Introduction Pertemuan 11 Matakuliah: G0302/Introduction to Literature Tahun: 2007

Bina Nusantara Most plays are written not to be read in books but to be performed. Plays are meant to be seen on stage, but reading a play may afford advantages. It’s better to know some masterpieces by reading them than never to know them at all. Reading a play 3

Bina Nusantara A play is literature before it comes alive in a theatre. Some plays, whatever the intentions of their authors, are destined to be read more often than they are acted. Such a play is called closet drama—closet means a small private room. Reading a play 4

Bina Nusantara Reading a play Some readers, when silently reading a play to themselves, try to visualize a stage, imagining the characters in costume and under lights. If such a reader is an actor or a director and its reading the play with an eye to staging it, then that reader may try to imagine every detail of a possible production, even shades of makeup and loudness of sound effects.

Bina Nusantara Reading a play Although some readers find it enjoyable to imagine the play taking place upon a stage, others prefer to imagine the people and events that play brings vividly to mind. Most plays, whether seen in a theatre or in print employ some conventions, customary methods of presenting an action, usual and recognizable devices that an audience is willing to accept.

Bina Nusantara Reading a play In reading a great play from the past, such as Oedipus the King, it will help if we know some of the conventions of the classical Greek theatre of the Elizabethan theatre.

Bina Nusantara Reading a play In Othello, when the sinister Iago, left on stage alone, begins to speak at the end of Act II, Scene 1, we recognize the conventional device of a soliloquy, a dramatic monologue in which we seem to overhear the character’s inmost thoughts uttered aloud. Like conventions in poetry, such familiar methods of staging a story afford us a happy shock of recognition.