Understanding the Stage

The “Well-Made” Play

- Beginning, middle, and end (3 or 5 acts)

- Balance between development of plot, character, and action

- Peripeteia = reversal in the external situation or fortunes of the main character

- Anagnorisis = Recognition in which character responds to peripeteia

- Perhaps also recognition of Hamartia (error)

- Catharsis = a purgation of these emotions (audience)

- Pathos = a destructive or painful act, such as deaths on stage, paroxysms of pain, woundings (audience)

Text, stage and screen categories

1. play area

2. scenery

3. properties

4. light

5. sound effects

6. music

7. physical constitution

8. mimicry

9. kinesics (gestures, movements)

10. proxemics (stage positions)

11. make-up (incl. hair)

12. costume

13. paralinguistic signs

14. linguistic signs

- If an edition provides line numbers and a playwright includes scenes and acts, the appropriate way to cite dramas is as follows:

• Hamlet asks "the question / Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles" (III.i.56-9).

Rationale:

- Drama editions differ in page numbers--almost always. Providing the 'universal' code of act, scene, and line numbers allows scholars to refer back to different editions of the same play. Dramas are also often appear in cramped editions. Page numbers, then, do not really give a good sense of where a citation is located.

- Large Roman numeral signifies the act, small Roman numeral the scene, and Arabic numeral the line numbers.

- Drama written in meter (like Shakespeare's) needs to be noted just as poetry is (hence the line breaks). Metered verse is signified by capital letters in most editions.

- The list of Works Cited should follow traditional MLA standards. Editions of plays, especially ones in translation or those written before 1900, can have pretty significant differences. Here is an example for the above citation:

Shakespeare, William. "Hamlet." The Harcourt Anthology of Drama. Ed. W. B. Worthen. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002. 182-228.

- If the play did not originally appear in English, the translator must be noted (in the same place as, or after, the editor).