Verse Drama Analysis

In the twentieth century, Ezra Pound went so far as to proclaim: “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.”

The most familiar of the verbal devices that enable the dramatist to record a clearly defined attitude within the dialogue of separate and limited characters is also one of the most impressive. Verse drama, especially, helps the audience’s understanding by the patterns of images which the dramatist uses in the text. Like any other poet, the dramatist constantly uses the image to clarify and evaluate a feeling, idea, situation, person, or object. Whether the image is a figure of speech, such as a metaphor or simile, or merely a concrete vivid detail makes little difference. What matters is the

In this technique, understanding is suggested not through conscious evaluations – like those of a chorus aware of everything, a character specially endowed with authority, or the observers who interpret a central referent – but through devices of speech that implicitly reveal a level of awareness beyond the speaker’s own comprehension. By introducing changes of tone, images, allusions, ambiguous words, and variation in sound, or by making a speech from words, images, and symbols repeated or duplicated in other contexts, the dramatist “breaks the barrier of human limitations of his individualized characters.” Through these devices, the dramatist creates authoritative dramatic facts relevant to all the characters. None of these stylistic devices can function alone. They acquire their significance from the general context of the action, which, they in turn try help to elucidate through their own contributions. Each of these stylistic devices works with other devices, of language and structure, in provoking the spectators to view the action as a whole in a certain perspective. This lack of autonomy is especially true of the sound pattern into which the dramatist shapes his words, that is, the pattern produced by variations in stress and pitch, differences in the placement and duration of pauses, the relationships between individual words or lines, the presence or absence of rhyme, and the contrast of one speaking voice with another. While it is possible to isolate and describe this pattern, the resulting description can embody no specific meaning. The sound pattern may have only appropriateness, meaning that the emotion articulated by the content of expressive words determines their arrangement. Nevertheless, in many instances sound devices lead the spectator toward a clearer understanding of the situation presented. Rhyme implies a