Literary Analysis for
Drama
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Literary Elements:
create the story
Theme
Conflict
Character
Plot
Setting
Technical Elements:
produce the drama
Performance Elements:
bring story to life on stage
Script
Speech
Sound/Lighting Non-verbal
Costumes
actions
Make-up
Props
Scenery
Cast
Structure of a Drama
A drama is a written story performed by actors for an audience. A
drama has many parts.
FEATURES TO CONSIDER WHEN ANALYZING DRAMA
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Themes
Information Flow
Overall Structure
Space
Time
Characters
Types of Utterance in Drama
Types of Stages
Dramatic Subgenres
Conflict
Dramatic Texts Analysis
Content Analysis
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Themes:
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Characters
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Space: dramatic environment (Word scenery, setting and
characterization)
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Time
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Conflict
Overall
Structure
Form
Analysis
Organization
Conflict and ideas
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Information Flow
Freytag’s Pyramid (plot)
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Dramatic sub-genre: comedy or tragedy
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External: acts and scenes
Internal; actions
Narrative techniques
Types of Stage
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Types of Utterance in Drama:
Monologue
Dialogue
Soliloquy
Asides
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Themes: Conflict and Ideas
What the play means as opposed to what happens (the
plot). Sometimes the theme is clearly stated in the title. It may
be stated through dialogue by a character acting as the
playwright’s voice. Or it may be the theme is less obvious and
emerges only after some study or thought. The abstract issues
and feelings that grow out of the dramatic action.
Themes are describes using ABSTRACT NOUNS: love, hate,
hypocrisy, etc
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Questions to answer
Analyzing Theme
• What happens to the main characters? What do they learn?
• What hints, if any, does the title give you about the author’s
message?
• What does the play demonstrate about people, values, or
society?
• What is the main message, or theme, of this play?
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Characters
• The characters in a play are divided into major characters and
minor characters, depending on how important they are for
the plot. A good indicator for it, is the time and speech as well
as presence on stage.
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Types of Characters
Antagonist
*Confidante
*Dynamic character/ Round character
*Flat character/static character
*Foil
*Narrator
*Protagonist
*Archetype
*Sympathetic character
*Unsympathetic character
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Questions to Answer
Analyzing Characters
• Who are the main protagonists—the heroes or most important
characters? Who are the main antagonists—characters in conflict
with the protagonists? (The antagonist can be an obstacle or a
force of nature.)
• What do you learn about the characters through their physical
appearance (including costumes), actions, and speech? What do
you learn from the comments of other characters?
• How does each character react to other people or events?
What do the reactions reveal about these characters, or about
what they are reacting to?
• If the play is a tragedy, what are the protagonist’s tragic flaws?
• What reasons does each character have for acting as he or she
does?
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Space-Setting
In George Bernard Shaw’s plays the secondary text ( all the texts
surrounding the main text.
Ex: (Title, scene descriptions, stage directions) provides details
spatio-temporal descriptions.
The stage set sets the scene(example poverty, ,misery, secrecy)
Word scenery:As drama is multimedial, the visual aspect play an
important role. The stage props described in secondary text help
visualize the stage. The stage was created by word scenery.
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Space-Setting
Setting and characterization: the setting can be used as indirect
characterization. A better look at the setting helps to understand
better the characters’ background, or behavior.
Characterizations made by the author in the play’s secondary text
(authorial) or by characters in the play (figural), and whether
these characterisations are made directly (explicitly) or indirectly
(implicitly).
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SPACE-SETTING
Time: how are references to time made by the characters’
speech, stage directions, setting. Time in the story. Use of
flashbacks and flashforwards.
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Different Types of Conflicts
1.
Character vs Character:
• Characters are pitted against one another.
• The antagonist (or other character) tries to keep the protagonist from reaching his goal.
• The protagonist must overcome the efforts of the antagonist to reach his goal.
2. Character vs. Nature:
• The hero must overcome a force of nature to meet his goal.
• Nature can be a force of nature (like a storm, earthquake, or difficult climate) OR an animal
from nature.
• In literature, the hero sometimes meets his goal, but sometimes is defeated.
3. Character vs. Society
• A protagonist sees something in a unique way.
• People in his town or culture don't like his way of thinking. His bold ideas diverge from
tradition or the rules. They ridicule and threaten him. He is compelled to act.
• Our hero may convince the others he is right, but he might be forced to flee town. He may
even lose his life.
4.Character vs. Self
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The protagonist must overcome her own nature to reach her goal.
The protagonist struggles within her own mind.
The protagonist needs to overcome her struggle to reach the goal. She may, or may not,
succeed.
