six beats in Ether-
ege’s The Man of Mode contain twelve, nine, seven, fifteen,
twenty-four, and four lines respectively. There is considerable
variation in the tension or pulse speed built up in the beat and in
the extent of change and release between beats, and smaller beats
without marked change between them can be grouped together
in larger beats with more marked change.
This rhythm is not the same thing as Francis Fergusson’s
“tragic rhythm” of purpose, passion, and perception, which uses
“rhythm” only in an abstract and metaphorical sense.9 The beat
as analytic unit is, for the most part, a stranger to literary discus¬
sions of the drama. It is found almost exclusively in rehearsal
parlance or in the writings of those whose experience with drama
has been primarily practical.10 Perhaps the reason for this is that
those things which mark off a beat are more noticeable in rehearsal
than on the printed page.
Ordinarily the beat is the unit chosen when a drama is to be
broken up into small units for rehearsal. Also apparent in rehearsal
would be the fact (suggested in our example from Long Day’s
Journey into Night) that a change of beat is apt to involve move¬
ment, so that shifting stage positions are coordinated with the
shifting purposes of the characters. Of course, a move such as
James Tyrone’s cross to sit in a chair is only one of the many
changes which mark the progress of an acted play. Changes of
voice, tempo, intensity of light, together with the obvious change
from speech to silence in a pause, help to vary this aspect of
the play.
This concept of the rhythm of the play looked at more precisely
shows itself to be based primarily on the sounds of the play, with
the spoken word the most frequent and evident of sounds. How¬
ever, every sound and movement contributes to and must be made
part of the rhythm. The sound of footsteps, the visual rhythm of
a cross or a gesture, a quickly or slowly descending curtain, a sud¬
den “black-out” at the end or a slow fade, all are a part of the
84
Improvisational Structure
85
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
86
lmprovisational Structure
the set, sell more orange drink, stretch the legs and refresh the
spirit of the audience. Act division conceived as a convention
presents a mechanical slicing up of the play which would not
interest us here; however, even the mechanical division of a play
has its ambiguity because the division into acts may be physically
marked in the production or may be made only in the printed
text so that only a reader would be aware of the division. On the
other hand, there are logical divisions of dramatic material into
the two to five segments which have traditionally marked the act
division of a play. These are analytic divisions corresponding
roughly to Aristotle’s triad: beginning, middle, and end.
It is well to observe here that this neat division of the ancients
would hardly occur to all dramatists of all times; it did not im¬
press the writers of the medieval cycles. Baldwin gives an inter¬
esting example of a perfectly logical dramatic division when he
notes about John Bale’s God’s Promises compiled in 1538 with
seven acts: “Again these seven acts are only the seven major sub¬
heads of Bale’s argument. There were seven promises, so Bale
devotes an act to each.”15 Even so, most of the great dramatists
of the western world, through Ibsen and his inheritors, have found
it logical to subdivide their total dramatic action. Explanations
of this logic vary.16 When drama assumes the Aristotelian tragic
pattern the hero’s progress quite naturally falls into stages which
might be summarized thus: the hero is found in his position and
discovers a challenge to it, the hero locks in final combat with
the challenge carrying him through the reversal of fortune brought
on by his struggle, and, finally, a new arrangement of the status
quo is made either by the hero or his survivors. Where custom
requires, this can be easily subdivided to give four or five acts in
all, but even in these situations the clearly perceptible stages of
striving are obvious in the play.17
Where these logical divisions really exist, something may be
gained by marking them off into units—even by sending the audi¬
ence out to smoke in the lobby—but this three-stage pattern
87
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
88
lmprovisational Structure
89
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
90
Chapter VI
91
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
92
Structure and “Pure Form”
93
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
94
Structure and “Pure Form”
95
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
96
Structure and “Pure Form”
97
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
men from going far into the meaning-centered verbal theatre, yet
a possible direction was pointed by Moholy-Nagy in terms which
recall our fourth formal category (representational elements in
pure relational patterns).
The creative arts have discovered pure media for their
constructions: the primary relationships of color, mass,
material, etc. But how can we integrate a sequence of human
movements and thoughts on an equal footing with the con¬
trolled, “absolute” elements of sound, light (color), form,
and motion? In this regard only summary suggestions can
be made to the creator of the new theater. For example, the
repetition of a thought by many actors, with identical
words and with identical or varying intonation and cadence,
could be employed as a means of creating synthetic (i.e.,
unifying) creative theater. (This would be the chorus—but
not the attendant and passive chorus of antiquity!) Or mir¬
rors and optical equipment could be used to project the
gigantically enlarged faces and gestures of the actors, while
their voices could be amplified to correspond with the visual
magnification. Similar effects can be obtained from the
simultaneous, synoptical, and synacoustical repro¬
duction of thought (with motion pictures, phonographs,
loud-speakers), or from the reproduction of thoughts sug¬
gested by a construction of variously meshing gears.13
98
Structure and “Pure Form”
99
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
his own field of the plastic arts, still their tentative extensions into
drama have been valuable in stressing the visual and aural aspects
of the dramatic image.
When we turn to the conventional drama, the complex of
causes for these complex art works makes it difficult to say exactly
what effect the possibilities for formal manipulation of the ele¬
ments have upon a playwright’s dramatic structure. A playwright
might make an effort to choose “colorful” locales which would
permit the designer one or more interesting sets, and some play¬
wrights twist their plots to provide the costumer with the chance
to dress the leading lady in a series of “stunning” gowns. Even
so, sets and costumes contrived in this way are at least as important
for their meaning (as an evening gown, as expensive, risque,
etc.) as for their pure form.
The pastoral setting was important for the Elizabethan au¬
thor—especially in The Winter’s Tale, where it contrasts markedly
with a repressed court setting—and it is difficult to believe that
Tourneur was not conscious of the effects of dark and light when
he plotted the evil of debauched nights in court in his Revenger’s
Tragedy. Of course, in those times the poet was the “scene de¬
signer,” and the contrasts of colors and fabrics, lines and shapes
with which the present-day designer works, were caught up by
Shakespeare and his contemporaries as contrasts in imagery,
which are less likely to be looked at as pure form than the raw
visual materials are. These images, nonetheless, give us visual and
tactile experiences, if only in the imagination, and the pure sounds
of the actors’ words are usually composed with care; if sound with¬
out meaning seems paltry of effect, it is by no means negligible,
especially on the lips of a good actor.
The case becomes clearer, however, when we consider not just
the verse organization of words, or the design of a single set or
costume, but the aural and visual effect of drama as actions. This
brings us to the artistic raw materials of moving speaking actors
in a given delimited stage space. Surely playwrights have been
100
Structure and “Pure Form”
101
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
102
Structure and “Pure Form”
103
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
104
Structure and “Pure Form”
105
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
materials from his own life into patterns representing his as¬
sumptions about human actions in time—while at the same time
making interesting arrangements of the physical elements of
production.
In Long Day’s Journey into Night the tragic descent of O’Neill’s
mother (Mary Tyrone in the play) into doped confusion is phys¬
icalized in a setting which gets progressively dimmer, going from
the bright morning sun, to midday, late afternoon and fog, to
midnight in James Tyrone’s sparsely lit house: a progression which
is physically present in the intensity of the stage lights. There is an
effective progression in the speech rhythms, too, as the characters
go from short speeches and quick changes of subject to long
reminiscences while drugs and drink suspend time. It seems natural
that this long day must have happened just that way in O’Neill’s
experience, yet we know from the information in the Gelbs’ biog¬
raphy that it did not.20 The image of a day was perfected and
form had its say.
The perfect form for the artist to copy probably never occurs
in life, nor does it pop full-blown from the intuition as Croce
would argue. Joyce Cary, criticizing Croce’s position, emphasizes
that “the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work,”
and speaks of the writer’s need to fix his vision in words, images,
rhyme, etc. “All these details . . . had to enforce the impression,
the feeling that he wanted to convey.”21 Cary, just as O’Neill, just
as Shakespeare, perfects the image, and pure elements and pure
relations are part of the whole.
