How Plays Work: Reading and Performance

Why are readers who are generally at home with narrative and discursive prose, and even readily responsive to poetry, far less confident and intuitive when it comes to plays? The complication lies in the twofold character of the play as it exists on the page - as a script or score to be realized, and as literature. Martin Meisel's engaging account of how we read play plays on the page shows that the path to the fullest imaginative response is an understanding of how plays work. What is enta...