Studying plays

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Studying plays is another exciting insight into the world of English Literature. There are many resources out there to help you with your studies, so read on!

• Shakespeare
• Modern drama
• Renaissance drama

Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s four major tragedies are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. They are generally recognised as Shakespeare’s finest plays. To understand why, it helps if we start by thinking about tragedy as a specific form of drama. The pattern of all the plays is that some action takes place or a character does something that throws life into turmoil. To express this in the simplest terms, social order prevails at the beginning of the play, but very quickly we see society in a state of disorder . The effect of this is that a play makes us think about the complex nature of people and the world we live in; we see the gap between our ideal notions of a peaceful society and the reality of a world where people are unruly.

Find out more in How to Study a Shakespeare Play by John Peck  & Martin Coyle.  This includes five chapters that illustrate the nature and impact of the new approaches to Shakespeare that have swept through literary studies in recent years: structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, new historicism and cultural materialism.

Modern drama

The precise meaning of the term ‘modern’ caries according to its context. If I were to drive a 1930s car or to wear clothes that were fashionable only ten years ago you certainly wouldn’t describe my tastes as modern; yet we usually describe as modern any play written since 1877! In this particular year the great Norwegian dramatist Ibsen turned from writing plays in verse to create a series of plays in everyday language dealing with important social and moral issues. It was the impact of these and similar plays on the European theatre of the late nineteenth century and the rapid spread of their influence to Britain, Russia and the United States of America that began the era of ‘modern drama’.

Find out more in Studying Modern Drama by Kenneth Pickering, John Peck and Martin Coyle

You may also want to go to the Studying modern drama section of this site, which has been written bt the same author and contains a step by step guide to studying drama, a quiz, workshop ideas and more useful resources.

Renaissance drama

What does the term Renaissance actually mean? It means ‘rebirth’, and is the word used to describe the widespread cultural developments which happened all over Europe during the sixteenth century. These changes occurred as a rather static medieval world yielded to a more dynamic, energetic modern world built around business, commerce and exploration. Old values were giving way to new, and the arts found different ways of expressing these changes and responding to them. Certainly the greatest glory of the English Renaissance was the unprecedented growth of professional stage drama.

Find out more in How to Study a Renaissance Play by Chris Coles which covers Marlowe, Jonson and Webster. Coles starts with the basic problem of understanding what a play is about, and then shows you how to discuss such matters as themes, language characters and staging.