Chapter 5: Stylistic Applications to Drama

Chapter 5: Stylistic Applications to Drama

Introduction 

• • A play exists in two ways—on the page, and on the stage; this presents something of a dilemma for the literary critic since the two manifestations are quite different and need different analytic approaches.
  • When stylistics has focused on drama, it has almost invariably been concerned with the text, rather than the performance. The text, after all, is static and unchanging, (although different editions of a play might contain textual variations). The stylistician may easily turn back the pages to a previous scene, and make comparisons between speeches in different parts of the play, or even reach for another book, and make comparisons between different plays. 
  • The (live) performance of a play, on the other hand, is transient (short-lived). A speech only partially heard through inattention cannot be heard again on that occasion. 
  • Actors may differ in their performances from one night to the next, and a half-empty house mid-week, compared to a packed house at the weekend, will also affect the experience. 
  • The director’s interpretation can alter the play from one staging to another at many, sometimes fundamental, levels. Shakespeare’s plays in particular are continually being interpreted in different ways—Macbeth can be set in the time of World War II, All’s Well that End’s Well can be set in modern society; settings can be naturalistic, or formal and abstract.

  The Significance of Context

  • When you watch a live performance of a play, the importance of context to the process of interpretation becomes strikingly apparent. Your interpretation of what is performed before you will be strongly affected by a number of factors. 
  • For example, how well you know the play will influence whether or not you pick up certain nuances (variations) in the performance. If you are tired, looking for the actors’ names in the programme, or eating sweets—all relatively common states or activities for theatre audiences—you may miss the backward glance thrown by one actor to another, which suggests a change in the relationship of the characters. 
  • If you are admiring the costumes or the set, you may be less aware of the tone of voice, a posture. These kinds of factors influence our reading of all texts; live performances simply emphasise their importance. 

  Drama on Film

  • Much drama is filmed and televised, and can be obtained commercially on video, or recorded at home, the conditions described above for live performances do not always apply to many filmed productions of plays. 
  • Video allows us the privilege of reviewing speeches we want to hear again, of watching the same scene many times, maybe once for the content and delivery of a speech, and once to watch the behaviour of other actors in the background. 
  • The process of filming also does some of the jobs of interpreting for us. The camera may focus on one character’s expression as they speak, the tension in the hand of another, and then move to the sky, to show the fading light. These are all elements which might be present on stage, but which we might miss if our gaze was not being directed by the camera in this way. 
  • Having pointed out the differences between a live performance of a play and the text, it is important to emphasise that from a linguistic perspective it clearly is both possible and easier to analyse a play as a written text, than to analyse it as a live performance. 
  • The text of a play is indeed a legitimate object of study, and there are reasons why the text of a play should be studied, rather than a performance of the play:
  • Teachers and students have traditionally read plays without necessarily seeing them performed and have still managed to understand them and argue about them. 
  • A special case of this is the dramatic producer, who must be able to read and understand a play in order to decide how to produce it…… 
  • There is a logical and terminological distinction between a play and a performance of it. Coming out of the theatre, people can be heard making comments of the form ‘that was a good/bad production of a good/bad play’...

  How Should we Analyse Drama?

  Drama as Poetry

  When analysing drama as poetry, one should consider the following elements:

  • Language: The words and phrases used in the dialogue and stage directions are an important aspect of the play as poetry. They can be used to convey meaning and create a certain mood or atmosphere. Pay attention to the use of imagery, metaphor, and other literary devices.
  • Structure: The structure of a play is different from that of a poem. It is divided into acts and scenes, and it has a clear progression of events. However, the structure of a play can be analyzed in terms of the way it develops and resolves conflicts and themes.
  1. Characterisation: In a play, characters are brought to life through their actions, dialogue, and stage directions. Analyse how the playwright uses characterisation to reveal the characters’ motivations, personalities, and conflicts.
  2. Theme: The theme or central idea of a play can be found by looking at the relationships between characters and the conflicts that arise. Consider how the theme is developed throughout the play and how it relates to the overall meaning of the play.
  3. Symbolism: Symbolism can be used to add depth to the characters, plot, and themes in a play. Look for symbols that are repeated throughout the play, and consider what they represent and how they contribute to the overall meaning of the play.
  4. Audience Expectation: A play is not just a script to read but it is meant to be performed in front of an audience. Consider how the playwright uses audience expectations to create tension, suspense, and other dramatic effects.

