Your high school English teacher may have scolded you, “Read the book! Don’t watch the movie!” That’s good advice for novels, but drama is not meant to be read in a book. It’s meant to be acted out on a stage or screen. With drama, when you read the book, you’re doing it wrong.

The word drama comes from the Greek word dran, “to do.”  With respect to the three kinds of literature – verse, prose, and drama – we might say that verse and prose are, while drama does. It is active, alive, meant to be performed.

As such, drama is the kind of literature that is most like life. Moreover, the interpretation of drama feels much like the interpretation of life and, by the same token, the interpretation of life feels much like the interpretation of drama. Thus, the interpretation of drama is practice for the interpretation of life.

At the same time, keep in mind the difference between text and performance, and the fact that not all performances are the same. The text of a drama often allows for multiple possible performances (it can also attempt to close off possibilities). Don’t confuse what a performance does with what a text demands. Every performance is already an interpretation that prompts and encourages certain ideas and understandings in its audience. When you see a text in performance, ask yourself if a given interpretation is allowed by the text or required by the text. 

When writing about drama, issues of theme, meter, imagery, and so forth are important, but those are really the provinces of verse. When writing about a play, it is even more important to address the ways that a writer responds to and exploits the features and traditions unique to drama. Some of those features and traditions unique to drama include:

• Genre: When Aristotle first theorized the existence of genres in literature – e.g., comedy and tragedy – he was speaking specifically about drama. To be sure, novels and poems have come to draw upon traditions of genre, but this idea began in a consideration of drama, and plays are more aware of and engaged with genre than novels or poems.
• Soliloquies: From the Latin solus, “alone,” + loqui “to speak,” a soliloquy is a speech given by a character when he or she is alone on stage. Don’t confuse “soliloquies,” which are spoken when a character is alone on stage, with “monologues,” which are extended speeches spoken when other characters are present on stage. These two dramatic devices function very differently and have different implications.
• Asides: Asides (sometimes marked in the text of a play, sometimes not) are lines a character speaks – to him- or herself, to another character, or to the audience – that other characters don’t hear.
• Dialog: Plays are unique in that you get direct dialog (without any framing such as “He yelled” or “She said in defeat”). Direct dialog allows and requires actors and readers to interpret tone, which usually isn’t determined by the text.
• Prologues and Epilogues: Prologues and epilogues are unique in drama because it is often a character who gives them (thus blurring the line between character and author).
• Plaudites: From the Latin for “applaud!” a plaudite is a character’s request (often in an epilogue) for applause from the audience.
• Plays within Plays: Instances of literature within literature are always important because they show the author thinking reflexively and self-referentially. Drama has developed a specific tradition of having plays within plays.

Clearly, the literary devices that are unique to drama are those that call attention to and play upon the theatrical event. Dramatists love to make reference to and play with the fact that their art is staged, acted, alive, performed before an audience. It is often those moments that should be the focus of your analysis when writing about drama.

According to Aristotle, there are six elements of drama:

• Plot: The order in which the events of the story are told. Note that plot is different from what Aristotle called action, which is the content of the narrative told, not the order in which things are told but the order in which they actually happened.
• Character: The ethical qualities of the people involved in the plot. Somewhat strangely, Aristotle first divided characters into “those who are better than we are” (by which he means heroes) and “those who are worse than we are” (by which he means knaves). The idea of a “villain” was a later invention. Over the centuries, “character types” began to emerge, and dramatists often invoke and play with the conventions of those character types.
• Speech: The style of speaking. The oldest distinction is between a “high style” (formal, inflated, serious) and a “low style” (informal, plain, common).
• Thought: The thinking or logic of the characters as known through their speeches to others, to themselves, and to the audience. Sometimes thought is explicitly stated – for example in a soliloquy – but sometimes thought must be inferred from actions and words.
• Spectacle: The visuals involved in the play. Needless to say, drama is the only kind of literature that has recourse to visuals including sets, costumes, cues, blocking, acting, etc.
• Music: The audios involved in the play.

Most of the time, drama is divided up into acts, scenes, and lines. The key unit here is the scene, which involves (usually) a single encounter or series of connected encounters. Take special note of when an author put two things that don’t go together into a single scene, and when an author uses one scene to comment upon another that is adjacent to it.

Drama can include the other two kinds of literature: verse and prose. For example, Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists often had their royals speak in verse and their commoners speak in prose.

Broadly speaking, there are two traditional genres: comedy and tragedy. The nature of each genre is so hotly debated that it would not be wise to attempt definitions here. In the most general terms, comedy is light and ends happily, while tragedy is serious and ends sadly, but even with these generalizations a thousand exceptions come immediately to mind.

A slightly more specific taxonomy of dramatic genre (one closely tied up with Shakespeare’s plays) is often noted: comedy, tragedy, satire, and romance.