Drama in English: Elizabethan to Contemporary
What it is
This unit traces drama in English from the guild stages of the Middle Ages to the postcolonial theatre of Africa, the Caribbean and India. UGC-NET tests it through attribution (play to playwright, character to play), chronology, movements and their features, and Aristotle's critical vocabulary. The skill is to pin each work to a period, so that one firm anchor date places everything around it.
Core concepts
Medieval drama. Mystery plays staged Bible history in guild-performed cycles on pageant wagons; four English cycles survive: York, Chester, Wakefield (Towneley) and N-Town. The Wakefield Master's Second Shepherds' Play mixes farce with the Nativity. Miracle plays staged saints' lives. Morality plays allegorise the soul's struggle through personified abstractions: Everyman, The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind. Interludes were short secular pieces, such as Heywood's The Four PP. Udall's Ralph Roister Doister is the first regular English comedy, and Gorboduc (Sackville and Norton) the first English tragedy in blank verse.
University Wits and Marlowe. The Wits were Lyly, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nashe and Marlowe, with Kyd usually grouped alongside. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy set the Senecan revenge pattern of ghost, delay, madness and a bloody close. Greene's Groatsworth of Wit mocks Shakespeare as an "upstart Crow". Marlowe made blank verse the voice of tragedy (Jonson's "Marlowe's mighty line") and built it on the overreacher, in Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II.
Shakespeare. The First Folio (1623), compiled by Heminges and Condell, prints 36 plays as comedies, histories and tragedies. A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) fixed the four great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. F.S. Boas named the problem plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida. The late romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, turn on lost children, long time-spans and reconciliation. Character keys: Iago (Othello), Edmund (Lear), Angelo and Isabella (Measure for Measure), Perdita (The Winter's Tale), Prospero and Caliban (The Tempest).
Jacobean drama. Jonson's comedy of humours builds each character on one dominant humour (blood, phlegm, choler, black bile). Every Man in His Humour is the model, and Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair followed. Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi (Bosola, Ferdinand) are the darkest tragedies of blood. Jonson also wrote court masques with Inigo Jones. Parliament closed the theatres in 1642.
Restoration drama. Theatres reopened in 1660, and women now acted. The comedy of manners satirises fashionable society through wit, intrigue and the rake, as in Etherege's The Man of Mode, Wycherley's The Country Wife (Horner) and Congreve's The Way of the World (1700; Mirabell and Millamant). Heroic drama, led by Dryden (The Conquest of Granada), sets love against honour in rhymed couplets, and Buckingham's The Rehearsal parodies it. Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) attacked the stage.
Sentimental versus laughing comedy. Sentimental comedy (Steele's The Conscious Lovers) swapped wit for virtue in distress. Goldsmith answered it in his 1773 essay comparing laughing and sentimental comedy and in She Stoops to Conquer (1773; Tony Lumpkin, Kate Hardcastle). Sheridan wrote The Rivals (Mrs Malaprop) and The School for Scandal (Joseph and Charles Surface, Lady Teazle). Gay's The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera.
The problem play. Ibsen made social realism the serious mode with A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts. Shaw championed him in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and wrote the drama of ideas: Mrs Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, Man and Superman (the Life Force), Major Barbara, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. He won the Nobel Prize in 1925.
Irish Revival and poetic drama. The Abbey Theatre opened in Dublin in 1904. Yeats wrote Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Lady Gregory) and the Noh-influenced At the Hawk's Well. Synge wrote Riders to the Sea (Maurya) and The Playboy of the Western World (Christy Mahon), which caused riots in 1907. O'Casey's Dublin trilogy is The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. Eliot revived verse drama with Murder in the Cathedral (1935, for the Canterbury Festival; Becket and the Four Tempters), then The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party.
