Characteristics of Shakespearian drama

Shakespeare is exceptional, exclusive and unique in the history of European drama; here we mention his uniqueness and otherness qualities of Shakespearian drama.

  • First of all there is a big crowd of human figures: kings and great barons, fools and tradesmen, princess and pheasant girls, eccentrics and outcasts of society, soldiers, witches and magicians, actors, mythological figures and fairies, cardinal and pagan deities; a whole theatrum mundi, in fact, which appears to play in the remote past and in the immediate present as well.
  • His drama also has contrasting scenes: ceremonies of state alongside tavern drinking-bouts and rough brawls, tender love-scenes alongside court festivities, marching armies and solemn coronation, masquerades and village fetes, assassination and pensive soliloquies, merry dances and dumb shows, songs and melancholy music of the lute.
  • It also has similar variety in the language, for we hear stylized speeches as well rapid prose dialogue, rich and formal Elizabethan verse alongside coarse jokes, melodramatic rhetoric in the scenes of grand passion, and simple, terse utterances in moments of distress.
  • Shakespeare’s drama appears to be a free and open form of drama, continually changing and not subject to prescribed rules, and also a form of drama in the most varied and mutually opposed elements combine to form a new unity.
  • A free form of drama means, Shakespeare does not feel himself limited by any rules, any three unities or superimposed sense of decorum, and also that exceptional possibilities are provided for bold inventiveness and experiment, possibilities of which Shakespeare takes equally exceptional advantage. This free, unrestricted form gives rise to the receptiveness of his drama for many features and suggestions from the non-dramatic literature of the time. For not only dancing and music, but also lyric and epic elements exercise their influence and are readily adopted by the poet. This is an inclusive, not an exclusive form of drama, for it has an extraordinary power of assimilation, and is consequently able to include many things which according to later standards would have been left outside the drama.
  • Shakespeare’s work becomes a melting-pot for many elements of form and expression which we find in Elizabethan prose and poetry, but which Shakespeare subordinates critically and consciously to his dramatic intentions.
This extract has been  taken from:
"Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Selected Plays"
 by Wolfgang Clemen