With a little help from Jacques Derrida Analyzing Drama Bonjour! With a little help from Jacques Derrida

Analyzing Drama Acts and scenes break the play into parts. Setting and staging information usually appears here, after the scene is numbered. Sometimes these are very detailed and long, other times, like here, they are very simple and short. Stage direction shows entrances to and exits from the visible stage; they can also direct action, volume, and mood. Shakespeare didn’t write very detailed stage direction, partly because he directed his own plays, but other playwrights go into more detail. Finally, we have the biggest element of drama, dialogue. What actors say out loud (usually) plays the biggest part in any play.

Analyzing Drama The other important element that drama adds is performance; that is, how each line and stage direction is interpreted when performed live or on film. Performance can apply to directing, acting, costumes, settings, and more. Famous lines from plays are often performed very differently from production to production; watch how different actors and directors have interpreted Macbeth’s “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech: MacKellen 1976 , Stewart 2011 , Fassbender 2015

Analyzing Drama At the extreme end of performance is adaptation; adaptation changes not only the way a scene is performed but what words are used to convey the message. Common forms of adaptation rework ideas to present them in different time periods, cultures, languages, genres, and media. Drama is especially open to adaptation because the element of performance allows for constant renegotiation of meanings already; Hamlet as a written work has not changed in 400 years, but no two performances or films based on it are the same.

Analyzing Drama Although any work in any genre or medium can be adapted to any other, the most common adaptations in the 20th and 21st centuries end up as films; book to movie, play to movie, poem to movie, comic book to movie, etc. Shakespeare adaptations are especially popular; for example: