Introduction

Dramatic conventions (such as soliloquy, asides, masks, disguises, and doubling) are techniques that playwrights use to create dramatic effects in their plays. We are probably so used to seeing dramatic conventions that we don’t really even think about them when we watch movies or television, but when we’re reading the text of a play, they can be a little more difficult to experience.

The popular Netflix series House of Cards makes ample use of the dramatic convention of soliloquy. Frank Underwood, frequently delivers these long speeches that reveal his characters thoughts, feelings, and responses to events. If you’ve seen The Wolf of Wall Street, you are already familiar with another dramatic convention, the aside. Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio often makes remarks and asides to the camera. In an aside, the character delivers lines directly to the audience or viewer (and sometimes to another character). The classic movie The Princess Bride makes clever use of the dramatic convention of masks and disguises when Wesley wears as black mask only to reveal his identity to his true love Buttercup in a dramatic flourish. And finally, you’ve definitely seen role doubling in movies before! Doubling is when one actor plays two or more roles in a given production. For example, in The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan plays Professor Marvel (the clairvoyant Dorothy visits in Kansas) and the Wizard himself (among a few other roles). This casting choice implies that there is maybe something similar between each of these characters.

Dramatic Conventions

Soliloquy

A soliloquy is a speech, usually quite lengthy, delivered by a character who is alone onstage. It is a convention of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in particular, apparently giving direct access to that character’s thoughts and feelings, divulging their intentions and reactions to events and to other people, and thus making that character more intimately known to the audience.

Read the following soliloquy (Othello, Act III, scene 3, 255–76) and think about what we learn about Othello.

OTHELLO
This fellow’s of exceeding honesty,

And knows all qualities with a learned spirit

Of human dealings. If I do prove her haggard,

Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,

I’d whistle her off, and let her down the wind

To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black

And have not those soft parts of conversation

That chamberers have; or for I am declined

Into the vale of years – yet that’s not much –

She’s gone: I am abused, and my relief

Must be to loathe her. O, curse of marriage!

That we can call these delicate creatures ours

And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad

And live upon the vapour of a dungeon

Than keep a corner in the thing I love

For others’ uses. Yet ‘tis the plague of great ones;

Prerogatived are they less than the base.

‘Tis destiny unshunnable, like death:

Even then this forkéd plague is fated to us

When we do quicken. Desdemona comes:

Enter Desdemona and Emilia

If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself

I’ll not believe’t.

Othello

Othello refers to two other characters in this speech, praising the honesty of one, Iago (whom we, the audience, know, is far from honest), and showing his distrust of the other, his wife, Desdemona, in the metaphor of lines 3–6, in which he compares her to a hawk. The comparison suggests a desire for control, which is emphasized later (ll.11–13) when, exclaiming against the trials of marriage, he bewails the fact that men can never entirely possess women. He thinks of reasons for Desdemona’s presumed decline of interest in him – his race, his lack of a courtier’s eloquence, his age – thus revealing his own insecurities. The repugnance of the metaphor of a toad in a dungeon reveals the violence of his emotions and his attempt to convert love into loathing. The next few lines (16–20) are difficult, but the general meaning seems to be that cuckoldry (‘this forkéd plague’) is as inevitable as death, a fate that comes at birth, though the metaphor of disease also implies contagious suffering, as though infidelity is ‘caught’ from others. As Desdemona enters, however, he quickly changes his mind, and distrust is banished.

Through this speech, his first soliloquy, we see Othello’s vulnerability and the precarious nature of the unwitting Desdemona’s relationship with him. He reveals to the audience his state of mind, taking us with him through the tortuous twists and turns of his emotional suffering. But the audience, privy to Iago’s machiavellian plans, realize that Othello, a man of action rather than of political intrigue, has been well and truly duped. Desdemona, who loves him for reasons other than the physical attributes he mentions, has no thought of infidelity.

Asides

An aside is a shorter speech, maybe only a few words, spoken sotto voce to the audience. It is presumed that the other characters on stage cannot hear what is being said, unless the aside is between two characters. Unlike the soliloquy, which largely died out with the decline of poetic drama, the aside is a convention that was widely used until the rise of naturalistic drama early in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it is still employed in those conventional dramatic genres, pantomime and farce. Asides are most likely to be used where there is intrigue and characters are acting with duplicity, whether this is in comedy or tragedy. It is noticeable that a history play like Henry V contains few (if any) asides; it is not a play of private intrigue but of political negotiations and warfare.

Masks & Disguises

Masks were used in classical Greek theatre to exaggerate expressions so that they could be seen in the large open-air amphitheatres. Most of us are familiar with the famous stereotypes for tragedy and comedy, but masks were also identified with particular types, whether comic or tragic, such as old man, or king, courtesan or queen. Masks have not been part of the dramatic conventions in Britain, but have been used to reflect social conventions of the Restoration period. The connotations of ‘play’ make it appropriate that plays should incorporate the social play of carnival and revelry, occasions when it was customary for participants to appear masked. Thus in The Rover masks are used by the characters, male and female, who participate in the carnival as a form of disguise, so that ‘whatever extravagances we commit in these faces, our own may not be obliged to answer ‘em’, as Belvile admits (Act II, scene 1).

Masking is a particular form of disguise, but disguising through clothes is a much commoner convention. The actors in a play are of course already disguising themselves simply by assuming their roles in the play, but a further level of disguise is frequently added, as it is in Henry V, As You Like It and The Rover. Disguise may encompass cross-dressing; Shakespeare, for instance, was particularly fond of requiring his heroines (played by boys of course) to take on a male role, as Rosalind does in As You Like It. But it can also be effected without any change of costume. The Macbeths, for instance, welcome Duncan to their castle with murder in mind: ‘look like th’innocent flower,/But be the serpent under’t’, Lady Macbeth advises her husband (Act 1, scene 5, Arden edition). Similarly, in Othello, Iago pretends honesty, in order to work on ‘the Moor’, who ‘is of a free and open nature,/That thinks men honest that but seem to be so’ (Act 1, scene 3). In A Doll’s House, Torvald draws attention to the mask of hypocrisy that Krogstad must assume, and Nora in effect disguises herself in the costume of a Neapolitan fisher-girl for a fancy-dress party. She adopts elements of that costume when at the end of Act II she dances the tarantella that reveals so much of her inner anguish. For that is the interesting thing about disguise; it both disguises and reveals or liberates, since clothes constrain not only by their form, but also by the behaviour that is associated with them. When Rosalind fashions herself as Ganymede she does so initially to escape danger at the court and to make her way out of the city without attracting notice. Similarly, the male disguise that Hellena adopts in The Roverallows her to behave with a freedom that would have been shocking in a woman. Disguise, then, can be used to escape danger, to titillate, or simply for fun, but it has the effect of exposing the dual nature of human beings, their repressed desires and impulses, as well as the self-consciousness of theatrical activity.

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-7.1

Summary

Although you are most likely familiar with dramatic convention through movies and television, these conventions existed on stage long before other kinds of visual media were invented. Dramatic conventions are the rules and techniques that playwrights use to create their plays, develop characters, and generate intrigue.

Dramatic conventions are often communicated in the text through stage directions, so it is important to read the stage directions with as much care as you do the dialogue. When you read the text, you experience the dramatic conventions differently than when you watch it in performance. For example, in The Princess Bride, the script probably has a stage direction that reads “(Wesley enters in a mask)” pages before his identity is ever revealed to the viewing audience. Alternatively, as a reader it becomes a little more complicated to keep track of and remember what roles are played by the same actor through doubling. Thinking about and paying attention to dramatic convention, once again, reminds us as readers to visualize the play as a performance while we read.