The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

synthesis. Thus thought and emotion in
poetry appeared embarrassingly raw. A
unified sensibility, such as Donne’s, was
able, on the other hand, to feel a thought,
‘as immediately as the odour of a rose’.
The poetry of the ‘moderns’ was to recapture
this unified sensibility: The Waste
Land is a kind of pattern for the poetic
amalgamation of disparate elements.
Coleridge’s synthesizing IMAGINATION is
at the back of this idea, but the terms and
concept derive from the French symbolist
critic Remy de Gourmont, and Eliot sees
in Baudelaire, Laforgue and Corbière a
similar unification (which was also present
by implication in Pound and Eliot himself).
By 1931 Eliot was detecting the dissociation
even in Donne, but in his last
reference to the problem (in 1947) he reaffirmed
the original doctrine, though in
more general terms: ‘All we can say is, that
something like this did happen; that it had
something to do with the Civil War...that
we must seek the causes in Europe, not in
England alone...’. Cleanth Brooks attributed
the dissociation to Hobbes and
L. C. Knights to Bacon, but Frank
Kermode, in a chapter on the doctrine in
Romantic Image (1957), described the
concept as ‘quite useless historically’.
FWB
Documentary See BIOGRAPHY.
Dominant See POETICS.
Double irony See IRONY.
Drama As a form of literature, drama
has been studied for centuries – ‘a poem
written for representation’ (Johnson). In
other words, it has been judged primarily
as a poem, and all that peculiarly belongs
to the stage – acting, production, scenery,
effects – have been subsumed under the
vague term ‘representation’. The alternative
is to invert that position, and stress
the representation before the poem. In the
Drama 63
theatre, the poet’s art is only one among
many, and it is not an essential one:
indeed, words at all are not essential. In
Greek the term meant simply to act or
perform, and the definition is still valid;
all others are derivative and of limited
historical significance. The dictionary
offers ‘a set of events...leading to catastrophe
or consummation’; but that relates
to Victorian theatre and to a Victorian
view of Greek tragedy. The dancing and
flute playing which Aristotle discussed are
not events, and do not lead to catastrophe;
nor does the Fool in Lear, nor the tramps
in Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s play is
constructed against an expectation of consummation,
but its positive qualities are
vested in the tramps, who are clowns.
Their performance derives for us from the
circus, or more specifically from Charlie
Chaplin, but the association of clown and
outcast is ancient, recurrent and common
to most societies.
The clown invites our laughter,
and through it our derision. The clown’s
opposite is the heroic actor, who invites
admiration (naïvely, emulation or identification),
and whose identity is established
by: presence on the stage and the
physical power to dominate the scene and
the audience; but the heroic actor, far
more than the clown, depends on words,
and can use them. For such an actor
(Alleyn), Marlowe created the language
of Tamburlaine. Hamlet’s language rarely
displays such authority, and readers have
doubted Ophelia’s view of him as a noble
mind o’erthrown; Shakespeare sets what
the actor is (leading actor) against what
the actor says, and makes that the focus of
Hamlet’s relation to the player king. A
heroic actor relies on projecting the role
through his personality, which means that
the ‘character’ presented depends on the
actor’s own. The clown, on the other hand,
like the character actor, appears to be