Drama
- Thomas Shadwell's play The Virtuoso (1676) includes an old libertine named Snarl who entreats a prostitute, Mrs Figgup, to bring out the birch rods. It is unclear if he is to flog her or be flogged.
- Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1684), an obscene Restoration closet drama thought to be by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester.
- In Thomas Otway's play Venice Preserv'd (1682), Act III, Scene i, an old senator, Antonio, visits the house of Aquilina, a Greek courtesan. Antonio pretends to be a bull, then a frog, begging her to spit on him, and then a dog, biting her legs. She whips him, then throws him out and tells her footmen to keep him out.
- Jean Genet's play The Maids (1947) concerns two maids who play out dominant and submissive roles.
- Genet's play The Balcony (1957) is set in a brothel where clients and staff perform various fetishized roles while a revolution brews outside.
Read more about this topic: Sadism And Masochism In Fiction
Famous quotes containing the word drama:
“Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations—all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)
“War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self- respect.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)