Drama and Imitation

Drama and the Imitative Faculty

• Drama is based on the fundamental human faculty of imitation, which is essential for human children to learn and perform various functions.
• The imitative faculty makes humans natural actors, and children often play roles like doctors, kings, and queens.
• The first drama was not play, but a serious activity performed by grown men, expressing the religious instinct.

Sympathetic Magic and Fertility Myths

• Sympathetic magic is a type of magic that believes whatever happens to an image must also happen to the person.
• Primitive societies believed that the god of life died in winter and could be brought back to life through sympathetic magic.
• In magical ceremonies, members of the community would pretend to be the life-god and death-god, and the life-god would miraculously rise again after being killed.
• This type of magic is based on the belief that what happens in representation must happen in fact, ensuring the earth's fertility and growth.

Greek Drama

• Greek drama had reached a more sophisticated stage, dealing with the moral relation between gods and men, with an instructive moral purpose.
• Greek tragic dramatists wrote religious dramas, usually taking stories from well-known myths.
• A tragedy deals with the fall of a man from power, brought about by a flaw in his character or a specific sin.
• King Oedipus is an example of a tragic hero, whose fall was brought about by sins he committed unknowingly.

Elizabethan Drama (Marlowe and Shakespeare)

• The Elizabethan age was the age of drama.
• Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, written in 1588, is the most famous drama from the Elizabethan era not written by William Shakespeare.
• Greek tragedy differs from Shakespearean tragedy in that the Greek heroes have no free will, while Shakespearean heroes have the power of choice and free will.