The "well-made play" structure is independent of the number of acts in a play and refers to the essential dramatic elements of the play: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (or denouement).
What is a well-made play in literature?
Definition of well-made play : a play constructed according to a predetermined pattern and aiming at neatness of plot and theatrical effectiveness but often being mechanical and stereotyped.
What is the purpose of a well-made play?
The well-made play was used for various purposes, including providing entertainment, educating audiences, and promoting social change. The form was particularly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries when a number of playwrights used it to engage with contemporary issues.
What is exposition in well-made play?
Exposition is a device used in television, films, poetry, literature, music, and plays. It is the writer's way to give background information to the audience about the characters and setting of the story.
How is a doll's house a well-made play?
A Doll's House clearly inherits from popular melodrama and the French 'well-made plays' which Ibsen had programmed and directed at Bergen's Norwegian Theatre. The play relies on melodramatic tropes: secrecy and revelation; a villainous blackmailer; and a fatal letter.
Which genre does well made play belongs to?
The well-made play (French: la pièce bien faite, pronounced [pjɛs bjɛ̃ fɛt]) is a dramatic genre from nineteenth-century theatre, developed by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe.
Is The Importance of Being Earnest a well made play?
Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour and the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play.
Which element of drama describes the structure of the story?
Plot. A plot is a sequence of events within a play that tells a story. Essentially, a plot is what makes a story. Five components make up a plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution--conflict and theme help drive the plot forward.
What are the structural elements of the dramatic plot?
Dramatic Structure: The plot structure of a play including the exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (or denouement).
What is the structure of a doll's house?
DRAMATIC STRUCTURE 'A Doll's House' is widely considered by many to be Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's magnum opus. The play is tightly structured with 3 acts that take place over a short span of three days. Each act contains just one long scene.
Is a dolls house a well-made play?
In conclusion, A Doll's House has all the components of a well-made play and moves away from a melodrama and social problem play. These elements include exposition, suspense, development and complication, strong curtain, cause and effect, resolution, scène à faire, and dénouement.
What is the main theme of a doll's house?
The main themes of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House revolve around the values and the issues of late 19th-century bourgeoisie, namely what looks appropriate, the value of money, and the way women navigate a landscape that leaves them little room to assert themselves as actual human beings.
What are the dramatic techniques in a doll's house?
Foreshadowing: Ibsen uses foreshadowing in the play to build dramatic tension. Nora's dialogue in particular often clues the audience or reader into her future actions and decisions, but without sacrificing any mystery or suspense.
Who brought the well made play to its pinnacle?
In John Russell Taylor's view, Arthur Wing Pinero brought the well-made play to its pinnacle so far as the English theatre was concerned, not only in his farces and comedies, but also in serious plays. Pinero did not regard the well-made play as sacrosanct, and wrote many plays in which he avoided the conventional formulas, including his best-known, The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893). After Pinero, in 20th-century British plays, the well-made play came to be seen as appropriate for comedies, but not for serious works. The comedies of Somerset Maugham were generally of the well-made genre, although he deliberately stretched plausibility to its limits; Noël Coward worked within the genre although his plotting was rarely complex and often slight; Taylor considers that he revived and refined the genre. With Terence Rattigan the English tradition of the well-made play was thought to have come to an end. Some writers have noted a resurgence: Taylor finds elements of it in Harold Pinter, with the important exception that Pinter's plays deliberately eschew crisp exposition of the plot, and in a 2008 study, Graham Saunders identifies Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn and Simon Gray as playwrights continuing to write well-made plays.
Who wrote the Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play?
Taylor, John Russell (1967). The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play. Oxford and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-41-572333-6.
How many stage works did Scribe write?
Writing with collaborators as a rule, Scribe produced some 500 stage works between 1815 and his death in 1861. His development of a form that could be used repeatedly to turn out new material met the demands of a growing middle class theatre audience, and made him a rich man.
What is Scribe play?
A Scribe play, long or short, is a masterpiece of plot construction. It is as artistically put together as a master watch; the smallest piece is perfectly in place, and the removal of any part would ruin the whole. Such a "well-made" play always displays fertility of invention, dexterity in the selection and arrangement of incidents, and careful planning. Everything is done with the greatest economy. Every character is essential to the action, every speech develops it. There is no time for verbal wit, no matter how clever, or for philosophical musing, no matter how enlightening. The action is all-important.
What did Scribe set out to do?
In his 1967 book The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, John Russell Taylor writes that what Scribe set out to do "was not to tame and discipline Romantic extravagance, but to devise a mould into which any sort of material, however extravagant and seemingly uncontrollable, could be poured".
