Introduction
WHAT IS FORMALIST SCRIPT ANALYSIS?
Although some readers may often have heard the term formal, they may not have a firm idea of what it means. This is understandable because it has taken on many meanings over time. Formal may be associated with the practice of doing something for appearance’s sake as in a formal wedding. Or it may convey a feeling of primness and stiffness. Maybe readers harbor an unconscious feeling that formal means fixed, authoritarian, and inflexible. All these meanings have in common the notion of an arrangement that gives something its essential character or what Aristotle described as “the inward shaping of an object.” The etymology of the word substantiates this. Formal is based on the idea of form or shape. The Latin word forma means that which shapes or has been shaped, but especially the shape given to an artistic object. The English word formula is related to it as are conformity, inform, reform, transform, and uniform.
Studying the etymology leads to the present meaning of Formalist Analysis: the search for playable dramatic values that reveal a central unifying pattern that informs or shapes a play from the inside and coordinates all of its parts. Playable dramatic values are those features that energize actors, directors, and designers in their work. To accomplish its goal, Formalist Analysis uses a traditional system of classifications to break up a play into its parts in order to understand their nature and relationship.
Some writers may call the formalist approach descriptive because it is concerned with describing a play in terms of its own internal artistic context. Or it may be called analytical because it analyzes the elements in a play as parts of an artistic totality. Others might describe this approach as Aristotelian because it is based on the parts of a play originally described by Aristotle. All these are acceptable alternatives. At the risk of seeming to split hairs, however, I should point out that Formalist Analysis is different from formal analysis, which means the study of a play in relation to the form or literary genre to which it belongs. Different, too, from formalistic analysis, which is based on the terms and concepts of the Formalist Critics (for which see below). In any event, the underlying assumption of Formalist Analysis is that the plays themselves ought to be studied instead of the abstract theories or external circumstances under which they are written. For theatre students especially, plays should not be merely a means to other kinds of studies, but rather the primary objects of attention.
Formalist Analysis of drama is customarily associated with the principles and methods of Aristotle. His Poetics (335–322 BC) treats the six elements of drama (plot, character, dialogue, idea, “song,” and production values), unity of action, probability, features of the tragic hero, plot requirements, and other subjects related to plays. Although the term poetics is derived from the same Greek source as is the word poetry, in Aristotle’s sense it more correctly means creatively making, constructing, and arranging an artistic work, in this case drama. The commonsense conclusions he reached continue to influence Western literature and drama even today, and his expressions and descriptions have become part of our critical heritage.
From his survey of the writing, construction, and arrangement of the best plays of his time, Aristotle deduced principles and methods for their analysis and evaluation. His work is the basis of the formalist approach. First, he summarized the basics of drama and analyzed their inner workings and possible combinations. Second, he insisted on the importance of the artistic nature of plays. Third, he reduced concern with outside realistic or moral issues and emphasized instead strict attention to inner structural design, placing special emphasis on the importance of plot as a unifying feature. Fourth, his method was inductive rather than prescriptive. These four principles together make up the heart of the formalist tradition in criticism.
During the Roman period, and later during the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, scholars treated Aristotle’s insights as rigid prescriptions. Inquiring into the historical motives behind this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this book, but we know now that the practical outcome left Aristotle with an undeserved reputation for pedantry, some of which lingers on to the present. As succeeding writers interpreted Aristotle with more insight and sensitivity, his reputation as a critic was for the most part restored.
Near the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, scholar and critic Alexander Veselovsky extended the Aristotelian tradition by developing a system of defined aims and methods for the study of literature and drama. His system, like Aristotle’s, was based on the importance of plot. Veselovsky was a member of the literary committee of Moscow’s important Maly Theatre and promoted his principles among the theatre artists working there. His ideas influenced actor Mikhail Shchepkin, artistic director of the influential Maly company, and Vladimir Nemirovitch-Dantchenko, a member of the same committee and cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre with Konstantin Stanislavski. Perhaps inspired by Veselovsky’s emphasis on plot and artistic unity, Nemirovitch-Dantchenko and Stanislavski promoted similar principles and methods among their own students. No matter what, their goal was practical, not scholarly: to help actors, directors, and designers understand and perform plays as logical arrangements of actions.
