What does the word play mean in literature? What is a play? It is the hardest form of word art.

20.04.2019

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Drama is one of the three main types of literature, which simultaneously correlates with three types of art - literature, theater and music.

Drama is mainly associated with theater as the main type performing arts... On its stage, all the "three unities" that underlie any dramatic work are realized. Their specific concept, intended for performance from the stage, has long been called plays. The very word "play" French origin and literally means "passage", "part", "work". Otherwise, a play can be called any dramatic work intended for staging in a theater, as well as for radio and television performances.

V musical art a play means, first of all, the specific name of works instrumental music... However, there are other meanings, for example, finished musical composition or a small instrumental lyric composition.

Building a play

It should be noted that the very concept of a play is purely formal and does not bear any genre or stylistic load. However, as a rule, the title of the play explains or indicates its genre originality: comedy, tragedy, drama, tragicomedy, etc.

Any play in the construction of its composition is subject to the laws of "three unities", which belong to the pen of Aristotle - the unity of time, place and action.

The logical sequence of the action is always spelled out in the following order of the elements of the play:

Exposition is the setting in motion of the piece. It contains the constellation actors, describes how the circumstances develop, reveals the reasons why the plot line begins to unfold. As a rule, the exposition is located before the setting of the action.
The plot is where the main conflict of the play begins to unfold.
The escalation of action is a chain of events that originate from the conflict in the play.
The climax is the peak of the main conflict.
The denouement of the action is mainly provoked by the climax, we find out with what the heroes end up with: someone loses, wins, and someone dies.

The structure of the piece is presented

dialogues and monologues of heroes;
author's remarks, where the author wants to emphasize, for example, some features of the behavior of the hero or the environment;
a list of characters, which is given at the very beginning of the play, indicating the profession or family ties heroes;
acts - the semantic parts of the play, which in turn are divided into smaller ones - episodes, pictures, phenomena.

Features and genre originality

The main difference between the play and others dramatic works is that it was created exclusively for theater productions.

Also, the play has a certain chain of plot development, which we talked about a little higher: exposure - setting - increasing conflict - culmination - denouement. It should be noted that this state of affairs prevailed in European theater until the middle of the 19th century, when the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen reformed the canons of the play. With Ibsen, the dramatic production began to bear an ideological subtext, and where it usually ended (denouement), everything was just beginning with him. The replicas and dialogues of the heroes began to play a more significant role in the development of the idea and plot. Human voice became the leader in the play, and the psychology of the hero began to emerge more clearly in the drama.

The play, as mentioned earlier, is not special kind or a genre of drama, however, it can be staged in any genre, for example, in the genre of comedy, where the humorous subtext is driving force plays. Or, on the contrary, staging in the genre of tragedy - where the plot inevitably moves towards a catastrophic outcome of the action: someone dies or someone is killed. Genre originality helps the viewer to enter the author's style of constructing the play.

On this topic, you may also be interested in the following articles.

Play it the form of a literary work written by a playwright, which, as a rule, consists of dialogues between characters and is intended for reading or theatrical performance; a small piece of music.

Use of the term

The term "play" refers to both the written texts of playwrights and their theatrical performances. Few playwrights, such as George Bernard Shaw, did not give preference as to whether their plays would be read or performed on stage. The play is a form of drama based on a conflict of a serious and complex nature.... The term "play" is used in a broad sense - referring to the dramatic genre (drama, tragedy, comedy, etc.).

Piece in music

A piece in music (in this case, the word resembles Italian pezzo, literally "piece") - instrumental piece, often small in volume, which is written in the form of a period, a simple or complex 2-3 partial form, or in the form of a rondo. The title of a piece of music often defines its genre basis- dance (waltzes, polonaises, F. Chopin's mazurkas), march (“March tin soldiers"From" Children's Album "by P. I. Tchaikovsky), a song (" Song without Words "by F. Mendelssohn").

Origin

The term "play" is of French origin. In this language, the word piece includes several lexical meanings: part, piece, work, excerpt. Literary form plays have come a long way from ancient times to the present. Already in the theater Ancient Greece formed two classical genre dramatic performances - tragedy and comedy. Later development theatrical art enriched genres and varieties of drama, and, accordingly, the typology of plays.

The genres of the play. Examples of

A play is a form of a literary work dramatic genres, among which:

Development of the play in literature

In the literature, the play was initially viewed as a formal, generalized concept that indicated the belonging artwork to the dramatic genre. Aristotle ("Poetics", V and XVIII sections), N. Boileau ("Epistle VII to Racine"), G. E. Lessing ("Laocoon" and "Hamburg Drama"), J. V. Goethe ("Weimar Court Theater" ) used the term "play" as a universal concept that applies to any genre of drama.

In the XVIII century. dramatic works appeared in the titles of which the word "play" appeared ("The Play on the Accession of Cyrus"). In the XIX century. the name "play" was used to refer to a lyric poem. The playwrights of the twentieth century sought to expand the genre limits of drama by using not only different dramatic genres, but also other types of art (music, vocals, choreography, including ballet, cinema).

