of the detailed stage directions that disfigure acting editions for the layman, and sometimes with the addition of prefaces. It was only natural that the playwright, once he was able to address a reading public as well as a theatre-audience, should be at pains to add a literary quality to his work. (Hudson 1951: 98)
This emphasises the importance of the playscript and ties in with the discussion and discriminations, which I have mentioned before, between the diegetic and mimetic nature of drama, and it poses an alternative corpus to that of the scholars who engage in performance studies.
The playwrights I am discussing in this book are Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They all have been regarded as the proponents of (social) realist plays. I have chosen four playscripts by each of these playwrights, the limitations of this project would not allow me to deal with more primary material. Thus I concentrated on the plays most commonly regarded and labelled as realist and socialist. From Ibsen, I will be discussing: A Doll House (1879),12 The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892). Wilde’s plays will be: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (performed 1895, published 1898) and The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895, published 1898). In Shaw’s case, I will be concentrating on his Plays Pleasant collection: Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894), A Man of Destiny (1895) and You Never Can Tell (1896).
As mentioned before, in the mid-nineteenth century, the standing of theatre was not high in Britain (nor was it on the Continent or the United States). It is often said that the arrival of A Doll House in London breathed new life into the whole body of drama and inspired a new generation of playwrights. This might be the reason why according to William Archer “Ibsen became the most famous man in the English literary world.”13 In the four plays I have chosen from Ibsen’s Realist Cycle, he sets the tone for many a playwright, and especially for Wilde and Shaw. What is particularly relevant to my work is how Ibsen has been able to “embody contemporary social problems through the medium of an individual’s destiny” (Hemmer 1994: 71). It is this presence of the individual ←30 | 31→and also society that make Ibsen’s plays well suited to my model of Palmerian character construction and intermentality, such as the fact that Nora is treated as a generic family member, but simultaneously her individual fate seals the fate of that family. These types of plays recur again in Wilde and Shaw. In Wilde, we have an abundance of the clash between characters and their identity. The concept of identity according to the individual and according to society is always at the heart of those plays (see Knox 2008). And Shaw has inherited characteristics from both Ibsen and Wilde. The variety of characters in Shaw is impressive and the way he constructs their individual and social consciousness reinforce my claims in this study. In the case of Shaw, his lengthy, novel-like introductions also provide ample ground for discussion about the narrative nature of the playscripts.
1.6 Structure of the Book
This book is structured in nine chapters. Chapter One is the current chapter and provides an introduction to the study.
The next chapter, Chapter Two, will provide a theoretical background. First I will give an outline of the premises of classical narrative studies. Then I will explain how postclassical narrative studies expand and complement the ideas of the existing theories. This is relevant because postclassical narratologists have introduced the inclusion of drama in narrative. Especially in cognitive narrative studies, drama is a fruitful corpus for analysis. I then explain the theory of Palmer as a cognitivist and how and to what extent I use his theory in my own model of analysing playscripts. In order to do so, I place Palmer’s work within the context of cognitivist ideas, and then particularly concentrate on his idea of intermentality. After explaining Palmer in-depth, I will consider the status of drama in narrative studies: that is, I will examine how drama was dealt with before, how its status changed and what new directions and studies there are today as well as what is still missing.
In Chapter Three, I will concentrate on character and consciousness construction. After an examination of previous work that has been done regarding characterisation and character analysis in drama studies, I will focus in detail on studies that are on the following categories:
1) character and consciousness in the embedded and doubly embedded narratives in playscripts;
2) character and consciousness in the stage directions;
3) character and consciousness in the introductory and explanatory passages.
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For all these subcategories I will elaborate on existing studies, what is missing and how I would like to complement those studies with the help of a cognitivist approach.
Chapters Four and Five introduce my model of consciousness construction and how one can apply it in the different categories of the playscript in order to construct the mentalities of the characters. I will be using my corpus and demonstrate my ideas with numerous examples from the plays. I will have distinct subchapters not only for the different parts of each play but also for the analysis of each playwright separately. This provides me with enough data to make a comparison between the playwrights at the end of each chapter regarding the way they construct the mentalities of the characters in their plays on an intramental level.
Chapters Six, Seven and Eight focus in detail on the dynamics of group formation and intermentality in all the plays. Even with regard to the intermental aspect of consciousness construction each playwright has an individual style based on the thought-action continuum. This will alter the dynamics of the interpretation of the plays. In Chapter Six, I will analyse Ibsen’s plays, separately in a subchapter. In Chapter Seven, I will do the same with Wilde’s plays and in Chapter Eight with Shaw’s. In these three chapters, the focus will be on the different types of intermentality between the characters in the plays. I will draw attention to the thought-action continuum and show that the dynamics of a play varies depending on its inclination to rely on thought, or action based group formations. The three playwrights differ in the application of the thought-action frame, not only on an intramental level, but also on an intermental level, and this results in very subtle differences in a genre that might be regarded as overtly similar.
In my conclusion, Chapter Nine, I will sum up my research and I will also propose that this method is applicable to drama of all periods and is by no means limited to either (social) realist plays, or plays with extensive introductions. Moreover, I make suggestions on how a cognitive approach toward drama could be developed further in order to achieve a more comprehensive study of drama. By taking a cognitive approach, the study of drama will no longer neglect playscripts as non-narrative or inferior narrative instances and will be able to come to new insights about how to approach not only playscripts as storyworlds, but within the same framework examine characters and groups in an intermental setting.
