Drama (Gr. from to do or act), a story represented by action. The principle of imitation is inherent in human nature ; painting, sculpture, and the drama must be coeval with society, and have been practised in some form by almost every nation. Among the South sea islanders a rude kind of drama was discovered. In China the drama dates from remote ages. The war dance of the Indian and the African, intermingled with pantomimic descriptions of the preparations for battle, the stealthy advance upon the foe, the combat, and the death of the enemy, is essentially a dramatic exhibition. But that form of the drama which is accepted and followed in Europe, divided chiefly into tragedy and comedy, was the creation of the ancient Greeks. The religious festivals of Bacchus were believed to have been introduced into Greece by Melam-pus. In the Bacchic ritual an ode in honor of the god was recited; and to produce the best ode, which should be selected by the priests to be inserted into their ceremony, became a favorite contest among the poets.

A goat was either the principal sacrifice at the altar, or the prize awarded to the successful competitor; thus from the two words goat, and song, came the Greek tragedy (literally, goat song). In like manner, at the rustic festivals or harvest homes of the Greeks, semi-religious ceremonies, composed of odes and dances in honor of Bacchus, were enacted. These odes, being more genial and comic, were called comedy, from village, and (literally, the song of the village). - The earliest known form of drama is the dithyrambus, a hymn in honor of Bacchus, song by a chorus accompanied by music, gesture, and dances. About 570 B. C. Susarion, a native of Megara, recited an ode at Athens. In 535 Thespis, a native of Icaria, recited an ode, with responses by a dithyrambic chorus; in this we perceive the first germ 'of dialogue. Such were the rude elements found by AEschylus about 500, and out of them he created the drama as we now behold it. Nothing essential has since been added to its structure. He removed the chorus into the background, and used them only as an auxiliary. He brought a second actor upon the scene, and introduced dialogue ; thus the drama became an action instead of a narrative. He invented scenery, costume, and machinery. Banishing the lewd and Bacchanalian character from the dithyrambic hymn, he supplied its place with pure tragedy. From his works were gathered those rules called the unities, referred to by Aristotle. These changes were wrought within 30 years.

His expansion of the drama caused the Athenians to build the great theatre of Bacchus, the Lenaeum, the former theatre having broken down under the pressure of the people gathered to witness a representation in which AEs-chylus and Pratinas were rivals. Thirty years later Sophocles introduced a third actor, and thus diffused the dialogue and fertilized the action. As a dramatic poet he surpassed AEschy-lus by a noble grace and a sweet majesty. Fifteen years afterward Euripides enabled Greece to behold as contemporaries the three greatest purely tragic poets the world has produced. In reviewing their works we must remember that AEschylus was the creator of that fanciful world which Sophocles and Euripides cultivated. The dramas of AEschylus are dark, gloomy, and terrible; thunder and lightning are their atmosphere, and demigods their dramatis persona;; his human beings are gigantic in moral stature, and removed above our sympathies. Sophocles drew human nature as it ought to be. Euripides depicted men and women as they were.

The origin of the drama is popularly but erroneously ascribed to Thespis. This improvisatore did no more than improve upon the dithyrambus; he first organized a regular chorus, and invented dances of peculiar energy and grace; but his performances were a kind of ballet farce. The tragedy of the Greeks was a fable or a series of events begotten of each other in a natural sequence. It began with a simple position, so selected that the auditor required no explanation to understand the present condition of affairs. The development of the characters was required to be simultaneous with the action, the one being involved in the other. The action should not stray from the one place beyond such a limit as the time employed in the performance might naturally permit; nor should a lapse of time take place during the piece longer than one day. These unities of action, place, and time, however, so strenuously insisted upon by the French dramatists, were not always strictly observed by the Greeks. Aristotle refers indistinctly to the unity of action; he says in reference to the unity of time: "Tragedy endeavors as much as possible to restrict itself to a single revolution of the sun." Of the unity of place he says nothing.