  In summary, when analysing drama as poetry, it is important to examine the language, structure, characterisation, theme, symbolism and audience expectation used by the playwright to create meaning and convey the message of the play.

  Drama as Fiction

  • The play can be analysed for character and plot, treating it more or less like fiction. The two components of plot and character clearly are as significant in dramatic texts as in fiction.
  • Drama however differs fundamentally from fiction in that it usually lacks a narrative voice, and this absence can make a novel difficult to dramatise successfully.
  • There are ways, in drama, of attempting to deal with the function of the narrative voice. A chorus, as was used in Greek Tragedy, has also been used in plays by T.S. Eliot (Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, for example), and can give another perspective on the actions of the characters or plot development. Dylan Thomas used a narrative voice reading over the play in Under Milkwood, and Dennis Potter, in the television play The Singing Detective, uses a voice-over technique. 
  • Information about the plot and the characters is sometimes given through explicit interjections by the playwright in the text of the play, as stage instructions. George Bernard Shaw, for example, gives very precise instructions about the appearance of his characters and the set. The following extract is taken from the opening stage directions to Arms and the Man:

  The window is hinged door-wise and stands wide open. Outside, a pair of wooden shutters, opening outwards, also stand open. On the balcony, a beautiful young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the night, and the fact that her own youth and beauty are part of it, is gazing at the snowy Balkans. She is in her nightgown, well covered by a long mantle of firs, worth, on a moderate estimate, about three times the furniture in the room. 

  
  

  • Explicit notes such as above mentioned ones can be interpreted by the director, actors, costume and set designers into audible signals through the choice of accent and other features of the speech of the characters, and into visual signals such as clothing, posture and movements, which can give the audience information about a character not dissimilar to that which a narrative voice might deliver.
  • Andrew Bradley, the author of a well-known textbook (1905) used by schoolchildren sitting exams in Shakespeare, which gave rise to the saying: ‘If you’ve read Bradley, you won’t do badly!’, concentrated on this aspect of Shakespeare’s plays. In doing so, he perpetuated (conserved) what was later viewed as a critical fallacy: the idea that the characters had some kind of identity beyond the boundaries of the play. It is sometimes referred to as ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, because one of Lady Macbeth’s speeches refers to her having breastfed a child, but no child of the Macbeths’ is mentioned or appears in the play. This anomaly has given literary critics much food for thought and debate and raised questions about whether Lady Macbeth had children in a previous marriage, or whether they had died young, and this was what had hardened her to the extent she could urge her husband to commit murder. 

  Drama as Conversation

  • Drama as conversation refers to the use of dramatic techniques, such as dialogue and character development, to create a sense of interaction and engagement between characters and the audience. This approach can be used in plays, films, and other forms of storytelling to create a sense of realism and emotional connection with the characters and their struggles.
  • One crucial aspect in which drama differs from poetry and fiction is in its emphasis on verbal interaction, and the way relationships between people are constructed and negotiated through what they say. 

  Linguistics, and techniques of discourse analysis in particular, can help us analyse the exchanges between characters, in order to: 

  1. help us to understand the text
  2. help us understand how conversation works
  3. allow us to appreciate better the skill a playwright has demonstrated in the way they have written the speeches of their characters
  4. help us to see things in the text that other forms of analysis might have allowed us to miss. 

