Text c The Basic Elements of Drama

The basic elements of drama are plot, character, point of view, setting, language, tone, symbolism, and theme, or meaning. Poetic drama, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, adds poetic elements such as meter and rhyme. All these elements have remained relatively constant throughout the history of drama.

Plot, action, and conflict

Plot in drama is an ordered chain of physical, emotional, or intellectual events that ties the action together. It is a planned sequence of interrelated actions that begins in a state of imbalance, grows out of conflict, reaches a peak of complication, and resolves into some new situation. Some plays have double plots – two different but related lines of action going on at the same time. Other plays offer a main plot, together with a subplot that comments, either directly or indirectly, on the main plot.

The mainspring of plot in a play is conflict, which can be physical, psychological, social, or all three. It can involve a character’s struggle against another person, the environment, or against himself or herself. Conflict in drama can be more explicit than in prose fiction because we actually see the clash of wills and characters on stage or on the page.

A classic full-length play, sometimes called a regular play (i. e. conforming to rule), has a five-stage plot structure – exposition, complication, crisis or climax, catastrophe, and resolution. The German theater critic Gustav Freytag (1816 - 1895) compares this pattern to a pyramid, in which the rising action (exposition and complication) leads up to the point of crisis or climax and is followed by the falling action (the catastrophe and resolution or dénouement).

In the first of these stages, the exposition, the audience receives essential background information; we are introduced to the characters, the situations and the conflict.

In the second stage, the complication, the conflict grows heated and the plot becomes more involved. As the complication develops, the situation becomes more and more tightly knotted, leading to the most excruciating part of the play – the crisis or the climax which is the turning point or high point. In this third stage, the hero or the heroine faces an agonizing decision and almost simultaneously chooses a course of action that determines the outcome.

The pyramid begins its downward slope in stage four, the catastrophe (“an overturning”). In the catastrophe (not to be confused with our modern use of the term to mean “disaster”), all the pieces and strands of the plot fall into place. It is often caused by the discovery of certain information or events that have been unknown to most of the characters up to that instant. During the final stage, the resolution or dénouement, conflicts are resolved, lives are straightened out or ended, loose ends are tied up, and the play ends.

Since the days of Shakespeare, English dramatists have generally been more concerned with dramatic effect than with dramatic form. As a result, many plays in English do not perfectly follow the regular structure outlined here. The pattern is rather an abstract model, which individual dramatists vary at will. You should therefore be prepared for plays that offer little exposition, have no resolution, compress the crisis-climax-catastrophe-resolution into a short space, or modify the formal pattern in some other significant way.