A few weeks ago I had a conversation about the drivers of drama. What is it that creates the sense of impending doom in a drama? It’s not that impending doom is necessary, but what is necessary is a driver to keep the audience wondering what happens next—and impending doom is a powerful engine. Classic tragedies are successful, in part, because of an underlying urgency in the causality of events. One thing happens because of what happens before, and we topple unstoppably in a terrible domino effect right to the end of the play. I want to take a moment now to examine two particular examples of this inevitability from Shakespeare—an undisputed master of drama.
The first example I derive from Romeo and Juliet. In this play, the domino-toppling is evident in a series of missed connections, failed communication, and unfortunate timing. If only, we gasp, the friar’s message makes it to Romeo, he will know that Juliet will awaken only a few moments after he finds her, and so does not need to drink the apothecary’s poison. Juliet, in turn, will not need to stab herself (as she does, of course) upon finding the fresh corpse of her lover beside her when she wakes.
These moments cause each other, thus bringing us satisfactorily to the end of the play, but what if the driver of the action were not happenstance—an unfortunate missed meeting—but actually a moral mandate established in the world of the play?
In Much Ado About Nothing (my second example), the climactic scene occurs when Claudio rejects and publicly shames Hero at what should be their wedding. He denies to marry her because he (falsely) believes she is no longer a virgin. A challenge new productions of this play must face consists in how (or whether) to set up the significance of virginity in the world of the play such that Claudio’s behavior can be not only understood but also corroborated by the response of the rest of the characters. We must understand that Claudio’s choice is in line with the moral underpinning of the play: Hero—not Claudio—has transgressed. As much as the moral bent within the play is difficult to swallow in a contemporary context, where we rightly emphasize women’s empowerment and freedom of sexual expression (and generally agree that virginity in itself does not qualify or disqualify anyone for marriage), it reveals a powerful dramatic engine for the action of the play. If such an emphasis is placed on virginity, then of course Claudio must renounce Hero to maintain his own pride and status. So doing, of course, he incites Beatrice to push Benedick to challenge him, and we are pulled beat by beat to the end of the play. It is the same domino effect we have seen before, but here it is driven by a moral predisposition, not by chance.
Of course there are moral questions and problems that arise in the world of Romeo and Juliet (family, religion, marriage, chastity), but I submit that the real force driving the play is the adolescent, hormonal, sexual frenzy of the protagonists. The urgency created by that energy pushes us through the play and causes most of the missed connections.
My provocation then, is as follows: how can we identify the moral drivers of a drama and manipulate them to raise the stakes for our characters, such that their choices and actions throughout the play are felt to be driven by something larger than themselves. The dramatic engine can be anything: loyalty, faith, virginity, honesty, freedom. But whatever it is, we must understand the significance it carries for our characters so that we believe their choices in context of the moral fabric of the play. Characters who are free to choose and who seal their fates by choosing are at the heart of drama.
Theodor Gabriel 