Absurd, Angry and American. Martin Esslin coined "Theatre of the Absurd" (1961). Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot in French first (Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky), then Endgame and Krapp's Last Tape, and won the Nobel Prize in 1969. Pinter's "comedy of menace" includes The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter, and The Caretaker followed. Osborne's Look Back in Anger (Royal Court, 1956; Jimmy Porter) launched the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink realism. O'Neill is the only American dramatist awarded the Nobel Prize (1936); his plays include The Hairy Ape, Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day's Journey into Night. Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie (a "memory play") and A Streetcar Named Desire (Blanche, Stanley). Miller wrote Death of a Salesman (Willy Loman) and The Crucible (Salem as an allegory of McCarthyism). Albee wrote The Zoo Story and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Postcolonial and Indian drama. Soyinka, the first African Nobel laureate in literature (1986), wrote The Lion and the Jewel (Baroka, Sidi, Lakunle) and Death and the King's Horseman (Elesin). Walcott (Nobel 1992) wrote Dream on Monkey Mountain and Pantomime. Karnad wrote in Kannada and translated most of his plays himself: Tughlaq, Hayavadana (from the Kathasaritsagara via Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads) and Naga-Mandala. Tendulkar wrote in Marathi: Silence! The Court Is in Session, Ghashiram Kotwal and Sakharam Binder. Mahesh Dattani, writing in English, was the first English-language playwright to win the Sahitya Akademi Award (1998). His plays include Tara, Final Solutions and Dance Like a Man.
Dramatic terms. Aristotle's Poetics defines tragedy as the imitation of a serious action that, through pity and fear, effects catharsis, the purgation of those emotions. Hamartia is the hero's error of judgement, not necessarily a vice. Of the three unities Aristotle requires only action; he notes that tragedy tends to keep within "a single revolution of the sun", and Castelvetro (1570) codified action, time and place. In a soliloquy a character alone speaks thoughts aloud. A masque is a courtly spectacle of verse, music and dance, and Jonson added the grotesque antimasque. A deus ex machina ("god from the machine") is an arbitrary rescue; Aristotle faults it, citing Euripides' Medea.
Worked example
Chronology question. Arrange in order of first performance: (a) Look Back in Anger, (b) The Way of the World, (c) The Duchess of Malfi, (d) She Stoops to Conquer, (e) Murder in the Cathedral, (f) The Playboy of the Western World.
Step 1. Tag each play with its period or anchor year.
| Play | Anchor | Why |
|---|---|---|
| (c) The Duchess of Malfi | Jacobean (1603–25) | Webster, under James I |
| (b) The Way of the World | 1700 | Congreve, late Restoration |
| (d) She Stoops to Conquer | 1773 | Goldsmith's laughing comedy |
| (f) The Playboy of the Western World | 1907 | Abbey Theatre riots |
| (e) Murder in the Cathedral | 1935 | Canterbury Festival |
| (a) Look Back in Anger | 1956 | Royal Court |
Step 2. Sort the anchors from Jacobean through 1700, 1773, 1907 and 1935 to 1956. The order is c, b, d, f, e, a.
Step 3. Check each adjacent pair. Webster's play falls before the 1642 closure, so it precedes everything after 1660. Congreve precedes Goldsmith's reaction against sentimental comedy. Synge's Abbey play precedes Eliot's verse-drama revival, which precedes Osborne. The order c, b, d, f, e, a holds.
Step 4. Eliminate distractors. An option with (f) after (e) confuses the Irish Revival with 1930s verse drama, and one with (b) before (c) puts the Restoration ahead of the Jacobean stage.
Common traps
- "Problem play" has two meanings. It is Boas's label for three dark Shakespearean comedies, and also the Ibsen–Shaw social-issue drama.
- Calling hamartia a moral "tragic flaw". Aristotle means an error of judgement.
- Crediting Aristotle with all three unities. He insists only on action.
- Swapping the comedy of humours (Jonson, one ruling trait) with the comedy of manners (Restoration wit).
- Treating Karnad and Tendulkar as English-language playwrights. Dattani is the one who writes in English.
Speed technique
- Hinge dates split most chronology items: 1642 (theatres closed), 1660 (reopened), 1698 (Collier), 1904 (Abbey), 1956 (Look Back in Anger).
