Because of the turmoil before this time, there was still some controversy about what should and should not be put on the stage. Jeremy Collier, a preacher, was one of the heads in this movement through his piece A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. The beliefs in this paper were mainly held by non-theatre goers and the remainder of the Puritans and very religious of the time. The main question was if seeing something immoral on stage affects behavior in the lives of those who watch it, a controversy that is still playing out today. [61] Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods, "Old Comedy", "Middle Comedy", and "New Comedy". Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, while Middle Comedy is largely lost (preserved only in relatively short fragments in authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis). New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander. Aristotle defined comedy as a representation of laughable people that involves some kind of blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster. [l]

Pavis, Patrice (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Translated by Christine Shantz. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-8163-6. Taxidou, Olga (2004). Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-1987-9. Leach, Robert, and Victor Borovsky, eds. 1999. A History of Russian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 978-0-521-03435-7.

Johnstone, Keith (2007) [1981]. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Rev.ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-7136-8701-9. Ward, A.C (2007) [1945]. Specimens of English Dramatic Criticism XVII–XX Centuries. The World's Classics series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-1-4086-3115-7. Plays are a piece of written literature popularly performed in a theatre setting. Although plays are available in written format, what better way to enjoy them than seeing the characters and story brought to life on stage? From magnificent West End plays to small productions in community and regional theatre, schools, and universities, many consider plays of high importance in art, literature, and entertainment. London is home to a multitude of theatres that put on the best possible productions - comedy, tragedy, and everything in between.

Gordon, Mel (1983). Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell'Arte. New York: Performing Arts Journal. ISBN 0-933826-69-9.Participation in the city-state's many festivals—and mandatory attendance at the City Dionysia as an audience member (or even as a participant in the theatrical productions) in particular—was an important part of citizenship. [14] Civic participation also involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evidenced in performances in the law-court or political assembly, both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and increasingly came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary. [15] [16] The Greeks also developed the concepts of dramatic criticism and theatre architecture. [17] [18] [19] Actors were either amateur or at best semi-professional. [20] The theatre of ancient Greece consisted of three types of drama: tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. [21] Elam, Keir (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents series. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-03984-0. Benedetti, Jean (2008). Dacre, Kathy; Fryer, Paul (eds.). Stanislavski on Stage. Sidcup, Kent: Stanislavski Centre Rose Bruford College. pp.6–9. ISBN 978-1-903454-01-5. Matthew, Brander. "The Drama in the 18th Century". Moonstruch Drama Bookstore . Retrieved August 7, 2012. Benedetti, Jean (1999) [1988]. Stanislavski: His Life and Art (Rev.ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52520-1.

Kuritz, Paul (1988). The Making of Theatre History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-547861-5. The city-state of Athens is where Western theatre originated. [7] [8] [9] [c] It was part of a broader culture of theatricality and performance in classical Greece that included festivals, religious rituals, politics, law, athletics and gymnastics, music, poetry, weddings, funerals, and symposia. [10] [9] [11] [12] [d] Francis Fergusson writes that "a drama, as distinguished from a lyric, is not primarily a composition in the verbal medium; the words result, as one might put it, from the underlying structure of incident and character. As Aristotle remarks, 'the poet, or "maker" should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imiates, and what he imitates are actions '" (1949, 8). Wilhelm Kosch, "Seyler, Abel", in Dictionary of German Biography, eds. Walther Killy and Rudolf Vierhaus, Vol. 9, Walter de Gruyter editor, 2005, ISBN 3-11-096629-8, p.308.Fergusson, Francis (1968) [1949]. The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama in a Changing Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01288-1. a b "London's 10 oldest theatres". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on January 11, 2022 . Retrieved April 6, 2020.

Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics ( c. 335 BCE); the earliest work of dramatic theory. [n] The use of "drama" in the narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the 19th century. Drama in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1873) or Chekhov's Ivanov (1887). In Ancient Greece however, the word drama encompassed all theatrical plays, tragic, comic, or anything in between. Women's Lives Surrounding Late 18th Century Theatre". English 3621 Writing by Women . Retrieved August 7, 2012. Gassner, John & Allen, Ralph G. (1992) [1964]. Theatre and Drama in the Making. New York: Applause Books. ISBN 1-55783-073-8. Regarded as the North's premier receiving venue, the iconic Alhambra Theatre attracts the very best in star names and live entertainment to the city of Bradford.Aristotle, Poetics, line 1449a: "Comedy, as we have said, is a representation of inferior people, not indeed in the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a species of the base or ugly. It consists in some blunder or ugliness that does not cause pain or disaster, an obvious example being the comic mask which is ugly and distorted but not painful'."