Dramatic Structure

Study Guide suggestions:
1. Apply the Freytag Pyramid to an analysis of the play's structure. Begin this approach by defining the conflicts that the play dramatizes. First, consider the classic types of conflict: character vs. character, character vs. self, character vs. environment / society. Then note the specific circumstances of those types within the play.
2. Apply the scenic model of analysis to the play's structure. Note the patterns of multiple plots, ceremonial endings, and expanded crises.
3. Look for Shakespeare's strategy of unity in multiplicity in the relating of plot to plot, to theme, to character, to atmosphere, and to imagery. What patterns of unity define individual scenes and, in turn, are reflected in the overall structure of the play.

Beginning with the First Folio of 1623 and continuing to the present day, Shakespeare’s editors have imposed on his original playscripts a five-act structure. According to William G. Leary, in his excellent guide to the making and performance of Shakespeare’s plays Shakespeare Plain, his first editors, his colleagues Heminge and Condell, "anxious to confer on their beloved colleague the cachet of classic drama," followed Aristotle’s paradigm of a five-episode structure for drama.

Freytag Pyramid: In the nineteenth century, the German scholar novelist and critic, Gustav Freytag, diagrammed this classic structure as a five-stage pyramid:
    Stage 1: Exposition sets forth the circumstances of the conflict: the exposition introduces the setting of the play, the characters, their situation, atmosphere, and theme, and the circumstances of the conflict. The opening scenes of a play are traditionally primarily exposition; however, background information is often only gradually revealed. Both major and minor characters perform the task of exposition through dramatic dialog.
    Stage 2: Complication and development. This second stage, also called the rising action, begins with the point of attack. The point of attack sets the play’s chain of actions in motion by either initiating the conflict in the play or accelerating an already existing conflict. Following this point, difficulties arise in the chain of actions, which intensify the conflict and, at the same time, progressively narrow the possibilities for the outcome of the play. Complications usually arise from the discovery of new information, the unexpected opposition to a plan, the necessity of making a choice. Complications can also arise from characters acting out of ignorance or from such outside sources as war or natural disasters.
    Stage 3: Crisis or turning point is the apex of the pyramid. The complications of the rising action culminate in the crisis. At the turning point, there is a significant "turn" or change in the direction of the action; it is the place at which the rising action reverses and becomes the falling.
    In discussions of dramatic structure, climax is also used to designate the turning point in the action. However, in the strict sense of the term, climax is the point of highest interest, the point at which the audience makes his greatest emotional response to a play. In this sense of the term, the climax can occur at point in the dramatic structure other than the crisis.
    Stage 4: Falling action is the fourth stage of the pyramid; it follows the crisis and is parallel to the rising action. The falling action increases the dramatic intensity of the action as it accelerates toward the catastrophe.
    Stage 5: Catastrophe is the conclusion of a play, particularly a tragedy. It is the final stage of the falling action, ending the dramatic conflict, winding up the plot and consisting of the actions that result from the climax. Today, denouement is more commonly used.

Scenic Structure: However, according to William G. Leary Shakespeare's actual practice was writing working scripts for actors, what the Elizabethans called "the book of the play." These books were "a succession of manuscript pages bearing speeches, with some insertions indicating entrances and exits, very few stage directions, and no indications of act or scene divisions." Furthermore, Leary argues, Shakespeare's playscripts are far too "varied," "fluid and organic" to be contained within a five-act structure. The plays should thus be viewed as a succession of scenes. Within the thirty-seven plays in the Shakespeare canon, "the number of scenes range from nine in A Midsummer Night's Dream to as many as fifth-two in Anthony and Cleopatra, with the average being nineteen [Hamlet has twenty].... Shakespeare's scenes [also] display a wide range of both length and complexity. They may be as simple as the 21-line monologue in which Edgar explains his disguise as a Bedlam beggar (Lear, II, iii) or as complex as the 301-line opening scene of Lear in which... almost all of the principal characters are introduced" and the tragic chains of events that will destroy most of them is set in motion.
    "A Shakespearean scene consists of a segment of talk, usually a dialogue but sometimes a monologue, introduced by entrances and terminated by exits with a cleared stage in between scenes. The cleared stage may signify the passing of time or a change of place or both. The dialogue in Shakespeare's scripts normally supplies the clues necessary to point up these scene divisions" (Shakespeare Plain 64-70).