Later, around the time of the Russian Revolution, formalist ideas began to be applied on an even larger scale by a group of critics known as the Russian Formalists. Headed by Viktor Shklovsky and Evgeny Zamyatin, the Formalists were characterized by their meticulous attention to the artistic aspects of literature as opposed to its social or moral connections.
After 1928, Russian Formalism was suppressed in the Soviet Union for political reasons, but its major concepts and strategies can be found in the New Criticism, which first appeared during the 1930s and flourished during the 1940s and 1950s in the West. New Criticism was an American movement led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, all of whom were writers and poets as well as critics. In his book, The New Criticism (1941), Ransom coined the term that identified this informal group, which also included R.P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks, Robert B. Heilman, William K. Wimsatt, and Ivor Winters.
Like the Russian formalists, the New Critics advocated meticulous study of the work itself. They disregarded the mind and personality of the author, literary sources, historical-critical theories, and political and social implications, which they deprecated as historical criticism. To emphasize their belief in the autonomy of the literary work itself, they referred to the writing as the text and termed their analytical approach close reading. Their ideas were presented in four textbooks: Wimsatt and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Fiction (1943), Brooks and Heilman’s Understanding Drama (1948), and Brooks and Warren’s guide to methodology, Modern Rhetoric (1958). These textbooks helped to shift the focus of literary instruction away from external concerns and back to the work itself.
The Cambridge Critics led a comparable movement in English literary criticism. Influenced by poet T. S. Eliot, this group was led by William Empson and included F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards, Caroline Spurgeon, and G. Wilson Knight. Knight’s analyses of Shakespeare’s plays, notably The Wheel of Fire (1930), were some of the major successes of the Cambridge Critics in the field of drama.
Many of the principles of the New Criticism were adopted by succeeding generations of American writers, including Francis Fergusson (The Idea of a Theatre, 1949), Elder Olson, Eric Bentley, Bernard Beckerman, Richard Hornby, and Jackson G. Barry, as well as theatre educators Alexander Dean, Hardie Albright, Lawrence Carra, William Halstead, F. Cowles Strickland, Curtis Canfield, Frank McMullan, Sam Smiley, and Francis Hodge, to name only a few. Among English-speaking theatre professionals, the members of the Group Theatre beginning in the 1930s adopted the analytical methods of the Moscow Art Theatre. Formalist thinking supports the creative principles of Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Richard Boleslavsky, Mordecai Gorelik, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg, and many of their students and followers, as well as Viola Spolin, Robert Cohen, Jean Benedetti, Charles Marowitz and Uta Hagen. Among the most influential of Stanislavski’s followers in America was the actor and teacher Michael Chekhov (1891–1955), whose acting principles have become so well known in film and television. After leaving Russia, Chekhov resided in Los Angeles, where he and his collaborator George Shdanoff (1905–1998) taught several generations of actors their variation of Stanislavski’s principles, which was based on Imagination and also involved a type of Formalist Analysis.
Beginning in the 1960s, drama and literature were influenced by movements in politics, sociology, anthropology, and religion in ways that seemed to defy traditional methods of criticism. Accordingly, a new generation of literary critics emerged who became dissatisfied with the self-imposed limits of the formalist approach. Within a decade more wide-ranging critical approaches appeared, which were based on deconstruction, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, semiotics, and theories of reception and communication. Some of them have clarified meanings previously unknown in plays, and sometimes their fresh interpretations seem promising. So far in the rehearsal hall, however, their results have not been consistently useful. Perhaps this is because they have emphasized taking apart (hence deconstruction) while theatrical production by definition must be concerned with putting together. Moreover, some of the more recent literary theories are by definition always conditional. As the film director Andrey Tarkovsky observed, it is sort of dangerous for actors, directors, and designers never having to reach final conclusions. It is much too easy to settle for hints of intuition instead of thorough, consistent reasoning.
At any rate, even though literary criticism seems committed to sociopolitical interests outside the play, theatre practice must continue to rely on close analysis of the play itself. Some may argue that this approach is not better than any other method at its best. After all, there are selected plays and periods of history where considerations outside the script are important and should be studied. Conversely, understanding the internal nature of the play is crucial to understanding its external context. More important in the theatre, plays must eventually exist in the practical realm of live performance and not just in the intellectual realm of scholarship. On stage, at least, the play itself is obliged to remain the final controlling factor. Formalist Analysis corresponds with this point of view. It offers more than intellectual insights; it supplies practical suggestions that can energize actors, directors, and designers for their work.
