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For a meaning of this word in sociology, see dramaturgy (sociology).

Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Some dramatists combine writing and dramaturgy when creating a drama. Others work with a specialist, called a dramaturge, to adapt a work to the stage.

Dramaturgy can also be defined, more broadly, as shaping a story or like elements into a form that can be acted. Dramaturgy gives the work or the performance a structure. More than actual writing, dramaturg's work can often be defined as designing.

History of dramaturgy

In western canon the seminal work is Poetics by Aristotle (written around 350 BC). In this work Aristotle observes tragedy and comedy. He draws his conclusions by observing the Greek writers of his own time. Tragedy is his main concern, and he considers Oedipus Rex as the quintessential dramatic work.

Aristotle regards drama as a subsection of poetry, but he does analyze also the relations between character and action, speech, plot and the story. He gives examples of good plots and examines the reactions the plays awake in the audience. Many of his "rules" are often associated with "aristotelian drama", where deus ex machina is a weakness and where the action is structured economically. Many key concepts of drama, such as anagnorisis and katharsis, are discussed in Poetica. Lately Aristotle has been applied in numerous tv- and filmwriting guides, and the courses of "basic dramaturgy" usually rely heavily on Aristotle's thoughts.

These classical notions of drama have been kept alive and even reenvigorated in the neoclassical classical unities. But an interesting development in dramaturgy comes at around the same time as neclassicism, over in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan drama, and most particularly that of William Shakespeare, was very popular but not universally recognized as a dramaturgical advance till some time later.

Shakespearean dramaturgy often stayed within the classical boundaries (Shakespeare renarrated his Histories to fit the tragic form), but also sometimes broke the boundaries (as Shakespeare's Romances were not exactly comedies), but at the same time contained important innovations, innovations that depend on an understanding of the audience and Elizabethan society. Shakespeare's plays were all written on three levels: broad and vulgar entertainment to appeal to the working class "groundlings"; the twists and turns of good plot to entertain the bourgeois viewer; and political and moral allegorical elements to entertain and reinforce the noble audience, who in most cases could be expected to already be familiar with the recycled plots.

Shakespeare incorporated these elements deeply, and each segment of the audience relied on the presence of the others. His plays include characters from each social class who speak words invested with double meanings to make the more daring ideas acceptable. The nobles wanted the comfort of a moral message that reinforced their position, while the groundlings want constant action or humor, or at least a working class person on stage to look at. The bourgeois want a good story, and then were not above sharing a dirty joke with a worker, but if they were to laugh at one in front of the nobles, it would have to be couched as a pun. The groundlings didn't so much like puns, but if it inadvertantly put a dirty joke into the mouth of a noble, well that was well worth sticking around for. From where the nobles sat, farthest from the stage, a male actor dressed as a woman looked the part. And those nobles looked down on the groudlings, who sat close to the stage highly entertained by now gaudy makeup of a princess obviously played by actor in drag, speaking filthy jokes.

The complexity of Shakespeare's dramaturgy relied on the structure and mores of Elizabethan society, and this contrasts it with contemporary continental drama. Not to make too much of this, but to state it in a simple form: if the king is willing to laugh at a dirty joke, the literature that emerges takes a more decadent form. The very tight and complex dramaturgical constructions of Shakespeare were hardly duplicated by other Elizabethans either, and nor have they been duplicated since, but comparative similarities are found today. The most successful movies today must work on more than one dramaturgical level to generate large audiences. Disney movies, for example, are carefully constructed to appeal to different age groupings.

The movie "The Matrix" pays some respect to classical ideas of heroism, and also contains plenty of action for the groundlings, a tight clever plot for the average viewer, and deep philosophical imponderables for the intellectual. Consider also the similarity of nobles who had seen the Shakespeare's story lines before, with intellectuals who will watch The Matrix over and over to analyze it; and of groundlings who will rewatch The Matrix (or Airplane) many times just for the action and the humor; and finally, the views of the bourgeoisie who seek a good story and would have deeply resented a Romeo and Juliet "spoiler" with all the vigor that the bourgeois do today when a spoiler ruins the drama of The Matrix for them, or at least the layer of The Matrix directed at them.

In modern times, latter drama, especially absurdism and several avant-garde movements, have tried to break away from the aristotelian perspective. Aristotle's teachings have often been oversimplified, but it is fair to say that Poetica is the first western work on drama theory. It is also one of the few "academic" works that many artist find still useful. Many directors and writers have since written about their own dramaturgical thinking, Grotowski and David Mamet among others, but Aristotle observes drama wholly from a scientist's viewpoint.

See also symbolic interactionism, dramaturgical perspective.

External links

• Dramaturgy Northwest
• Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas

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