Examine the history of drama, learn where theater began, and discover famous drama and theater through the ages. Understand more about drama's evolution through time.
Updated: 11/21/2023
History of Drama | Genre, Origin & Time Periods
Table of Contents
ShowTable of Contents
ShowAt its most basic level, theater is an enactment, or re-enactment, of stories and events, typically dictated by a dramatic script or what we commonly call a "play". While the script, what we consider drama or dramatic literature, is important, theater is also a mix of many elements that add to the experience of viewing it in real time--lights, sound, costumes, and props. Those dramatic plays exist outside of time, passed down, and performed in multiple iterations throughout the ages, either on paper or in language. There are slight variations, but each is built around an existing frame--the script. At the same time, while drama is always being reinvented, it's important to understand the context of the time period and the culture in which the play came into being, as well as the circumstances of its initial performances. By examining all facets, we gain a deeper understanding of the work, both what it meant to audiences of its time, and what it can mean for contemporary audiences.
To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
Create your account
You must cCreate an account to continue watching
Register to view this lesson
Are you a student or a teacher?
Create Your Account To Continue Watching
As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over 88,000 lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. Plus, get practice tests, quizzes, and personalized coaching to help you succeed.
Get unlimited access to over 88,000 lessons.
Try it now
It only takes a few minutes to setup and you can cancel any time.
Already registered? Log in here for access
BackResources created by teachers for teachers
Over 30,000 video lessons
& teaching resources‐all
in one place.
I would definitely recommend Study.com to my colleagues. It’s like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. I feel like it’s a lifeline.
Jennifer B.
Teacher
Back
Your next lesson will play in
10 seconds
What we know as theater and drama has a long, rich history, beginning even before man put a pen to paper to write things down. Below, you will find a brief history of theater and drama through the ages, highlighting particular movements and trends as theater and drama developed into what it is today.
Primitive Theaters
While early renditions of what we know as theatre and drama are undocumented and subject to speculation, humankind's nature to perform began long before the first official plays were written down by the Greeks. Early plays, like much of Primitive Man's culture, were oral and subject to memorization. Most likely, they began as re-enactments of stories told around a campfire for entertainment, ritual, or teaching purposes. Anthropologists and archaeologists have found evidence of performances in cave paintings, as well as in the behavior observed in more isolated tribes today. Scholars believe these performances were re-enactments of hunting exploits, often involving a human wearing the skin of the animal they successfully hunted. These performances might involve song, dance, or ritual aspects, such as a sacrifice (real or symbolic) or a shaman presiding over the proceedings. The original "play" would be performed by others, sometimes in a ritual of re-creating past events to bless future ones, such as another hunt. These performances and their ritualistic aspects set the precedent for the Ancient Greek theater practices that would follow.
Greek Theaters
 |
For Ancient Greeks, theater was often both a performance for the audience and a ritual in honor of the gods. The Greeks had a vast system of major and minor gods, as well as numerous legends and myths that explained both the known and unknown world. The polytheistic Greeks loved to use theatre and drama as a way of gaining favor with the gods and teaching their stories. Much of Greek drama was based on ritual, including the formation of a chorus, who as group, narrated and commented upon the events being depicted in the play, sometimes incorporating song and dance.
Like the epic poetry of Homer's The Odyssey, these plays were initially word-of-mouth and passed by memorization rather than written down. Thus , various different "scripts" evolved covering similar material and common stories. Later in the Greek Empire, the first dramatists began to write works down, including the famous Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, from whom we get our most well-known works of Greek drama.
During the infamous annual Festival of Dionysus in Greece, drama played a huge role, and playwrights were often pitted against each other to gain the most popularity. There were three main types of Greek drama, which included tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. Tragedies often told the stories of flawed heroes and their misfortune. Comedies, such as the work of Aristophanes, were typically satiric in nature about man's pride and vanity. Satyr plays were shorts performed between the acts of tragedies as a way to lighten the audience's mood and usually involved characters dressed at mythical satyrs (half-human, half animal).
