How Plays Work: Reading and Performance
Martin Meisel
Abstract
Why are readers who are generally at home with narrative and discursive prose, and even readily responsive to poetry, far less confident and intuitive when it comes to plays? The complication lies in the twofold character of the play as it exists on the page — as a script or score to be realised, and as literature. This engaging account of how we read play plays on the page shows that the path to the fullest imaginative response is an understanding of how plays work. What is entailed is something like learning a language — vocabulary, grammar, syntax — but learning also how the language operat ... More
Why are readers who are generally at home with narrative and discursive prose, and even readily responsive to poetry, far less confident and intuitive when it comes to plays? The complication lies in the twofold character of the play as it exists on the page — as a script or score to be realised, and as literature. This engaging account of how we read play plays on the page shows that the path to the fullest imaginative response is an understanding of how plays work. What is entailed is something like learning a language — vocabulary, grammar, syntax — but learning also how the language operates in those concrete situations where it is deployed. This book begins with a look at matters often taken for granted in coding and convention, and then — under ‘Beginnings’ — at what is entailed in establishing and entering the invented world of the play. Each succeeding chapter is a gesture at enlarging the scope: ‘Seeing and Hearing’, ‘The Uses of Place’, ‘The Role of the Audience’, ‘The Shape of the Action’, and ‘The Action of Words’. The final chapters, ‘Reading Meanings’ and ‘Primal Attractions’, explore ways in which both the drive for significant understanding and the appetite for wonder can and do find satisfaction and delight.
Keywords:
narrative,
discursive prose,
poetry,
plays,
twofold character,
script,
literature,
imaginative response,
language learning,
coding
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199215492 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199215492.001.0001 |
