Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

25.3 The formal analysis of drama
Unit 25 Ways of reading drama
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

Instead of saying that the distinctive feature of dramatic texts is that they are designed for, or only achieve their full realization in, theatrical performance, it is more useful to define dramatic texts in purely formal terms in ways that bring out their differences from narrative prose fiction and most kinds of poetry. Basically, following Aristotle (1965, p. 34), the three main genres of literature can be distinguished from one another by the different ways in which they present themselves as speech or present the speech of the characters they construct. The distinctive formal feature of lyric poetry is that it presents itself as the unmediated speech of a first person speaker. The distinctive formal feature of narrative prose fiction is that it typically presents itself as the speech of a number of different characters mediated to us through a narrator. Drama differs from lyric poetry and narrative fiction in that it typically presents itself to us as the direct speech or dialogue of a number of different characters without a mediating narrator. Thus the scene from Othello examined above continues with Iago responding to Desdemona’s supplication as follows:

In this exchange, there is no narrator to mediate the characters’ speech or to guide the reader: there are no reporting clauses (’she said, anxiously’) or descriptions of the characters and their behaviour (’she knelt with her head in her hands’). Thus reading dramatic texts can be more demanding than reading narrative prose fiction since the reader is required to picture what is happening or to gauge the characters’ emotions or motives by picking up on the clues embedded in the characters’ speech (as in ’Here I kneel’). But it is usually perfectly possible for a reader to do this without needing to see or imagine the scene acted out on a stage.