- For a character question, recall the play's central couple or family (Mirabell–Millamant, the Tyrones, the Lomans).
- Movement cues: "one ruling trait" is humours, "wit and intrigue" is manners, "tears and reform" is sentimental, "stasis and repetition" is absurd.
Check yourself
- Which three plays did F.S. Boas group as Shakespeare's problem plays?
Show answer
All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida — dark comedies that resist comic resolution. - Mrs Malaprop appears in which play, by whom?
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The Rivals, by Sheridan — her misused words gave English "malapropism". - Which unity does Aristotle actually require?
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Unity of action — place was added by Renaissance critics such as Castelvetro. - Who coined "Theatre of the Absurd"?
Show answer
Martin Esslin, in his 1961 book of that title. - Hayavadana reworks a tale from which source, and in which language did Karnad write it first?
Show answer
The Kathasaritsagara, via Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads; Kannada — he later translated it into English himself.
Try it: Drama in English: Elizabethan to Contemporary questions
Real questions from the NET English bank on exactly this skill. Pick an answer to see the full solution — the intuition, the worked steps, the faster methods and the traps.
The phrase 'Theatre of the Absurd', used for the plays of Beckett, Ionesco and their contemporaries, was coined by the critic:
Show the answer and worked solution
Answer: option A
Martin Esslin gave the label currency in his 1961 book The Theatre of the Absurd, which grouped Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet and others.
Esslin drew on Camus's idea of the absurd: these plays present a meaningless world through stasis, repetition and the breakdown of language rather than by arguing about it.
So the phrase was coined by Martin Esslin, option A.
Tony Lumpkin, the mischievous stepson of Mr Hardcastle, is a character in:
Show the answer and worked solution
Answer: option C
Tony Lumpkin is Mrs Hardcastle's son by her first marriage; he sends Marlow and Hastings to the Hardcastle house pretending it is an inn, which sets the comedy going.
The play is Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773), a laughing comedy written against the fashion for sentimental comedy.
So Tony Lumpkin belongs to She Stoops to Conquer, option C.
The first English tragedy written in blank verse is:
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Answer: option B
Gorboduc, by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, was performed at the Inner Temple in the early 1560s and is the first English tragedy in blank verse.
It follows the Senecan model of a dynastic tragedy, with a dumb show before each act; Kyd and Marlowe came a generation later.
So the first English blank-verse tragedy is Gorboduc, option B.
Match the Restoration plays in List – I with their authors in List – II and choose the correct answer from the options. List – I (Play) | List – II (Author) --- | --- (a) The Way of the World | (i) George Etherege (b) The Country Wife | (ii) John Dryden (c) The Man of Mode | (iii) William Congreve (d) The Conquest of Granada | (iv) William Wycherley
Show the answer and worked solution
Answer: option B
Congreve wrote The Way of the World (1700), with Mirabell and Millamant (a – iii); Wycherley wrote The Country Wife, whose rake is Horner (b – iv).
Etherege wrote The Man of Mode, whose hero is Dorimant (c – i); Dryden wrote the heroic play The Conquest of Granada in rhymed couplets (d – ii).
So matching List I, from "The Way of the World…", gives a – iii, b – iv, c – i, d – ii, option B.
Match the characters in List – I with the plays in which they appear in List – II and choose the correct answer from the options. List – I (Character) | List – II (Play) --- | --- (a) Jimmy Porter | (i) A Streetcar Named Desire (b) Willy Loman | (ii) Look Back in Anger (c) Christy Mahon | (iii) The Playboy of the Western World (d) Blanche DuBois | (iv) Death of a Salesman
Show the answer and worked solution
Answer: option A
Jimmy Porter is the angry young hero of Osborne's Look Back in Anger (a – ii); Willy Loman is Miller's travelling salesman in Death of a Salesman (b – iv).
Christy Mahon is the young man who boasts of killing his father in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (c – iii); Blanche DuBois is the fragile heroine of Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (d – i).
So matching List I, from "Jimmy Porter", gives a – ii, b – iv, c – iii, d – i, option A.
Answer above — every one shows its working.