Studying Drama

1. Studying Drama

2. Conventions associated with words written and spoken • Dialogue • Monologue (others on stage) • Soliloquy (alone on stage) • Verbal irony (double entendre) • Aside (to audience)

3. Always keep in mind: • likely or possible effects of the words • movements and gestures either included or implied • limitations and possibilities of different types of theaters

4. Conventions associated with character portrayal • Protagonist vs. antagonist • Anti-hero • Stock character (i.e. the clown) • Eponymous character (i.e. Othello) • Backstory • Flashbacks (analepsis) • Flash forwards (prolepsis) • Deliberately construed entrances and exits • Gestures and repetitive actions (the absence of words)

5. Drama vs. Novel • How might a playwright be limited in a way that the novelist is not? • What strategies can a playwright use to convey characters?

6. Conventions associated with plot • Freytag’s triangle – exposition, rising action/exciting force/complication, climax, falling action, dénouement • Prologue/epilogue • Curtain lines – delivered at the end of an act or scene • Dramatic irony • Comic relief • Deus ex machina – introduction of an unexpected or improbable event that leads to a solution to some dramatic problem

7. Opening scenes • How does the scene engage the audience? • What effect does the playwright want this scene to have on the audience? • What purpose does the scene serve in the play as a whole?

8. Conventions related to staging and performance • Set • Lighting and sound • Stage business – actions that are incidental to the immediate action • Freeze frame –meaning conveyed through silence and stasis • Breaking of the fourth wall (curtain) – actors acknowledging or speaking to the audience • Moving beyond the script – how the play is to be enacted, and thus many meanings rather than a single meaning. First understand generally what is happening; then think about the ways in which this could be enacted on the stage

9. Audience: viewer vs. reader • How are they/their needs different? • What strategies are employed for each different audience?

10. Shakespeare

11. Structural pattern

12. Thematic Topics of Shakespeare • conflict – external and internal (protagonist) • appearance vs. reality • order and disorder – causes of breakdown tend to include jealousy, love, hate, and ambition • change – centered on protagonist • love

13. Themes are often developed in one of three ways: • Individual character/characters experience some personal difficulties or inner turmoil, perhaps moral or spiritual, that causes some mental conflict • The family, society, or the country is affected by turmoil • Nature or the universe may be disordered, or supernatural events may be involved

14. Language of Shakespeare • blank verse • unrhymed iambic pentameter (unstressed, stressed) • used by “high” characters, in keeping with their elevated natures • prose • just as carefully structured and organized as verse • used by “low” or comic characters • used for sub-plots This is general/simplistic; look at the context of the specific episode to determine why Shakespeare has chosen to use the language in the specific form.

15. Shakespeare uses language to: • create atmosphere and setting (due to lack of backdrops, set pieces, etc.) • conjure vivid images that are linked to central themes