Discussions of pure form spread over a wide and amorphous
area. I have attempted to include in my analysis all logically con¬
sistent meanings of these terms which bear on dramatic structure.
There are, however, two aspects of structure which, though not
within the realm of pure form as we have defined it, are commonly
associated with it. Because both of these have an undeniable in¬
fluence upon the making of a dramatic production we must ex¬
amine them briefly.
106
Structure and “Pure Form”
107
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
108
Structure and “Pure Form”
109
Chapter VII
110
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
Ill
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
112
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
113
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
114
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
115
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
events and they may be seen in some kind of pattern. But the
events in this account, interesting or illuminating as they may be,
are finally meaningless without our independent knowledge of
the heartbreaking campaign they fit into. The nurse has related
her own actual experience. It is individual and, as it were, acci¬
dental. The ending, in which the nurse flies to safety in Australia,
cannot be construed as a typical pattern for nurses; it cannot be
construed as atypical. It stresses neither a fatal pessimism of death
as the soldier’s inexorable end, nor the whim of chance that some
are saved. In short, the pattern is meaningless.
History has certainly supplied many artists with patterns for
their stories—Shakespeare’s “history plays” are an obvious ex¬
ample—but, in a sense, all stories are based on history. Certainly
someone could make a story of the battles of Bataan and Corregi-
dor which would exhibit a meaningful pattern of events. It would
differ from the usual history because we do not ordinarily consider
tactical information as making an “artistic” story—we demand,
rather, a pattern of events in some human life. The “artistic” story,
however, could certainly be based upon actual happenings.
Standing at what might be considered the opposite pole from
the factual account, the folk tale exhibits a pattern of events the
meaning of which is strikingly clear. Aesop even sums up the
meaning and passes it on in a moralizing phrase, such as “Pride
shall have a fall.”
If the nurse’s story is basically an account of events chosen by
interest and ordered by the ordering of the experience in reality,
The Three Bears is a story in which a simple fanciful tale of a
young blond tresspasser is manipulated for the demands of pattern.
The main charm of The Three Bears lies in the repetitions in
three’s by which the story progresses: Goldilocks tries the Big
Bear’s porridge and finds it too hot; she tries the Mother Bear’s
porridge and finds it too cold; she tries the Baby Bear’s porridge
and finds it just right. The events of the story are arbitrarily moti¬
vated—getting the bears out of the house and the choice of some
116
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
objects rather than others for Goldilocks to try and the bears to
find disrupted. Franz Boas has described the use of such repeti¬
tions in primitive narrative:
117
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
118
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
119
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
120
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
121
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
122
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
because the greatest value is gained when the events are con¬
sidered simultaneously. Thus the poem does not give us the basic
offering of the drama, an image of our experience in time. The
relationship of bloom and decay could be used in a drama, but
it is not the kind of relationship which gives a basic organization
to drama.
The kind of relationship which typically structures the drama is
that in which events are so ordered that they have significance
only when one follows another in a specific order; often this is a
cause and effect relationship, but it need not necessarily be. The
person who is pursuing one course of action and who receives a
piece of news that makes him reverse his course is an example of
the effect of one event on another. Compare the situation late in
Macbeth: The tyrant has retired within the walls of Dunsinane
castle to “laugh a siege to scorn,” but news of his wife’s death,
then hard upon it the announcement of the “moving wood,” make
him decide on the suicidal open battle (V.v). Clearly the de¬
cision to leave the security of the castle must come after Macbeth
has heard of the dire blows to his security.
The discussion of narrative and poetry may finally be summed
up in a few observations on the structure of these genres as they
compare with drama. It is extremely important to realize that
narrative structure is not something that can be found exclusively
in the novel or short story, dramatic structure exclusively in the
play, and poetic structure exclusively in a book of verse. Each of
these genres is likely to include the others, sometimes even to take
the structure of another genre as a basic shaping principle. Rene
Wellek and Austin Warren have pointed out how confusing genre
criticism can be.13 I am only interested in showing how the
typically dramatic, poetic, or narrative structure functions, wher¬
ever it is found.
Poetry depends basically on a structure which relates ideas and
images to one another “spatially.” Although poetic images may
be of time, the poetic image is not structured temporally. The
123
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
124
The Structures of Narrative and Poetry
125
Chapter VIII
126
Music and Dramatic Structure
127
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
128
Music and Dramatic Structure
129
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
130
Music and Dramatic Structure
131
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
Blanche: Stella, oh, Stella, Stella! Stella for Star! (She be¬
gins to speak with feverish vivacity as if she feared for either
of them to stop and think. They catch each other in a spas¬
modic embrace.)
Blanche: Now, then, let me look at you. But don’t you look
at me, Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I’ve bathed and
rested! And turn that over-light off! Turn that off! I won’t
be looked at in this merciless glare! (Stella laughs and com¬
plies) Come back here now! Oh, my baby! Stella! Stella for
Star! (She embraces her again) I thought you would never
come back to this horrible place! What am I saying? I didn’t
mean to say that. I meant to be nice about it and say—Oh,
132
Music and Dramatic Structure
133
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
134
Music and Dramatic Structure
135
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
and musical structure, because Ibsen and many others have proved
that it is possible to construct a drama without verse.
Actually, exact repetition in literature is more often found in
primitive than in modern works. Primitive song, which merges
indistinguishably with dance, drama, and poetry, is full of exact
repetitions.22 Homer repeats certain formulas word for word;
primitive rituals may repeat the same prayer before a succession
of altars. These are all equivalents to classical musical form, but
our image of life has become more dynamic, a progression of
cause and effect. If our assumptions about life should ever so
change that we come to feel that striving is futile, that our idea of
cause and effect is illusion, perhaps drama would assume a form
more closely allied to the repetitive form in music (we have noted
hints of such a tendency in Ionesco and Beckett). Even then it is
doubtful that a thoroughgoing formal equivalence in the smaller
formal elements would be felt, for while it is conceivable that the
general outline of a scene might be repeated, it is unlikely that
whole sections would be repeated word for word, which would pro¬
vide the only true equivalent to the repetition of the musical
motive or phrase.
Victor Zuckerkandl offers a discussion of repetition in his theo¬
retical treatment of music which may summarize what we have
attempted to say here. He points out the large proportion of
musical composition which is just repetition, then mentions a
passage from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. The passage con¬
sists of:
136
Music and Dramatic Structure
137
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
138
Music and Dramatic Structure
from the hands of the musician who has had the opportunity to
explore and develop them as pure sounds. The dramatist recog¬
nizes in this music some of the quintessential sounds of drama. To
take one compelling example, he recognizes in certain modulating
chordal sequences the essence of transition and he uses the device
at its most obvious in the organ music that accompanies most
daytime “soap operas.” At a much more elevated level the drama¬
tist’s recognition of “developed sounds” in music suggests the pos¬
sibility of grand opera.
One of the greatest challenges in the arts is to blend the dis¬
parate structures of music and drama over an extended compo¬
sition. The challenge has been successfully met only a few times;
however, the problems encountered and the terms of success can
tell us a great deal about the two structures. Thus we may turn to
the detailed examination of musical and dramatic structures in a
piece from one of the successful operas.
The Beaumarchais-Mozart Marriage of Figaro suggests itself
for a number of reasons. Both play and opera have enjoyed popu¬
lar and critical acclaim for excellence in their respective mediums.
Moreover, Mozart is considered to have been highly successful in
making the opera work as both music and drama.27 More im¬
portant for our present purposes is the fact that Mozart achieves
whatever dramatic success he may claim while utilizing traditional
musical forms to carry the dramatic content.28 For example, the
piece to which we shall devote some close attention below, the
trio No. 13, is built on the sonatina pattern, freely handled, as is
the case in other, purely musical, compositions by Mozart.
