A Narratology of Drama

Dramatic Storytelling in Theory, History, and Culture from the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century

Christine Schwanecke

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110724141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en théâtre

This volume argues against Gérard Genette's theory that there is an "insurmountable opposition" between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

Part I: Towards a Transgeneric and Contextual Theory of Narrative in Drama, Or, Reframing ‘Drama’ as a Narrative Genre

1 ‘Enter Drama!’ Putting the Genre (Back) Centre Stage in the Study of Literature and Culture

Nature, not art, makes us all storytellers, but narrative art reflects and explores the nature of storytelling, in art and life outside art. Narrative art takes many different forms: drama is one of these forms.

(Hardy 1997, 13)

Although I do not wish to enter into the debate of whether storytelling comes to humans naturally or culturally, this study does take its cue from the above assumption that plays, just like novels, tell stories, and that they are no less narrative than prose fiction is conventionally held to be. Despite a certain conservatism in some fields of literary studies and in ways of teaching literature in Europe, this assumption has recently gained traction across the disciplines, as a variety of studies on the relationship between drama and narrative shows. Epic elements in plays, which have arguably been imported from traditionally narrative genres, such as medieval short story collections or novels, have been analysed just as often as traditional dramatic forms which bear narrative traits, like the messenger report, teichoscopy, the generative narrator, the commenting choir, diegetic spots in the action, and storytelling characters. Even transgeneric and transmedial phenomena such as focalisation, perspective, and/or point of view, have been considered in the research on a genre that used to be well-known for its allegedly ‘unmediated’ ways of presentation and its depiction of ‘external’ realities rather than internal, psychological ones. Also individual, overtly narrative plays have been increasingly recognised as such, like William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare 2010 [1611]), which carries ‘story’ even in its title, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (Shaw 2002), which is based on a myth and whose end is narrated instead of shown, or J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (Barrie 2008 [1904]), in which bedtime stories and fairy tales play a crucial role in both story and structure. And yet, the narrative structures of plays like these, plays that appear narrative ‘somehow,’ have yet to be exhaustively explored. In addition, there is a vast territory of plays which prominently feature novelists or the process of writing narratives and plays which refer to or are based on popular narratives, like fables and rumours, or well-known narrative genres, such as romances, fairy tales, or Gothic novels, and which imitate their structure. So, to put it in a nutshell: While the presence of story-levels in drama and the existence of narrative matters on this level will hardly be a matter of dispute, the narrativity brought about by dramatic discourse, as well as the communicative situation of dramatic narration, are issues that urgently need to be discussed and conceptualised.

Scholars have pointed to promising research possibilities sketched above and begun to carry out first, fundamental studies. But they have not yet set out to sufficiently map the both vast and multifaceted field. At the same time, calls for the establishment of a narratology of drama have become louder (Bonheim 2000, 2; Claycomb 2013, 159). And indeed, as the introductory examples and the remainder of this book aim to show, it does make sense to put drama ‘centre stage’ in the transgeneric study of narrative and the study of (narrative as) culture.

Even if there are laudable exceptions to the rule, drama as a genre has often been neglected by narratological research. Especially before the establishment of narratology’s intermedial and transgeneric branches,¹ researchers were happy enough to focus on fiction and film (cf., e.g., Bordwell 2014 [1985]; Chatman 1978, 1990).² Albeit not wholly forgotten or regarded as too old-fashioned in the recent bloom of transgeneric and cross-disciplinary literary research, drama has been regarded as a less attractive field for narratological research. Scholars have preferred to focus on TV series (cf. Mittell 2007, Bronfen, Frey, and Martyn 2016), video games (cf. Grimm 2014), digital narratives (cf. Ryan 2001), and other hybrid or intermedial genres (cf. A. Nünning and Schwanecke 2013; Grishakova and Ryan 2010). This study aims at filling the lacuna of considering drama as a narrative genre. It will hopefully show that drama, across all times and cultures, deserves as much narratological attention as those genres which have been traditionally or more recently been granted it.

This study rests on the thesis that drama has to be examined from a transgeneric point of view because, just like the proverbial “cannibal,” the novel (Woolf 1966 [1927], 224), it has devoured many forms of art and genres. It is a literary and, in its theatrical realisation, performative genre that, throughout its history, has developed alongside other genres within the system of genres. It has been inspired by their shifting characteristics as much as it has, in turn, inspired them. Drama is thus essentially multi-generic, and it has a special history with the genre of narrative, even across all dramatic sub-genres. With narrative modes, the allowances of dramatic storytelling are expanded. These narrative modes,³ textual features within plays that are likely to trigger the realisation of the cognitive frame of narrative (rather than that of ‘drama’) in readers’ minds, arguably exert a certain performative power. They shape mental schemata of genre and socio-cultural mind-sets; by doing this, they construct realities. In being read or performed, the plays examined here and their particularities are likely to both remediate existing socio-cultural problems and to suggest or premediate alternative realities. They inspire generic and socio-political innovations in individual and collective minds, first and foremost those of their contemporary audiences, and might ultimately advocate or even trigger change in a whole culture – and this across all dramatic sub-genres and from the Renaissance to the present time. This study aims at proving these theses.