To conclude, the principles of Formalist Analysis have endured in the theatre because they correspond with the nature of the thing to which they are applied. They are an outcome of how actors, directors, and designers think about plays, and they are based on the assumption that what these artists need to know about plays is what is important. Although we may not always be aware of it, the principles of Formalist Analysis help to make plays work out in production. Without them, play scripts would seem unfinished and maybe even unintelligible. Moreover, they are not just empty concepts to learn because generations of actors, directors, and designers have done so before. They are the keys that actors, directors, and designers use to check their work, to explore its possibilities, and find new directions in it. Formalist topics are not only the basis of the playwright’s vision, but also a guide for actors, directors, and designers through the process of creation.
Action Analysis
This edition introduces a variant of Formalist Analysis, called Action Analysis, which concentrates heavily on plot and pays comparatively little attention to the other features of a play. This reduced type of Formalist Analysis has its own interesting history and purpose. Stanislavski developed Action Analysis during the later stages of work on his “System” of acting. He died before he could codify its principles, but his followers adopted and disseminated them. Among them was Maria Knebel (1898–1985), who was a personal student both of Stanislavski and Michael Chekhov. A director, teacher, and author of important books on acting, directing, and theatre pedagogy, Knebel started directing at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1935. She was Artistic Director of the Central Children’s Theatre from 1950–1960, where the revival of the Russian theatre after Stalin began. From 1960–1985 she taught directing at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatre Training. There she made a conscious effort to preserve, maintain, and disseminate her teacher’s final principles in their undiluted form. The principles of Action Analysis described here are adopted from her books, which are listed in the bibliography. They were translated by the author and are presented here in English for the first time.
According to Stanislavski, the concepts of the Super-Objective and Through-Action are central to the creativity of the actor (and by extension, of course, the director and designer). It is widely known that the Moscow Art Theatre originated the period of so-called table work, that is, analytical work at the table prior to scenic rehearsals on stage. During this period, the actors, under the guidance of the director, subjected to careful analysis all the motives, implications, relationships, characters, through-action, super-objective, etc. of the play. Table work made it possible to penetrate the play deeply, to define its ideological and artistic problems. It encouraged the actors to penetrate into the private world of the characters as the foundation for creation of the performance. This manner of work later became essential for all theatrical organizations, from the largest professional theatres to the smallest amateur performances.
Yet as early as 1905 Stanislavski already had misgivings about the study method he had helped to develop. Since the director as artistic leader needs to comprehend the future result of the work, the internal structure of the play—including the Super-Objective and Through-Action—must be made clear so that he or she can imagine the path that will lead the actors and designers to the final result. For that reason, the director is prepared for work much more deeply and multi-dimensionally than the actor or designer in the first period, the table period, of rehearsal. Stanislavski saw that even the most patient and sensitive directors (including him) could not avoid becoming creative despots by their need to merge the actors as soon as possible with the director’s previously imagined impression of the play. Involuntarily, this practice of intensive table work had begun to deprive the actor of creative initiative. Actors and designers were becoming passive recipients of the director’s plan, which, in any case, seemed to offer all the right answers. Stanislavski eventually became disenchanted with the unequal relationship that had unintentionally arisen between the director and the actors in the first stage of rehearsal. He wanted to find a way of working that would put the actors back into direct contact with the play, but still guided by the script, of course. After further study and practice, he concluded that the easiest and most accessible way to grasp a play was through its plot. He worked out a rehearsal method that combined intellectual analysis with physical action and which came to be known as “The Method of Physical Actions.”
In the usual way of rehearsing, the director pushes the actor toward the characterization by trying to stir his or her imagination talking “at the table” about the contents of the play, the character, the time period, etc. Stanislavski asserted that in the early stages of work actors naturally perceive a director’s ideas coolly. The actor is not prepared to digest someone else’s ideas and feelings because he or she does not feel on firm ground yet and does not know what to accept or reject. For a true awareness of the essence of a play, not only intellectual and emotional, but also physical, experience are necessary. Stanislavski criticized his earlier method of extended work “at the table” where the actors sit down with scripts and pencils and, under the prodding of the director, try to penetrate the expressive life of the play. He felt that this approach separated the internal life of the play from the external and in doing so impoverished the results.