It strikes one immediately, of course, that Mozart and Da Ponte
have chosen to cut a good deal of material from the play. While
they have retained much, considering the operatic necessities, and
stayed remarkably close to Beaumarchais, a comparison of the
libretto and the play text shows how many lines have fallen by the
way. We see, for example, that almost the entire trial scene has
been dropped from Beaumarchais’ third act. Indeed, Beau-
759
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
marchais’ last three acts are combined in the opera into two acts
which only coincide with the divisions of the play at the end. A
glance at the scene we quote below will show why the cuts must
be made. The opera progresses through a section of dialogue
which would be spoken in less than thirty seconds in a piece which
plays on record for slightly more than three minutes: roughly six
times as long. At that rate, a setting for the entire play text would
have lasted all night.
What sort of material strikes the librettist and composer as dis¬
pensable to the opera? As we have seen, the trial scene is cut,
probably because it adds an intellectual type of confusion (the
legal niceties of Figaro’s agreement with Marceline) to an already
complex plot. It may be said that the opera does not suffer from
this exclusion. This is the kind of scene that would be likely to be
cut by anyone who wanted to shorten the play and is not neces¬
sarily pruned away on purely musical grounds.
The nature of some of the other cuts is more interesting to us.
These cuts we roughly divide into two hardly exclusive kinds:
single line cuts and tailoring of the characters. One of Beau¬
marchais’ more charming bits of dialogue is the line which he
gives to Suzanne in Act II as she teases Cherubino about his song
to the Countess: “The nice young man, with his long, hypocritical
lashes. Come, bluebird, sing us a song for my lady.”29 It is hard
to sustain this much figurative language in the recitative and Da
Ponte reduces the epithet to “Hypocrite!”30 In Act III of the play,
Figaro introduces an amusing diversion when he tries to convince
the Count that he is in possession of all the English necessary to
get by in London since he knows the phrase, “Goddamn!”31 As
one would suspect, this idea about language has no relation to
music and, indeed, it disappears from the libretto.
Admirers of Beaumarchais probably would find two characters
decidedly changed in the transfer to opera: Figaro and the Count¬
ess. I would argue that musical reasons may account for the
alterations. In the play Figaro is both witty rogue and philosopher;
140
Music and Dramatic Structure
141
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
142
Music and Dramatic Structure
143
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
RECAPITULATION
r\
m. 72-83 84-92 m. 93-99 m. 100-121
RECITATIVE CODA
m. 122-123 m. 124-146
final restatement
of position
145
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
746
Music and Dramatic Structure
147
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
148
Music and Dramatic Structure
key back to the tonic. When the music restates its first theme, it
does so with new lines (i.e., 7 and 8).
Actually there is a good deal of structural logic to this arrange¬
ment, and it indicates how differently the same device can func¬
tion in the two arts. The musical bridge (measures 62—71) gives
us a feeling of transition, of building to something. It contains a
repetition of lines which, since they have already been spoken,
mark time and gain impetus in the same way the chords, carrying
no real melody, mark musical time. The pressures built up by the
modulating chords and the tossed-off lines require a firm and ful¬
filling resolution. Musically the most satisfying result is the re¬
statement of the strong first theme. Dramatically the right solution
is a new attack, a carrying forward of the situation. It is significant
that in spite of the advance of the dramatic situation (where the
Count accepts the prohibition on seeing Suzanne but feels he can
still trap the Countess by requiring Suzanne to speak if she is
there—which he, of course, believes she is not), still the shape of
the action is the same as that of lines one and two in the expo¬
sition: a line of brusque demand by the Count, a line of frantic
refusal by the Countess. Dramatic dialogue rarely has this neat
symmetrical form unless, as in the Greek drama, it is shaped on
musical-poetical principles. A glance at the scene as quoted from
Beaumarchais will confirm that though Mozart and Da Ponte
have regularized the shape of the dialogue somewhat they have
neither distorted it nor made it undramatic. This testifies to at least
the possibility of opera as drama.
The second of our “comment” sections begins with measure
eighty-four. The nine measures (84-92) comprise one of the
most musically interesting places in the trio: an exploration of
remote tonal regions leading into a repeat from measure ninety-
three of the thematic material which carried our previous com¬
ment section, measures twenty-eight through thirty-seven. We
should notice that dramatically we make the transition to comment
without any quieting line of explanation such as that which the
149
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
150
Music and Dramatic Structure
151
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
152
Music and Dramatic Structure
153
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
154
Music and Dramatic Structure
155
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
156
Chapter IX
ARISTOTLE
157
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
158
Aristotle
159
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
Plato and common to the thought of the day, in a way that some¬
times signified a quite literal copying of life and, at other times,
expressed a broader idea. Most of the time, the idea of imitation
seems definitely to imply something lifelike, even though liberties
might be taken for artistic purposes.
The idea of imitation could be particularly important in the
exploration of structure, because if the drama literally imitated
the actions of men, our search for the source of structure would
be over; drama would simply take the structure of the events imi¬
tated. Indeed, Aristotle himself implies this solution for one aspect
of structure, “As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imita¬
tion is one [unified] when the object imitated is one” (Poetics 8.
1451a 30-32). The problem is that imitation in itself does not
and cannot supply the all-important clue of what to leave out. But
in this we are getting ahead of ourselves, for before we can mean¬
ingfully discuss structure, we must discuss the ideas of action
and plot.
The last term in the famous “Tragedy is an imitation of an
action,” presents fewer problems than the one preceding it. There
seems to be general agreement that praxis meant a doing, physical
or mental activity, striving.8 There is also general agreement on
the claim that doing was important in Aristotle’s philosophy.
Characters are happy or unhappy, brave or cowardly, as they do
(or behave) ,9 Though Butcher perhaps saw action as more inward
and mental than Aristotle really meant it to be,10 he admits that
it must be shown in some outward and physical way. On the other
hand, it seems doubtful that Aristotle understood actions in Stani¬
slavsky’s sense, or in the sense adapted by Francis Fergusson on
the claim that he was following Aristotle.11 However, actions, or
men in action, are certainly the subject matter of drama. In fact,
this helps to distingiush drama from the other arts. As Susanne
Langer says, drama’s basic abstraction is the act.12 We may note,
though, that the difference is probably more marked in our day
160
Aristotle
161
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
162
Aristotle
163
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
Basic Pattern of Events can contain these and more; it can serve
as explanation for the basic structure of many different kinds of
drama. What is more, it suggests its own derivation. Even before
art takes over we are accustomed to order the events we observe
into patterns; the events of a day, a career, an adventure, a voyage,
etc. Stories enforce this kind of patterning in us. But the ordering
implies an active selection and grouping according to some mental
concept which usually further implies an assumption that the
ordering is “meaningful.” A single complete entity of the magni¬
tude of a drama without any extraneous parts is never found in
raw experience simply waiting to be imitated.
We have considered the Aristotelian conceptions of imitation
and action and in so doing have discussed aspects of structure in
its limiting phase (the concept of the whole). But, besides a be¬
ginning and an end, we have also a middle, and we must now
turn to Aristotle’s suggestions on the inner structure of the play,
that is, we must consider plot.
Aristotle devotes a great deal of space to plot, from Chapter 6
section 9 to Chapter 14 section 9, where he finally says, “Enough
has now been said concerning the structure of the incidents, and
the right kind of plot.” Yet even after this he keeps returning to
plot. It will not be necessary to cover in detail all the material on
plot in these many chapters. Those sections in which Aristotle
deals with the ideal tragic hero, the best manner of recognition,
etc., are shrewd observations on a great mode of drama, but they
are also essentially hints on how to write a good play (more or
less the kind of thing we find today in the standard playwriting
text, although these later authors aspire to well-made plays, not
Greek tragedies). Aside from tips on the kinds of material that
ought to be put in a perfect tragedy, however, we are interested
in how Aristotle sees the abstract problem of arranging incidents.
Let us, as usual, set out the evidence Aristotle gives, then see
what can be made of it.