The Greek tragedy was often composed in trilogies, or three distinct plays, all connected; such, for example, was the trilogy of AEschy-lus, formed of the "Agamemnon," the "Choe-phori," and the "Eumenides." In the first, Agamemnon, returning from the siege of Troy, is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; in the second, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, avenges his father by the slaughter of his mother; in the third, Orestes is pursued by the Furies for this unnatural deed; the gods cannot agree upon his case until Minerva decides in his favor, and releases him from the torture of the avenging divinities. These three conjoined formed a complete action. The early history of comedy is more obscure than that of tragedy. The earliest comic poet of whom we have remains is Aristophanes, who flourished nearly a century after AEschylus. He was the last of what was called the old school. Comedy was divided into three forms, the old, the middle, and the new. In the first or old comedy, the characters were real living personages, who were freely satirized under their real names. This license was soon so abused that a law was passed forbidding the names of real personages to be used in comedy.

This impediment produced the second or middle comedy, where the prohibition was evaded by giving fictitious names to the real characters, and distinguishing the individual intended to be satirized by a mask or by some unmistakable inference. The middle comedy lasted about 50 years, when it was superseded by the third or new comedy; in this form the characters and the subject were fictitious, and as the old satirized and ridiculed statesmen, orators, and generals under their real names, so the new was aimed at abstract vice, and not at the individual offender. As tragedy descended from the contemplation of divine matters to depict human woes, it gradually lost its grandeur. So, also, as comedy divested itself of its direct influence upon men and things, and from a statesman became a philosopher, it lost its pith and power. The list of dithyrambic poets preceding AEschy-lus, from 700 to 525 B. C, includes Archi-lochus, Simonides, Lasus, Arion, Stesichorus, Solon, Susarion, Hipponax, Theognis, Thespis (birth of AEschylus). Afterward came Choeri-lus, Phrynichus, Epicharmus, AEschylus (invents the drama, and first exhibits in 499), Chionides, Sophocles (first victory in 468), Euripides (first exhibits in 455), Cratinus, Aristarchus, Ion, Crates, Achaeus, Melanippi-des, Pherecrates, Phrynichus the comic poet, Lysippus, Eupolis, Aristophanes (427), Aga-thon, Xenocles, Amipsias, Sannyrion, Asty-damas, Antiphanes, Theopompus, Eubulus, Alexis, Heraclides, and Menander (first exhibits in 321), after whom the Greek drama died obscurely.

The Romans derived their drama from the Greeks. Terence, Plautus, and Seneca are the only Latin dramatists worthy of mention, and these are but translators and imitators of the Greek. The only element introduced by the Romans into the drama was farce, an invention of the Tuscans; buffoonery became more popular than wit. In truth the Roman people took little pleasure in pure intellectual amusement; they preferred to watch the agonies of the body suffered in the circus, rather than sympathize with the woes of the soul simulated in the theatre. - Thus ended the first or classic age of the drama. The second, or romantic age, gave its first indication of existence in the 12th century, when dramatic performances called entremets were introduced, as the word implies, between the services at royal banquets and carousals. These entremets soon became pageants, masks, and mummeries, and lasted as distinct dramatic entertainments up to the period of Shakespeare. Simultaneously a dramatic composition called a mystery, usually founded on passages of Scripture, was introduced and became a popular exhibition on saints' days.

Subjects from the Bible, rudely treated in the form of a dialogue between the holy personages, were represented on a stage erected in the church or church yard, the priests and acolytes being the actors. These performances were carried to an abuse, and became so blasphemous that they were suppressed. The next form of drama was the morality, bearing a relation to the mystery similar to that between the new and old comedy of the Greeks. The morality was aimed at abstract vice, its action was a fable, its characters were typical. In the 15th and 16th centuries histories began to be written - long, rambling pieces of action without form or object, but introducing rudely the design of that romantic drama destined to so wondrous a perfection under the hands of Shakespeare and his colleagues. As the classic drama was derived from the dithyramb, a pure poetic germ, subsequently developed into action, the romantic drama was derived from the pageant, mask, or mummery, a pantomimic germ, subsequently developed into poetry. In the first the action is subservient to the passion; in the second the passion is subservient to the action.