He came to believe that intellectual preparation was necessary mainly to find the core of the play, to define the chain of events and the essential actions of the characters. But as soon as the actors understand this much of the dramatic structure, after that early sensations of the theme and through-action could begin to arise almost of themselves. This manner of rapid analysis Stanislavski called mental investigation. As soon as this part of the work is done, Stanislavski suggested passing on to the next period of deeper analysis, which no longer exclusively occurs at the table but also in the form of real physical action. This he called the period of physical investigation. At this point, the actors work on the internal and external life of the play simultaneously and truly experience what he termed the psycho-physical unity of the creative process. The practice of integrating mental and physical processes was later labeled “Active Analysis” or “The Method of Etudes,” in which an etude is an improvised sketch using the play’s actions and the actors’ words.
A textbook on play analysis is not the place for a discussion of rehearsal methods. Here it is enough to say that Action Analysis is in essence the intellectual part of Stanislavski’s Method of Physical Actions, the part Stanislavski called mental investigation. Action Analysis offers a big picture of the whole play quickly because it concentrates on one element: plot. Formalist Analysis devotes a lot of attention to plot, too, but also to dialogue, character, idea, and tempo-rhythm-mood and style. Except for certain learning purposes, there is no particular advantage to one method over the other. Both are necessary for a thorough understanding and they are often used together in practice. Curiously, the two approaches seem to reflect the different personalities of Stanislavski and Nemirovitch-Dantchenko. As an actor and teacher, Stanislavski was always more interested in the process of rehearsal than in performance as such. Possibly for that reason, he developed an approach that minimized table work and maximized the actors’ time working creatively on their feet. Nemirovitch-Dantchenko was a playwright, critic, and director whose attention was always focused on the final product, the performance and its thematic significance. He was always committed to extensive table work. The concept of the “seed” explained in Chapter 1 is his, although Stanislavski adopted it and it has been integrated into Action Analysis. Since 1989, we have been learning more about the inner world of the early Moscow Art Theatre, about the working relationship between Stanislavski and Nemirovitch-Dantchenko, and about the development of their creative principles. Sharon Carnicke’s book, Stanislavski in Focus (1998), is recommended for those who want to know more. Also valuable is The Russian Theatre After Stalin (1999) by Anatoly Smeliansky.
Formalist Analysis: Plan of Work
The classifications of Formalist Analysis and their main subdivisions as used in this book, including Action Analysis, are listed below:
1. Action Analysis
Sequence of Events: External Events
Reviewing the Facts
Seed
Sequence of Events: Internal Events
Three Major Climaxes
Theme
Super-Objective
Through-Action
Counter-Through Action
2. Foundations of the Plot: Given Circumstances
Time
Place
Society
Economics
Politics and Law
Intellect and Culture
Spirituality
The World of the Play
3. Foundations of the Plot: Background Story
Technique
Identification
4. Plot: External and Internal Action
External Action
Internal Action
5. Plot: Progressions and Structure
Progressions
Structure
6. Character
Objectives
Qualities
Conflict
Strength of Will
Values
Personality Traits
Complexity
Relationships
7. Idea
Words
Characters
Plot
The Main Idea
8. Dialogue
Words
Sentences
Speeches
Special Qualities
Theatricality
9. Tempo, Rhythm, and Mood
Tempo
Rhythm
Mood
10. The Style of the Play
Given Circumstances
Background Story
Plot
Characters
Idea
Dialogue
Mood
This sums up what most actors, directors, and designers need to know about the heritage of Formalist Analysis. The complete history, of course, is more complex than this. For example, the Freudian, Jungian, Marxian, Structuralist, and Post-Modern critics whose ideas currently influence some of the more radical methodologies are omitted from this survey. If the contributions of Freud, Jung, Marx, Sartre, Foucault and Derrida are understated, the position of the New Critics regarding the independence of the text is a little overstated. As a matter of fact, apart from their theories, there are passages in their writing that go beyond the literary work and into the areas of politics and morals. The survey is also responsible for another necessary exaggeration. By design, it leads the reader to feel a straight line of thinking, which supports the formalist tradition. This is unlikely for a diverse group of theorists dealing with such a complex subject. But having agreed about these over-simplifications, the survey is still adequate to establish the heritage of the formalist viewpoint. Those who wish to learn more can read some of the books that have been written about the history of literary criticism. Among the more informative are Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (1965) and A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (1992).
THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF DRAMATIC WRITING
Before we begin to study the principles of play analysis, it will be helpful to review some of the basic principles of reading in general. Initial learning about a play almost always begins with the written words of the script. But when we act, direct, or design a play, we not only read the play but the play reads us, so to speak. If we fall short in this respect, the results are there for everyone in the theatre to see. Therefore, what is done at the table before the rehearsals and production conferences begin is crucial. If initial perceptions are wrong, every succeeding repetition reinforces the error. If initial perceptions are confused, every succeeding repetition increases the confusion. Persistent errors and extended confusion are certain to lead down the path of artistic failure. For these reasons alone, reviewing some of the basic principles involved with reading and thinking can help theatre artists approach their work with something worthwhile to say.
When plays are treated as subdivisions of literature, they are likely to be analyzed with the same principles as those applied to fiction, poetry, and other literary genres. A number of writers have pointed out, however, that there are crucial differences between literature and drama that orthodox literary analysis may not be equipped to address by itself. To begin with, the dialogue in fiction is supplemented with generous amounts of narration to explain plot, character, idea, and feelings not otherwise apparent. Of course, some narration is always necessary in drama. We shall discuss this subject in more detail in Chapter 3, but in general, dramatic writing depends on dialogue, not narration, to convey the action. Unlike the literary author, the dramatist cannot interrupt the action to offer supplementary information or to clarify complex meanings without hampering the spirit of the play. Even when there is a narrator in the play, the words still must sound like normal speech within the context of the situation, and although stage directions are written in narrative form, they are not spoken by the actors and are not central to the dramatic action.
Another feature that contributes to the extra expressiveness of plays is their short length. Even in a very long play, the number of words is small compared to those in a standard novel. Yet although plays employ far fewer words than do novels, they must still contain at least as much dramatic potential as does a complete novel to be effective theatrically. Playwrights achieve this extra potency by infusing stage dialogue with a special expressiveness that is absent, or at least less important, in other literary forms. It is true that stage dialogue often looks very much like its literary cousin. Sometimes it even sounds so ordinary that it seems as if it was written without any conscious effort at all on the part of the playwright. But this is a crafted deception. The truth is that theatrical dialogue is a concentrated and powerful form of verbal expression. Speech is more condensed on stage and each word carries far more dramatic impact than in most other literature. Even a single utterance can pack a tremendous wallop. Because of the extra measure of expressiveness put into it by the playwright, there is more expressiveness per page in a play than in almost any other form of writing. Novelist Henry James, himself an experienced dramatist and a perceptive critic, maintained that playwriting required a more masterly sense of composition than did any other kind of writing.
Concentrated dependence on spoken dialogue plus radical compactness together creates the need and the opportunity for extra expressiveness in dramatic writing. It follows that actors, directors, and designers should learn to understand this special expressiveness to energize and illustrate every last ounce of it in production. But this does not always happen. Because the first experience of a play is a written script, the extra expressiveness is easy to overlook. There is an understandable confusion between the literary activity of reading and the theatrical activity of seeing, hearing, and feeling a play on the stage. Confusion is even more likely to occur with plays that have strong literary merit like those of Shakespeare and other authors whose works are studied in dramatic literature courses. To avoid underreading, theatre students should be aware of two important considerations about theatrical dialogue. First, the words in a script are far, far more expressive in a live performance than they are in the solitary, concentrated act of reading, and second, the words are only the tip of the iceberg, merely the visible part of what is happening deep within in a play. Energized acting, direction, and design are always required to unleash a play’s potent expressiveness completely.
ANALYTICAL READING
There are no hard and fast rules for reading plays, but certain mental powers are needed to understand the special kind of expressiveness they contain. The first important power is that of analytical reading. Unfortunately in its initial stages at least, analytical reading can be hard work. Some people think that experienced professionals can sight-read a play the way some musicians sight-read a score, but this skill is as rare in the theatre as it is in music. A professional’s analysis of a play is a long and painstaking process. In fact, a major characteristic of professionals is their recognition of the value of slow, methodical table work.
Another mental power consists of the ability to understand the many meanings of words and the dramatic force that may be expressed by them. Art students pay attention to shape and color; music students listen for pitch and timbre. Those who wish to make a living in the theatre should develop a sense of the expressiveness and emotion inherent in words.