164
Aristotle
The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul
of a tragedy. {Poetics 6. 1450a 37-38)
For the power of Tragedy ... is felt even apart from repre¬
sentation and actors. {Poetics 6. 1450b 19-20)
This is the impression [to thrill with horror and melt with
pity] we should receive from hearing the story (mythos)
of the Odeipus. {Poetics 14. 1453b 6)
165
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
did not imagine, but, if we are to deal with the specifics of drama,
these vague terms and phrases must be given some concrete
reference.
First we must deal with the idea of structure as plot or story,
what we might call the “soul of the drama” concept, and it will be
well to note right away an objection to this simplification. Else
sums up his observations on mythos as follows:
166
Aristotle
167
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
Butcher: “Anyone who hears the events as they unfold will both
shudder and be moved to pity at the outcome: which is what one
would feel at hearing the plot of the Oedipus”18 Some commenta¬
tors have felt that in this passage Aristotle must have meant
mythos to include a reading of the whole play.19 To this Else
answers:
168
Aristotle
169
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
170
Aristotle
from being sacrificed or that she end up wielding a knife over her
brother?) Of course the Aristotelians have a ready answer for this
last criticism, and we call on Butcher for the standard apology:
“The rule of probability which Aristotle enjoins is not the narrow
vraisemblance .... The rule of ‘probability,’ as also that of ‘ne¬
cessity,’ refers rather to the internal structure of a poem; it is the
inner law which secures the cohesion of the parts.”24
Either you go outside the internal structure of the work of art
to probable or necessary in life or, the other horn of the dilemma,
you end up in ambiguity and circularity. What does it mean to
say that the incidents, or any parts of a work of art, should have a
necessary and logical connection with reference only to the in¬
ternal structure? It can really mean little more than that the parts
should be placed so that they work best, or “What works, works.”
Aristotle himself allows for this answer when he comments on the
popular success Agathon had with several presumably improbable
endings: “This [satisfying] effect is produced when the clever
rogue, like Sisyphus, is outwitted, or the brave villain defeated.
Such an event is probable in Agathon’s sense of the word: ‘it is
probable,’ he says, ‘that many things should happen contrary to
probability’” (Poetics 18. 1456a 21-25).
We are required to say that the incidents must be arranged so
they are necessary or probable to the inner artistic structure,
but then we ask how are we to judge what this necessity or proba¬
bility is if we are denied outside reference. There is no logic, no
necessity, to the drama itself, despite recent formalist attempts
to derive syntactical systems of “formation rules” and “transfor¬
mation rules” from the “ ‘structural’ properties of any medium.”25
Aristotle probably did not mean to leave us in this circular po¬
sition. On a number of occasions he refers to life as a test for the
probable and necessary, particularly in Chapter 9, where he dis¬
cusses poetic and historical truth. Here he says that poetry tends
to express the universal, which means “how a person of a certain
type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of proba-
171
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
172
Aristotle
173
Cliapter X
174
Structure and Thematic Analysis
175
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
176
Structure and Thematic Analysis
In Magic in the Web Heilman expands this idea: “If love is what
Othello is ‘about,’ Othello is not only a play about love but a poem
about love.”9 In the idea of structure just quoted, my particular
objection is to the implication that Othello, taken as play or poem,
could be accurately described as structured by turns upon the
idea of love, because it has been held in the preceding chapters
that a play is basically structured by patterns of events not plays
upon an idea.
In the transubstantiation of Othello from play to poem, Heil¬
man, after substituting a thematic structure for “descriptions of
the action,” calls our attention to the language of the plays, “to the
fact that Othello is written in verse rather than prose.”10 This
“fact” is of central importance to Heilman because he holds that
“a play written in poetic form is simply not the same kind of
literary work as a play written in prose.”11 To spell out Heilman’s
implication here (which he himself does not do): There is one
kind of work, essentially crass, which is prose drama; there is
another kind of work with certain superficial resemblances to
drama, but which is really that higher kind of thing, a poem.
Perhaps the sense of fuzziness and ambiguity in Heilman’s po¬
sition results from his refusal to follow out the implications of his
statements containing a strong preference for the poetic form. He
tries to have his drama and his poetry too, but his desire to make
the poetry rule the drama—separating it in kind from a prose
drama—leads him into such typical confusions as the statement
(to be quoted in context below) which makes the poetry “neither
primary nor wholly secondary.” Essentially Heilman tries to make
177
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
178
Structure and Thematic Analysis
179
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
180
Structure and Thematic Analysis
181
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
182
Structure and Thematic Analysis
183
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
184
Structure and Thematic Analysis
185
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
time, which means that the characters invent the poetry. The poet
is not understood as communicating directly with the audience. If
Shakespeare wanted to communicate his thoughts in this way, to
write, as Heilman calls Lear, “an essay on nature,”28 he would
hardly have set the immense machinery of this long drama in
his way.
This does not entail a naive view which overlooks the hand of
the poet; it merely asks the critic to be specific about what is
created. Of course the poet-playwright creates all the world and
being of Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, but the image he has created
is of characters in action, including verbal action. The interesting
thing about the poet’s creation is that the poet too creates an
image, not a lecture. Cleanth Brooks himself states in an argu¬
ment against the kind of separation of poetry from drama which
Francis Fergusson makes, “The most fragile lyric has at least one
character, that of the implied speaker himself, and it has a ‘plot’—
an arrangement of psychic incidents, with a development, at least
of mood.”29 The real difference between poetry and drama is the
spatial structure of poetic relations as opposed to the temporal
nature—the necessary sequence—of drama. To avoid misunder¬
standing it should be added that the drama is not only generated
spontaneously by the characters. There is a kind of unity to a
play which the one controlling mind of the author must give. Heil¬
man sees an imagistic unity which exists between characters. This
can certainly be concluded to be the work of the poet without
denying that the essential image is of action in time, not of
poetic interrelatedness.
Heilman describes a kind of spatial form in Shakespeare’s plays
which he construes as “poetic” and a basic structural determinant.
It certainly is possible to consider a play spatially as well as tem¬
porally, especially when the play is studied in the text.30 The
problem is that Heilman imputes great poetic and dramatic power
to the spatial or thematic structure he abstracts, in spite of the
fact that often the worst prose melodramas are rich sources for
just such thematic treatment.31
186
Structure and Thematic Analysis
187
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
788
Structure and Thematic Analysis
ment, perhaps the following remark on King Lear will best demon¬
strate the weakness in Heilman’s view of drama (and poetry).
“When there is repeated speculation upon nature, the play is to
that extent an essay upon nature—an essay necessarily broken
up into parts which are apportioned according to, and probably
modified by, dramatic necessity.”35 Though Heilman probably
does not really mean to identify the drama and the essay, still, why
does he repeat this idea in so many places (to use Heilman’s own
criterion that repeated ideas are important to the author)? All
this leaves one with the disconcerting image of Shakespeare tak¬
ing Hooker’s essays and apportioning the sentences as appro¬
priate to the various characters. The approach does not call
to mind what most people perceive to be the strengths of Shake¬
speare’s plays.
189
Chapter XI
190
Form or Formula
form of / Love Lucy is just as good, in its general outlines, as, say,
The Imaginary Invalid.
One suspects that Northrop Frye could easily include a few
typical examples from the I Love Lucy series among his samples
of realistic comedy. He could identify the characters by Greek
names: Lucy would presumably be a female eiron, the neighbor
Fred, a bomolochos. The result of the analysis would differ in no
important way from the analyses of plays by Moliere or Plautus
and Terence. This is not to confute Frye or suggest a possibility he
has not already seen. He speaks of the characters and plot struc¬
tures of ancient comedy (as he says, “less a form than a formula”)
as persisting down to our own day when “the audiences of vaude¬
ville, comic strips, and television programs still laugh at the jokes
that were declared to be outworn at the opening of The Frogs.”2
Such an intriguing overview is concomitant with a basic notion
of a pure literary design based on myth, but, on a certain level of
abstraction, bearing relations to mathematical structure. This is
certainly the call of the wild to a philosophical critic, bringing up
again both the problems of the relevance of gross structural de¬
scriptions and the possibility of pure form in drama and putting to
the test some of our conclusions in Chapters II and VI. In dis¬
cussing these problems one must deal with another theorist, Mrs.
