English Literature: Tuesday, 21st February 2012 APPROACHES TO DRAMA -drama from Greek : to do / perform.

1) Understanding the GENRE: -Drama is dependent on performance for a full appreciation of its meaning. -context: day) ->Setting of the play ->Audience ->Appreciation of the actors role. (-> In Shakespearean plays they were only boys) (From Elizabethean perspective) ->Collective appreciation (experience) -> Different to poetry and prose. ->Impact on the audience - >Conversation 2) Understanding the FORM: -Unrealistic drama (Ibsen) -Feminist and political drama (Caryl Churchill Top Girls) -> Time of performance -> Year put on ->Time of a day (Shakespeareans plays were put out on the open air theatre

Forms: feminist, political, action, realistic, gothic, social, kitchen sink drama. -These forms affect the writers choice of lexis, style and structure, How does an understanding of form affect your understanding of play? You cannot form any opinion. 3) Understanding the FORM: Codes and conventions of drama: -Playwrights use dramatic devices, stage symbols and other paralinguistic features such as sound/music to convey ideas and thoughts of characters ->It forms the understanding and allows us to start making links. ->Sounds/music: create the atmosphere/tone. ->Soliloquy revealing thoughts lack of narrator. 4) Understanding the STRUCTURE: -The structure of plays means that often acts and scenes are used to reveal information or provide thematic links/contradictions. -How has the action been developed? Think about exits and entrances/openings and endings moments of revelation, reflection, conflict and resolving. 5) Understanding the LANGUAGE: -Playwrights often create distinct voices (idiolect) for each character by using different registers/varying the style/use of imagery/dialect/modes of address

English Literature: Tuesday, 28th February 2012 Harold Pinter Subtext: what is unsaid, or going on underneath. ->Silence ->Territory People as territorial animals. -Masculine world Ritual and Repetition Patterns of behavior + Game playing Tension and Confusion as the audience experience. Middle Class Concentration on it, most of the time. Limited amount for interpretation for the actors due to short dialogue and well developed stage directions.

Realistic drama? (+) -The silence and small talks are quite often happening in the real life, as people are trying to avoid the important matters and cover own imperfections. -Patterns/rituals of everyday and the way that people are able to notice breaking the patterns (blinds), etc. -Stereotypical gender roles for the time

(-) -Exaggeration of awkward situations between couples. (-Idea of it being stylised.) -Ridiculousness and mocking tone describing the stereotypical relationship. - Clothes symbolic rather than naturalistic.

English Literature: Monday, 12th March 2012 Bed Among The Lentils - Alan Bennett

Kitchen sink drama : A type of British play of 1950s &1960s which showed the conflicts or unpleasant quality off the house life in a realistic way.

-Setting : home ->attention to details -Realistic ->not stylized/staged -> Dramatic monologue :Only one character speaking to the audience. -Presents stereotypes of women: roles, relationships and positions in household, society, etc. -Designed for TV audience. ->Very limited stage directions -Close ups, talking heads Description of the structure:

-Beginning of the dramatic monologue. -Lack of acts, scenes- written in one piece of continuous writing. -Stage directions introduced in the brackets. -Use of both short and long sentences -> Structural cohesion: development of ideas -Introducing to Susan in her domestic environment/setting. -Monologue seems to occur during one day. -She begins by reminiscing on her day.. suggestion that we are now going to be introduced to her past. -Chronology seems to be linear -Chronology seems to be linear ->Search for Adverbial of Time in order to find chronology. Long sentences: -> prayer shows behavioural patterns -> monotonous -> trapped in a routine -> fast pace -> no need to worry about conversational aspects. - Release of emotions. Short sentences: -> Suppressed feelings? Geoffreys short sentences only from her point of view though! ->He cannot defend himself (subjective) -> Tone is sarcastic Is she (this) trustworthy? -> Way in which A. Bennett uses reported speech, is overcoming limitation of First person narrative (monologue). In a MONOLOGUE opposed to the play, there needs to be a variety of both short and long sentences. Combined pace.

English Literature: Tuesday, 13th March 2012 -How can we describe the language (idiolect) ? ->Relates everything to religion and brings it up on several occasions. Is she aware of that? Or is it outcome of her routine? ->Ironic -> Constantly changing the subjects. -He takes over her identity by referring as a Mrs Vicar. -Referring to the God, gives the sense that she doesnt know who he is supposed to be. -By her responses she keeps the perceptions that people have of her, alive. -Plain, unsophisticated language. ->Seems to be referring to her emotions/thoughts. -Rambling -Phrases such as vicars wife repeated, so are apparently and somehow/ ->Ironic humour -> who is she targeting? -puns/play onwards with the language. Bed Among The Lentils P2

English Literature: Friday, 17th March 2012 -A Dolls House : ->stereotypes ->marionettes ->staged? ->unrealistic ->plastic Ibsen on his naturalistic play: A Dolls House Henrik Ibsen (1879)

The play is, as you must have observed, conceived in the most realistic style; the illusion I wished to produce was that of reality. I wished to produce the impression on the *reader that what he was reading was something that had really happened We are no longer living in the days of Shakespeare. () What I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk the language of Gods. *reader instead of referring the audience!!

Structure : (Well made play)

-Emphasis on a clear structure of three unities. -Skeletons set up in Act One to be developed later. -Exposition to set up the situation/tell us what we need to know. -Development and complications ensuring each act drives towards a climactic curtain. -A final resolution.

1) Hardy:

Question Two: A comparison of the ways in which unfaithfulness is presented in these extracts.

FORM: -Victorian play (1887), pastorial. STRUCTURE: - Conventional pattern, linear, chronological. - Presumption that its the end of the play, based on the events occurring (death, resolutions). - Third person narrative. -Collaboration of the short and long sentences in dialogues to allow views from more than just one person (limitations). -Frequent hesitations, awkwardness, much more explanation and speech, acceptance of infidelity. LANGUAGE: - Animalistic connotations (A little bird), - Similes (As white as wall) WIDER READING: -> Pinter: Infidelity, awkwardness ->Bennett: Infidelity, balance of short and long sentences. ->Ibsen: Turning point when she claims the affair took place in Hardys. Compared to Noras progressing and becoming independent.

English Literature: Friday, 10th March 2012 Drama in the Nineteenth Century

-Prose and poetry were the dominant genres during the nineteenth century. -Popular theatre persisted in music halls, melodramas and adaptations of the best selling novels, but nineteenth century plays that are most frequently performed today, and are seen as important in the development of English drama, are the translations of plays by writers from Scandinavia and Russia Henrik Ibsen (1829-1906) and Anton Chekov (1860-1904). -Henrik Ibsen: Most influential on writers in England and later in America. From 1877 he produced influential dramas, focusing on contemporary political and social issues. He tackled causes and consequences of marriage breakdowns, fraud and inherited sexual disease. His work inevitably provoked strong positive and negative reactions from Victorian critics and audiences. Ibsen combines realism with symbolism in his critiques of society and relationships between men and women. -A Dolls House (1879) The title of a play about a wife infantilized by her husband in a conventional XIX century marriage. -Ghosts(1881) A play about the dreadful consequences of secrets about the past hidden for too long from the person who most deserves to know them.