Mental power also means concern for literal facts and their connections. A fact is a verifiable assertion about a thing, and literal facts are those that are frankly stated in the dialogue as true. Literal facts in drama include identification of people, places, actions, and objects, but they may also describe wishes as well as feelings and thoughts. Learning how to recognize hard facts is a basic test of artistic awareness. In the earliest readings of a play, the literal, verifiable facts should be searched out to find what is objectively being said. Furthermore, since plays are orderly arrangements by their nature, making logical connections among the facts is necessary for understanding the sequences and patterns found in them. We call these connections implications and inferences. Implications are hints or suggestions that are not directly stated, and inferences are deductions of unknown from known information, that is, deduced from literal facts and their implications.
Remember the short scene in the garden from Act 2 of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman. After a climactic confrontation with his son, Biff, Willy Loman decides late the same night to plant vegetables in his backyard garden. As in several earlier scenes, his absent brother Ben appears to him in his imagination, and they carry on a short dialogue. In this scene, the literal facts about planting a garden are important. We know that planting a garden requires certain external activities and special tools. Since these can be described precisely, this part of the action is easy to understand. Some of the literal facts involved with planting a garden are present: opening packages of seeds and reading the instructions, pacing off the rows for different kinds of plants, using a hoe, and planting the seeds in the ground. But most readers will see right away that planting a garden is not all that is happening here. There are things going on that are not connected with planting a garden. Planting is not done late at night with a flashlight, and a gardener does not carry on a conversation about life insurance with an imaginary figure the way Willy does. Willy is also possessed by a mysterious sense of urgency or anxiety in his task that prevents him from paying close attention to Ben. Obviously planting a garden is no longer what we normally think it is.
Implications and inferences now become important and they do not support a literal reading of the scene. A closer examination of Willy’s unusual actions relates them to his innermost feelings and thoughts, particularly his profound sense of personal failure as a father. He is no longer simply planting a garden; he is performing a ritual in preparation for his imminent death. The garden scene becomes an important clue to the meaning of the whole play, which is a conflict between Willy’s ideals as a salesman and his fatherly duty toward his son, Biff. Therefore, although literal facts are a helpful starting point, implications and inferences need to be considered to arrive at a complete understanding. Script analysis involves piecing the known and unknown together into a consistent and meaningful pattern just as detectives do in popular crime fiction.
LOGICAL THINKING
Evidence of all kinds is important, but so is logical thinking. Unfortunately, unawareness of the creative capacities of logical thinking is widespread, particularly among young artists. It can lead to the feeling that careful study of a play is stuffy and even inhibiting. But experienced professionals appreciate that logical thinking can uncover dramatic possibilities that make plays come alive in a new way. There is another value to consider. Audiences are becoming smarter all the time because playwrights demand far more intelligence from them today than they did in the past. Ever since Vsevelod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht, a good number of modern plays have been fashioned to pull in the audience by forcing them to comprehend what is happening ideologically, not just experience the play in a submissive manner. Increasing emphasis has been placed on the semantic meaning of the play and a great deal of aesthetic pleasure comes from penetrating the secret thinking of the characters. Consequently, modern acting, directing, and design need to demand the most of audience understanding. If this is to occur, the artistic team needs to be at least one step ahead of the audience in its thinking. Unless the audience is given something exciting to think about, unless the artistic team understands and expresses the inner logic of the play, the production cannot be considered truly modern in the creative sense.
Bringing some of the common fallacies of thinking encountered in play reading out of the subconscious, where they often lurk, and into the open, can help readers avoid accidental misreading. There are a few pitfalls, and they are not difficult to understand. Most of them can be classified as non-sequiturs, either as conclusions that do not follow from the facts or as reasoning that does not make sense. Sometimes readers may need to revisit the principles of logical thinking before trying to deal more thoroughly with plays. The basics can be found in any good rhetoric textbook. With the help of a good tutor, this should be enough to fill in any gaps.
