The Study of Drama

I. One must make a special effort to visualize scenes, persons, and actions in

reading drama.

A. Sometimes there are no outright descriptions, so one infers from dialogue what is to happen.

B. Picture the scene as specifically as possible - looks of characters, setting, and sound.

C. Imagine the response of spectators:

1. Where they feel the tension

2. Where they would applaud

II. Suggestions for studying narrative

A. Ask if the story represents life as it has been or is at present, or if it is unrealistic.

B. A story of reality depends for its value on its validity and how much validity is in the plot.

C. Ask what its unifying purpose is.

1. Sometimes there is a moral lesson, an expression about the significance of life.

2. In plays, an author speaks this through one or more of his characters.

3. Sometimes the unifying purpose, moral, or main idea is placed in an important place, perhaps the end.

4. Does the story appear to be the work of a great or wise man who has thought deeply over life and felt it deeply?

5. Sometimes characters are in sharp contrasts to one another.

III. Characters

A. What is the function of each of the important characters, and what is the value of each in the plot?

B. What levels of characterization are there?

1. Characters may be:

a) Only names

b) Abstractions like good deeds in Everyman, the morality play

c) Stock types repeated in the drama of a period, such as the mother in melodrama or the villain in Elizabethan tragedy

d) Caricatures: characters with one superficial trait, exaggeration

e) Greatly conceived figures, with either one or two traits that are made effective by the author's imagination

2. Are fundamental traits made effective by the vigor of the author's imagination, or are characters well-rounded, with many traits (like Shakespeare's great characters)? Hamlet, for example, loves Ophelia, yet wants revenge.

3. Are the principle characters unchanged by the events of the plot as it develops? Or do they go from bad to worse, good to better?

4. Are the characters portrayed by direct description from the author, or are we left to infer what they are like from their words and deeds, and the attitude of other characters to them? Sometimes names are significant.

5. Do any of the characters say or do things inconsistent with what they are represented to be?

6. That they act differently from people we know proves nothing; our knowledge may be limited. It does matter whether or not the author seems to force his characters to do what they normally would not.

C. Shakespeare's characters are highly developed.

1. Shakespeare's characters are the most highly developed that one can find anywhere. He is known for his immortal characters. They still live today.

2. In his early plays, he developed characters mainly by having outward circumstances push them along and determine them.

3. As Shakespeare matured, he learned to develop character and outward circumstance. A good example of this is Othello, the main character in the play by Shakespeare