Dawson - Drama and the Dramatic

For my Father

This volume is one of a series of short studies, each dealing with a single key item, or a group of two or three key items, in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms will not be the subjects of studies in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions of them. The purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Some of the terms in question refer to literary movements (e.g. Romanticism, Aestheticism, etc.), others to literary kinds (e.g. Comedy, Epic, etc.), and still others to stylistic features (e.g. Irony, The Conceit, etc.). Because of this diversity of subject-matter, no attempt has been made to impose a uniform pattern upon the studies. But all authors have tried to provide as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to compose their studies in such a way as to guide readers towards the short bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

The critical idiom is there only one? The question needs to be faced. Johnson was a great critic, from whom we can learn a great deal, but feeling our way into his idiom is a labour of literary and historical imagination, from which we emerge with a sharpened consciousness that we couldnt express ourselves in it. Even Arnold, so much nearer to us in time, forces us to realize that however valuable we consider the emphasis implied in poetry is a criticism of life it is hardly a phrase we would use without the inverted commas. What we have taken from Johnson or Arnold we have translated into our own idiom, the idiom of modern English criticism.

That idiom is the words and phrases we use in talking about literature; it is the condition of our understanding one another, and derives from the tradition of modern criticism. That we, of course, raises difficulties, for the decision what is the central tradition of modern criticism is in itself a critical judgement which cannot be dodged. The idiom (this we can see more clearly as a result of our reading of Johnson and Arnold) is never a mere set of descriptive terms, since it implies standards, values and preferences. A critical term which continues to be used over the centuries, like conceit, changes its meaning with the dominant literary preferences of the age, which are never, of course, purely literary preferences. Other words, and drama and dramatic are among these, change from being almost neutrally descriptive terms (drama = plays, dramatic = characteristic of plays) and take on, within the prevalent tradition, strong implications of approbation or disapprobation. What strikes one particularly in reading modern criticism is the frequency with which the adjective dramatic is used with reference to literature other than plays dramatic irony in Chaucer, the novel as a dramatic poem, dramatic language in Donnes poetry and so on. We find in modern critical usage such a pervasive use of the term and others closely related to it that if Johnson were able to return and scrutinize modern criticism he would find it initially quite as puzzling as we find his own characterization of the pastoral mode of Lycidas easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.

Writing about the modern critical tradition in an objective fashion presents the same problems as face the anthropologist who attempts to analyse the culture of which he is a part and whose language he shares. Particularly one becomes aware of the interdependence of concepts, what Wittgenstein somewhere calls a nest of propositions. Dramatic in modern criticism is vitally connected with a whole body of other terms situation, response, tension, concrete and presentment for example and with an unprecedented (historically speaking) stress on irony and the central importance of metaphor. Wimsatt and Brooks, in their