Unity in Multiplicity: Shakespeare’s strategy in the pattern and arrangement of scenes is to create the effect of unity in multiplicity. William G. Leary uses a musical metaphor to describe this strategy: Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) composed plays in which the plot unfolds like "variations on a theme." What distinguishes Shakespeare’s genius is that this strategy carries over from plot to theme to character, to atmosphere, and imagery in Shakespeare’s plays. Individual scenes will have this pattern of unity; in turn this pattern is also reflected in the overall structure of the play.
    A plot reveals a plan: the plan will reveal a selection of events from all the possible events that could make up a story, and a plot will reveal a careful arrangement of those selected events. The selection and arrangement of events will, in turn, reveal a significant meaning or theme. Sylvan Barnet, editor of the excellent Signet Classic series of Shakespeare’s plays, observes in his Short Guide to Shakespeare, that "the often repeated charge that Shakespeare borrowed the plots of his plays is, in practice, false. "He borrowed his stories and arranged them into his own plots, selecting events and linking them into meaningful patterns" (89).

Plot Patterns: William G. Leary defines the following patterns in the plots of Shakespeare’s plays: multiple plots, ceremonial endings, and expanded crises.
    A. Multiple plots: Shakespeare frequently begins two or more story lines in rapid succession in a play’s first two or three scenes. For example, in King Lear, "after a complicated opening scene in which we witness an old man’s mishandling of the division of his kingdom and his fatal misinterpretation of the feelings of his three daughters, we are immediately confronted in Scene ii with another story about another father, the Earl of Gloucester, only this time we see an old courtier fatally mistake the feelings of his two sons, one of whom, is good, the other evil (Shakespeare Plain 89).
    In a second example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no fewer than four plots are launched in succession by the end of the first three scenes. According to Shakespeare scholar David Young, "the intricate design [of this play] not only is an extraordinary piece of dramatic construction," but is also "emphatic about its symmetries and complexities. It invites us to enjoy pleasing patterns and repetitions.... Shakespeare shifts the action between two worlds, the mythical Athens and a nearby forest. From the Athenian world come two distinct groups, members of the Athenian court and a group of workmen (the "mechanicals"), for a wild night in the woods. There they encounter a third group, the fairies, with hilarious and quite varied results. Each of the groups has further subdivisions: the courtly Athenians break down into two pairs of lovers and their elders; the mechanicals into Bottom and everybody else; and the fairies into the opposing camps of Oberon and Titania. At the play's close all the characters converge on the palace of Theseus for a triple wedding, a dramatic performance, and a ritual blessing by the fairies after everyone else has gone to bed"(The Shakespeare Hour 31-32).
    The arrangement of multiple plots in succession have, according to William G. Leary, two significant effects: 1) The first is to expand themes to universal significance. King Lear, among other themes, is about foolish fathers and filial ingratitude. By having both Lear and Gloucester suffer from the cold cruelty of their ungrateful children, Shakespeare suggests that the plight of foolish fathers in universal. The second effect is to deepen and make more complex the thematic resonances of individual scenes (Shakespeare Plain 91-92).
    B. Ceremonial endings: "To a modern audience, the endings of Shakespeare's plots seem long and unnecessarily complicated. The reason for such a practice lies in the Elizabethan audience's well-cultivated love of story and consequent interest in seeing it rounded off. The pattern of his endings is consistent: a) ceremony replaces action, b) the pace and tempo are slowed, and c) resolutions are spelled out explicitly, in detail, and often at some length. In Shakespeare's comedies the complexities that earlier stood between the characters and the triumph of love are systematically explained and resolved. In the tragedies, the [obstacles] that earlier stood between the characters the attainment of justice are dispelled, and order is restored." As part of the "tradition that associates comedy with fruitful good fortune, Shakespeare’s comedies end with as many marriages as ingenuity can conceive and credulity can accept; his tragedies close with the restoration of order and the binding up of social wounds." These ceremonies are presided over by "some ranking figure," often a duke (Shakespeare Plain 95).
    C. Expanded crises: The third pattern in Shakespeare’s plots, as defined by William G. Leary, is expanded crises. Rather than building to a single moment of crisis when, in Aristotle’s words, "the action veers round to its opposite" in "a reversal of fortune," Shakespeare’s plots are characterized by "sustained suffering and endurance in the tragedies" and of a "succession of complications" in the comedies (Shakespeare Plain 96).