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Different Types of Conflicts
5. Character vs. Technology
• The protagonist must overcome a machine or technology.
• Most often the encounter with the machine or technology is
through the character's own doing. For example, it may be
technology or a machine that they created, purchased, or
owned with the assumption that it would make their life
easier.
• Over time the protagonist must overcome the technology, in
some instances, even destroying it before it destroys them.
6. Person vs. Supernatural
Superficially, conflict with the supernatural may seem equivalent
to conflict with fate or God, or representative of a struggle with
an evocation of self (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) or nature (The
Birds). But this category stands on its own feet as well.
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Overall Structure
Story and plot: As with the study of narrative texts, one can
distinguish between story and plot in drama. Story addresses an
assumed chronological sequence of events, while plot refers to
the way events are causally and logically connected. Thus, plot
refers to the actual logical arrangement of events and actions
used to explain ‘why’ something happened, while ‘story’ simply
designates the gist of ‘what’ happened in a chronological order.
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Plot and Theme questions
• Examine Plot
• • What happens in the play? Use an Outline or Sequence Chain to
record the
• main events.
• • What conflicts develop? Which are internal, and which are
external—between
• two people, people and society, or people and nature?
• • What is the main conflict?
• • How is the main conflict resolved?
• Analyze Theme
• • What happens to the main characters? What do they learn?
• • What hints, if any, does the title give you about the author’s
message?
• • What does the play demonstrate about people, values, or society?
• • What is the main message, or theme, of this play?
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Questions to answer
Explore the Setting
• Where and when does the play take place?
• What impact does the setting have on the events of the play?
• What choices are suggested concerning set design, lighting, and
props? Do you
agree with these choices? Why or why not?
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Freytag’s Pyramid
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Freytag’s Pyramid
Act I contains all introductory information and thus serves as
exposition: The main characters are introduced and, by
presenting a conflict, the play prepares the audience for the
action in subsequent acts.
The second act usually propels the plot by introducing further
circumstances or problems related to the main issue. The main
conflict starts to develop and characters are presented in greater
detail.
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Freytag’s Pyramid
In act III, the plot reaches its climax. A crisis occurs where the
deed is committed that will lead to the catastrophe, and this
brings about a turn (peripety) in the plot.
The fourth act creates new tension in that it delays the final
catastrophe by further events.
The fifth act finally offers a solution to the conflict presented in
the play. While tragedies end in a catastrophe, usually the death
of the protagonist, comedies are simply ‘resolved’ (traditionally in
a wedding or another type of festivity). A term that is applicable
to both types of ending is the French dénouement, which literally
means the ‘unknotting’ of the plot.
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Literary Elements
INFORMATION FLOW
• Usually there is no narrator.
• The information is delivered through characters, stage or in
the exposition
• Exposition answers the readers’ WH questions.
• Lack of information leads to keeping the reader interested in
the play.
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Dramatic Subgenre Comedy or
Tragedy
Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, one distinguishes at least between
two sub-genres of drama: comedy and tragedy. While comedy
typically aims at entertaining the audience and making it laugh by
reassuring them that no disaster will occur and that the outcome
of possible conflicts will be positive for the characters involved,
tragedy tries to raise the audience’s concern, to confront viewers
with serious action and conflicts, which typically end in a
catastrophe (usually involving the death of the protagonist and
possibly others).
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Types of Comedy
Types of Comedy
Sometimes, scholars distinguish between high comedy, which appeals to the intellect (comedy
of ideas) and has a serious purpose (for example, to criticise), and low comedy, where greater
emphasis is placed on situation comedy, slapstick and farce. There are further sub-genres of
comedy:
Romantic Comedy:
A pair of lovers and their struggle to come together is usually at the centre of romantic comedy.
Romantic comedies also involve some extraordinary circumstances, e.g., magic, dreams, the
fairy-world, etc. Examples are Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It.
Basics of English Studies, Version 03/04, Drama 133
Satiric Comedy:
Satiric comedy has a critical purpose. It usually attacks philosophical notions or political
practices as well as general deviations from social norms byridiculing characters. In other words:
the aim is not to make people ‘laugh with’ the characters but ‘laugh at’ them. An early writer of
satirical comedies was Aristophanes (450-385 BC), later examples include Ben Jonson’s Volpone
and The Alchemists.
Comedy of Manners:
The comedy of manners is also satirical in its outlook and it takes the artificial and sophisticated
behaviour of the higher social classes under closer scrutiny. The plot usually revolves around
love or some sort of amorous intrigue and the language is marked by witty repartees and
cynicism. Ancient representatives of this form of comedy are Terence and Plautus, and the form
reached its peak with the Restoration comedies of William Wycherley and William Congreve.
