Drama Holds A Mirror To Life Part 3

With the pageant of life as its eventual subject, drama as well made nature of the today has a tendency towards naturalism which is all the more true to life. This progressive movement has an  all round development in social, intellectual and critical fields, but its most universal quality has been a life-like character. It has been the endeavor of the dramatists to present the out ward semblance of life as closely as possible. It is a definite form of art like naturalism in painting and not like that of the photographic art. It never was photographic. the imaginative colouring of Shakespeare of the plays is strictly in the order of painting though the subject was from life.

Naturalism is indeed a form of style and gives impetus to the form wanting style."The dramatist says Ashley Dukes, "Who takes pen in hand to portray everyday life in everyday speech must be a writer, a writer in the ten thousand if he is altogether to avoid the rut of ordinary expression. The dramatist is to seek the help of style, if he has to make his individual idiom more homely and if he is to clothe the apparent reality in a proper manner.

The personal experience specially that of the writer is predomina in drama. In ordinary intercourse men, for fear of mistrust or indifference from allowing others to look into what passes within them, exhibit only the outward man to each other, but the dramatist breaking through the conventional barriers, gives intensity to his feelings of the heart. This new tendency had its influence on the English drama in the days when Renaissance had touched it. This unmistakable element of personal character was full of vigour and strength of life.

Continually we catch the echoes of the doubts and fears and hopes that fill the spirit of man in his quest, not of the Gods indeed, or of the riddle of Sphinx, but of himself. The royal figure of lear, undergoing the sufferings of the tragic destiny has a nature common to ours and as much sensitive also, the dramatist being one of us, the common fellowman, is not to present the inner recesses of his characters' personality, the parables of which may easily be heard in his or our nature. 

The artist, says Plato, produces not reality but something less than that; though he creates something lesser than reality, he also creates something more than reality. He gives us his intention according to his standpoint. This kinship does not exist anyhow or the other. The listener to drama, it is held, needs absolutely neither learning nor cultivation, but a pair of eyes and a heart. This also reflects upon the relation that drama has with life.

The function of the dramatist as pointed out by critics is also practicable. To him subject is all important from every standpoint. As he stands in close proximity to real life, and endeavors to enclose his own imaginary creations with vitality-he must decidedly take part with one or another of leading views of human life, and constrain his audience also to participate in the same feeling. This is the keynote of the dramatist's art. So also the function of drama insists in its being acted and what is missed by the dramatist, is to be compensated by the actor. So in this way drama becomes self-contained, a complete picture of life as it is, rather a mirror to life.

Firstly, a mirror in the sense that it presents a view of life and secondly in a metaphorical sense as something presenting us a realisation of what life actually is. It is in the latter sense that we take imaginative side of the dramatists' mind and views. So we feel that drama holds a mirror to life in every sense of the word.

                                                        [ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]