Shakespeare’s Ear, Part 2: Rhythm, Cadence and Dramatic Contours

23rd October 2013

Five Act Structure 1

• Horace, Ars Poetica where he insists upon a play having five acts (no more or less)

• 1960s argument about whether this is traceable in Shakespeare – people tend to see the plays scenically now.

• Some plays can be fitted to this paradigm – The Winter’s Tale is interesting in this regard.

• Other Renaissance dramatists – notably Ben Jonson – followed classical paradigms much more closely. Jonson translated Horace.

Five Act Structure 2

• Act 1: happy

• Act 2: presentation of a problem/dilemma

• Act 3: crisis

• Act 4: failure to avert crisis

• Act 5: consequences of this failure

Generic Distinctions in Form

Comedy

Prologos

Parados

Agon

Parabasis

Epeisodia

Exodos

Tragedy

Prologos

Parados

Epeisodia

Stasima

Exodos

}intertwined

Tragedy

• A pathetic situation was the original form of tragedy. Nothing actually happened.

• Divine will and human agency introduced – ‘invented’ peripeteia and anagnorisis. This means something happened – the plot was not all narrative.

• Difference between reported and shown action: liaison (the interplay between live and reported action by which the play runs itself).

‘Scene’

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/172219?redirectedFrom=scene#footerWrapper

sense 5

Scene ‘Changes’

• Are they physical or mental breaks?

• Are they always both?

• Act 1, scenes 4 and 5 of Hamlet:

http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search

How to find seventeenth-century original texts on the Web

What is a Scene change?

French scene analysisNeoclassical DramaA new stage situation was created by the

entrance or exit of any one character and the French marked the scene shift accordingly. (Servants don’t count).

Modern analogue in the theatre game where you have to imagine the stage is a saucer.

Balance of Power; Or Why Don’t Servants Count?

• Saucer theory relates to ‘reaction’• Messengers give the balance of power

to one of the people listening to the message

• But they don’t change the people to whom the balance can be given, only who has it

http://eebo.chadwyck.com/search/fulltext?action=byid&warn=N&id=D10000998466150279&div=1&sequence=1&SOURCE=var_spell.cfg&file=../session/1382474604_17026