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)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)