Drama
A comprehensive explanation of drama as a literary form, including its types, characteristics, and examples from classical and modern literature.
drama:
The form of composition designed for performance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated actions, and utter the written dialogue. (The common alternative name for a dramatic composition is a play.) In poetic drama the dialogue is written in verse, which in English is usually blank verse and in French is the twelve-syllable line called an alexandrine. Almost all the heroic dramas of the English Restoration Period, however, were written in heroic couplets (iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs). A closet drama is written in dramatic form, with dialogue, indicated settings, and stage directions, but is intended by the author to be read rather than to be performed; examples are Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), Byron’s Manfred (1817), Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904–08).