AP® English Literature and Composition · Drama: Speech, Irony, and the Tragic Shape
4.C The Chorus and a Play's Built-In Commentary
A chorus is a play's built-in narrator: a voice outside the action that sets up the story, reacts to it, and tells the audience how to feel about what they are watching.
A novel has a narrator sitting inside every sentence, shaping how you take each event. A play, performed live with nobody reading over your shoulder, has no such voice built into its form. The chorus is the Greek solution: a group standing at the edge of the stage who do not take part in the action but comment on it, giving the play something like a narrator without breaking the illusion that we are watching real people talk to each other.
A chorus has three jobs. It sets up, giving the audience facts they need before the action starts: the city, the families, the nature of the quarrel. It reacts, stepping in after a turn in the plot to tell the audience what that turn means. And it tells the house how to take what it has seen, often closing the play by naming the lesson or the feeling to carry out of the theater. Romeo and Juliet opens with exactly this: fourteen lines naming the two households and announcing that the lovers will die. That should ruin the plot. Instead it changes the question. The audience stops asking what happens and starts watching how, counting the missed chances and the minutes by which a rescuing message arrives too late. That shift from what to how is where dramatic irony lives, and it is the engine of tragedy.
Modern plays sometimes compress the chorus into one person, like the Stage Manager in Our Town, who narrates, predicts which townspeople will die, and then steps into a scene to play a minor part. A group standing outside the action cannot do that. A single chorus-figure with a body can cross the line between commentary and action, which changes what commentary is able to do.
Key terms
- Chorus
- A group of performers outside the main action who set up, react to, and interpret the events of a play for the audience.
- Dramatic irony
- A gap in knowledge where the audience knows something a character does not, often created by a chorus revealing events in advance.
- Stage Manager
- The narrator figure in Thornton Wilder's Our Town who performs a chorus's jobs alone and also steps into scenes as a character.
- Tragic shape
- The sense of an unavoidable fall toward disaster that a chorus's early announcements help the audience feel building.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a chorus work as a narrator's voice bolted onto a form that otherwise has no narrator?
- How it worksWalk me through a chorus's three jobs: setting up, reacting, and telling the audience what to feel.
- Worked exampleShow me the Chorus opening Romeo and Juliet and giving the whole ending away in fourteen lines.
- Going furtherWhat changes when one character, like the Stage Manager in Our Town, becomes the entire chorus?
Check yourself
End of topic.