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Verse drama is anydrama written significantly inverse (that is: with line endings) to be performed by an actor before an audience. Although verse drama does not need to beprimarily in verse to be considered verse drama, significant portions of the play should be in verse to qualify.[1]
For a very long period, verse drama was the dominant form of drama inEurope (and was also important in non-European cultures).Greek tragedy andRacine's plays are written in verse, as is almost all ofWilliam Shakespeare's,Ben Jonson's andJohn Fletcher's drama, and other works likeGoethe'sFaust andHenrik Ibsen's early plays. In most of Europe, verse drama has remained a prominent art form, while at least popularly, it has been tied almost exclusively to Shakespeare in the English tradition.[2] In the English language, verse has continued.
In the new millennium, there has been a resurgence in interest in the form of verse drama. Some of them came in blank verse or iambic pentameter and endeavour to be in conversation with Shakespeare's writing styles.King Charles III byMike Bartlett, written in iambic pentameter, played on the West End and Broadway, as well as being filmed with the original cast for the BBC. Likewise,La Bete byDavid Hirson, which endeavours to recreateMoliere's farces in rhyming couplets, enjoyed several prominent productions on both sides of the Atlantic.David Ives, known best for his short, absurdist work, has turned to "transladaptation" (his word) in his later years: translating and updating French farces, such asThe School for Lies andThe Metromaniacs, both of which premiered in New York City. With the renewed interest in verse drama, theatre companies are looking for "new Shakespeare" plays to produce. In 2017, theAmerican Shakespeare Center foundedShakespeare's New Contemporaries (SNC), which solicits new plays in conversation with Shakespeare's canon. This was partially in response to theOregon Shakespeare Festival commissioning "modern English" versions of Shakespeare plays. SNC has been on hold since the start of theCOVID-19 pandemic.
However, the twenty-first century also saw theatre practitioners using verse and hybrid forms in a much wider selection of dramatic texts and theatrical performances and forms than those inspired by Shakespeare. A transnational researcher, Kasia Lech, showed that contemporary practices reach for verse to test the boundaries of verse drama and its traditions in Western theatre, including English-language theatre but also Polish, Spanish, and Russian. Lech argues that verse is particularly relevant for contemporary theatre practice because the dialogical relationship between its rhythmic and lexical levels speaks to the globalized world's pluralistic nature.[3] Lech discusses how artists such as PolishRadosław Rychcik and Spanish-BritishTeatro Inverso use verse inmultilingual contexts "as a performative tool to engage with and reflect on interlingual processes as a socio-political force and as a platform for dramaturgies of foreignness." NigerianInua Ellams explores his identity that escapes geographical, national, and temporal boundaries. RussianOlga Shilyaeva in her 201828 dney: Tragediya menstrualnogo tsikla (28 Days: The tragedy of a menstrual cycle) uses verse to talk about experience ofmenstruation. IrishStefanie Preissner in herOur Father (2011) andSolpadeine Is My Boyfriend (2012) plays with autobiography and her multiple identities "as the character she performs, as the performer, the writer, and a voice of a young generation of Ireland facing the drastic political, social, and personal changes and desperately looking for predictability."[4][5]
Dramatic verse occurs in a dramatic work, such as aplay, composed in poetic form. The tradition of dramatic verse extends at least as far back asancient Greece.
TheEnglish Renaissance saw the height of dramatic verse in the English-speaking world, with playwrights includingBen Jonson,Christopher Marlowe andWilliam Shakespeare developing new techniques, both for dramatic structure and poetic form. Though a few plays, for exampleA Midsummer Night's Dream, feature extended passages of rhymed verse, the majority of dramatic verse is composed asblank verse; there are also passages of prose.
Dramatic verse began to decline in popularity in the nineteenth century, when the prosaic and conversational styles of playwrights such asHenrik Ibsen became more prevalent, and were adapted in English byGeorge Bernard Shaw. Verse drama did have a role in the development ofIrish theatre.
An important trend from around 1800 was thecloset drama: a verse drama intended to be read from the page, rather than performed.Byron andShelley, as well as a host of lesser figures, devoted much time to the closet drama, in a signal that the verse tragedy was already in a state of obsolescence. That is, while poets of the eighteenth century could write so-so poetic dramas, the public taste for new examples was already moving away by the start of the nineteenth century, and there was little commercial appeal in staging them.
Instead,opera would take up verse drama, as something to be sung: it is still the case that a verselibretto can be successful. Verse drama as such, however, in becoming closet drama, became simply a longer poetic form, without the connection to practical theatre and performance.
According toRobertson Davies inA Voice From the Attic, closet drama is "Dreariest of literature, most second hand and fusty of experience!" But indeed a great deal of it was written inVictorian times, and afterwards, to the extent that it became a more popular long form at least than the fadedepic. Prolific in the form were, for example,Michael Field andGordon Bottomley.
Dramatic poetry is any poetry that uses the discourse of the characters involved to tell a story or portray a situation.
The major types of dramatic poetry are those already discussed, to be found in plays written for the theatre, andlibretti. There are further dramatic verse forms: these includedramatic monologues, such as those written byRobert Browning andAlfred Tennyson and Shakespeare.
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