Susanne Langer, less sophisticated in literature but considerably
more sophisticated in philosophy, who has also explored drama in
terms of a highly abstract form that again suggests analogies with
logical and mathematical forms.
I shall undertake to show that in their concern with gross struc¬
tural patterns these theorists look through specific plays to the
myths and life rhythms they want to see behind them. Such a re¬
ductive view fails to provide the kind of detailed structural infor¬
mation needed by a director for the practical purposes of shaping
a production or a critic for the purposes of evaluation. Put very
bluntly: Can we separate form from formula, Lucy from Ange-
lique: at this level? This is not to imply that either Mrs. Langer
191
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
192
Form or Formula
193
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
194
Form or Formula
195
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
ically extends to the other arts in Feeling and Form. Pairing Mrs.
Langer’s theory of comic form with Mr. Frye’s should be particu¬
larly enlightening because, while Mrs. Langer specifically avoids
a number of the traps that Frye willingly steps into, her basic
aesthetic of comedy derives, as does Frye’s, from analogies to
forms outside art, like the rhythm of sentient life and certain
logical forms. Both these critics cast light upon one another here
because both fall into the same difficulty with comedy (and art
in general) of transcending the specific work of art for a “greater
reality” beyond. In the words of Richard Rudner’s criticism of
Mrs. Langer’s aesthetic: “The art work is no longer the aesthetic
object—but simply a sign for an experience which the composer
‘means’ by it.”15
As for Mrs. Langer’s ideas on the form of comedy, she says,
“Drama... always exhibits such form [an image of organic form];
it does so by creating the semblance of a history and composing
its elements into a rhythmic single structure.”16 Unfortunately
Mrs. Langer’s descriptions of the comic rhythm, developed orig¬
inally from a fairly extended treatment of biological survival,
differ somewhat among themselves, but the following seems to be
about the clearest statement. The comic rhythm, she says, “is de¬
veloped by comic action, which is the upset and recovery of the
protagonist’s equilibrium, his contest with the world and his tri¬
umph by wit, luck, personal power, or even humorous, or ironical,
or philosophical acceptance of mischance.”17 It represents the
human being winning out over Fortune by his vital energy, dis¬
played most strikingly in reproduction.
Mrs. Langer offers us a warning, however:
But the fact that the rhythm of comedy is the basic rhythm
of life does not mean that biological existence is the “deeper
meaning” of all its themes, and that to understand the play
is to interpret all the characters as symbols and the story as
a parable, a disguised rite of spring or fertility magic, per¬
formed four hundred and fifty times on Broadway. The stock
characters are probably symbolic both in origin and in ap-
196
Form or Formula
197
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
198
Form or Formula
199
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
This leaves our comic happy ending looking very much like
formula. On the one hand, with Mrs. Langer, it is the final beat
in the triumph of the comic rhythm of biological survival; with
Frye, it is the final crystallization of a new society around the hero
in myth. But in both, as we just noted, the happy ending comes
close to being merely a formal device: it becomes literally formula
in the mathematical sense. At this level the formula of I Love
Lucy looks as good as The Tempest.
Let us step down a moment to look at the problem from another
point of view. To adapt terms from Frye, we shall descend from
the high aesthetic to the low aesthetic of an early twentieth cen¬
tury theoretician whom Mrs. Langer has referred to, Clayton
Hamilton. Clayton Hamilton quite frankly balks at some of
Shakespeare’s endings, happy and otherwise. Fiction, for Hamil¬
ton, must be in some sense true, but the final judge of truth is our
intuition. In any case, Hamilton’s intiution tells him that certain
of Shakespeare’s endings are false. “When Shakespeare tells us,
toward the end of As You Like It, that the wicked Oliver suddenly
changed his nature and won the love of Celia, we know that he is
lying. The scene is not true to the great laws of human life.”25
The problem of the ending in comedy is probably by its very
nature a difficult one, just because comedy does not have the
obvious kind of “built-in” end that tragedy finds in death. In a
sense Clayton Hamilton was right to suspect Shakespeare’s end¬
ing. At least he was trying to make sense of the material immedi¬
ately at hand and not fobbing off difficulties on a myth. Remember
Shaw’s difficulty with the ending of Pygmalion, resolved not in
the theatre, but only in a lengthy essay. Yet certainly one does not
want to remain in this sceptical predicament. There must be ways
of going beyond Hamilton’s “intuition” that still do not lead to
either pure formalism or an abstract myth or “rhythm.” A little
thought suggests some useful analogies. One that comes quickly
to the mind of a theatre person is the opening-night party. The
wedding is another happy ending preserved into our mean age.
200
Form or Formula
201
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
202
Form or Formula
203
Chapter XII
CONCLUSION
204
Conclusion
205
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
206
Appen
207
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
208
The Categories and Hamlet
209
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
210
The Categories and Hamlet
211
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
212
Appendix II
213
No. 13. Susanna, or via sortite!
Terzetto
Count, Countess, and Susanna
(Susanna enters through the door she used on leaving, and halts, on seeing the Count at the
door of the small room.)
Countess
■T7W ”-
SM ■ 1 ■•i -v-o—i——
j jiL n
L/ r ^ LI
Sor - ti - te, co - si vo’! Fer-
p—sj tr tr —~ —^
I " v
m ■
i m <a w « gg ss:r&i r*' l P
l v-l/_ n r* ' ft <5, 1
1
{ " I p
1
§ .fiV
v l £ ^
- -
I '■ r
j_ft k $
ft (Zg •
. i ... ,y i -
Susanna
Susanna
P
p
W5 &
=KS—=»--A.-. . —-
1mb.
} 1 |1 | fi
L
Dun-que par-la-te al-me-no,
/ — p /
-p- *
®
=2*=fi- ji
Susanna
Susanna
sor -
p p p ■ i r ■ r--; ^ i i r g m
te mio, giu - di - zio! con - sor - te mio, giu - di - zio! un
P
i ■f■ J: 7
Con - sor - te mia, giu - di - zio! un
qrJ—j oJmrr—-r-J—-J -i
r ~*~1 -f--ftf*- -f--—
li J i 1
m
A 1.J J i j. £1
m =5bZ
or - di - ne, qui cer - to na - see - ra,.
P
$ J■ ■ j> J^ij i mmtm
or - di - ne, schi-viam per ca - ri - ta, per ca - ri - ta,
Y Pi Y r - tr-ff t^Tf
y j Y —i
x
-i—rf—
3,\-*
-ff if 3i:-i
f~
x
p ipigi iJ jv-ih i j i i
scan - da-lo,ondis - or - di- ne, schi-viam per ca - ri - ta,
?f.-?-# f ir~ g i i ir is
scan - darlo,un dis - or - di-ne, schi-viam per ca - ri - ta,
fii Jgi
/
J- -U- 4hs>-
3EE3E
4 £ p
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
228
NOTES
229
Notes to Pages 3-5
INTRODUCTION
1. A number of investigations in the field of linguistics and drama have
been undertaken by Czech writers. See the bibliography given in A
Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, se¬
lected and trans. Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C.: Washington Lin¬
guistics Club, 1955).
5. Robert Edmond Jones was much impressed by the magic and ritual of
drama. See The Dramatic Imagination (New York: Duell, Sloane &
Pearce, 1941). The mystical and musical reverberations of the stage
are also reflected by Jean-Louis Barrault’s Reflections on the Theatre
(London: Rockliff, 1951).
9. Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1913) con¬
tains most of her material on the drama. For a critical sketch of the
school see Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Myth, Ritual, and Nonsense,”
The Kenyon Review, XI (Summer 1949), 455-475.
10. See Gilbert Murray, “The Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,”
in Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis (Cambridge: The University Press,
1912); and Francis Macdonald Cornford, The Origin of Attic Com¬
edy, ed. Theodore H. Gaster (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961).