The Middle Ages
While the pagan, polytheistic drama of the Greeks did not sit well with authorities nor audiences deeply aligned with The Christian Church (which controlled much of culture), theater still survived via traveling groups of performers that performed at court and in other settings. Like the Greeks, these groups were sometimes ritualistic and tied to religion, specifically putting on plays that would appeal to Christian audiences. This manifested as mystery plays, depicting stories from the Bible, and miracle plays, telling the stories of the saints. Similarly, morality plays, were used to relate stories in allegorical form that aligned with the church's beliefs. Such plays were sometimes performed alongside ceremonies and religious sermons. As an allegory, they often involved personifications of abstract concepts like Good, Evil, and the Seven Deadly Sins. One of the most famous morality plays , the anonymous Everyman, first written down in the mid 1500's, involved a hero, representing all of mankind, who encounters the character of Death, and learns a lesson about mortal vs. moral concerns in life.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance, often seen as the re-awakening of culture outside the domain of the church, informed much of what we think of as theater today, including the development of the stage as a performance space. Renaissance theaters usually consisted of a raised platform in front of the audience with an arch (or proscenium), side wings and backstage areas. In this time, there was a proliferation of structures built solely for such performances. Rather than existing purely as a religious teaching tool, theater became a way to explore other types of stories, as well as cater to popular audiences of the time.
 |
Different corners of Europe had their own flavor of Renaissance-era drama. Italy was popular for its Commedia Del Arte, consisting of comedic plays involving stock characters and costumes such as the Harlequin and the puppet duo Punch and Pulcinella. Commedia del Arte usually involved a fair amount of improvisation and pantomime. The plays were performed by troupes that traveled widely but did not rely solely on a script. French comedic Renaissance theater was more informed by script; its most popular playwright, Moliere, rose to fame for his witty comic plays. Some of the most famous Renaissance plays were written in England during the 1500-1600s, including the work of playwrights like Christopher Marlowe, known for his tragedies, and Ben Lerner, noted for his comedies. Perhaps the most famous, of course, of all Renaissance playwrights, was William Shakespeare. He not only wrote both comedy and tragedy successfully and prolifically, but he also re-imagined the physical theater space as a round one, which democratized audience placement and offered greater possibilities for what happens on stage.
Romanticism and Realism
In the 18th and 19th century, drama often took its cue from the Romanticism movement, which considered the individual consciousness in the face of nature and society. German authors, such Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who penned the famous Faust, told stories of heroes navigating good and evil. Such plays were often melodramatic, or sentimental, and could include supernatural elements and unrealistic plots. These plays often took their inspiration from novels, which were rising in popularity. Dramatic adaptations of books like Alexander Dumas' The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, were huge successes. While Dumas dramatized his own novels, other playwrights adapted the existing work of others, such as Richard Brinsley Peake's wildly successful adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1823.
A reaction to the melodrama fostered by Romanticism, Realism swiftly followed, and presented a less adventurous, but more restrained, version of drama, depicting more subdued themes and story lines. Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and Russian author Anton Chekhov were famous for their realistic depictions of richly layered characters and subdued, often domestic, scenes. Unlike the plays of the Romantic era, the endings of such plays were more complicated and not always happy.
Modern Theater
In the early 1900's, drama shifted largely toward explorations of ordinary family dynamics and tragedies, most notably in the work of playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams Taking their inspiration from the Realism sparked by Ibsen, the characters in the works of 20th-century drama were well-formed and familiar. The plots of such plays were embedded in American culture and told distinctly American stories-- substance abuse in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, the failed salesmen of Miller's The Death of A Salesman, and the fading southern belle Blanche Dubois in Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
In response to this Realism-driven drama, the mid-20th century and postmodern thought brought The Theater of the Absurd, a movement from ordered narratives toward examinations of both theater as a creative space and the futility of existence itself. Playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene Ionesco dramatically changed what audiences expected on stage. Their work was often abstract and disjointed, with themes examining man's folly.
In the latter half of the 20th century, many playwrights were influenced by one or the other of the above dichotomies. In the Realism camp, audiences appreciated the work of contemporary playwrights like Neil Simon and Sam Shepard. The 60's and 70's brought experimental theatre to the forefront with groups like The Living Theater and theatrical "happenings" of more performance art-geared pieces. Musical theatre, which blended written scripts with music and dance, rose in popularity through the latter half of the century, with creators like Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber achieving great popularity. Identity politics and diversity also informed drama of the latter half of the 20th century. Black playwrights, chronicling the African-American experience in America, had great success, as seen in with Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun and August Wilson's Fences. One of the most popular shows in recent decades is Eve Ensler's feminist-driven The Vagina Monologues.
To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
Create your account
With its long rich history, theater and drama through the ages has had many common threads despite the differing versions we see as it evolved into what we know as theater today. Primitive and Greek theater both emerged from ritual and faith. With clear ties to religion, Medieval morality plays of the next era were allegorical explorations of Church doctrine-related subject matter that carried Biblical teaching to the masses in a different way. The Renaissance brought new strides in dramatic literature as well as formed the structure and conventions what we know of as a theater today, with a new physical indoor space with raised platform and an audience. Melodrama, a hallmark of the 18th/ 19th century Romantic era, very often featured heroic adventures and happy endings. Realism, which followed, often possessed more developed and flawed characters, complicated thematic matter, and unhappy endings. Culminating in Modern Theater, all of these threads have informed plays and drama written today, including the rise of family-driven dramas, Absurdist work, and the late 20th Century rise of musical theater.
