BACKThere are a number of main aspects of a drama that you need to be able to understand.
Drama has conventions which the audience needs to understand. You are not aware of understanding them, it just comes naturally. It is only when you fail to understand the conventions that you see them. For example, if you were to watch an episode of a soap opera, having never seen TV before, you would probably get very confused as the short scenes jumped between characters and storylines. You are able to follow the complicated plot because you understand the conventions of TV drama. Similar conventions affect drama, and we must recognise them to understand them.
Poems are separated into verses, and books are separated in chapters. Likewise, plays too are also divided into smaller chunks. Plays tend to be divided into Longer sections called acts and acts are often divided into scenes. There are a number of questions we need to answer when studying a play. Relate these questions to Macbeth
The story of a play usually cover a longer period of time than the 2 - 3 hours that they take to perform. This means that the structure - the way it is put together - must convey this passing of time. This is usually done in one of two ways:
