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DRAMATIC GENRE, RITUAL, CONELICT RESOLUTION
tribunal vote which achieve the ultimate breakthrough. Trials, where a social
process becomes visible on stage, remain one of the most freguent rituals lead¬
ing to conflict resolution in drama.
Another ritual often adapted to theatrical performance is "pageant-like
formal processions."" Unsurprisingly, the reconciliatory genres of Western
drama have borrowed from Christian rites, such as the Eucharist (as in late
medieval Corpus Christi plays and Spanish Eucharist plays, the autos sacra¬
mentales, e.g., Calderén’s El gran teatro del mundo) as well as forgiveness and
penance (as in Shakespeare’s problem plays and late romances which may have
been conscious of the church’s traditional ritual practices precisely because
they were in the process of breaking up).” The institutional roles that advance
the process of conflict resolution, such as witness, mediator, and healer, can
often be found in ritual as well as drama.
Social ritual can of course be misused and thus become the cause of conflict,
rather than conflict resolution: recall, as a case in point, the ritualistic celebra¬
tion planned by Lear (in King Lear 1.1), which prevents true acknowledgment
between father and daughters, or in The Tempest IV.1, the distracting ritual¬
istic masque which almost makes Prospero repeat the mistake of neglecting
the duties of a responsible ruler. In the first case, the ritual is subconsciously
divisive; in the second, the ritual, while intended as a celebration of harmony,
is not timed to occur at the most productive moment and thus almost becomes
a stumbling block on the path to conflict resolution. Ritual, especially because
it is pre-rational, can be dangerous and destructive. When relying on ritual’s
ability to effect change in the — in this case, fictional — world, success is
not guaranteed; its actual success depends on how and toward what ends the
methods of ritual are employed.
Drama knows many ways of solving conflict: natural, psychological, so¬
cial, religious. However, the most interesting ones, because they are genuinely
dramatic and theatrical, should be drama and theater’s very own conduits,
developed from its proper experience and expertise, the specifically perfor¬
mance-related conduits. Some of these structures — like the play-within-a¬
play, Director’s Drama, theatrum mundi or scena vitae — are not necessarily
linked to ritual, and it would require much space to lay out how they might
function as rituals; other structures can more immediately be understood as
ritualistic.*° For instance, the strategy of deus ex machina was a mainstay of
?* Robert Hapgood: Shakespeare and the Ritualists, Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962), 121; Stroup:
Ibid., 144.
Shakespeare’s use of Christian ritual has been extensively researched; a recent superb repre¬
sentative of this approach is Sarah Beckwith: Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness,
Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2011.
I plan to devote a separate article to this task. For more detail on the notion of Director’s
Drama, see Jan L. Hagens: Forging a Link between Stage and World: The Genre of Director’s
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