Plays vs Prescriptivism

As both a Drama and English Language student, I read a lot of plays and study a lot of words, grammar, spellings and punctuation. I find these two subjects fascinating in their own right: plays have the power to creatively inspire the reader, audience and the professionals who will be bringing it to life, and the English Language provides the tools for the playwright to actually do this. 

We’ve been exposed to a lot of prescriptivist media lately, article after article complaining about ‘the decline of our language” or how “the youth of today are abandoning the rules of English”. As a student, I’m required to take a more descriptive approach, which encourages one to observe how English is changing, rather than prevent it. But I don’t have this attitude just because I’m told to. I believe that the idea that English has certain rules (which inherently are all rooted in classism) is ridiculous . Because plays break these rules in every creative, theatrical choice the playwright makes. In every misplaced exclamation mark. In every overused ellipsis. In all the italics, capital letters and hyphens, each harbouring a theatrical purpose. I adore how plays inject these small, rather unordinary things with power and subtext and energy. Each are stage directions or dialogue in their own right. 

The culture around playwriting is so much more playful than that of writing a novel or an article. I don’t know much about poetry but I do think that plays and poems have a rather entwined connection in that sense: ingenuity. I’ve read some plays that require an introductory key to outline what each punctuation mark means. “Full stops do not indicate an end in the sentence but a change in tone.” “Dialogue that is capitalised doesn’t need to be shouted but should be emphasised, in whichever way feels right.”

This innovation completely goes against the prescriptivist way of tackling English by warping our familiar rules to fit the needs of the play. And, for me, the reason for this goes back to the idea of theatre itself. Ground-breaking and weird, featuring the wonderfully wacky and innovative ideas of hundreds of creatives all collaborating to create something beautiful. And so scripts, the earliest form of a play, must communicate this on top of the writer’s vision. They must be both a written text and a visual masterpiece. And so, in this instance, the English language is the most useful tool at the playwright’s disposal. A heavily prescriptivist British society soon needs to realise that, by allowing language to be a malleable, flexible being through which all emotions and artistic influences are realised, such rules and corrections will eventually become unnecessary and perhaps even creatively damaging.