Drama, including Shakespearean drama
Reading drama as performance
Drama in STPM 920 tests how well you explain the working of a play as script and as stage event: structure, character, conflict, language and dramatic technique, including Shakespeare's verse and prose. Examiners reward analysis of how meaning is made, not plot recall.
Core rules
- Treat stage directions, entrances and exits, props, setting and off-stage action as evidence.
- Soliloquy and aside construct interiority and dramatic irony; they position the audience differently from other characters.
- In Shakespeare, shifts between verse and prose signal status, emotion or disorder; shared lines and caesura create tension.
- Link every device to audience response and the play's central concerns; place an extract in the arc of exposition, climax and resolution.
Worked example
Question: How does Shakespeare present Macbeth's state of mind before Duncan's murder? Quote: "Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?" Reasoning: the soliloquy admits the audience to a mind already divided; the interrogative shows uncertainty, while "Come, let me clutch thee" (imperative, physical gesture) shows hallucination becoming compulsion. The dagger symbolises the murder and the guilt that precedes it, so the audience knows the mind before the deed - a reverse dramatic irony that makes the murder inevitable.
Traps
- Retelling plot instead of analysing method.
- Naming a device without explaining its effect.
- Forgetting who is on stage and what the audience knows.
- Treating a soliloquy as the playwright's own opinion.
- Ignoring the boundaries of a quoted extract.