What is the formula for drama?
The formula came into regular use in the early 19th century and shaped the direction of drama over several decades, but its various elements contained nothing unknown to previous generations of writers, and neither its first proponent, Eugène Scribe, nor his successors applied it unvaryingly. The academic Stephen Stanton (1957) gives seven key points of the genre, which may be summarised as: 1 a plot based on facts known by the audience but not known by some or all of the characters 2 a pattern of increasingly intense action and suspense 3 a series of ups and downs in the main character's fortunes 4 the depiction of the lowest and the highest point in the main character's adventures 5 a central misunderstanding or quiproquo (see below), clear to the audience but unknown to the characters 6 a logical and plausible dénouement 7 the overall structure is reflected in each act.
What was Pinero's best known play?
Pinero did not regard the well-made play as sacrosanct, and wrote many plays in which he avoided the conventional formulas, including his best-known, The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893). After Pinero, in 20th-century British plays, the well-made play came to be seen as appropriate for comedies, but not for serious works.
What is the rise and fall of the well made play?
John Russell Taylor’s The Rise and Fall of the Well Made Play (1967) usefully discusses the development of this format both before and after the impact of Ibsen, and helps to build a picture of the tastes and expectations of a typical middle-class audience of the period. He demonstrates the durability of the structure, with its emphasis on suspense and an exciting curtain at the end of each act. Ibsen relied on it to give A Doll’s House a solid framework, even though the characters are doing everyday things like paying visits and sneaking sweets.
What is the structure of a doll's house?
A Doll’s House has a clear basic structure – that of the well-made play, as devised by the hugely popular French dramatist Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). First, the exposition sets up the situation. Nora’s conversations in Act One with Helmer, Mrs Linde and Krogstad tell us all we need to know in order to understand how pressing the situation is. The curtain falls on a note of suspense with Krogstad’s first demand. Act Two is taken up with the development and complication of the story. Nora struggles to find a way out, first by changing Helmer’s mind, then by asking for Dr Rank’s help. The action reaches a crisis when all her possible solutions fail. Nora’s tarantella – a frantic attempt to postpone the reading of Krogstad’s letter – makes a strong curtain .
Definition of well-made play
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First Known Use of well-made play
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Overview
The well-made play is a dramatic genre from nineteenth-century theatre, developed by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. It is characterised by concise plotting, compelling narrative and a largely standardised structure, with little emphasis on characterisation and intellectual ideas.
Scribe, a prolific playwright, wrote several hundred plays between 1815 and 18…
Definitions
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the "well-made play" as one "written in a formulaic manner which aims at neatness of plot and foregrounding of dramatic incident rather than naturalism, depth of characterization, intellectual substance, etc." The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2004) elaborates on the definition: "A dramatic structure [designed] to provide a constantly entertaining, exciting narrative which satisfyingly resolved the many complications an…
Background
Before the late-18th century, French theatre had been neoclassical in style, with strict forms reflecting contemporary interpretations of the theatrical laws propounded by Aristotle in his Poetics, written some 1,500 years earlier. The prevailing doctrine was "verisimilitude", or the appearance of a plausible truth, as the aesthetic goal of a play.
In 1638 the Académie Française codified a system by which dramatists should achieve verisimilit…
Scribe
The dramatist and opera librettist Eugène Scribe was born in 1791, at a time when the conventions and forms of the traditional European literature and theatre of the neoclassical Enlightenment were giving way to the unrestrained and less structured works of Romanticism. In his 1967 book The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play, John Russell Taylor writes that what Scribe set out to do "w…
Influence
Scribe's influence on theatre, according to the theatre historian Marvin Carlson, "cannot be overestimated", and French playwrights of the 19th century, even those who reacted against Scribe and his well-made plays, were all influenced by them to a greater or lesser degree. Carlson observes that, unlike other influential theatre thinkers, Scribe did not write prefaces or manifestos declai…
Objections
In the later 19th century and subsequently, the principal objection to Scribe's model, so far as serious plays were concerned, was that their concentration on plot and entertainment was limiting for playwrights who wished to examine character or discuss a social message. His admirer Dumas fils alluded to this by saying that the greatest playwright who ever existed would be one who knew humanity like Balzac and the theatre like Scribe.
Notes, references and sources
• Archer, William (1930). Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship. London: Chapman & Hall. OCLC 1050814206.
• Brockett, Oscar (1982). History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 978-0-20-507661-1.
• Carlson, Marvin (1984). Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-80-141678-1.
External links
• Works by Eugène Scribe at Project Gutenberg
• Dramatic Technique by George Pierce Baker