In the Elizabethan age the romantic drama sprang at once into existence; and as in the single life of AEschylus the classical or Greek drama passed from infancy to maturity, so Shakespeare and his colleagues raised the romantic or Gothic drama from rudeness to the highest perfection it has ever achieved. In the romantic drama the unities of time, place, and action are not observed. The poet is allowed unbridled license; prose and poetry may be mingled without rule or reason, beyond the aptitude of each to the moment and the character. The English dramatists of this age gave originality at least to the form of the romantic drama, and, whatever its faults, it was new. The French and Italian poets clung to the Greek models; Corneille and Racine were imitators of Sophocles and Euripides; Alfieri affected the same ancient simplicity. As students of the Greek, their individual merit is great; but having had no share in the progress of the drama, they have no prominent place in its history. The Italians and Spaniards at this period contrived a species of performance, part pantomime, part farce, part comedy of intrigue. It was derived from those Italian narrators of whom Bocca-cio is the best type, and represented dramatically short and pithy tales.

Lope de Vega was the first to inaugurate this comedy of intrigue, and Calderon surpassed him in it; it was quickly imitated and greatly improved by the French, who by admitting more Italian elements gave it variety and scope. Hardy, Rotrou, and Corneille, Scarron and Quinault, prepared the public taste for Moliere, who truly founded and made the second or middle age of comedy, as Shakespeare and his colleagues made the first or old. Comedy at this time mainly occupied the stage. In England the four great masters, Wycherly, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, brought forth the prose drama. In the beginning of the 18th century the sentimental drama, a mixture of comedy and tragedy, was introduced, but cannot be considered a forward movement in the art. In Germany it obtained great popularity under Kotzebue, and at the same time a wild and ideal, often mythic and philosophical form of dramatic poetry was created by Schiller and Goethe. These poets rather embellished dramatic literature than added to the development or progress of the drama as an art.

Lessing, their predecessor, may be said to have founded the German drama, but he attempted no reform. - The next and last great step which the drama has made, and one that has become prominent in the present age, is the invention of opera, or a drama in which music takes the place of poetry, and the dramatic action is subservient to a new musical development. It is a mistake to presume that an opera is a musical drama. The musical form of an opera and its dramatic treatment are essentially different from the form and treatment of a drama based on the same fable. There is also in the form of the music, apart from the libretto, a plan and proportion to which the drama must be subservient. - Among the various minor forms of the modern drama are melodrama, farce, vaudeville, and pantomime. Melodrama owes its invention to the laws which restricted the performance of tragedies and comedies to certain privileged theatres. Booths were erected in which serious pantomimes, or dramas without words, were performed, accompanied throughout with expressive music. By degrees the actors ventured a few extempore phrases or jests. This license was gradually extended, until dialogue was regularly introduced, and the music was only used to accompany the movement of the actors.

Melodrama is now understood to he a drama wherein the passion and development of character are subservient to the action and plot; whereas tragedy is a drama where the action and plot are subservient to the passion and development of character. Farce is a humorous piece of buffoonery, in which probability may be outraged both in the incidents and character, and stands in relation to comedy as melodrama does to tragedy. Vaudeville is an invention of the French stage. It has its name from vau de Vire, which was originally a satirical song containing a keen, witty thought, and applicable to some popular person or event. It was a lyric epigram invented in that part of Normandy called Val or Vau de Vire, and carried thence to Paris, where these musical satires became the vogue. Presently the writers of small comedies threw their keenest epigrams into verses which might be sung to any air that would happily suit them, and were called vaudevilles. The comic pieces through which they were scattered eventually received the name. When the work is but slightly speckled with these musical epigrams, it is distinguished as a comedie vaudeville or a drame vaudeville. Pantomime is a drama without language, composed of gesture accompanied with music.

It is probably the most ancient form of drama, and has changed less in its essential character than any other. The most perfect and most elegant kind of pantomime is the ballet, where graceful dances are interspersed. - Further accounts of the dramatic literature of the principal nations will be found under the titles of the respective countries.