The chapters to follow focus on the intersections of dramatic and narrative modes within the super-genre of drama, which are plentiful in number and rich in form.⁴ Starting from the premise that all drama necessarily bears narrative traits, this study considers drama from the perspective of transgeneric narratology. In Part I, the long-required narratology of drama is devised. Here, the characteristics of dramatic narration – i.e., the ways in which plays present their stories – are conceptualised. In Part II and with the help of the narratology of drama, the history of British drama⁵ is reframed as a transgeneric, especially narrative, history. Looking at plays from the Renaissance to the present which feature particularly high degrees of narrativity – by including salient forms of narrative and/or an especially high number of narrative modes –, I examine not only the text-internal and generic function of narrative in plays, but also the performative power and the cultural thrust that narrative in plays potentially develop.

In general, ‘drama’ and ‘narrative’ are thereby regarded as mental schemata or cognitive macro-frames,⁶ whose generic features vary with time and culture. These features appear in concrete, tangible, material, and textual modes and trigger, in recipients, the realisation of the respective frame. Recipients are able to recognise and understand, on the basis of their respective world knowledge, a given artifact as drama, dramatic, or narrative and interpret it accordingly (cf. Sect 3.2). Even though the cognitive macro-frame of drama may entail semantics that link it to ‘performance’ or the ‘theatre,’ this study honours the widely accepted distinction between ‘drama as literary text’ and ‘theatre as its performance’ (e.g., Horstmann 2018). Drama is regarded as one of the three literary super-genres and I will focus on play scripts, i.e., written texts. While analysing them, I still try to stay aware of their cultural contexts (that is, the cognitive dimensions and historical semantics in which they are originally embedded). In consequence, I, firstly, aim at reconstructing the historical macro-schemata and semantic fields that are likely to have accompanied the script when each play was first written or staged. Secondly, I pay heed to possible performances latent in the play texts as well.

In particular, I conceptualise drama as narrative; that is, even if the macro-frame applied to a given written text (i.e., a play) is ‘dramatic,’ in general, there may be salient modes of narrative within that text which allow for a realisation of the mental schema of ‘narrative’ on a sub-ordinate level of the play’s generic processing, as well. I revisit pertinent questions of genre theory and, in doing so, also reframe narrative as both a transgeneric concept and an essential part of dramatic literature. After all, there are, in the history of the literary-theoretical debate on drama and narrative, multiple and often divergent ways in which ‘narrative’ is defined and applied; and it is deemed necessary to discuss which conceptualisation(s) of narrative are most likely to facilitate the establishment of a narratology of drama.

I examine the treasure trove of forms and potential functions of dramatic storytelling, and bring (back) drama ‘centre stage’ – a genre that used to be the foundation of all literary theory (cf. Aristotle 1996 [c. 335 BC]) and that, unfortunately, seems to have lost its academic appeal since the ‘rise of the novel’ in the eighteenth century (cf. Watt 1987 [1957]), in periods in which the “novel [was said to] reign[…] supreme” (Bakhtin 2000 [1941], 71), and particularly in a time in which research in digital, visual, and multi-modal narratives thrives (cf. Ryan and Thon 2014; Hallet 2015a, 2015b).⁷ With this, drama will hopefully become more prominent once again in academic disciplines such as literary studies, narratology, or the study of culture, and beyond, in European and transatlantic thought and in the implicit cultural evaluations of genres and ‘genre hierarchies of the mind.’⁸ Grounding my research in the pioneering and inspiring work on drama and narration in narratology and drama studies published since the 1980s, I work towards a narratology of drama (cf. Ch. 2, 3).

On the basis of seminal work in cultural theory and history which frames ‘narrative’ as a political and ideological instrument, as an ‘institutional tool of power exertion,’ I examine not only the various forms that ‘dramatic narrative’ and ‘narrative within drama’ have taken, but also the cultural functions of narrative in English drama history. Acting on the established ideas that genre conventions are mental schemata (cf. Hallet 2007; Jahn 2008; Zymner 2011a) and that narrativity is a gradable quality which, in principle, can characterise any art form (cf. Prince 1996; Wolf 2002), I would like to put forth two major hypotheses: Firstly, all drama can be gainfully examined with the help of the tools of transgeneric narratology. Secondly, plays that display a heightened degree of ‘narrativity’ or appear particularly ‘narrative’ do more than play a vital, hitherto neglected part in the genre of dramatic li...