by Jerri Rivers

Created on: November 07, 2007

As long as people live, there will always be a need for dramatic presentations and a market for soap operas. Since the beginning of time there has been a demand for drama and fiction. Soap operas, like all television programs, movies, and literature, can be traced back thousands of years. The original "soap operas" were cave drawings. A man went out to hunt and told his family about the things he saw by drawing a picture.

With the invention of spoken language, oral storytellers made a living traveling from village to village, entertaining crowds with tales of adventure and love. In ancient Greece festivals were held to honor Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fertility. Songs, dances, and plays were performed, and this was the beginning of Western theater. By the eighteenth century the modern novel was invented. Domestic fiction novels, made popular by Samuel Richardson and the Brontes, were the romance novels and soap operas of the day. They became instantly popular among upper class housewives, and this paved the way for the birth of the modern day soap opera after the invention of radio and television. Whether in ancient Greece, Renaissance Europe, eighteenth century London, or present day America, drama has always been a popular form of entertainment.

To critics who believe that soap operas are "trash tv," and that the popularity of these tales of love, betrayal, and rich, dysfunctional families is short lived, they should look at one of the most famous plays of all time by Shakespeare. Hamlet is visited by his father's ghost, who tells Hamlet that he has been murdered by his own brother, who is married to Hamlet's mother. Meanwhile, Hamlet goes mad; his girlfriend Ophelia drowns. Hamlet's uncle tries to poison him but instead poisons Hamlet's mother. Hamlet kills his uncle, and Hamlet, himself, is killed by Laertes, the son of a man whom Hamlet had murdered. If that does not sound a lot like the plot of a soap opera, than I do not know what does. Obviously the greatness of modern day dramas, in terms of language, pales in comparison to that of the works of Shakespeare, but the similarities in the plots are undeniable. The soap operas that are popular today may not have the longevity to stay popular for hundreds of years like the works of Shakespeare, but I believe that, at the very least, they will be replaced by other soap operas, and that day time dramas will always exist as a genre in some kind of capacity.

The reasons that people watch soaps are the

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