Drama and the Theatrical Text

Drama is literature written to be performed. A play exists twice: as a written text on the page and as a live event on the stage. This double life makes drama a distinctive text type. When you read a play, you must imagine its performance, translating printed words into voices, bodies, and space.

Dialogue and the absent narrator

The most obvious feature of drama is that it is built almost entirely from dialogue, the speech of characters. Unlike prose fiction, a play usually has no narrator to explain motives or describe scenes. Everything a reader learns must come through what characters say and do. This places great weight on subtext, the meaning beneath the literal words. Two characters may discuss the weather while the real drama, jealousy or fear, moves silently underneath. Skilled rea