Aristotle sorted drama from epic and lyric by 335 BC
Drama is fiction meant to be enacted—on stage, radio, or screen—not merely read. Aristotle’s Poetics, around 335 BC, already set that dramatic mode against epic and lyric. The Greek root means deed or act, and comedy and tragedy still share the twin masks.
English speakers long preferred play or game for staged stories; Shakespeare’s era still said play-maker and play-house more readily than dramatist and theatre. Only later did drama also name a modern middle type that is neither comedy nor tragedy—Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1873) and Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) are textbook cases—and film and television borrowed that narrower genre label.
Western theatre roots sit in classical Athens, where tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays entered Dionysian contests by the fifth century BC. Thespis is credited with adding a speaking actor who impersonates a character against the chorus. Almost nothing survives from most dramatists; complete texts cluster around Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and later Menander. Aeschylus’s The Persians, first prize at the City Dionysia in 472 BC, is the oldest surviving play.
Rome met Greek drama after expanding into Greek lands between about 270 and 240 BC; regular Roman drama is dated from 240 BC with Livius Andronicus. Surviving Roman comedies are Greek-subject fabulae palliatae by Plautus (about twenty plays from 205–184 BC) and Terence (all six from 166–160 BC). Empire-era tragedy that remains includes nine Greek-adapted plays by Seneca.
After antiquity the church revived performance. The Easter trope Quem-Quaeritis, dated to about 925, had two groups answering each other in sung Latin without anyone playing a character, and by the eleventh century it had reached Russia, Scandinavia and Italy. In the tenth century Hrosvitha wrote six Latin plays on religious themes modelled on Terence, the first known work by a female dramatist, and Hildegard of Bingen followed with the musical drama Ordo Virtutum around 1155. English trade guilds later staged vernacular mystery cycles: York's runs to 48 playlets, Wakefield's to 32 and Chester's to 24.
Source: Drama
