Matakuliah : G0302/Introduction to Literature
Tahun
: 2007
Introduction
Pertemuan 11
Reading a play
• Most plays are written not to be read in books but to be
performed.
• Plays are meant to be seen on stage, but reading a play
may afford advantages.
• It’s better to know some masterpieces by reading them
than never to know them at all.
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Bina Nusantara
Reading a play
• A play is literature before it comes alive in a theatre.
• Some plays, whatever the intentions of their authors, are
destined to be read more often than they are acted.
Such a play is called closet drama—closet means a
small private room.
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Bina Nusantara
Reading a play
• Some readers, when silently reading a play to
themselves, try to visualize a stage, imagining the
characters in costume and under lights.
• If such a reader is an actor or a director and its reading
the play with an eye to staging it, then that reader may
try to imagine every detail of a possible production, even
shades of makeup and loudness of sound effects.
Bina Nusantara
Reading a play
• Although some readers find it enjoyable to imagine the
play taking place upon a stage, others prefer to imagine
the people and events that play brings vividly to mind.
• Most plays, whether seen in a theatre or in print employ
some conventions, customary methods of presenting an
action, usual and recognizable devices that an audience
is willing to accept.
Bina Nusantara
Reading a play
• In reading a great play from the past, such as Oedipus
the King, it will help if we know some of the conventions
of the classical Greek theatre of the Elizabethan theatre.
Bina Nusantara
Reading a play
• In Othello, when the sinister Iago, left on stage alone,
begins to speak at the end of Act II, Scene 1, we
recognize the conventional device of a soliloquy, a
dramatic monologue in which we seem to overhear the
character’s inmost thoughts uttered aloud.
• Like conventions in poetry, such familiar methods of
staging a story afford us a happy shock of recognition.
Bina Nusantara