A Student Guide to Play Analysis (review)

David Rush clearly and effectively draws upon his many experiences, both as a professor and as a widely-produced practicing playwright, to create a very usable and accessible introductory play analysis text. Rush states in his introduction that "we are going to be concerned solely in this study with the written text of the play" (9, author's emphasis). While there are certainly limits to such a project, especially given the need to imagine production concerns and to think in terms of sound and movement on the stage, Rush's strategy will nonetheless prove valuable to the student learning basic analysis skills. Using readily-available plays from many periods in theatre history, Rush focuses his attention upon mostly structural concerns. The great success of this textbook lies in the ability of its author to isolate and differentiate key aspects of play construction for the beginning student.

The first half of the book (Introduction and Part One) is a conventional and readable discussion of The Poetics. With Aristotle as his foundation, Rush provides concise explanations of matters such as the questions one should ask at the beginning of the analysis and the essential differences between a story and a play. If one accepts the premise that Aristotle is the starting point of criticism—something instructors will have to decide for themselves—then Rush's text offers useful discussions of the key concepts. Rush's explanation of Aristotelian Plot addresses structural concerns such as inciting incident and climax, and his chapter on Character introduces three key considerations: literal (background and goals), functional (protagonist, antagonist, etc.), and connotative (symbolic). His section on Language is a brief but packed analysis of meaning—denotation and connotation—and euphonics, which includes sounds and rhythms. While his explanations of rhythm and meter are carefully considered and informative, they are curiously more meticulous than other sections of the book. Indeed, Rush's play analysis technique apparently favors the Aristotelian element of Language. This is exemplified in his discussion of the oft-cited six elements of drama, which Rush lists as Plot, Character, Language, Thought, Spectacle, and Music "in order of importance as he stressed them" (31). While it is true that Aristotle initially inventoried the elements of drama as Rush presents them, the author of The Poetics straight away modifies that list in a prioritized order: Plot, Character, Thought, Language, Music, and Spectacle. Students reading along in The Poetics will surely notice the author's choice to forego Aristotle's prioritizing of Thought over Language, and perhaps less importantly, Music over Spectacle. To be consistent in his own reliance upon The Poetics, it would perhaps have been better for Rush to pay greater attention to the Aristotelian notion of Thought, which includes the rhetorical and moral arguments located within character speeches. After all, Aristotle considered Language the handmaid of Thought.

The second half of the book, Parts Two and Three, offers solid introductions to the subjects of dramatic genre and styles. In Part Two, Rush traces the development of classical tragedy and comedy, melodrama, farce, and other genres such as drama (drame) and tragicomedy, each described in terms of the viewpoints about life they exhibit. The section on classical tragedy includes an explanation of the Aristotelian tragic figure—neither completely good nor completely bad. The discussion of classical comedy introduces Northop Frye's conceptualizing of the Green World as a place of renewal and a locale in which a suspension of the mundane occurs (e.g., Shakespeare's forests and, conversely, the illusory residence of A Doll's House). These are all clear and helpful insights. Oedipus and The Glass Menagerie are the scripts cited most often early on, with several other well-recognized works factored in depending upon the genre in question. In each section, the reader is guided from classical plays to more recent examples—for example, Death of a Salesman under tragedy and The Importance of Being Earnest under comedy. Additional brief discussions of Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and even...