ABSTRACT
Imaginative teaching of the very young has demonstrated the educational value of writing and acting plays, and of various kinds of impromptu drama. To determine what is drama, what is dramatic, is to be concerned with books; that is, the criteria are ultimately literary. Dramatic literature requires a responsiveness, not just of mind, but of the whole body, so that only in performance does the whole work realize itself. Theatrical as opposed to dramatic thinking is essentially mechanistic. Rejection of the idea of delusion, and an understanding of the nature of convention does not, however, entirely settle the problems which have become attached to the nature of what is often called ‘dramatic illusion’. It is characteristic of drama, as of no other form of literature, that it makes an absolute and sustained demand on our attention. A dramatic action then, to return to Aristotle, must be ‘of a certain length’ and have ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’.
