ORIGINS OF DRAMA

The origin of drama in Western culture is rooted in the Greek theatre. The playwrights of ancient Greece created dramatic structure. Its philosophers, principally Aristotle in the Poetics, defined the theories of tragedy and comedy concepts that hold true to the present day. Its architects created amphitheaters. The Romans continued the theatrical tradition by writing and performing plays. The remains of their amphitheaters as well as their viaducts exist to this day in places far from Rome in what were their colonial outposts in Europe.

Although performance, singing, juggling, reciting poetry, and storytelling never ceased during the centuries, there is little evidence of theatrical culture after the Romans until Medieval morality plays and the miracle of Elizabethan theatre in six-teenth-century England. In this extraordinary ferment of poetry, of rediscovery of the classical literature of Greece and Rome, and of reinvention of the theatrical stage, the genius of Shakespeare flowered and endowed us with 37 plays consisting of comedies, histories, and tragedies. Ever since, English-speaking culture has continued to produce playwrights, plays, and players.

If you were alive at the beginning of the twentieth century and somehow got involved with the new medium of movies and wanted to create dramatic films, you would have naturally drawn on the theatrical tradition that you knew. Plays and photoplays, as they were initially called, had certain things in common that made them work. To have drama you have to have conflict.

CONFLICT

Conflict is the basis for all dramatic plots. Conflict...