Othello

Drama terms and practices

Plays are meant to be performed rather than read.

Plays present action

• through actors
• on a stage
• before an audience

Plays present characters through

• action
• dialogue
• soliloquy (always presumed to be truthful insofar as the character knows the truth)
• aside (always presumed to be truthful insofar as the character knows the truth)

Plays present setting through

• props
• scenery
• dialogue

Plays demand a well-defined plot with

• swift exposition
• strong conflict
• dramatic confrontations

Plays always employ the objective or dramatic point of view

Playwrights generally avoid purely narrative material

Art always involves a heightening or intensification or reality. (It is greatest in poetic drama.)

Dramatic conventions include

• the illusion of the three-walled room
• the fiction that the characters speak the language of the audience
• the necessity that the actors situate themselves so as to face the audience

General exercises for analysis and evaluation of drama

• In descriptive (not evaluative terms), does the play employ realistic or non-realistic conventions?
• Identify the protagonist(s) and antagonist(s). Are there any foil characters? What dramatic functions are served by the various minor characters? Do they shed light on the actions or motives of the major characters? Do they advance the plot by eliciting actions by others? Do they embody ideas or feelings that illuminate the major characters or the movement of the plot?
• How is dramatic suspense created? Contrast the amount of information possessed by the audience as the play proceeds with the knowledge that various individual character have: what is the effect of such a contrast?
• What themes does the play present? To what extent do the thematic materials of the play have an effect on the dramatic experience? Does the power of the ideas increase or decrease the pleasure of the theatrical experience? Does the play seem either too didactic or insufficient in its presentation of important human concerns?
• What amount of time is covered in the action? How much of the action is presented as a report rather than dramatized on stage? Is there a meaning behind the selection of events to be dramatized and those to be reported? Does the play feel loose or tight in its construction? Is that feeling appropriate to the themes and dramatic effects of the play?