Introduction

While you can use the skills you have learned for analyzing poetry and literature to analyze plays as well, there are some important differences to keep in mind when you approach reading a play. You might be most familiar with seeing plays on stage or on video, or you might be even more familiar with TV or movies, which, like plays, are based on scripts.

A television episode looks very different as a script than it does in the finished product we usually encounter when we turn on our television set. When we read plays, we are reading a script for a performance yet to be created. As a student of literature, you will encounter the play on the page, but you must remember that these words are only one part of the finished performance. As you read, you should keep in mind that the words will be spoken by a actor who wears a costume, speaks to other actors, and who moves on a stage, populated with set pieces, that is located in front of an audience.

The fact that plays are meant to be performed, makes them a very unique genre and because of this, you won’t often see people grab a script for pleasure reading. In fact, playwrights never really mean for their text to be read and as your read plays, it is important to remember that the text was written for performance. This means that you must pay close attention to the nuance of language in the play and use your imagination to visualize what is happening on stage. This kind of imaginative and careful reading will help you to overcome some of the difficulties that are a natural part of reading play texts.

The Basics of a Play

Most people’s experience of plays will be through seeing them on stage, or on television or video. Or, thinking of drama in a more general sense, we might be avid watchers of TV soaps or films. But, as a student of literature, you are sitting at home with a book open in front of you. It contains the text of a play. What, then, are you to make of the words on the page before you? If the script you were examining was intended for a film or a TV play it would look different from the examples that follow, since these media focus more on the visual aspect, and the conventions or presentation for a film or TV script are different from those of a play script intended primarily for the stage. In this course, we shall be concentrating on play texts, but we shall also be offering some guidance for how to get the most out of watching a performance. Let’s dive into a few examples below:

Example 1: Caryl Churchill, Top Girls

ANGIE – Wish she was dead.
KIT – Wanna watch The Exterminator?
ANGIE – You’re sitting on my leg.
KIT – There’s nothing on telly. We can have an ice cream. Angie?
ANGIE – Shall I tell you something?
KIT – Do you wanna watch The Exterminator?
ANGIE – It’s X, innit.
KIT – I can get into Xs.
ANGIE – Shall I tell you something?
KIT – We’ll go to something else. We’ll go to Ipswich. What’s on the Odeon?
ANGIE – She won’t let me, will she?
KIT – Don’t tell her.
ANGIE – I’ve no money.
KIT – I’ll pay.

Example 2: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

NORA – Really! Did a big dog run after you? But it didn’t bite you? No, dogs don’t bite nice little dolly children. You mustn’t look at the parcels, Ivar. What are they? Ah, I daresay you would like to know. No, no – it’s something nasty! Come, let us have a game! What shall we play at? Hide and seek? Yes, we’ll play hide and seek. Bob shall hide first. Must I hide? Very well, I’ll hide first.

[She and the children laugh and shout and romp in and out of the room; at last NORA hides under the table; the children rush in and look for her but do not see her; they hear her smothered laughter, run to the table, lift up the cloth and find her. Shouts of laughter. She crawls forward and pretends to frighten them. Fresh laughter. Meanwhile there has been a knock at the hall door but none of them has noticed it. The door is half opened and KROGSTAD appears, he waits a little; the game goes on.]

Example 3: William Shakespeare, Henry V
KING HENRY
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility:

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a galléd rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Stage Directions

There are no stage directions in the extract from Top Girls, which consists simply of short lines of dialogue exchanged between two characters, and on the whole there are relatively few in this play, unlike A Doll’s House, where Ibsen gives many instructions to do with setting, action and expression. In the example here, the speech seems almost secondary to the action, and there are clearly actors on stage (the children) for whom no dialogue is written, though they are not silent, and another actor appears who is silent for some time. Henry V’s speech is written in blank verse, a poetic form consisting of unrhymed iambic pentameters that was generally used in drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in combination with prose dialogue. The play script, put together after the performance, contains no stage directions beyond indications of entrances, exits, fights and flourishes. Obviously techniques that are used for analysing poetry and other texts can be relevant in reading a speech like this, but what is important to remember is that it is being delivered by an actor, in costume, to other actors, and to an audience.

This is where a play text differs crucially from a poem, a novel or a short story – it is a text for performance. Poems and stories may be performed in the sense that they may be read aloud, and in that event the way that they are read is itself an interpretation, but a play text is specifically a text for performance, and therefore it is necessary to read it with attention to the way the words will be brought to full life on stage; the performance will need to make not just an aural but also a visual appeal. Another important difference between drama and prose fiction, however, lies in the absence (generally speaking) of a narrator. There are exceptions to be found, for instance in the chorus in Henry V and Romeo and Juliet, or, to take two more modern examples, in Peter Schaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun, and Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons. In a novel, the narrator, typically, will act as a guide and interpreter, shaping the narrative to give it a particular significance, evaluating character and commenting on the action. In particular, through the handling of point of view the narrator can direct the reader’s sympathies. On stage, the play will be interpreted by the director and the actors, and the way in which the audience’s sympathies are manipulated is less obvious; much will depend on the extent to which they can identify with one or more of the characters.

Approaching Plays. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/culture/literature-and-creative-writing/literature/approaching-plays/content-section-1

Summary

Reading a play is very different than seeing a play or watching a movie. Although all of the literary analysis tools you’ve learned still apply, dramatic literature requires more thoughtful consideration of language and implied action to get the most available from the play.

Literary devices such as theme, setting, character, and diction are all still at work, but dramatic literature requires its readers to also think about spectacle, that is, the action on the stage. What is happening? Who moves when and why? What drives a character to walk across the stage toward another? How does the meaning of their line change if they run across the stage instead? What language in the script indicates that they either walk or run? The language of a play can also help a reader know when the location of the play has changed, for example in Othello the characters are in Venice one scene and in the next they are in a military base in Cyprus. The only way for a reader to be aware of this change of setting, is by paying careful attention to the words and actions that characters use to indicate this location shift.