Dramatic Texts: Characteristics, Subgenres, and Analysis

Posted on Feb 17, 2025 in English Studies

Drama: Appellate Function

Drama brings together texts created for representation. Therefore, it involves the transformation of a text into a theatrical experience.

Characteristics

  • Develops a story directly through the words and/or actions of the characters, without the intervention of a narrator. The appellate function predominates, along with the expressive.
  • Verbal communication, especially dialogue, is crucial. The mode of discourse can be both prose and verse.
  • Although dramatic texts can be read, their transmission and reception are essentially collective.

Dramatic Subgenres

Two types of subgenres are distinguished: major and minor. This focuses on the major subgenres, known for their longer interpretation and autonomy:

  • Tragedies: Present a tragic conflict resulting in high heroism associated with ethical or religious values. The hero must always overcome a destined path. Basic components are:
    • Hubris: The hero’s recklessness and arrogance.
    • Pathos: The suffering of the hero.
    • Catharsis: The purgation of passions.
  • Comedy: Focuses comically on history from a vision in which human imperfections are seen as natural. Its characters are usually the same or worse than real people.
  • Drama: Presents a conflict, but away from the grandeur of the tragedy. It is generally realistic and bourgeois, focusing on the problems of contemporary man.

Dramatic Text and Representation

In the dramatic text, a distinction is made between the main text, formed by the words of the characters, and the secondary text, comprising the stage directions. The main text takes the following forms:

  • Dialogue: Corresponds to the verbal exchange between the characters. Reversibility occurs in the communicative process, as characters act alternately as transmitters and receivers.
  • Monologue: These interventions have considerable extension and lack verbal exchange, as the character’s discourse is not addressed to any partner, but to themself. When the character meditates, it is called a soliloquy.
  • Aside: Short, often comic, interventions a character makes on the scene so that the other characters do not hear, but the audience does.

Stage directions: Indicate the nonverbal aspects of the staging. They may appear at the beginning of the drama, at the beginning of the acts, or between the words of the characters.

In the representation of the play, there is a dual type of connection: one that establishes between the characters and another that exists between the characters and the audience. The representation of a dramatic text constitutes the theatrical spectacle. The spectacle includes the characters’ words and non-verbal elements (visual and auditory).

Discourse Analysis

The level of discourse of a dramatic or theatrical text is divided into two sublevels:

  • Speeches of the Characters: The characters in a play speak directly without the intervention of a narrator, so their speech is always direct and dramatic. Their words serve to characterize them and to move the dramatic action forward. Some works use the narrator as a character to provide summaries of the story.
  • Discourse of Representation: The discourse that constitutes the representation is the way the story is told. Besides the speech of the characters, which includes verbal elements, there are nonverbal elements of representation. The dramatic text provides some of these elements in stage directions or through the words of the characters, but others are unique to a particular staging. Therefore, the representation of the same work by two different companies with different directors will never be equal.