230
Notes to Pages 5-8
12. His major work in this field is The Idea of a Theatre (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949).
13. Basic texts on the psychological approach through archetypes are
C. G. Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic
Art,” in Contributions to Analytical Psychology (London: Kegan
Paul, 1928); and Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (New
York: Vintage Books, 1958).
14. Such hints may be found in Franz Boas, Primitive Art (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1927); and Melville J. & Frances S. Her-
skovits, Dahomean Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1958).
15. A. B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1960).
16. In The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947).
17. This common criticism of the school was made recently by John
Holloway in The Story of the Night (Lincoln: University of Ne¬
braska Press, 1961), pp. 1-20.
18. See R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of
Poetry (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1953).
19. (rev. ed.; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953), pp. 1-2,
10-43.
20. See especially Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New
York: Grove Press, 1958); and Brecht on Theatre, ed. John Willett
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1964).
21. Statements by these and other experimenters may most conveniently
be found in the pages of The Drama Review (formerly Tulane Drama
Review). Peter Brook has provided a commentary on some of his
work in The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968).
22. Pirandello is not widely known as a theorist but his revolutionary
plays and such few pieces as the preface to Six Characters in Search
of an Author have perhaps had a more profound effect upon our ideas
of drama than the works of any other theatre man of the century.
23. Most influential in spreading Stanislavsky’s ideas in America have
been My Life in Art (New York: Meridiarr Books, 1956); An Actor
Prepares (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1936); and Building a
Character (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1949).
24. Compare Stanislavsky’s method with Johannes Itten, Design and
Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus (New York: Reinhold, 1964),
pp. 11-12.
231
Notes to Pages 8-14
25. For Fergusson’s experience in “Method” acting classes see his The
Human Image in Dramatic Literature (Garden City: Anchor Books,
1957), pp. 105-111.
26. Of the recent books in English not discussed in this work note should
be taken particularly of: Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New
York: Atheneum, 1964); Allardyce Nicoll, The Theatre and Dramatic
Theory (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962); Ronald Peacock, The
Art of Drama (New York: Macmillan, 1957); J. L. Styan, The Ele¬
ments of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
Alan Reynolds Thompson, The Anatomy of Drama, (2nd ed.; Berke¬
ley: University of California Press, 1966).
27. An early statement of general principles is available in Allardyce
Nicoll, Film and Theatre (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936).
28. Two notable attempts at definition are in the Colloque sur le mot
structure, Paris, 1959, edited by Roger Bastide and published as Sens
et Usages du Terme Structure dans les Sciences Humaines et Sociales
(Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962); and in the special issue on structure
of the Revue Internationale de Philosophic, XIX (1965) which often
refers back to the “colloque.”
29. R. Buckminster Fuller quotes an M.I.T. catalogue as saying “Mathe¬
matics, which most people think of as the science of number, is, in
fact, the science of structure and pattern in general.” In Gyorgy Kepes
ed., Structure in Art and in Science (New York: George Braziller,
1965), p. 68.
30. Poetry and Mathematics (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962).
31. “Form” has been used in many ways, at least one of which overlaps
our understanding of “structure.” It is to avoid these ambiguities, and
particularly the idea “form” allows of the parts and their relationship,
that we use the more restricted term “structure.” See Chapter VI, pp.
92-93 for further discussion of structure in relation to form.
32. For an interesting comparison consider the structure of the “blues.”
A description of their poetic and harmonic patterns seems superficial
until we perceive how these simple structures reflect deep patterns
of experience and return a rich fund of meaning on the individual
lyrics and tunes.
33. See Aspen Magazine, V-VI (1968) for an attempt at a play in this
mode, “Structural Play #3” by Brian O’Doherty.
232
Notes to Pages 14-21
36. See Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), pp.
247-248.
37. For a remarkable analysis of the use of stage space see The Theatre
of the Bauhaus, ed. Walter Gropius (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1961), pp. 91-101.
CHAPTER I
1. See Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1960); and Lewis Sheaffer, O’Neill, Son and Playwright
(Boston: Little Brown, 1968). Sheaffer, who was associated with the
Broadway production, has done much research on the period repre¬
sented in Long Day’s Journey into Night. This book and that of the
Gelbs provide interesting opportunities for comparing actual events
with their transmutations in art.
233
Notes to Pages 21-29
12. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City: Doubleday
and Company, 1961).
13. Eugene Ionesco, Four Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York:
Grove Press, Inc., 1958), p. 9 and p. 14.
CHAPTER II
1. Interesting examples may be found in Elisabeth Woodbridge, The
Drama: Its Law and its Technique (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1898).
6. See Bell’s Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), expecially pp.
15-34.
10. William Barrett has shown that Oriental assumptions about the nature
of experience result in different structures for their art. Irrational Man
(Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1962), pp. 54-55.
234
Notes to Pages 32-44
11. Translated by David Grene in Greek Tragedies, eds. Grene and Latti-
more, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960), I, 164. The
rendering of line 1193 is in question especially as regards the use
of “pattern” rather than, say, “example.” See the notes in Jebb’s
Cambridge text.
CHAPTER III
1. Chester Clayton Long argues a somewhat different basic structure
for this play in The Role of Nemesis in the Structure of Selected
Plays by Eugene O’Neill (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 198-215.
4. Gillo Dorfles, “The Role of Motion in Our Visual Habits and Artistic
Creation,” The Nature and Art of Motion, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New
York: George Braziller, 1965), p. 45.
235
Notes to Pages 46-56
5. John Gassner, Producing the Play (rev. ed.; New York: Holt, Rine¬
hart and Winston, 1953), p. 35.
6. Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1960), p. 407.
7. See W. T. Price, The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic
Principle (New York: W. T. Price, 1908), pp. 282-293.
8. See Sister Miriam Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Time (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962).
9. An interesting extension of this discussion, and one of the rare per¬
ceptive treatments of small structures, may be found in Harold Brooks,
“Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors,” in Kenneth Muir,
Shakespeare: The Comedies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1965), pp. 11-25.
CHAPTER IV
1. Experience and the Creation of Meaning (New York: The Free Press
of Glencoe, 1962), p. 153.
2. For an interesting discussion of the problem of finding basic units for
analysis in the arts, see Z. Czerny, “Contribution a une theorie com-
paree du motif dans les arts,” in Stil-und Formprobleme in der Litera-
tur (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1959), pp. 38-50.
3. Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), p. 94.
4. Feeling and Form (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 306.
5. For Mrs. Langer on abstraction see, most recently, “Abstraction in
Art,” JAAC, XXII (Summer 1964), 379-392. Her systematic treat¬
ment of drama appears in Feeling and Form, Ch. XVII-XIX.
6. This is the suggestion of Francis Fergusson, a modern Aristotelian
whose analysis of the Oedipus provides a good example of this think¬
ing. See The Idea of a Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1949), Ch. I.
7. See the analysis of actions in Robert Lewis, Method or Madness? (New
York: Samuel French, 1958), pp. 29-32.
8. Susanne Langer stresses this point, Feeling and Form, p. 306.
9. See how Alexander Dean treats the composition of stage picture and
movement in Fundamentals of Play Directing (Rev. ed.; New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965).
10. A trio of articles in TDR present views of drama as more dependent
upon literary structures than I take it to be. Joseph Kerman discusses
music and drama and T. E. Lawrenson describes the baroque de-
236
Notes to Pages 56-63
12. See Leonard B. Meyer, “The End of the Renaissance,” Hudson Re¬
view, XVI (Summer 1963), 169-186. Reprinted in Meyer’s Music,
the Arts, and Ideas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).
13. For some of the problems involved see George Dickie, “The Myth of
the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly, I (January
1964), 56-65; and Virgil C. Aldrich, “Back to Aesthetic Experience,”
JAAC, XXIV (Spring 1966), 365-371.
14. Sir Russell Brain, The Nature of Experience (London: Oxford Uni¬
versity Press, 1959), p. 69.
