Character And Characterization In Drama

2.1 Character and Characterization Character is one of the drama elements which is an important part in drama because if there are no characters, the drama stories cannot be played or performed. Since drama presents us directly with scenes which are based on people’s actions and interactions, characters play a dominant role in this genre.For short, character is one of the people who appears in the play. Besides character, there is also characterization. These two things are different and this is how to differentiate them.
There is an important distinction to be made between character and characterization. A character is a person in a literary work. Characterization is the way in which a character is created. (Gill, 1995, p.127)

Therefore,

What, then, can you say about characters? The most important thing to remember is this: You can only learn about a character from the words of the play. (Gill, 1995, p.235)

Knowing and studying a character easily can be done by looking on their words. It means the sources when analyzing characters are the dialogue or maybe the soliloquy. When those things are looked deeply and carefully, knowing what to say about the character is an easy thing to do. From their words, such as dialogue or soliloquy, it reflects many things which cannot be seen by eyes but it can be felt through the words which showing what a character is like. According to Gill, there are four things that create the character through the words.
When we look at the words of a play we see four ways in which characters are created:the way they speak, what they say about themselves, what they say about each other, how they are contrasted. (Gill,

There may be three reasons for this: they could be ‘stock’ character, they may change to serve the plot, theplaywright may not be interested in them as personalities at all. (Gill, 1995, p.240)

Characters with no special personalities will be a difficult thing to analyze. There will be no idea how to describe them and they maybe include in some reasons above.The first reason is, maybe the characters are actually the ‘stock’ characters. It is a term for character who has only one or two features inside the character. Second is these characters may change to lead the plot and the last reason is maybe the playwright doesn’t fascinated with their personalities.

Gill stated that a stock character is almost similar to a flat character in a novel who has only one or two characteristics rather than being a character that has lots of characteristics(Gill, 1995, p.240).In other words, a stock character is a character that has common features and easy to recognize. Usually the stock characters are accepted by the audience. Here are some examples of stock characters: the bashful lover, the domineering wife, the lovesick young man, the melancholy man who is never cheerful,