The Importance Of Speech In Drama

Elizabeth Burns observed that “[d]rama is not a mirror of action, it is a composition…” and the “fabricated” activities, including speech in drama need to be “authenticated” by an audience or reader as credible activity in the dramatic world in which it functions. Therefore, dramatic action becomes meaningful in relation to the “authenticating conventions” which are invoked in a play, which are drawn from the social world of affairs in which dramatic activity is embedded.
On the other hand, we should not consider dramatic speech only as an extension of everyday speech into drama. Despite the interdependence between dramatic speech and everyday speech, yet there is no identity and although there are many common elements, there are also important differences. These differences can be seen in the fact that drama, theatre, film and other performance genres are part of the social culture but as part of what has been called “expressive culture.” Effective dialogue is not an exact reproduction of real-life speech but rather a

A critical approach to drama written in verse requires the knowledge of not only of metre but also the function and purpose of the various figures of speech. These should never be only decoration because they are one of the means by which the playwright can develop and express his meaning. The various figures of speech have often been made interchangeable, thus a satisfactory definition of them is difficult to provide. There is a tendency to include symbols, similes, and metaphors making up the imagery. Metaphorical is used to mean figurative and symbolical or symbolizes is often applied to almost any of the figurative qualities of language. Each of these terms, though, has a specific meaning and it is important to know these meanings in order to have a terminology for analyzing the subtleties and complexities of