  Differences between Speech and Writing

  • Speech in plays is quite unlike naturally occurring conversation. However, even apparently naturalistic contemporary dramas usually use language in a way which is quite unlike the language of ordinary, private conversations.
  • Because spoken language, particularly in conversations, is very different from ordinary written language, we need special conventions to represent it in a written form. This written representation of speech is called a transcript, and there are many different ways of transcribing a conversation, although none of them can claim to capture every detail of the talk.
  • Let's see an extract from a naturally-occurring conversation between two women who are preparing for an evening event to inform people about African culture (Pages 98 & 99):

  M=words spoken by Mary; S=words spoken by Susan
  The lines are numbered and follow on from one another without a pause. Where the two speakers speak at the same time, their words have the same line number (e.g. line 3).
  Pauses less than half a second long are shown as a full stop in brackets. Where speech was unreadable, it is shown as ‘(unclear speech)’.

  Mary and Susan’s Conversation Part 1:

  1. M: ok (.) so we can have some tea (.) what else (.) and 
  2. M: then I’ve got a a book on Zambezi (.) 
  3. M: just just a wildlife book em
     S: yeah (.) that’s quite a lot already (.) 
  4. s: I’ll see what Ricky’s got she’s got a em 
  5. S: (.) (unclear speech) 
  6. M: em (.) and then I suppose we can have baskets and 
  7. M: things but (.)
     S: yeah
  8. M: how (.) those are just things tha. that gonna stand kinda
  9. M: like stand up on the workbench but what about like on the 
     
