Literature: Drama
The drama portion of the CLEP Humanities exam asks you to recognize dramatic genres and conventions, place plays and playwrights in their periods, and read a short plot description or quoted speech to identify the technique at work.
Aristotle and Greek practice
The Poetics supplies most of the exam's critical vocabulary: hamartia (the protagonist's error), peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), and catharsis (purgation of pity and fear). Aristotle stressed unity of action; the "three unities" of time, place, and action are a later neoclassical codification, not his doctrine. Greek staging used masks, a chorus, and at most three speaking actors; deus ex machina denotes an improbable rescue device.
Period markers worth memorizing
- Medieval: mystery and miracle cycles, morality plays (Everyman).
- Elizabethan and Jacobean: blank verse, soliloquy, revenge tragedy (Hamlet; Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy), Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
- Neoclassical France: Racine, Corneille, and Molière's satiric comedies.
- Modern: Ibsen's realism (A Doll's House), Chekhov, Wilde's comedy of manners, Shaw's discussion drama, Brecht's epic theater and alienation effect, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Theater of the Absurd), Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.
Devices that get tested
A soliloquy is spoken alone on stage; an aside is spoken in company, unheard by the other characters. Dramatic irony gives the audience knowledge a character lacks. Foil, subplot, and comic relief are structural terms.
Worked example
A prompt describes a nobleman alone at midnight declaring that he will act tonight and that no eye observes him, with no other actor present. Candidates often answer "aside" because the speech is confidential. But an aside requires other characters on stage who cannot hear it; with the stage empty, the correct answer is soliloquy.
Traps
- Choosing "aside" for any confidential speech.
- Attributing the three unities to Aristotle's own text.
- Assuming tragedy must end in the hero's death; Greek tragedy often ends in ruin rather than death.
- Mixing up Beckett and Ionesco, or Brecht's alienation effect with Stanislavski's emotional recall.