To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
Create your account
Video Transcript
Introduction to Theatre
When you're analyzing or interpreting a piece of literature, it's useful to know something about the time period during which the work was written. This information can help you identify patterns, anticipate forms and predict themes. Looking at drama is no different. If you know a little bit about the history of the theatre, you will have a better chance of understanding the context of a play before you even begin reading it.
Primitive Theatre
Since this is a brief history of drama, you're probably subconsciously asking yourself, 'When did people begin acting out plays?' Well, I hate to tell you, but I don't know. Actually, no one knows for sure. What we do know is that all drama is simply an imitation of actions or ideas, so many theories suggest that the first dramatic stories were probably told by primitive tribes who would return from the hunt and reenact the events for the rest.
Over time, it may have become a ritual and the performance might have taken place before the hunt. Like most rituals, the shaman, the religious leader, would have become a sort of religious or spiritual celebration. This could have set the stage for theatre for the next several hundred years.
Greek Theatre
And while we aren't quite sure where or how it all began, we do know that the Greeks embraced theatre as a means to worship their mythical gods. In doing this, they transformed drama from a ritual into sort of a ritual-drama and held festivals in honor of the Greek god of wine and fertility, Dionysus.
These early plays were performed by a group of men and boys called a chorus. The chorus worked as a group to provide commentary on the action of the story. But even with the introduction of individual actors, the chorus still remained in the background, acting as narrators providing insight to the action on stage and the characters' thoughts.
In fact, there were very few people on stage in general, which meant that everyone had to play multiple parts. The drama masks that so many of us associate with theatre were used for exactly this purpose. The smiling comedy mask and the frowning tragedy mask were visual representations of Greek muses and were used to enhance the songs and actions on stage.
With this development of drama, it's no surprise that many famous plays came from this time period. Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides are all well-known playwrights from this time, though it is believed that many of their works were never recovered.
The Middle Ages
Theatre continued to be popular through the fall of the Roman Empire. With the onset of the Middle Ages from 500-1500 A.D., however, the Church had different views of the mythological gods and saw theatre as evil. Most theatre was outlawed, and drama was only performed by traveling groups of actors.
Eventually, though, the Church saw the value of the ritualistic nature of drama, and began to reenact short Bible stories during mass. Mystery plays were stories from the Bible. Miracle plays focused on saints. Over time, these plays transformed into something known as morality plays. These plays promoted a godly life, but they did not teach the Bible stories exclusively. Instead, the morality plays worked as an allegory, which is a literary device where the characters or events represent or symbolize other ideas and concepts.
Morality plays, which featured a hero who must overcome evil, were allegorical in nature. In the case of the morality plays, the hero represented mankind. The other characters served as personifications of many things, including the Seven Deadly Sins, death, virtues and even angels and demons - anything that wanted to take over mankind's soul. In the end, the hero would choose the godly route.
An example of a 15th century English morality play is Everyman. In the play, God sends Death to strike down the sinners who have forgotten him. Death finds the main character, Everyman, and tells him he is to begin his journey from life to death. Everyman asks if he can bring someone with him, and Death agrees. Unfortunately, Everyman cannot persuade any of his friends, who include Fellowship, Beauty, Kindred, Worldly Goods, to go with him on his journey. Finally, Good Deeds says that she will go with him. Together they go into the grave and ascend into heaven. The moral of this story is that good deeds will help every man get into heaven. It is a subtle turn from the straight biblical stories, but it allowed for more secular forms of drama during the Renaissance.
The Renaissance
You might already know the word Renaissance means 'rebirth'. In the case of drama, the Renaissance, which lasted from approximately 1400-1700, was the rebirth of interest in theatre across Europe. In fact, the Renaissance introduced many of the elements we still think of when we imagine a theatre: indoor theatres, an arched stage, a curtain dropped between scenes, more elaborate set design. All of these changes were implemented during the Renaissance. More importantly, however, the purpose of drama transitioned from stories told by the Church to stories made primarily for entertainment for both royalty and commoners.
Usually when we hear the word Renaissance, especially in conjunction with drama, we think of Shakespeare's England. What most people don't know is the Renaissance actually began in Italy, where music, song and dance were implemented into the plays produced in the new indoor theatres. From there, the rebirth of the arts moved to other countries in Europe. The French imitated Italian theatre and boasted the talent of playwright Molière, whose plays poked fun at the people in important positions.
