Literary and Theatrical Approaches

From The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama

"Literary" approaches to drama focus our attention initially, sometimes, exclusively, on the text of a play and train the complex strategies of poetics and poetic interpretation on it. Such interpretation regards the dramatic text as incomplete and specifies the text's range of possible meanings by placing it in various textual and cultural contexts; in a sense, the negotiation between the text and these contexts determines what we can say the play means.

"Theatrical" approaches to drama tend to see a play in terms of stage practice, both in terms of the play's original production and in the light of performance practice today. This approach interrogates the play's staging: how it can be set, what obstacles it presents to acting and casting, what the dramatic effects of costume and design will be. "Theatrical" interpretation regards the dramatic text as an incomplete design for performance and trains the complex machinery of stage representation - directing, acting, design, costuming - on the task of fleshing the script out as performed action.  The meaning of the play in this regard emerges from what we can make the play do.

The literary and theatrical approaches to drama and theatre share the assumption that plays are not fully meaningful in themselves; they share the sense that the meaning of drama emerges from the kinds of questions we ask of it, the contexts - literary, historical, theoretical, theatrical - in which we can make it perform, and make it mean something in particular. Although each approach can seem needlessly mysterious, involving its own specialized language and critical practice, its own set of "right" questions and "right" answers, this book has been assembled with the belief that the literary and the theatrical approaches are necessary complements to each other.