Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
25.4 Narrative in dramatic texts
Unit 25 Ways of reading drama
Section 6 Media: from text to performance
The suggestion that drama can be characterized as dialogue unmediated by narration is a useful one, but it does need to be qualified. In fact, dramatic texts make use of a variety of narrative devices or strategies that perform a number of functions: guiding actors, directors or set designers; guiding an audience; or guiding readers.
25.4.1 Implicit and explicit stage directions
As we have seen, characters’ speeches can contain implicit stage directions (’Here I kneel’) that do two things at once: they guide actors, and they guide readers by performing a narrative function. Explicit stage directions can also be read both as guidelines for stage performance and as functioning like a narrative voice. In the scene from Othello that we are examining, the text continues as follows:
In a novel, this passage might have been written as follows:
’Tis but so, I warrant,’ Iago replied. As he was speaking they heard the sound of trumpets calling them to supper.
In the naturalist and realist drama of nineteenth-century Europe (involving largely middle-class audiences watching the critical breakdown of middleclass life as if through a transparent ’fourth wall’ of a living room), stage directions became more extensive and began to resemble the narrative voice of the realist novels of the period. One of the reasons for this was that such plays were beginning to be published before they were performed and so began to be written as self-sufficient texts independent of dramatic performance. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House(1879), for example, begins with two paragraphs of stage directions. The first paragraph describes in detail a middle-class, late nineteenth-century drawing room in which all the on-stage action will take place; the second paragraph describes Nora Helmer arriving back from a Christmas shopping trip. Such extensive and detailed stage directions offer directors, set designers and actors explicit instructions about staging the play. But they also read not so much as a description of a theatrical set but of an actual drawing room with real people in it. For example, the first two sentences of the second paragraph are as follows (in an English translation first published in 1961):
The front door-bell rings in the hall; a moment later, there is the sound of the front door being opened. Nora comes into the room, happily humming to herself. She is dressed in her outdoor things, and is carrying lots of parcels which she then puts down on the table, right.
This passage is mostly indistinguishable from the kind of narrative exposition that features in the nineteenth-century realist novel, except that: (1) it is in present rather than past tense; (2) the narrative voice seems confined to the room; and (3) the table is said to be ’right’ - that is, stage right.
25.4.2 Narrative exposition in dialogue
Another way in which dramatic texts can include narrative elements is to have the characters themselves present the reader/audience with narrative exposition in dialogue with other characters. Thus, when Iago says to Desdemona ’Hark how these instruments summon to supper’, he says it as much for the reader/audience as for Desdemona (who presumably knows what the trumpets signify). More crucial passages of narrative exposition often occur in characters’ speeches at the beginning of plays in order to help the reader/audience understand what is going on - as in Iago’s speech in the opening scene of Othello:
Off-capped to him, and by the faith of man
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them, with a bombast circumstance
Horribly stuffed with epithets of war,
And in conclusion
Nonsuits my mediators. For, ’Certes,’ says he,
’I have already chose my officer.’
And what was he?
Forsooth, a great arithmetician,
One Michael Cassio, a Florentine
(Othello, I, i, 5-19)
Iago’s speech fills in part of the story of what has occurred before the opening scene: Iago had attempted - through the intercession of friends in high places - to get a position as Othello’s lieutenant, but Othello rejected him because he had already chosen Cassio for this position. In telling this to Rodrigo, Iago is also telling it to the audience or to the reader - and providing one motive for his hatred of Othello.
25.4.3 The chorus as narrator
Another way that narration may be presented in drama is through the use of a ’chorus’. In the tragic drama of classical Greece, the chorus consisted of twelve to fifteen men who sang odes as part of the dramatic performance. The chorus would also deliver speeches - spoken either as a group or by the leader - that constituted a kind of commentary on the action. Since the classical period, the chorus has largely disappeared from drama, though it has occasionally been used in original and effective ways. Shakespeare uses a chorus (consisting of a single person) in King Henry V (c.1599) to deliver a prologue at the beginning of each act and an epilogue at the end of the final act. Shakespeare’s chorus directly addresses the audience, carrying out a number of functions and producing a variety of effects. He encourages the members of the audience to accept that the necessarily limited action that takes place on the stage represents the large-scale events of war between England and France involving ships, armies, horses, battles and so on: ’Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth’ (Henry V, prologue to Act I, 26-7). In doing this, the chorus serves to highlight that this is a play, not real life: ’Admit me Chorus to this history / Who prologue-like your humble patience pray, / Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play’ (Henry V, prologue to Act I, 33-5). Shakespeare’s chorus also works as a narrative voice for the audience/reader, as in the prologue to Act 2 in which he describes England preparing for war:
Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies.
Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man.
(Henry V, Prologue to Act II)
The chorus device has occasionally been used in plays since Shakespeare, including Milton’s Samson Agonistes(1671) and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral(1935). Indeed, it underwent something of a revival in the twentieth century precisely because of the way it foregrounds theatricality and hence breaks with the naturalistic illusion of late nineteenth-century drama. In The Threepenny Opera(1928), for example, Bertolt Brecht employs a chorus-type ’Narrator’ who introduces each act and delivers a prologue to the whole play that includes the well-known song ’Mack the Knife’. Brecht used choruses - along with a range of other theatrical devices - to produce an alienation effect in the audience. Brecht’s plays tend to disrupt the audience’s tendency to become uncritically absorbed in the theatrical spectacle because he felt that this was akin to the way the people of Europe were being mesmerized by fascism and/or capitalism in the period, both of which used a kind of mass theatre to manipulate the masses (today, TV advertising is simply the most explicit version of this process).
The fact that a chorus serves to foreground the theatrical process and produce an alienation effect, preventing the audience from consuming the represented events as if they were real, would appear to make it an inherently theatrical device whose effects need to be experienced in live theatre. Yet we have seen that the chorus is also a kind of narrator for someone reading the play as a dramatic text; and, for a reader used to the playful foregrounding of the narrative situation in postmodernist novels, even the anti-realist, alienating commentary of a chorus like La Corbie in Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989) does not make the dramatic text unreadable.