In Spain, they kept some of the religious dramas, but also began performing action-based plays. It wasn't until later that the Renaissance was embraced in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and continued through the reign of King James I and King Charles I. Theatre flourished during this time, producing several great playwrights. These included Christopher Marlowe, who was known for writing tragedies, and Ben Jonson, who was known for writing comedies. Of course, most well known of all was William Shakespeare, who wrote both and is still popular today.
Romanticism and Realism
Theatre remained popular with a few minor changes after the Renaissance and during the Reformation, when women began acting on stage. By the 1800s, however, Romanticism, which began in Germany, began to influence the content of scripts written for the stage. The typical romantic play focused on a hero who was fighting against an unjust society to maintain his rights as a human being. These plays embraced nature and the supernatural.
The most popular of these was the melodrama, a play where the hero always succeeds. There was usually a battle of good and evil, complete with special effects, like train crashes, horse races and earthquakes. It was during the Romantic period that German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote Faust, and French playwright Alexandre Dumas, produced scripts for the novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
With new scientific and psychological discoveries, people began to want more realistic stories that reflected the world around them. This transition into realism was a reaction against the Romantic idealism. In fact, most literature can be characterized as either romantic or realistic. Unlike the melodrama, realistic plays usually did not have a happy ending. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House tells the story of a woman who leaves her husband and children in an effort to find herself. Ibsen argues that a woman could not find herself in modern society, a controversial idea at the time of its production. At first, audiences preferred the melodrama to the more serious nature of realism, but over time, these plays did become popular and have remained popular even today.
Modern Theatre
Eugene O'Neill, who wrote in the first half of the 20th century, was a Nobel laureate and the first American playwright to find success abroad. His realistic play, Long Day's Journey into Night, is somewhat autobiographical, as it explores his family's struggle with addiction and loss.
After World War II, several American playwrights became popular. Arthur Miller, who was once married to Marilyn Monroe, wrote the play, The Crucible, in response to the McCarthy trials of the 1950s. His play, Death of a Salesman, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. Tennessee Williams is another famous American playwright, whose works have a more poetic quality. Williams' The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire are still widely read and performed.
Realistic theatre is extremely popular in spite of some of the attempts to move away from the style. Among these attempts is absurdism. The primarily European Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s sprung from the belief that our existence has no purpose and, as a result, there is little in the world that is logical or rational. In absurdism, the dialogue is illogical and the actions irrational. These plays usually end in silence. Absurdist plays, while still written and produced today, are not part of mainstream theatre.
Minority theatre, a term for plays focused on minority groups and their struggles, began finding success in the 1960s. Lorraine Hansberry was both the first African American and the first African American woman to find success in American theatre. Her play, A Raisin in the Sun, shows the struggles of a multi-generational African American family as they attempt to achieve the American dream.
Minority plays continue to be written. In 1983, August Wilson wrote a series of plays called the Pittsburgh Cycle, 10 plays that explore the African American experience. The most famous of these is Fences, which looks at race relations in the 1950s. Today, modern theatre has become a mix of styles and has expanded with the use of multimedia.
Lesson Summary
As we've seen, theatre has changed quite a bit over time. It started with the ritualistic nature of primitive theatre and continued through the ritual worship of the Greek gods. This ritualistic tendency changed during the Middle Ages, when the Christian Church insisted on morality plays that showed godly heroes overcoming evil. During the Renaissance, there was a rebirth of the arts, including drama, which resulted in more modernized theatres, sets and scripts.
It also gave us the most famous of playwrights, William Shakespeare. After the Renaissance, the Romantic period introduced the melodrama, where the hero always wins. This was followed by the Realism period. Today's modern theatre uses a mix of these styles to entertain live audiences across the world.
Learning Outcome
After finishing this video lesson, students should be able to recognize the changes in drama/theatre starting with telling tales around a primitive fire to the Golden Age of Greece to the Renaissance work of the Bard to the realism of Chekhov and Ibsen to the post-modernist like Williams, Miller and Inge. Throughout these eras, things like modernization, religion, war and the growth of society's maturity in all ages influenced the stage around the world.
To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member.
Create your account
Register to view this lesson
Are you a student or a teacher?
Unlock Your Education
See for yourself why 30 million people use Study.com
Become a Study.com member and start learning now.
Become a MemberAlready a member? Log In
BackResources created by teachers for teachers
Over 30,000 video lessons
& teaching resources‐all
in one place.
I would definitely recommend Study.com to my colleagues. It’s like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. I feel like it’s a lifeline.
Jennifer B.
Teacher
Back
History of Drama | Genre, Origin & Time Periods
Related Study Materials
Explore our library of over 88,000 lessons
Browse by subject