16. Susanne Langer’s essay “The Art Symbol and the Symbol in Art,”
Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), pp. 124—
139, is illuminating on this point which cannot be pursued here. A
summary of the position of semiotic aesthetics, with extensive refer¬
ences to other articles for and against the position, may be found in
Charles Morris and Daniel J. Hamilton, “Aesthetics, Signs, and Icons,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXV (March 1965),
356-364.
237
Notes to Pages 63-78
CHAPTER V
1. Ferdinand Brunetiere, “The Law of the Drama,” trans. Philip M.
Hayden, European Theories of the Drama, ed. Barrett H. Clark (New
York: Crown Publishers, 1947), p. 408.
4. Richard Schechner’s discussion of the agon with time and the distinc¬
tions he draws between “event time” and “set time” throw a further
light upon the special situation of the monologue or piece of business.
See “Approaches to Theory/Criticism,” Tulane Drama Review, X
(Summer 1966), 28-29.
238
Notes to Pages 81-87
8. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1956), p. 15.
11. After watching hundreds of student scenes and auditions I have be¬
come convinced that the rhythm is the most sensitive indicator of the
degree to which the actor is involved in his material. See also Constan¬
tin Stanislavsky, Building a Character, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hap-
good, (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1949), p. 236. Stanislavsky’s
theory of “tempo-rhythm” in movement and speech runs from page
177 to 237 with a too brief summary on pages 234-237.
12. Laurence W. Cor, “Reading a Play,” JAAC, XXI (Spring 1963), 322.
239
Notes to Pages 92-97
CHAPTER VI
1. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1961), p. 2.
2. Morris Weitz in W. E. Kennick, Art and Philosophy (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1964), p. 344.
3. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), p. 30. For a
slightly different presentation of the position see Roger Fry, “Some
Questions in Esthetics,” in Transformations (Freeport, N. Y.: Books
For Libraries Press, 1968).
4. Bell, p. 10.
5. For the problems of pure versus referential music which bear closely
on the issues in this chapter see the purist Eduard Hanslick, The Beau¬
tiful in Music reprinted in W. E. Kennick, Art and Philosophy (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964); and for a sophisticated referentialist
position Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Men¬
tor, 1948), Ch. VIII.
6. A distinction, not necessary to our argument, is often made between
the artist’s materials as physical elements—blue pigment of such and
such a scientifically measurable hue—and these materials as the “pre-
hended” medium—a blue that recedes. See Virgil Aldrich, The Phi¬
losophy of Art (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 40.
7. The interesting cases of performers in certain Happenings who are
merely themselves, like lecturers or musicians, I would still consider
representational in Bell’s context because they are ordinarily appreci¬
ated for what they do or represent not for the physical qualities they
possess. See Michael Kirby, “The New Theatre,” Tulane Drama Re¬
view, X (Winter 1965), 23^13.
8. It is dangerously inviting to illustrate these categories by paintings, in
which the first might be illustrated by a Franz Kline, the second by any
good anecdotal painting, say, Raphael’s School of Athens, the third by
a Mondrian, and the fourth by a good stilllife, say, Chardin or Picasso.
However, the purity of pure form is itself so problematic and the
analogy of the static patterns of painting to the temporal patterns of
drama so incomplete that this effort has very slight value.
9. See The Theatre of the Bauhaus, ed. Walter Gropius, trans. Arthur S.
Wensinger (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961),
insert opposite p. 48.
10. The Theatre of the Bauhaus, pp. 62-64.
11. The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p. 67.
12. The Theatre of the Bauhaus, pp. 88, 91.
240
Notes to Pages 98-107
13. The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p. 62. Long before this work in Weimar
and Dessau, Servandoni experimented with textless visual spectacles
in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century. T. E. Lawrenson,
The French Stage in the XVIIth Century (Manchester: The Man¬
chester University Press, 1957), p. 159. Valuable articles on the
Bauhaus and its theatre are being published in Cahiers Renaud-Bar-
rault. Nos. 46, 52, and 53 contain such material.
14. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon (New York: The Noonday Press,
1958), p. 165. Compare Herbert Read, “Poetry depends, not only on
the sound of words, but even more on their mental reverberations.”
The Nature of Literature (New York: Horizon Press, 1956), p. 45.
15. Some of the interesting possibilities here are set forth in a book in the
Bauhaus tradition The Nature and Art of Motion, ed. Gyorgy Kepes
(New York: George Braziller, 1965).
17. See, for example, W. T. Price, The Technique of Drama (New York:
Brentano’s, 1911), p. 169.
18. Henrik Ibsen, The Collected Works, trans. William Archer (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923) XI, p. 376.
19. Compare Kant’s idea of satisfaction through the final harmony of the
object with the faculties of cognition, Critique of Pure Judgement,
trans. J. H. Bernard (2nd. ed. rev.; London: Macmillan, 1914), pp.
41-42; and the theories of such psychologists as Rudolf Arnheim in
Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1954).
20. Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1960), Ch. XX.
21. Joyce Cary in A Modern Book of Esthetics, ed. Melvin Rader (3rd
ed.; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 105.
241
Notes to Pages 108-120
23. Madeleine Doran holds that the smaller forms received more attention
at this period than the big ones. Endeavors of Art (Madison: The Uni¬
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1964), p. 29.
24. Several nonrepresentational painters have objected to having their
work called “abstract.” Their pure paintings, they say, are more con¬
crete than the representationalist’s abstractions of a house.
25. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Wittenborn,
Schultz, 1948).
CHAPTER VII
1. The argument and demonstration appear in Hans Reichenbach, The
Philosophy of Space and Time, trans. Maria Reichenbach and John
Freund (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), pp. 37-81. See
also W. H. Werkmeister, The Basis and Structure of Knowledge (New
York: Harper & Bros., 1948), p. 80.
2. For a detailed treatment of the Poetics and Aristotle’s use of mythos
see Ch. IX.
242
Notes to Pages 120-128
middle ages when stories interwove with little concern for what mod¬
erns consider “proper” narrative sequence. Studies in Medieval and
Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: The University Press, 1966),
pp. 133-135.
12. The child signifies not only hope, but regeneration—the key to the
“comic rhythm” for Susanne Langer. Feeling and Form (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), pp. 326-331.
CHAPTER VIII
1. Adolphe Appia, Music and the Art of the Theatre (Miami: University
of Miami Press, 1963). Walter Pater, quoted in Jerome Stolnitz
Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (Boston: Houghton Mif¬
flin Co., 1960), p. 142.
2. Eugene Vinaver, Racine et la Poesie Tragique (Paris: Librairie Nizet,
1951), pp. 105-107.
3. Pierre Moreau, Racine L’Homme et L’Oeuvre (Paris: Boivin et Cie,
1934), pp. 171-173.
4. Five Plays of Strindberg, ed. & trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City:
Doubleday and Co., 1960), p. 122.
5. T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1951), p. 43.
6. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: The Noonday Press,
1961), p. 30.
7. Arnold Wesker, quoted in The New York Times, February 12, 1961,
Sec. 2, p. 1.
8. Sir Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music (New York: Meridian
Books, 1956), pp. 229-230.
243
Notes to Pages 129-138
16. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: The New
American Library, 1951), pp. 18-19.
17. “Supplement I,” in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of
Meaning (8th ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., n.d.), pp.
313-315.
19. Cleanth Brooks, “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness,” in
The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947).
23. Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, trans. Willard R. Trask (New
York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1956), p. 216.
26. For an example of a play where the peak of stage action and the climax
244
Notes to Pages 138-158
27. Joseph Kerman, who in turn cites Edward J. Dent, is one of the many
critics who would advance this opinion, Opera as Drama (New York:
Vintage Books, 1959), pp. 99-100.
28. See Leichtentritt, “Forms of the Mozart Opera,” Musical Form, pp.
204-205.
29. Phaedra and Figaro, trans. Robert Lowell and Jacques Barzun (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), p. 129.
30. W. A. Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro, (score for piano and voices) ed.
Natalia Macfarren (London: Novello and Co., Ltd., n.d.), p. 81.
