Drama Overview

Sophocles (c. 496–406 BC) of Athens is one of the three great masters of Greek tragedy, beside Aeschylus and Euripides. He wrote more than a hundred plays, and Oedipus Rex, first staged about 429 BC, is his finest. Aristotle in the Poetics holds it up as the perfect tragedy for its tight plot, its recognition and its reversal. It is also called King Oedipus or Oedipus Tyrannus, and it stands at the head of his Theban plays.

A plague grips Thebes, and the oracle declares that the murderer of the old king Laius must be driven out. Oedipus, the present king who once defeated the Sphinx, vows to find him. The blind prophet Teiresias is forced to name Oedipus himself; Oedipus suspects a plot with Creon. Jocasta mocks prophecy, saying Laius died at the hands of strangers where three roads meet. But a messenger from Corinth and the old shepherd drag out the whole truth: Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta — the murderer he hunts, and the husband of his own mother. Jocasta hangs herself; Oedipus blinds himself with her golden brooches.

The play turns on fate against free will, and on hamartia — the proud error of a great man. Oedipus' intelligence becomes hubris, and his hot temper at the Teiresias scene is his tragic flaw. Sophocles builds the whole drama on dramatic irony, for the audience knows the truth that Oedipus cannot see. Recognition (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia) strike together, and pity and fear end in catharsis. Blindness versus sight is the great symbol: the blind prophet sees, the seeing king is blind.

This play supplies the most repeated NU questions: the role and function of the Chorus, Oedipus as a tragic hero, the play as a classical tragedy, dramatic irony, and fate versus character. Must-use terms: hamartia, hubris, catharsis, recognition, reversal, dramatic irony. A famous line to remember: "You are the murderer of the king whose murderer you seek."

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote As You Like It about 1599–1600, in his happiest comic period. He took the story from Thomas Lodge's pastoral romance Rosalynde (1590) and set it in the Green World of the Forest of Arden, following the pastoral tradition in which people flee from a wicked court to the woods and learn wisdom from simple life. The play was printed in the First Folio of 1623.

The old Duke has been banished by his brother Duke Frederick, and Rosalind, the Duke's daughter, is driven out too; she dresses as a young man called Ganymede and enters Arden with Celia, disguised as Aliena. Orlando, wronged by his brother Oliver, also flees to the forest and hangs love poems on the trees. As Ganymede, Rosalind teaches Orlando how to love, cures Silvius and Phoebe of their follies, and finally drops her disguise: four marriages close the play, Jaques gives its famous melancholy speech, and Frederick, converted by a hermit, restores the dukedom.

Love appears in many varieties — romantic (Rosalind and Orlando), hopeless (Silvius), scornful (Phoebe), comic (Touchstone and Audrey) and faithful (Celia and Oliver). Disguise and gender play run through the plot: a boy actor plays a girl who plays a boy. Nature is set against the court — Arden heals and frees, though Shakespeare keeps its "winter winds" real. Wit and humour live in Touchstone's foolery, Jaques' satire and Rosalind's teasing, and "All the world's a stage" is the play's most quoted speech.

Standard NU questions: Shakespeare's use of disguise, Rosalind as one of his most brilliant women characters, the romantic elements, wit and humour, his treatment of love, and the play as a romantic comedy. Learn the seven ages of man speech, a line from Orlando's tree poems, and the Ganymede love-test trick as your ready evidence.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the Irish dramatist, critic and Nobel laureate, wrote Arms and the Man in 1894; it was staged the same year and collected in Plays Pleasant (1898). The title laughs at Virgil's war-song "Arms and the man I sing". Shaw wrote plays of ideas: here he strips romantic glory off war and love and replaces it with common sense, arithmetic and honesty.

The Petkoff family of Bulgaria is drunk on heroic news from the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885. Raina dreams of the "higher love" of her fiancé Sergius, whose cavalry charge won the battle. At midnight a ragged Swiss officer, Bluntschli, climbs into her balcony with pistol and chocolate creams — his cartridges are all eaten, for he carries food instead of ammunition. Raina hides him and lends her father's old coat. Three months later, after the war, Bluntschli returns to give the coat back, exposes everybody's romantic posing — Sergius flirts with the maid Louka, Raina's hero-worship was vanity — and shows that a professional soldier's realism beats a romantic hero's dreams. He inherits a great hotel business and wins Raina.