  10. M: walls or (.)
  11. S: are we meant to have something
  12. M: I don't know I just thought how are we gonna make it cos
  13. M: the (.) the actual recipe isn't that Africany really
  14. s: no (.) (unclear speech)
  • Pauses and Pause Fillers
  • We often pause while we organise our thoughts. There are also some pause fillers: the noises we make when we have not finished what we want to say, but are hesitating. 
  • Sounds we make in those circumstances include umm, uh, mmm and er. Pauses and umms and ers do occur in drama in controlled ways. On the radio, recordings of people who umm and er too much when they are interviewed are often edited before they go on the air, so they sound smoother, briefer, faster-moving and more confident.
  • Unclear Speech
  • Natural conversations often have unclear parts to them, especially when they are recorded—because speakers turn away from the zv1 24 microphones, because they laugh or cough or eat while they are talking, because they whisper or mutter to themselves or to someone very close to them, because they pronounce words or phrases in a way unfamiliar to the hearer/transcriber, or because they speak very quickly. 
  • In contrast, on the stage or in films, it is usually the actor’s job to make sure that every word the audience is supposed to hear is clear and audible.
  • Repetition and Recycling
  • A lot of repetition takes place when we talk. For example, at line 2, Mary says a twice, and at line 8, she says tha. before she says that, the word she probably intended to say. At line 3, she says the word just twice. At lines 8 and 9, she repeats part of a clause those are just things tha. that gonna stand kinda like stand up on the workbench. 
  • When we speak, we generally make a lot of what might be termed ‘production errors’, which we repair as we go along. It is common to repeat the first sound of a word (b.b. biro), especially if we are momentarily distracted from what we are saying, or haven’t quite made up our mind about which word to use. Recycling occurs when we get halfway through a phrase or an utterance and decide we need to amend some aspect of the grammar; we then return to the beginning and repeat it with the amendment in place.
  • An example of this in Mary’s speech is at line 8 when she says:
    tha. that gonna stand kinda like stand up
    recycling her choice of verb stand as stand up. False starts are also frequent in talk—in line 8 again, Mary begins her utterance with how then changes it to those are just things tha. These last two features are also so common that most of the time we don’t notice people doing them
  • These features occur seldom in scripted plays but are evident in some modern films, in which the dialogue is ad-libbed, or deliberately made to appear like natural speech.
  • Turn-Taking
  • One of the linguistic features of conversations which tends to be modified in dramatic texts is the way turns are taken, i.e. the way people having a conversation organise who is going to speak next. For example, in the extract, Mary and Susan usually take turns to talk—when one finishes, the other starts, usually without a perceivable gap; this kind of organisation of talk is called ‘no gap, no overlap’. However, at line 3, they both talk at the same time:
    3. M: just just a wildlife book em
    S: yeah (.) that’s quite a lot already (.)
  • Simultaneous talk is sometimes described as ‘interruption’, but this isn’t an interruption by Susan, but rather an agreement (yeah) which is followed by a comment on the stage of their preparations (that’s quite a lot already), while Mary finishes describing her book on Zambezi (just a wildlife book). 
  • Overlap like this is frequent in conversations, but usually relatively short-lived. If one speaker constantly talked at the same time as the other, over long stretches of the other one’s turn, then the talk would probably become less of a collaborative conversation, and more of a confrontation. There are no real examples of interruption in this extract between Mary and Susan.
  • In plays, compared to naturally occurring speech, there is usually a reduction in interruptions and overlaps. In scripted dialogue, the writer has already decided which character is going to speak next; it is not the participants, in this case, the actors, who are organising their turns at talk. 
  • Moreover, as an audience, rather than as an active participant in the talk, we can only really understand one speaker at a time. We can usually manage to understand a speaker despite some background noise, such as shouting or whispering, but even these can be distractions. 
  • Interruptions and overlapping speech, therefore, tend to be quite carefully organised in plays, to appear to be overlapping and competing for the floor without making the speeches difficult to follow.
  • Research suggests that overlapping speech is a more common feature in the conversations of women than of men. Caryl Churchill is an example of a playwright who has experimented with an overlapping speech in all-women conversations such as those in her play Top Girls. In a section that prefaces the text of the play, Churchill explains how overlap between the characters is shown in the text, using examples from the play as illustrations:
  • When one character starts speaking before the other has finished, the point of interruption is marked/.
    e.g. ISABELLA: This is the Emperor of Japan?/I once met the Emperor of Morocco.
    NIJO: In fact he was the ex-Emperor.
  • A character sometimes continues speaking right through another’s speech:
    e.g. ISABELLA: When I was forty I thought my life was over./ Oh I was pitiful. I was
    NIJO: I didn’t say I felt it for twenty years. Not every minute.
    ISABELLA: I was sent on a cruise for my health and I felt even worse. Pains in my bones, pins and needles... 
  • Back Channel Support
  • When we are listening closely to someone, or when we want to indicate that we are listening, we signal our attention to the speaker in a number of ways. We may turn towards them, lean towards them slightly, nod and/or make sounds which are called back channel support, or sometimes minimal responses. These are speech sounds such as uhuh, yeah, and mmhmm. At line 7, Susan says yeah which is a minimal response to Mary’s suggestion I suppose we can have baskets and things.
  • On stage, an actor might indicate that they are listening through body posture, but they are less likely to have back channel support zv1 27 scripted in for them—their listening is more likely to take place in silence. If you try not giving any back-channel support, and not nodding when someone is talking to you in real life, what usually happens is that the speaker will become increasingly hesitant and unsure of themselves. This is not what usually happens on the stage, although there is no reason why this type of interaction cannot be dramatised. 
  • Discourse Markers
  • In ordinary conversations, people frequently use words and phrases that have various, and sometimes rather ambiguous, functions. These include items like well, you know, like and others. At lines 8 and 9, Mary uses like twice: ‘that gonna stand kinda like stand up on the workbench but what about like on the walls’. She also uses kinda (kind of). 
  • These markers can signal a number of things, such as uncertainty, or the wish to disagree but politely, or they can be ‘in-group markers’ (if all your friends use a particular expression, you may use it too, to show you are part of the group), or even all three things at the same time. 
  • Discourse Cohesion
  • The term ‘cohesion’ literally means ‘sticking together’. For a conversation or indeed any text to be understandable, it must be cohesive. In other words, the different parts of the text must relate to one another. 
  • If it lacks cohesion, it will appear very disjointed, and won’t seem to make sense. One of the things that makes a conversation or text ‘cohesive’ is that all the information in it relates to something we’ve already been told or know anyway. 
  • In the transcribed conversation between Mary and Susan, one of the things which makes it rather confusing is that there is quite a lot of information which they, as participants, are taking for granted, but which we (as readers of the transcript) are not actually aware of. In a scripted exchange, the writer or writers usually make sure that everything the reader or member of the audience needs to know is made explicit.

