Tackling different kinds of play

Abstract

All the steps that I have suggested so far in your study can be applied to any play, but there comes a stage when you are bound to realise that the particular play you are studying has certain labels and definitions attached to it and that it has characteristics which make it like some other modern plays and unlike others. You may notice this especially if you have come to studying modern drama after having studied Shakespeare, where definitions such as ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’ or ‘history’ seem fairly watertight and where you have few doubts as to which plays you are talking about if you use these labels. However, you may remember that Polonius in Hamlet reels off an extraordinary list of play categories as if to suggest that it is by no means easy to pigeonhole any play: ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’. The difficulty of categorising plays particularly applies to modern drama, which belongs to a period of great experimentation and includes works of every imaginable shape and form, lasting anything from thirty seconds to several days.