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A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group, perhaps in a small room called a closet. Any drama recorded in a written text, and which does not depend to any significant degree upon improvisation for its effect, can be read as literature without being performed. Closet dramas, however, are designed especially for reading and do not concern themselves with stage technique. Featuring little action but often rich in philosophical rhetoric, they are rarely produced for the stage, though this does happen on occasion. The philosophical dialogues of ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Plato were written in the form of conversations between "characters" and are therefore similar to closet drama. The tragedies of Seneca the Younger in the first century AD, though modelled on Roman tragedy, were probably never meant for performance. They were intended to be read or recited at small gatherings of the wealthy. The emperor Nero, a pupil of Seneca's, may have performed some of them, however. Some of the drama of the Middle Ages was also of this type, such as the drama of Hroswitha of Gandersheim, or dialectical works such as The Debate of Body and Soul or the Interludium de Clerico et Puella.
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