  Analysing Dramatic Language

  • Dramatic language is the language used in plays, films, and other forms of dramatic literature. It is characterised by its use of figurative language, such as metaphor and simile, as well as its use of rhetorical devices, such as repetition and parallel structure, to create a sense of tension and emotion. The goal of the dramatic language is to engage the audience and create a sense of immersion in the story or scene being presented. When analysing dramatic language, it is important to consider the context in which the language is being used, as well as the audience for whom it is intended. Additionally, looking at the literary devices used in the text can give insight into the theme, tone and mood of the play.
  • Here, we look at the speech in dramatic texts and show how analytic techniques which linguists have applied to naturally occurring conversations can be applied to dialogue in plays to explore the interaction between characters.
• Turn Quantity and Length
• How much a character talks can be indicative either of their relative importance in the play or of how important they appear to think they are. Generally, central characters have longer and more speeches than minor characters. 
• A model frequently proposed as a common structure for exchanges between speakers is the adjacency pair, a concept originally developed during the late 1960s in the work of American sociologist Harvey Sacks (1995), and used subsequently in much work in conversation analysis. Typical adjacency pairs are two-part exchanges such as: 
• greeting—greeting:
  A: Hi, good to see you.
  B: Hello, I’m glad I could make it.
• question—answer:
  A: What time’s the train?
  B: Half past seven.
• request—response:
  A: Pass the mustard, please.
  B: Here you are (passes mustard).
• Another model for structuring conversational exchanges is the IRF model, developed in the approach to discourse analysis of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) who identify a three-part exchange structure. 
• Examples of this type of exchange are commonly found in teaching situations, when a teacher may ask a question (the initiation, coded I), to which the student replies (the response, coded R). The teacher then gives feedback on the student’s answer (feedback, coded F): 
• Teacher: Can anyone explain the meaning of the word ‘pragmatic’? I
  James: Practical. R
  Teacher: Yes, practical, good. F 
• Another frequently observed variation is what Sinclair and Coulthard term ‘skip-connecting’, where one exchange pair is embedded within another:
  A: So where did you get your handbag? (Q 1)
  B: Promise you won’t tell anybody? (Q 2)
  A: Promise. (A 1)
  B: I found it in my aunt’s wardrobe. (A 2)
• Harold Pinter’s plays, for example, are famous for the very strange dialogues between characters, where these expected patterns do not occur. The extract below is from A Night Out. The characters, Albert and a Girl, are in the Girl’s flat, where she has brought him back with her after picking him up on the street.
• His hand screws the cigarette. He lets it fall on the carpet.
  GIRL [outraged]: What do you think you’re doing? She stares at him. Pick it up! pick that up, I tell you! It’s my carpet! She lunges towards it. It’s not my carpet, they’ll make me pay—
  His hand closes upon hers as she reaches for it.
  GIRL: What are you doing? Let go. Treating my place like a pigsty... Let me go. You’re burning my carpet!
  ALBERT [quietly, intensely]: Sit down.
  GIRL: How dare you?
  ALBERT: Shut up. Sit down.
  GIRL: What are you doing?
  ALBERT: Don’t scream. I’m warning you…
  GIRL: What are you going to do?
  ALBERT [seizing the clock from the mantelpiece]: DON’T MUCK ME ABOUT! 
• This dialogue does not ‘fit’ our model of exchange structure in several respects. 
• First, Albert does not respond to the girl’s exclamations about the dropped cigarette, and her commands to pick it up. 
• Second, she asks him a series of questions ( ‘How dare you?’, ‘What are you doing?’, and ‘What are you going to do?’), none of which he gives a direct answer to. 
• Ignoring her questions and commands is one way he demonstrates the unequal distribution of power between them, which culminates in his threat of physical violence. 
• The Cooperative Principle
• Above we have suggested that so-called production errors such as hesitations, repetitions and incomplete turns are common in ordinary, naturally occurring conversation, but less typical of dialogue in plays (except, as in the example given above, in films which deliberately imitate natural discourse). 
• However, sometimes a writer will deliberately use forms such as hesitations to convey something about the character—that they are distracted, for example, or uncertain or shy, or confused, or embarrassed. In this example from Professional Foul by Tom Stoppard, the character Anderson meets one of his footballing heroes and offers advice on the opposition in a forthcoming match, a situation in which he demonstrates signs of embarrassment, shown in bold:
• ANDERSON: I’ve seen him twice. In the UFA Cup a few seasons ago... I happened to be in Berlin for the Heel Colloquium, er, bunfight...(In a rush) I realize it’s none of my business—I mean you may think I’m an absolute ass, but—(pause) Look, if Hahas takes that corner he’s going to make it short—almost certainly—... 