Compositional structure of the piece

The compositional construction of the text of the play includes a number of traditional formal elements:

title;
list of actors;
character text - dramatic dialogues, monologues;
remarks (author's notes in the form of an indication of the place of action, characteristics of the character of characters or a specific situation);

The textual content of the play is divided into separate complete semantic parts - actions or acts, which may consist of episodes, phenomena or pictures. Some playwrights gave their works an author's subtitle, which indicated the genre specificity and stylistic orientation of the play. For example: "Discussion Play" by B. Shaw "Marriage", "Parabolic Play" by B. Brecht " kind person from Sichuan ".

Functions of the play in art

The play had a strong influence on the development of the arts. The plots of the plays are based on the world famous art (theatrical, musical, cinematographic, television) works:

operas, operettas, musicals, for example: W. A. Mozart's opera "Don Juan, or the Punished Libertine" is based on the play by A. de Zamora; the source of the plot of the operetta "Truffaldino from Bergamo" - the play "Servant of two masters" by K. Goldoni; the musical "West Side Story" - an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet";
ballet performances, for example: the ballet "Peer Gynt", staged after the play of the same name by G. Ibsen;
cinematographic works, for example: the English film "Pygmalion" (1938) - an adaptation of the play of the same name by B. Shaw; Feature Film"Dog in the Manger" (1977) is based on the plot of the play of the same name by Lope de Vega.

Modern meaning

The interpretation of the concept of a play as a universal definition of belonging to dramatic genres which is widely used in modern literary criticism and literary practice. The concept of "play" is also applied to mixed dramatic works that combine features of different genres (for example: comedy-ballet, introduced by Moliere).

The word play comes from French piece, which means piece, part.

To understand what a play is, you need to know why and why there is itself. literary word v human culture why is it more important than that a definition that is formulated logically, accurately and clearly. And why this bare and irrefutable logic is perceived by a few, and literary fabrication - by millions, if not billions.

Man is an emotional creature

The nature of a person, it turns out, is as follows: a thought that is not tinged with saturated emotion is unable to enter the information space of most specific individuals. After all, the same mathematics as a system of some knowledge, even purely formally, is much easier Them nevertheless, only a few people really understand the Queen of all Sciences, but what Romeo and Juliet tells about is perceived by everyone. And then there is no need to explain what a play is.

The work of Leo Tolstoy is indicative in this respect. As an example, he clearly and clearly described the character of the same Natasha Rostova on many pages, but this description did not linger in the minds of people for a moment. And suddenly we see her dancing to the guitar of her distant relative, gazing enthusiastically at the night native and Russian sky, absorbing with all her awakening female nature the views of men thrown at her body ... And each person instantly understood her, because poetic perception woke up the world. This is what the transfer of a bunch of information about anything through the emotional channels of human consciousness to its information field is.

A play is a composition for a stage, radio and television performances

People who have never been engaged literary creativity, having read the title of this section, they will not even be interested in the meaning of what has been said. They will not remember that actors are walking around the stage, and each of them has its own unique inner world; they don’t think how hard the director, playwright, artist, props, stage technicians worked on a specific performance ... But these are all worlds, worlds, worlds that come together to create an artificial universe in which important thoughts should come to life. And when everything works out, not a single answer to the question "what is a play" is able to accommodate the action that unfolds within two or three hours before the eyes of the audience.

An important formality

And yet, what is a play? the term is quite a set of dialogues of the characters that they pronounce during the development of the plot. But in the case when the author, albeit unconsciously, adjusts the speech of fictional characters to his understanding and vision of what is happening in the world in which he lives, then the truth of life dies, and the words sound in vain. Through the speeches of the heroes of the work, it is necessary to show exactly what the character himself sees, and not the author. There is no place in the play to explain something, to explain to the viewer how it is done in novels and poems. That is why writing dramatic works is the most difficult form of word art.

Livelier than life itself

Once Gogol was asked what the play "The Inspector General" was. At first, the writer became gloomy and withdrawn, and after an hour or two, when the questioner forgot about his question and forgot to think, the genius replied that this is something that is more alive than life itself, because not years, but minutes pass. And he is infinitely right, because every plot twist, the appearance of new characters is a multidimensional allegory, and every single phrase is like a revelation. It is in this definition that the essence of what a play is. After all, the viewer, even an inexperienced one, instantly bites through the deception, and the written masterpiece dies without being born. For all the time in Russian Empire more than 20,000 plays were written, but very few live on the stages of the world to this day - only 7. The mystical number of perfection ...

The meaning of the word PLAY in the Dictionary of Literary Terms

PLAY

- (from French piece - piece, part) - common name literary works of dramatic genres (tragedy, comedy, drama, vaudeville, etc.). See drama

Dictionary of literary terms. 2012