Affective Fallacy (Impressionism)
According to literary critic W.K. Wimsatt, this error results from confusion between the play and its results (what it is versus what it does). It comes about when readers allow their favorite ideals or momentary enthusiasms or the momentary enthusiasms of the community to intrude on their judgment of the play. Maintaining enough emotional detachment is necessary to analyze a play correctly, but this is not always easy to do. After all, plays are meant to be emotional experiences, and many readers respond to the emotional stimuli in them. Actors, directors, and designers, for example, respond in personal ways, as indeed they should. In the scene from Death of a Salesman cited above, it is possible that readers could be reminded of their own families. They might be drawn in to confuse emotional memories of them with that of Willy Loman in the play. Or, alternatively, readers who sympathized with Willy’s economic plight might be tempted to entangle their own point of view with the harsh economic world described in the play. Personal experiences like these can be interesting if readers are experienced artists or critics; but if not, they can lead to loose thinking or analytical lack of attention. At worst, a reader might become hopelessly, if unconsciously, bogged down in self-analysis. Nonetheless, it is possible to maintain emotional distance and still respond emotionally to a play. The solution is to try to separate intimate personal responses from what is objectively there in the play. Director Elia Kazan has stated, “The first job is to discover what the script is saying, not what it reminds you of.” Absolute objectivity is impossible, of course, but impartiality and the tracing out of both routine and unusual consequences needs to be maintained as much as possible. Successful script analysis depends on it.
Fallacy of Faulty Generalization (Overexpansion)
Some readers are inclined to this reading error when they jump to a conclusion without having enough evidence. When a reader uses all or never in statements about the play with only a casual concern for the information in the play itself, further close reading will normally correct this mistake. But even more deadly in play reading is inattention to contrary examples. If, after reading Hamlet, for instance, a reader resorts to the worn-out generalities about “the melancholy prince” or “the man who could not make up his mind,” he should test the conclusions with contradictory evidence. A little scrutiny will show that Hamlet is cheerful while welcoming the Players, and he’s decisive while dealing with the Ghost. A few contrary illustrations like these should be enough to disprove the original sweeping assertions.
Fallacy of Illicit Process (Reductiveness)
This kind of error reduces complex issues to one thing, which is a frequent mistake even among experienced play readers. Reducing Hamlet to the Freudian Oedipus complex is an extreme instance. So is thinking that Mother Courage is nothing but an antiwar play, that A Raisin in the Sun is a plea for racial integration, that A Lie of the Mind is a plea against spousal abuse, that Angels in America is a defense of homosexuality, or that Three Sisters is about the degeneration of the Russian intelligentsia. The spoken or implied phrase nothing but is the giveaway. The motive behind attempts to reduce a play to less complex equivalents is generally disparagement.
Genetic Fallacy
Related to reductiveness is the genetic fallacy or the fallacy of origins, which is an attempt to reduce a play to its sources in the biography or social world of the artist in order to explain it. There is for any play a large body of secondary writing about its circumstances, the author’s life and times, and so forth. Much of this writing is pedantic in the extreme and full of banalities. For example, the question is not what does Death of a Salesman tell us about Arthur Miller’s personal life or about American economics during the l940s, but rather what does it tell us about itself? There may be some connections between a play and some external features in the life and world of the author, but they are not as important as people believe them to be. No point-to-point correlation exists, and although Formalist Analysis teaches the fundamental unity of plays, it also teaches that plays are complex independent objects deserving intellectual respect. Readers should exercise caution before attempting to trace the meaning of a play to a tendency observed in the life or times of the author.
Fallacy of the Half-Truth (Debunking)
This error in logic occurs when readers use the same explanation for everything, with negative implications. In this way, the author, play, or character is discredited or debunked. Henrik Ibsen’s plays often suffer from this fallacy among readers. To say that Ibsen wrote grim Victorian social dramas carries the unspoken meaning to others that his plays are (1) gloomy and humorless, (2) the result of psychological neuroses in the author’s temperament, and (3) Victorian journalism masquerading as drama. Readers holding this opinion see Ibsen’s plays as boring, depressing, and outdated. Another example is the statement that: “nothing really happens in Samuel Beckett’s plays—there’s no plot.” What is the real meaning behind this half-truth? The remedy for automatic cynicism is to study the script more than once with an open mind. This is not just a question of finding any reasonable explanation and verifying it in the script but also of testing what connects to what against many points in the script.