• The philosopher Grice (1975) developed the theory of a cooperative principle, which he asserted people used to make sense of their conversations by enabling them to distinguish between ‘sentence-meaning’ and ‘utterance-meaning’, i.e. between what a sentence ‘means’ (out of context) and what the speaker ‘means’ when they say that sentence (in a particular context).
• For example, take the words ‘nice earrings’; on the page, these words have a straightforward meaning, a statement of approval about items of jewellery. 
• However, imagine someone twirling in front of you, saying ‘how do you like my new outfit?’. If you then responded ‘nice earrings’, the person in the new clothes would probably assume that rather than just complimenting them on their jewellery, you were also communicating your dislike of what they were wearing. 
• Grice claimed that this meaning can be inferred by the hearer, as participants in conversations expect each other to do certain things, in other words, their talk is governed by the cooperative principle, which is made up of four conversational maxims (motto):
• The maxim of Quantity: give the appropriate amount of information—not too much or too little
• The maxim of Quality: be truthful
• The maxim of Manner: avoid ambiguity and using obscure expressions; give information in an appropriate order
• The maxim of Relevance: be relevant
• Grice suggested that people actually break these maxims (motto) quite often when they talk—for example, when we deliberately tell a lie we are not ‘being truthful’. He suggested that speakers also flout (go against) them in a way that is apparent to the addressee, but that we take this for granted in the way we conduct our conversations. For example, in another extract from Pinter’s A Night Out, Albert apparently flouts the maxim of relevance when he responds to the Girl’s questions:
• GIRL: And what film are you making at the moment?
  ALBERT: I’m on holiday.
  GIRL: Where do you work?
  ALBERT: I’m freelance.
• Albert’s replies do not directly answer the Girl’s questions—he does not tell her what film he is working on nor where he works. However, most people would probably make sense of this exchange by assuming that the answers were relevant to the questions at an underlying level. This would result in the response ‘I’m on holiday’ being understood to mean ‘I’m not making a film at the moment because I’m on holiday’, and the response to the second question meaning ‘I don’t have one single place I can identify, because being freelance, I work all over the place.’ 
• By flouting the Maxim of Quantity, and not giving out personal details as requested, he keeps the Girl at arm’s length and communicates clearly that he is not inviting intimacy. 
• Speech Acts
• The philosophers Austin and Searle were very interested in the way language can be described as action, and Speech Act theory is an account of what we use language for. For example, we can make promises (I will marry you), threats (I’ll never speak to you again if you tell anyone), give orders (Leave the room!), make suggestions (Why don’t we leave work early and all go down the pub?). 
• Sometimes saying an utterance explicitly accomplishes an action, like when someone says ‘I declare this supermarket open’, or ‘I name this ship Clara’. This type of action cannot be accomplished by anybody though. Opening supermarkets and naming ships is usually done by people with some publicly recognised status, whereas promising and making threats can be accomplished by most of us, given the right conditions.  
• Speech acts can be quite explicit; for example, if a character in a play says: ‘Take this letter to the post’, it is clear an order is being given (which the addressee can choose to obey or disobey). The fact that one character gives an order to another gives the reader /audience information about the relationship between the two characters (i.e. that one may have, or assumes they have, higher status than the other). Speech acts like this which are intended to produce some form of action as a response are called directives. 
• Directives can also be considerably less explicit, and generally, the less obvious they are, the more polite they are. Consider the following: 
1. Take this letter to the post.
2. Would you mind posting this letter?
3. Are you going past the post box?
4. What time does the post go today?
• These might all be interpreted as directives in particular contexts. (4) is a ‘hint’—neither the letter nor the person whom it is hoped will carry out the action are mentioned explicitly, but it might nevertheless be interpreted as a covert request to post the letter. 
• One of the challenges for a dramatic critic is to identify speech acts and the ways characters respond to them.
• Presuppositions
• When we talk, we are constantly making assumptions about what kind of knowledge is available to our addressee(s), and what we have to make explicit in our utterances. Sometimes this knowledge is described in terms of ‘given’ and ‘new’ information—i.e. what is already known, and what has to be made known to the addressee. One way of encoding given information is through semantic presupposition, for example, in the sentence:

Jane was late for school yesterday

• The information that there is someone called Jane, and that she went to school yesterday, is presupposed, or ‘given’ information, while the assertion that she was late is new information. 
• Status Marked through Language
• Language can be used to signal to what extent the relationship between a speaker and an addressee is based on a social power difference (or asymmetry), and to what extent it is based on solidarity (harmony). How people address one another usually signals where they perceive themselves to be socially in relation to their addressee.
• The social ‘rules’ which make it acceptable for a head teacher to call a child by their first name: ‘Laxmi’ or ‘Hari’, while the child would respond with the teacher’s last name and title: ‘Mrs Sharma’, or with just a title such as ‘Sir’, are largely taken for granted by both parties. 
• On the other hand, some relationships are negotiated zv1 38 moment to moment. A mother who calls her child ‘Sri’ when she is happy with her, may call her ‘Shreebha’ in the next instant if she is angry with her and wants to assert her parental status. Playwrights can indicate to an audience this kind of information about the relationships between characters through the ways they address one another on stage. 
• Register
• Register is the term used in linguistics to describe the relationship between a particular style of language and its context of use. 
• As language users, we can recognise a wide range of styles even though we might not be able to actively produce them. An example of a linguistic register is legal discourse—we recognise a legal document when we see one, but lawyers are generally the only people who are trained to produce them using appropriate linguistic choices.
• Every line spoken in the play reminds us of the status of that character in the scheme of things. Characters in the play include fairies, nobility and ordinary working people, and the different social status of each group is marked through their style of language. 
• Speech and Silence—Female Characters in Play
• A considerable amount of work in linguistics has gone into looking at the distribution of talk between women and men, and there is some evidence that men tend to talk more than women in mixed-sex conversations.
• It is accepted that women are the talkative sex in the sense that silence is the preferred state for women in a patriarchal society. There is certainly some support for this hypothesis: some of Shakespeare’s characters notably regard silence in women as a virtue.
• Coriolanus, for example, greets his wife as ‘My gracious silence, hail!’ (Coriolanus Act 2 scene 1). King Lear grieves for his daughter Cordelia and praises her quiet voice: ‘Her voice was ever soft,/Gentle and low—an excellent thing in a woman’ (King Lear Act 5 scene 3).

Analysis of Dramatic Texts: Checklist

• Dramatic texts can be analysed in a series of stages, starting with the most basic and least controversial, and working up to the most sophisticated and debatable. If you are required to analyse a dramatic text, you may find it useful to refer to these guidelines:
• Paraphrase the text - i.e. put it into your own words: Although your paraphrase should be as close to the content of the original as possible, there may be still some room for ambiguities or different interpretations. As far as possible you should note these, perhaps by indicating the various possible interpretations in different paraphrases.
• Write a commentary on the text: Interpret what the significance of the extract you are analysing is in the context of the play as a whole: how does it contribute to the development of the plot and the zv1 43 evolution of the characters? This is also a chance to check any literary allusions and ambiguities which give the text more than one possible reading.
• Select the theoretical approach: Consider the text from a specific point of view, applying one theoretical model of the way language and communication work. This needs to be very thorough and detailed, and it is more likely to be debatable whether the approach you have selected is appropriate. Applying a theoretical model to the text may leave you feeling that you have learnt very little that is new, or that you have learnt a great deal.

END OF THE PART 

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