The play is a satire on foolish ideals about war and love: the famous cavalry charge was a stupid blunder, Sergius' higher love is theatre, and Raina's picture of a soldier — pistols and glory — is answered by chocolates and a raincoat. Shaw's realism makes war a trade and soldiering arithmetic. Class feeling lives in the Louka–Nicola thread, and comedy of manners lives in Catherine's pretensions. Farce, irony and epigram keep the ideas entertaining, and the chocolate-cream soldier becomes the anti-hero of modern drama.

Standard NU questions: the first meeting scene between Raina and Bluntschli, Bluntschli's character, the play as a problem play, anti-romantic comedy, satire on foolish ideals about love and war, Shaw's use of Bluntschli to deromanticize war, Raina versus Louka, and Bluntschli versus Sergius. Remember the coat-pocket episode, the chocolate creams, the cavalry-charge joke and Shaw's epigrammatic style.

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) was the leading dramatist of the Irish Literary Revival and of the Abbey Theatre, which W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory founded. Living among the fisher-folk of the Aran Islands gave him both his language — the poetic English of Irish speech — and his stories. Riders to the Sea, a one-act tragedy first staged in 1904, is often called the finest short tragedy of modern times.

The sea has taken Maurya's husband and five sons. One dark day Nora and Cathleen identify clothes from a drowned corpse far away: it is Michael, the sixth son. Yet Bartley, the last son, must ride to Galway fair with his grey pony. Maurya, shaken by a vision of Michael riding behind Bartley on the grey pony, fails to give him the blessing — the bread falls from her hand. That evening the neighbours bring Bartley's body, knocked into the sea by the grey pony. Old Maurya, who has nothing left to fear, sprinkles holy water on him and accepts: "No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied." Her final dignity defeats the sea itself.

Fate and death rule the play: the sea is the unseen antagonist, and every omen — the rotten boards, the vision on the white-board road, the dropped bread — points to doom. Maurya becomes a figure of eternal motherhood and human helplessness; her acceptance gives the tragedy a strange peace instead of a scream of revolt. The play keeps the classical unities — one act, one day, one room — and the island girls and women work like a Greek chorus. Synge's prose is spare, dialect-flavoured and deeply poetic.

Standard NU questions: the play as a modern tragedy with a classical setting, the use of nature and the role of the sea, how destiny works in the play, the life of the islanders, Maurya's character, and "Maurya stands for eternal motherhood". Quote the horse-vision and "No man at all can be living forever"; compare Maurya with Jocasta, or the sea with Fate, when a short comparison strengthens the answer.

Wole Soyinka (born 1934) of Nigeria is Africa's greatest living playwright and won the Nobel Prize in 1986, the first African to receive it. The Lion and the Jewel, published and staged in 1959, is his best-known early comedy. It builds theatre out of Yoruba village life — dance, mime, drumming and festival — and became a classic of modern African drama.

In Morning, Sidi, the village belle of Ilujinle, sees her photographs printed in a Lagos magazine and swells with pride; the schoolteacher Lakunle offers to marry her without bride-price, quoting his modern books, and she refuses. In Noon, the old Bale Baroka, the Lion of Ilujinle, sends his head wife Sadiku to woo Sidi for him; when word spreads that Baroka has become impotent, Sadiku and the women dance their triumph over man's power. In Night, Sidi visits the Lion to mock him and falls into his trap: the "last hunt" of the old lion succeeds, and Sidi, no longer a maiden, marries Baroka with full bride-price. Lakunle would still marry her now, but Sidi only laughs and runs to Baroka's arms.

The duel is tradition against modernity: Baroka knows every trick of custom — and even stops the railway from entering his town to protect his tax power — while Lakunle apes the white man's manners and understands neither bride-price nor the village. Gender and power meet in Sadiku's hidden strength and Baroka's cunning; Sidi's vanity and her fall show the price of the jewel's beauty. Soyinka's stagecraft — the dance of the lost traveller, mime, songs, the trap as symbol — blends European dramatic form with Yoruba festival theatre.

Standard NU questions: the play's victory of traditional values over western ones, the correctness of the title, Lakunle's character, the major themes, Sidi's decision to marry Baroka, how women are presented, and the picture of African society. Remember the Morning–Noon–Night structure, the impotence trick, the bride-price debate and the railway scene as your readiest evidence.