What's the difference between drama and epic?

Drama


Definition:

  • (n.) A composition, in prose or poetry, accommodated to action, and intended to exhibit a picture of human life, or to depict a series of grave or humorous actions of more than ordinary interest, tending toward some striking result. It is commonly designed to be spoken and represented by actors on the stage.
  • (n.) A series of real events invested with a dramatic unity and interest.
  • (n.) Dramatic composition and the literature pertaining to or illustrating it; dramatic literature.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Peter retired in 1998, when he was appointed CBE for his services to drama.
  • (2) The dramas are part of the BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow's plans for her "unashamedly intelligent" channel over the coming months.
  • (3) Here's a certainty: When you play out your personal dramas, hurt and self-interest in the media, it's a confection.
  • (4) While ITV1's Harry Hill and the final series of BBC1's Gavin and Stacey will stay put, Sky1 did manage to secure US drama House, starring Hugh Laurie, from Channel Five, paying an estimated £500,000 an episode.
  • (5) There could be no faulting the atmosphere or the football drama.
  • (6) A Catholic boys’ school has reversed its permission to allow civil rights drama Freeheld, starring Julianne Moore and Ellen Page as a lesbian couple, to shoot on location in New York State.
  • (7) Mr Bae stars in a popular drama, Winter Sonata, a tale of rekindled puppy love that has left many Japanese women hankering for an age when their own men were as sensitive and attentive as the Korean actor.
  • (8) "We don't think British drama is failing because these things are so good – it just shows that other countries do good drama."
  • (9) Limits are a relief, because they concentrate the drama and free the writer from the torture of choice, as Aristotle knew when he advised playwrights to preserve "the unities" by telling one story in one place over a single day.
  • (10) George RR Martin , whose series of novels inspired the HBO drama , has woven a tapestry of extraordinary size and richness; and most of the threads he has used derive from the history of our own world.
  • (11) He'd later carry this over into Netflix's House Of Cards but before that, TV had already begun to emulate this new, bleak, antiheroic maturity with a cycle of dark, longform, acclaimed dramas, commencing with The Sopranos and culminating in Breaking Bad .
  • (12) The prime minister told the Radio Times he was a fan of the "brilliant" US musical drama Glee, preferred Friends to The West Wing, and chose Lady Gaga over Madonna, and Cheryl Cole over Simon Cowell.
  • (13) He knew his subject personally, having worked with him on the 1993 romantic drama Poetic Justice , in which the rapper starred opposite Janet Jackson.
  • (14) Phoenix will next be seen in James Gray's Lowlife, a historical drama about immigrants in 1900s New York.
  • (15) Ellen Page is to make her directorial debut with Miss Stevens, starring Anna Faris as a teacher chaperoning a mob of high school students to a state drama competition.
  • (16) The first episode of the gothic drama pulled in 6.1 million viewers on Easter Monday but that number dropped to only 4.5 million for the second episode, prompting fears that the audience numbers could decline even further for Wednesday's finale.
  • (17) This House , his witty political drama set in the whips' office of 1970s Westminster, transferred from the National's Cottesloe theatre to the Olivier, following critical acclaim.
  • (18) Whatever conclusion the crowd might have drawn, what's striking is that Tempest's poem couldn't be ignored: the conviction and drama of her performance forced a reaction and coloured the rest of the evening.
  • (19) (Personally, I think a perfect contemporary drama would highlight the quiet, fraught, human, ongoing battle between those who want to live life and those who want to live life electronically.
  • (20) Meanwhile he is preparing a new double piano concerto by Kevin Volans with the Labèque sisters for a concert at the Edinburgh festival next week, and he tells me with a glint in his eye about ideas for the next two seasons: concert performances of Don Giovanni this October, more Brahms symphonies, and more Berlioz – an ambitious plan to realise the gigantic drama of Roméo and Juliette on a chamber-orchestral scale, following up his rapturously received performances of L'Enfance du Christ in February.