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Types of Comedy
Farce:
The farce typically provokes viewers to hearty laughter. It presents highly
exaggerated and caricatured types of characters and often has an unlikely plot.
Farces employ sexual mix-ups, verbal humour and physical comedy, and they formed
a central part of the Italian commedia dell’arte. In English plays, farce usually
appears as episodes in larger comical pieces, e.g., in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the
Shrew.
Comedy of Humours:
Ben Jonson developed the comedy of humours, which is based on the assumption
that a person’s character or temperament is determined by the predominance of
one of four humours (i.e., body liquids): blood (= sanguine), phlegm (= phlegmatic),
yellow bile (= choleric), black bile (= melancholic). In the comedy of humours,
characters are marked by one of these predispositions which cause their eccentricity
or distorted personality. An example is Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.
Melodrama:
Melodrama is a type of stage play which became popular in the 19th century. It mixes
romantic or sensational plots with musical elements. Later, the musical elements
were no longer considered essential. Melodrama aims at a violent appeal to
audience emotions and usually has a happy ending.
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Types of Tragedy
Senecan Tragedy:
A precursor of tragic drama were the tragedies by the Roman poet Seneca
(4 BC – 65 AD). His tragedies were recited rather than staged but they
became a model for English playwrights entailing the five-act structure, a
complex plot and an elevated style of dialogue.
Revenge Tragedy / Tragedy of Blood:
This type of tragedy represented a popular genre in the Elizabethan Age
and made extensive use of certain elements of the Senecan tragedy such as
Basics of English Studies, Version 03/04, Drama 134
murder, revenge, mutilations and ghosts. Typical examples of this sub-genre
are Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. These plays were
written in verse and, following Aristotelian poetics, the main characters
were of a high social rank (the higher they are, the lower they fall). Apart
from dealing with violent subject matters, these plays conventionally made
use of dumb shows or play-within-the-play, that is a play performed as
part of the plot of the play as for example ‘The Mousetrap’ which is
performed in Hamlet, and feigned or real madness in some of the
characters.
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Types of Tragedy
Domestic / Bourgeois Tragedy:
In line with a changing social system where the middle class gained increasing importance and
power, tragedies from the 18th century onward shifted their focus to protagonists from the
middle or lower classes and were written in prose. The protagonist typically suffers a domestic
disaster which is intended to arouse empathy rather than pity and fear in the audience. An
example is George Lillo’s The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1731).
Modern tragedies such as Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman (1949) follow largely the new
conventions set forth by the domestic tragedy (common conflict, common characters, prose)
and a number of contemporary plays have exchanged the tragic hero for an anti-hero, who does
not display the dignity and courage of a traditional hero but is passive, petty and ineffectual.
Other dramas resuscitate elements of ancient tragedies such as the chorus and verse, e.g., T.S.
Eliot’s The Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
Tragicomedy:
The boundaries of genres are often blurred in drama and occasionally they lead to the
emergence of new sub-genres, e.g., the tragicomedy. Tragicomedies, as the name suggests,
intermingle conventions concerning plot, character and subject matter derived from both
tragedy and comedy. Thus, characters of both high and low social rank can be mixed as in
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600), or a serious conflict, which is likely to end in
disaster, suddenly reaches a happy ending because of some unforeseen circumstances as in
John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1609). Plays with multiple plots which combine
tragedy in one plot and comedy in the other are also occasionally referred to as tragicomedies
(e.g., Thomas Middleton’s and William Rowley’s The Changeling, 1622).
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Organization
External Structure
Parts: Acts and scenes in the play.
Dramatic Techniques: Monologue, dialogue, Soliloquy, asides.
Theatrical Point of View: is the dialogue direct without
intervention?
Internal Structure
Actions which take place in the drama
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Organization- Narrative
Techniques
In drama, in contrast to narrative, characters typically talk to one
another and the entire plot is carried by and conveyed through
their verbal interactions. Language in drama can generally be
presented either as monologue or dialogue.
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TYPES OF UTTERANCES
The written form of a drama is a script.
The cast of characters is a list of who is in the play.
Stage directions tell actors what to do; they are written in italic
print.
A scene has a fixed setting and continuous time frame.
An act is made up of several scenes.
Dialogue is the conversation between characters.
A monologue is when one character speaks at length to another.
A soliloquy is when a character is alone on stage and thinks
aloud.
Asides are spoken away from other characters, and a character
either speaks aside to himself, secretively to (an)other
character(s) or to the audience (ad spectatores).
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Types of Stages
http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/discover-theatres/theatrefaqs/170-what-are-the-types-of-theatre-stages-and-auditoria
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