Hayavadana

Hayavadana, the play by Girish Karnad, tells the story of two friends who are in love with the same woman and who accidentally swap heads. A comedy ending in tragedy, the narrative also tells the stor...

Woman as Protagonist and Victim

Silence! The Court is in Session is the first of Vijay Tendulkar’s plays to become part of the New Indian Drama phenomenon of the sixties and the first significant modern Indian play in any language t...

From Transience to Permanence

Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra is a drama on the theme of true love. This lyrical play is a work of supreme art that has immense use of symbols and poetical language. Tagore is known for his aesthetic a...

A Critique of Gender Discrimination

Vijay Tendulkar’s Silence! The Court is in Session is a critique of gender discrimination in patriarchy and the women’s fight against the injustice done to her. He represents the problems faced by ind...

Sophoclean Drama

Sophocles was an ancient Greek playwright and the second of the 3 greatest Greek writers of tragedy with Aeschylus and Euripides. He is known best for what he wrote about Oedipus, the mythological fig...

Antigone, the Classic

Classical works of literature usually share a common element: a memorable main character. Classics feature central characters with vivid, distinct personalities and strong points of view about the wor...

Types of Drama

From the earliest times drama has been divided broadly into two kinds, Tragedy and Comedy, the one dealing with the dark side of life, the other with the light side of life. Tragedy aims at inspiring ...

The Origin of Drama

Drama is a form of literature intended to be performed by actors and written as prose or verse dialogue. In Western culture, it is one of the three genres developed by the Greeks: drama, epic and (lyr...

The Cenci

The Cenci -A Tragedy in Five Acts is a verse drama in five acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819 and inspired by a real Italian family, the House of Cenci and, in particular, Beat...