Verse drama is any

drama Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television.Elam (1980, 98). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has b ...

written significantly in verse (that is: with line endings) to be performed by an actor before an audience. Although verse drama does not need to be ''primarily'' in verse to be considered verse drama, significant portions of the play should be in verse to qualify. For a very long period, verse drama was the dominant form of drama in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

(and was also important in non-European cultures).

Greek tragedy Greek tragedy is a form of theatre from Ancient Greece and Greek inhabited Anatolia. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy. Greek tragedy is widely believed t ...

and Racine's plays are written in verse, as is almost all of

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

's,

Ben Jonson Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for t ...

's and John Fletcher's drama, and other works like

Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as tr ...

's ''

Faust Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust ( 1480–1540). The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroa ...

'' and Henrik 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. 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 Charles III (Charles Philip Arthur George; born 14 November 1948) is King of the United Kingdom and the 14 other Commonwealth realms. He was the longest-serving heir apparent and Prince of Wales and, at age 73, became the oldest person to a ...

'' by Mike 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'' by

David Hirson David Hirson (born 1958) is an American dramatist, best known for his award-winning Broadway comedies, '' La Bête'' and ''Wrong Mountain''. Biography Hirson was born in New York City to actress Alice and playwright Roger O. Hirson. He was educ ...

, which endeavours to recreate Moliere's farces in rhyming couplets, enjoyed several prominent productions on both sides of the Atlantic.

David Ives David Ives (born July 11, 1950) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He is perhaps best known for his comic one-act plays; ''The New York Times'' in 1997 referred to him as the "maestro of the short form". Ives has also written ...

, known best for his short, absurdist work, has turned to " transladaptation" (his word) in his later years: translating and updating French farces, such as ''The School for Lies'' and ''The 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, the

American Shakespeare Center The American Shakespeare Center (ASC) is a regional theatre company located in Staunton, Virginia, that focuses on the plays of William Shakespeare; his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Christopher Marlowe; and works related ...

founded Shakespeare's New Contemporaries (SNC), which solicits new plays in conversation with Shakespeare's canon. This was partially in response to the

Oregon Shakespeare Festival The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is a regional repertory theatre in Ashland, Oregon, United States, founded in 1935 by Angus L. Bowmer. The Festival now offers matinee and evening performances of a wide range of classic and contemporary pla ...

commissioning "modern English" versions of Shakespeare plays. 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. Lech discusses how artists such as Polish Radosław Rychcik and Spanish-British Teatro Inverso use verse in

multilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

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.” Nigerian Inua Ellams explores his identity that escapes geographical, national, and temporal boundaries. Russian Olga Shilyaeva in her 2018 ''28 дней. Трагедия менструального цикла'' (''28 Days. The tragedy of a menstrual cycle'') uses verse to talk about experience of menstruation. Irish Stefanie Preissner in her ''Our Father'' (2011) and ''Solpadeine 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.”

Dramatic verse

Dramatic verse occurs in a dramatic work, such as a

play Play most commonly refers to: * Play (activity), an activity done for enjoyment * Play (theatre), a work of drama Play may refer also to: Computers and technology * Google Play, a digital content service * Play Framework, a Java framework * P ...

, composed in poetic form. The tradition of dramatic verse extends at least as far back as

ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of Classical Antiquity, classical antiquity ( AD 600), th ...

. The

English Renaissance The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England from the early 16th century to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th cent ...

saw the height of dramatic verse in the English-speaking world, with playwrights including

, Christopher Marlowe and

developing new techniques, both for dramatic structure and poetic form. Though a few plays, for example '' A Midsummer Night's Dream'', feature extended passages of rhymed verse, the majority of dramatic verse is composed as

blank verse Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and Pa ...

; 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 as Henrik Ibsen became more prevalent, and were adapted in English by

George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from ...

. Verse drama did have a role in the development of

Irish theatre The history of Irish theatre begins with the rise of the English administration in Dublin at the start of the 17th century. Over the next 400 years this small country was to make a disproportionate contribution to drama in English. In the ea ...

Closet drama

An important trend from around 1800 was the

closet drama A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or sometimes out loud in a large group. The contrast between closet drama and classic "stage" dramas dates back to the late eighteenth century. Al ...

: a verse drama intended to be read from the page, rather than performed.

Byron George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...

and Shelley, 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 Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...

would take up verse drama, as something to be sung: it is still the case that a verse libretto 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 to Robertson Davies in '' A 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 in

Victorian times In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardi ...

, and afterwards, to the extent that it became a more popular long form at least than the faded epic. Prolific in the form were, for example, Michael Field and

Gordon Bottomley Gordon Bottomley (20 February 187425 August 1948) was an English poet, known particularly for his verse dramas. He was partly disabled by tubercular illness. His main influences were the later Victorian Romantic poets, the Pre-Raphaelites and ...

Verse, theatre, and the COVID-19 pandemic

During the first wave of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

, Polish theatre artists experimented with verse to re-create the sense of liveness, presence, and immediacy while theatres were closed due to lockdown.Lech K. (2020) Lockdown verses and anxieties of presence: How Polish theatre rhymed a case for its purpose on the pandemic stage?. Critical Stages/Scènes critiques 2
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Dramatic poetry in general

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, and

libretti A libretto (Italian for "booklet") is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term ''libretto'' is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major l ...

. There are further dramatic verse forms: these include

dramatic monologue Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. M.H. Abrams notes the following three features of the ''dramatic monologue'' as it applies to poetry: Types of dramatic monologue One of the mo ...

s, such as those written by Robert Browning and

Alfred Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...

and Shakespeare.

Dramatic verse

Closet drama

Verse, theatre, and the COVID-19 pandemic

Dramatic poetry in general

See also

References

Further reading