Perspective
Drama is literature written for performance--or at least written in a style
that would allow for stage performance. As a text form, drama can be thought of
as story told though spoken remarks and stage directions.
Of all fictional forms, drama comes closest to virtual transcription of speech.
It relies on simulating the language of everyday speech as well as the
encounters and interaction of speech: lying, confronting, prevaricating,
concealing, admitting, proclaiming, and a wealth of other social/linguistic
interactions.
And of all the literary forms, drama is the one in which the author/dramatist
almost never speaks directly to the audience/reader. (The use of an onstage
narrator—as with the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town— is relatively
rare.) Similarly, few dramatists create characters as vehicles for their
thoughts or values, as in some works of George Bernard Shaw. For the most
part, dramatists convey ideas through their characters and the plot, rather
than in a direct embodiment of themselves in the way novelists do with
narrators and poets do with personas.
If discussion of novels focuses on content, and discussion of poetry on
language, discussion of drama perhaps focuses most on structure--not only the
structure of the unfolding story, but also on the interrelationships of
characters. Drama is about the "dramatic," about conflict and resolution,
about compelling actions and reactions, conflicts and discovery.
Reading Drama: Content
We can use the same criteria of content with drama as we used with novels and stories:
character, action, and setting. With dramatic performance, however, we must
add several additional elements. Putting on a play involves not only actors,
but also a set designer, a costume designer, and a director. The director
controls the action. The set and costume designer contribute to creating a
visual representation of the setting.
Reading Drama: Language
Since drama consists of the spoken word, language plays a role in drama insofar
as the language of the characters offers clues to their backgrounds, feelings,
and personalities, and to changes in feeling throughout the play..
Reading Drama: Structure
As with stories, we can examine drama with two understandings of structure. On
the one hand, we have the linear unfolding of the plot from scene to scene, act
to act. Drama often includes contrasting subplots that reinforce or set the
main plot in additional perspective . On the other hand, we have the structure
of the conflict itself, and can identify elements running throughout the text
in patterns of behavior and events.