A type of drama that was popularized by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
In problem plays, the situation faced by the protagonist is put forward by the author as a representative instance of a contemporary social problem; often the dramatist manages—by the use of a character who speaks for the author, or by the evolution of the plot, or both—to propose a solution to the problem which is at odds with prevailing opinion.
The issue may be the drastically inadequate autonomy, scope, and dignity allotted to women in the middle-class nineteenth-century family (Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, 1879); or the morality of prostitution, regarded as a typical product of the economic arrangements in a capitalist society (George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, 1898); or the crisis in racial and ethnic relations in present-day America (in numerous current dramas and films).
A subtype of the modern problem play is the discussion play, in which
the social issue is not incorporated into a plot but expounded in the give and
take of a sustained debate among the characters. Shaw's Getting Married,
and Act III of his Man and Superman; also his book on Ibsen's plays, The Quintessence of lbsenism (1891).
In a specialized application, the term problem plays is sometimes applied to a group of Shakespeare's plays, also called "bitter comedies"—especially Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends
Well—which explore ignoble aspects of human nature, and in which the reso-
lution of the plot seems to many readers to be problematic, in that it does not
settle or solve, except superficially, the moral problems raised in the play. By
extension, the term came to be applied also to other Shakespearean plays
which explore the dark side of human nature, or which seem to leave unre-
solved the issues that arise in the course of the action.
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