Epic


Definition:

  • (a.) Narrated in a grand style; pertaining to or designating a kind of narrative poem, usually called an heroic poem, in which real or fictitious events, usually the achievements of some hero, are narrated in an elevated style.
  • (n.) An epic or heroic poem. See Epic, a.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) His first ball reaches Ali at hip height and he flicks him to fine leg for a boundary that takes him to a quite epic century.
  • (2) President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government has joined MPs, bloggers and local media in denouncing the newly-released Warner Brothers epic, 300, as a calculated attempt to demonise Iran at a time of intensifying US pressure over the country's nuclear programme.
  • (3) The 2014 MTV Video Music Awards didn’t achieve the same degree of controversy as last year’s celebration of tongues, twerking and teddy bears , but between a speech by a homeless teen, an ill-timed wardrobe malfunction, and Beyoncé’s spectacular, epic, show-stopping finale, there were nevertheless a few moments worth watching.
  • (4) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Global trade unions called the collapse ‘mass industrial homicide’, while Vogue magazine described it as ‘tragedy on an epic scale’.
  • (5) This is a report on our experience with the EPICS C (Coultronics) cytometric flux apparatus, a screening cell analyzer, employing a laser ray (2 or 5 watts); we obtained good results to analyze immunologically-tagged mononuclear blood cells with or without prior separation: for rhythm, repeatability, and contamination.
  • (6) In the latest round of the epic divorce battle between Michelle and Scot Young, the judge, Mr Justice Moor, is making a fresh attempt to discover how much the property dealer is worth.
  • (7) But here he is, feeling as if this epic encounter with his own music is something he’d rather not deal with.
  • (8) RSL kick off... 3.09am GMT Speaking of epic... …this might be a spurious link, but I don't care.
  • (9) As he described, with something approaching relish, the horrifying effect of a desperate eurozone willing to destroy the British economy, our industry and our society, purely to protect itself, I was reminded of the epic Last Judgement by John Martin, now in the Tate, which depicts the terrifying chaos as the good are separated from the evil damned.
  • (10) It was made into a silent film in 1925, and then one of the definitive Hollywood epics in 1959, starring Charlton Heston alongside 10,000 extras and 2,500 horses – it became a huge box office success and won 11 Oscars.
  • (11) Armitage's stage version, commissioned for the in-the-round Royal Exchange in Manchester, a space that can encompass both the intimate and the epic, reworks The Iliad , adding an ending Homer never wrote.
  • (12) Friday's ruling, combined with Trafigura's epic failure to suppress information, suggests that courts may be less willing to issue such injunctions in future.
  • (13) After a couple of weeks they started sending me on epic coffee runs – it's quite a balancing act to transport 10 skinny cappuccinos.
  • (14) I never felt stirrings of faith – apart from when faced with natural wonders such as the multilayered celestial splendour of a night sky, my newborn babies, an epic coastline – so I embraced tolerance and tried to remain open to the multitude of organised belief systems I don’t share.
  • (15) Those kind of moments are epic, like Cathy Freeman in the Sydney Olympics.
  • (16) A rsenal versus Manchester United was a fixture that dominated the chase for trophies in the late 90s and early Noughties – a rivalry in no small part formed by an epic FA Cup semi-final replay in 1999.
  • (17) The epic struggle to keep Greece solvent and in the eurozone intensified on Saturday night amid signs of a looming crisis within the anti-austerity government that took Europe ablaze barely three months ago.
  • (18) It would be an epic, devastatingly hilarious battle on the scale of Godzilla and Mothra.
  • (19) Rather than head back towards the Saas Valley in the east via Grächen, we head west, taking a train to St Niklaus, a cable car to Jungu, then hike east to Gruben, to stay at the historic but simple Hotel Schwarzhorn, before ending our epic journey with a final night in luxury, at the charming hotel Bella Tola in St-Luc.
  • (20) Titanic now comes in behind 1977's Star Wars, 1965's The Sound of Music, 1982's ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, and even the 1956 Charlton Heston biblical epic The Ten Commandments.