Reading a Drama Text: An Empirical Case Study

Abstract

Reception aesthetics and reader-response theory are the two strands of literary criticism to have underlined the reader’s active role in the reading process, forming various reader constructs. Moreover, the new field of research has prompted theatre theorists to take a keener interest in the processes of reading and understanding drama texts, as well as to pay attention – especially in the postmodern multimedia civilisation – to the audience’s perceptions. The paper presents the results of an empirical case study examining the readers’ contact with a selected drama text at several levels of response. Their responses are compared to the perceptions of spectators on attending the performance, and to the spectators’ understanding of the production’s reading.