‘What kind of world is this?’

When we begin reading a play or novel, we take in much more than the expository information related to Who, What, Where and When. Although we habitually scour any text for the answers to these fundamental questions, we are at the same time searching for cues to anchor the incoming data in a ‘kind of world’. This ‘kind of world’ is based on our own, but carries inferences about the nature of things, which help us gauge not only which facts are likely to be important, but what to do with them, what meanings to assign them; it endows the fictional world with an atmosphere or feeling. We become practised in identifying the characteristics of different ‘kinds of worlds’. As discussed provisionally in the Introduction, texts ruled or inflected by comedy tend to give off a sense of playfulness in their blood, although this sense can be manifested in a world of different ways (see Figure 1.1).

As we embark upon any first reading, we attempt to build a contextual scaffold by (consciously or otherwise) referring features and structures of the unfolding world to a matrix of patterns accrued from all our previous reading experiences. In so doing, we begin to compile a version of reality being defined, its rules of engagement, its emotional contours, its projected course and probable outcomes and how it reflects upon the one we inhabit.