Translated from the Italian by Jackson Barry.
38. Siegmund Levarie, Mozart’s ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ (Chicago: The Uni¬
versity of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 95-100.
CHAPTER IX
1. In order to say how we ditfer or agree, I must indicate what I under¬
stand Aristotle to mean. I have depended on several specialists, par¬
ticularly G. F. Else, the recent date of whose work has allowed him to
consider most of the previous scholarship, and Butcher, whose trans¬
lation and commentary have been so widely used in this field. See
245
Notes to Pages 158-166
4. Butcher, p. 129.
6. Butcher, p. 121.
12. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1953), p. 306.
13. The published version of this play contains alternate endings. Ten¬
nessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (New York: New Directions,
1955).
16. See the intriguing theory of myth by the French anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss in which he treats the Oedipus story as consisting of all
246
Notes to Pages 166—175
17. W. P. Ker, Form and Style in Poetry (London: Macmillan & Co.,
1928), p. 99.
19. Else, p. 408 n. 3. Else places Butcher in the wrong camp here (as favor¬
ing “whole play”) by citing a passage of Butcher that does not relate
to the question at hand.
20. Else, pp. 408-409.
21. Else translates logos as “argument” (of the play), then discusses
“story” and then talks about this outline as plot or plot structure, pp.
503-509.
23. Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1960), pp. 438-439.
24. Butcher, pp. 165-166. In the following pages of his chapter on “Poetic
Truth,” Butcher argues that this “probability” is of a higher order,
representing things as they “ought to be.”
CHAPTER X
1. See especially T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York: Har-
court, Brace & Co., 1932) and Poetry and Drama (Cambridge: Har¬
vard University Press, 1951).
247
Notes to Pages 175-184
5. In Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal &
Hitchcock, 1947). Notable exception to this essay, principally on the
grounds of Brooks’ “incorrect” readings, has been taken by C. J.
Campbell. “Shakespeare and the ‘New’ Critics,” Joseph Quincy Ad¬
ams: Memorial Studies, eds. McManaway, Dawson, and Willoughby
(Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948).
6. Heilman’s notes in This Great Stage and The Magic in the Web (Lex¬
ington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956) supply many citations,
often with comment, to articles and books on the subject. R. S. Crane,
The Language of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: Uni¬
versity of Toronto Press, 1953) supplies more citations in an attack
on the thematic analysts.
248
Notes to Pages 184-194
30. G. Wilson Knight makes a strong plea for the “spacial” view of Shake¬
speare in The Wheel of Fire (London: Oxford University Press,
1930), pp. 3-7.
CHAPTER XI
1. Bella and Samuel Spewack, Boy Meets Girl, in Sixteen Famous Amer¬
ican Plays, ed. Cerf and Cartmell (New York: Garden City Publishing
Co., 1941).
3. Derek Traversi’s attempt to say that, especially in the late plays, “plot
has become simply an extension, an extra vehicle of the poetry,” if it
means anything more than the far from profound observation that
plot and language are parts of a unified whole, finally fails to revise
the common understanding of poetry as verse. Derek A. Traversi, An
Approach to Shakespeare (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1956), p.
290.
4. Frye, p. 341.
5. Frye, p. 341.
6. Frye, p. 342.
7. Frye, p. 136.
8. Frye, p. 139.
9. Frye, p. 171.
249
Notes to Pages 195-207
APPENDIX
1. Space does not allow me to give a full bibliography on Hamlet here.
However, Gordon Ross Smith, A Classified Shakespeare Bibliography,
1936-1958 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1963), gives a good list. In addition, two rather unusual books may
help the reader: Morris Weitz, “Hamlet” and the Philosophy of Liter¬
ary Criticism (Cleveland and New York: Meredian Books, 1966);
and Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, “Hamlet” through the
Ages (London: Rockliff, 1955). The first of these subjects the criti¬
cism and interpretation of this play to a searching philosophical analy¬
sis; the second provides the reader with a sense of how Hamlet has
been physically realized on the stage.
250
Notes to Pages 208-210
3. If, as has been suggested, Laertes’ breaking in on the king was based
on the brash intrusion of Essex upon Elizabeth, we have here a par¬
ticularly interesting example of the way in which a real-life incident
finds its way into art.
251
INDEX
253
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
254
Index
255
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
256
Index
and interests in, 210; improvisational drama of a society, 20. See also As¬
structure, 210-212 sumptions
Happenings, 57, 58, 92, 96, 240 n.7 Intermediate patterns, 40-49; signifi¬
Harrison, Jane Ellen, anthropological cance, 41-42; differentiated from
theories of drama, 4 Basic Pattern of Events, 42-43; use
Heartbreak House (Shaw), mechanical of holidays, 43; waiting as temporal
dialogue in, 72 pattern, 44; expectation and fulfill¬
Heilman, Robert, criticism of Othello ment, 45-47; preparation and fore¬
and King Lear, 174-189; Under¬ shadowing, 47; the trick, 47-48; use
standing Drama, 175; Magic in the of a contest, 48; rhetorical devices,
Web: Action and Language in 48-49; in Hamlet, 209-210
“Othello176, 177-179 passim; Ionesco, Eugene: and identity, 19; use
This Great Stage: Image and Struc¬ of repetition, 23; assumption of
ture in King Lear, 176; views on dra¬ failures of communication, 81
matic structure, 176-177; “More Irony in Greek tragedy, 21-22
Fair than Black: Light and Dark in
‘Othello,’” 176, 177-181 passim-, on Jenkins, Iredell: on audience response,
Othello as a poem, 177-179; on 27; on the aesthetic experience, 67
language of Othello, 177-184; on Jones, Robert Edmond, on magic and
Shakespeare’s imagery, 180-181, ritual in theatre, 230 n.5
183-185; on poetic play of thought, Jung, Carl Gustav: on ritual origins
185-188; spatial form in Shake¬ of drama, 5; archetype theory, 36-
speare, 186,188 38
Henry 1V-1, use of tricks in, 47-48
Herskovits, Melville J. and Frances S., Ker, W. P., on prose argument in The
criticism of Jung’s theory, 37-38 Ancient Mariner, 167
Human experience. See Experience Kerman, Joseph, on character of Figa¬
ro, 141; on Mozart’s use of ensemble
Ibsen, Henrik, use of visual form, 102 music, 142
Identity, assumption of, 19 King Lear, Heilman’s criticism of, 175,
/ Love Lucy, 190-191, 192, 202-203 176, 182, 183, 186, 189
Image of man’s interaction in time,
drama as, 10 Langer, Susanne: drama theories, 4,
Image of reality, concept of art as, 58- 190-203; on act and actions, 51, 160;
60 on relation of the act to past and
Imagery, contrasts in, 100 future, 63-64; “virtual memory,”
Images: of temporal experience, 44; 124; on comic structure, 190-203;
objects or events as, 58-59; method Philosophy in a New Key, 195-196;
of composition, 61-68 theory of music and art, 195-198
Improvisational structure; nature of Laplace, mechanistic theory, 23
time, 70-71; dialogues, 71-72; dra¬ Leave It to Beaver, 190
matic interplay, 71-72; monologues, Levarie, Siegmund, analysis of Mar¬
72-76; pressure of time, 73-77; re¬ riage of Figaro, 147, 153
lationships in time between charac¬ Leichtentritt, Hugo, analysis of primi¬
ters, 77-80; of Shakespeare, 80-81, tive music, 131
210-212; lack of sensitivity of char¬ Levi-Strauss, Claude: and French
acters, 81; beats, 82-86; act and structuralism, 14; on Oedipus story,
scene division, 86-90; in Hamlet, 246 n.16
210-212 Lewis, C. S., on polyphonic technique
Inge, William; use of holiday as struc¬ of story telling, 242 n.ll
tural device, 43; use of expectation Life as art, 57
and fulfillment, 45-46 Literary critics, views on dramatic
Interests: definition, 20; effect on structure, 3-4, 6
257
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
258
Index
259
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
260
Index
261