Teaching Drama: A Manifesto

Literature teachers should make a greater claim on drama in the literature curriculum. In my department, and probably in most, introductory literature courses downplay the drama, and advanced drama courses are offered infrequently. Our students can avoid the subject altogether, except for Shakespeare—and many do. Shakespeare's plays make it into the literature curriculum, but they are often venerated rather than enjoyed: students are taught to look up to them, not take them in. An effect on one generation naturally cycles to the next, and college literature teachers who feel uneducated in drama avoid it.

This is to neglect a form of literature that, taking Shakespeare's plays as the obvious example, has been supremely important in art and history, even as it has been accessible to the broadest possible audience. Drama is fundamental in every culture that we know, now and in the past. In contemporary culture, its scope has expanded immensely through film and television, and there is now no more popular form of literature worldwide. By these measures, drama deserves a much larger place in the literature curriculum. This is not to compete with colleagues in theater schools and departments, whose focus is on production values. The literature of drama is our province, and our students should explore it broadly and deeply.

Now setting Shakespeare aside, almost all of the drama courses we teach to advanced literature students take the form of historical surveys: Elizabethan, Restoration, and so on. Likewise, all of the drama textbooks that are set up for broad drama courses are historical in their format. They link one play with another by historical periods and march across the centuries, beginning with Oedipus, including two or three Shakespeares, never forgetting Death of a Salesman, and ending with something contemporary and obscure. These anthologies get larger with each edition, as they include more and more ancillary materials, like critical essays and production histories. Almost all poetry and fiction genre textbooks are set up very differently, not historically but formally, because the full history of poetry or fiction cannot be represented in a single volume. We should likewise recognize that no single historical survey can encompass the full scope of dramatic literature, certainly not if we look beyond stage plays.

The broad genre of drama includes plays, film and television scripts, public rituals, "closet" dramas, street theater, cartoons, musicals, and more, but traditionally, drama courses and textbooks include only stage plays. The arguments that distinguish stage plays from other kinds of drama are important. The camera makes filmed drama like narrative by continually shifting the point of view; the scope of filmed drama tends to be much broader in time and place; filmed drama is a single, same performance for every audience. But the subject of literature is texts, not productions. Play texts are scripts when they are performed. Conversely, film and television scripts are texts, best understood as literature when they are read.

There was a time when the popularity of theater kept even play texts from qualifying as literature, and we are likely to evolve that same way, eventually legitimizing these various other forms of drama as literature. Then we will acknowledge that differences between plays and films (and television drama, and musicals, etc.) are no greater than differences between different productions of Oedipus and Death of a Salesman, or between songs and sonnets. Then, a first course in drama in schools and colleges will focus not so much on historical periods as on forms and effects. Drama textbooks will include a fuller variety of texts, and drama teachers will prepare themselves differently.

This point of view can be rendered into precepts for teaching drama, meant to be provocative and not arrogant.

• • Introductory drama courses should include the full variety of drama texts, from primitive rituals to television sitcoms, from stage plays to scripts for film and other media. The very best drama texts of various kinds should be included, so that comparative judgments are impartial. But popularity does count in literature and should be a factor in the table of contents and the syllabus. Some forms of drama, like religious and social rituals...