ABSTRACT
Many people imagine that the term ‘epic theatre’ is self-contradictory, as the epic and dramatic ways of narrating a story are held, following Aristotle, to be basically distinct. The difference between the two forms was never thought simply to lie in the fact that the one is performed by living beings while the other operates via the written word; epic works such as those of Homer and the medieval singers were at the same time theatrical performances, while dramas like Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred are agreed to have been more effective as books. Thus even by Aristotle’s definition the difference between the dramatic and epic forms was attributed to their different methods of construction, whose laws were dealt with by two different branches of aesthetics. The method of construction depended on the different way of presenting the work to the public, sometimes via the stage, sometimes through a book; and independently of that there was the ‘dramatic element’ in epic works and the ‘epic element’ in dramatic. The bourgeois novel in the last century developed much that was ‘dramatic’, by which was meant the strong centralization of the story, a momentum that drew the separate parts into a common relationship. A particular passion of utterance, a certain emphasis on the clash of forces are hallmarks of the ‘dramatic’. The epic writer Döblin provided an excellent criterion where he said that with an epic work, as opposed to a dramatic, one can as it were take a pair of scissors and cut it into individual pieces, which remain fully capable of life.