Intentional Fallacy
This is another of Wimsatt’s formulations that is central to the principles of Formalist Analysis. It means trying to determine what the author’s intention was and whether it was fulfilled, instead of attending to the work itself. Examples of this are easy to find because of the modern vogue for literary criticism and the frequency with which artists insist on writing about their own works. Take the situation of Bertolt Brecht. No one can measure the amount of misunderstanding that has resulted from misapplication of his theoretical writings to productions of his plays (that is, the alienation effect, epic realism, and so forth). Wimsatt in The Verbal Icon argues that a work of art is detached from the author the moment it is finished. After that, the author no longer has the power to intend anything about it or to control it. Wimsatt’s opinion, however, should be taken as a warning more than as a strict rule. As with the other reading errors, the antidote to use against the intentional fallacy is repeated close reading of the play itself before attempting to make a definitive statement about the author’s intention.
Frigidity (Insensitivity)
The next error turns in the opposite direction. Frigidity is author John Gardner’s term for not showing enough concern—or the right kind of concern—about the characters or situations. Frigidity here means not treating the feelings in the play with the importance and care they deserve. Frigidity also includes the inability to recognize the seriousness of things in general. The standard of comparison is the concern any decent human being would show under the circumstances. Frigidity occurs when pulling back from genuine feeling or when only looking at the surface trivialities in a conflict. Unfortunately, in the form of irony it is one of the chief characteristics of the current artistic scene. It leads to less concern for the characters, plot, and concrete meaning of a play, is one of the worst errors possible in play reading, and is often the root of other errors. The error is frigidity when actors, directors, or designers knowingly go into a production less than fully prepared.
Literal-Mindedness
Related to frigidity is the error of evaluating everything in the play on the basis of its literal resemblance to real life. When it is used as a negative judgment, a statement like “the Angel in Angels in America and Sutter’s ghost in The Piano Lesson are not plausible because modern science tells us there are no such things as angels or ghosts” is a typical if crude example. This kind of thinking is a possible sign of a limited imagination as much as anything else. It may stem from misunderstanding the idea of reality in acting, sometimes called by actors emotional honesty. But the quality of observed reality in a play has little connection with the play’s potential for expressing psychological truth. A play, after all, can be unrealistic in all its external features and still permit honest acting. A simple door can be different from one play to another, depending on the artistic plan of the production. In one play, it can be realistic while in another the actor can enter by appearing out of the darkness in a spotlight. Emotional honesty and theatrical reality are separate and distinct issues and do not contradict one another. Whatever the source of the confusion, however, the lesson is that everyday reality is irrelevant to understanding a play as an artistic experience. Plays create their own realities.
Secondhand Thinking
This error is a corollary of the intentional fallacy. Although it is not a logical fallacy, it can still be troublesome for novice play readers. It stems from relying too much on other people’s opinions, especially when dealing with difficult material. The methods of the college classroom and the recent interest in radical criticism have not discouraged the habit. Unfortunately, addiction to the judgments, even of experienced critics, even when they are accurate, can inhibit self-confidence and independent thinking. Artists, especially young artists, should beware of cutting themselves off from new experiences, feelings, or words by relying on established opinion rather than on direct contact. To permit the free exercise of imagination, script analysis should initially be a solo experience. Experts can safely be consulted afterward.
Over-Reliance on Stage Directions
Secondhand thinking also extends to stage directions, which are notes incorporated in a script or added to it to convey information about its performance not already evident in the dialogue itself. Ordinarily they are concerned either with the actor’s movements on stage or with scenery and stage effects. Plays written in the past tended to keep stage directions to a minimum, but over the years their use grew more widespread until, by the end of the nineteenth century, they were often long and very elaborate. The prefaces to George Bernard Shaw’s plays, for instance, often run on for dozens of pages and contain explicit instructions for actors and producers. There is some evidence among modern playwrights, however, of a reversal of this trend.
But stage directions may not always belong to the author. According to the custom of most publishers, stage directions are as likely to be written by the stage manager from the original setting provided by the scene designer or written by the literary editor of the text (as in the case of Shakespeare, for example). Even when we are certain the author has written them, it is prudent to recall the advice of the late designer, Edward Gordon Craig, about the reliability of stage directions. In his treatise, On the Art of the Theatre, Craig contended that stage directions are an infringement on the artistic rights of actors, directors, and designers. From this he concluded that playwrights should cease using them altogether. Of course, Craig’s prejudices are notorious, and his position on this subject was extreme. He did have a point, however. Stage directions are intended to supplement the dialogue, not replace it. They shouldn’t be confused with the play itself. Many professional actors, directors, and designers as well as producers and agents will seldom read stage directions, any stage directions. They want to work with the play itself and allow it to tell them everything they need to know, which is the point of view of this book.