Topic 12 - Meaning between the lines (Session A) > Inference and the Discourse Architecture of Drama > Task B

Inference and the Discourse Architecture of Drama

Task B - Overhearers and audiences (and dramatic irony)

Let's pretend for a moment that someone else (let's call him Big Ears) was behind us as we walked out of the theatre and overheard the snippet of conversation we have just discussed in Task A. Note that Big Ears would be able to understand what you understood because he would have the same linguistic and contextual information. An audience in a theatre watching a conversation between two characters (or someone reading the play) would be in the same position as Big Ears, and would be able to infer this kind of knowledge 'between the lines'.

But there is also a difference in that dramatic audiences and readers of plays are 'licensed overhearers' in the sense that we, the audience/readers are intended by the dramatist to overhear and understand what is going on when the characters talk to one another. This follows from the 'doubled discourse' nature of drama that we explored in Task B of the 'Analysing drama - preliminary matters' page in Topic 11.

So far we have assumed that the audience and the characters on stage will be able to infer the same knowledge. But the doubled discourse structure of drama also enables a playwright to communicate additional things to the audience/reader, which some, or all, of the characters will not know. It is this use of the discourse architecture of drama that leads to what critics call dramatic irony'.

We will use as an example a speech by Algernon, a 19th century upper class layabout, to his aunt, Lady Bracknell, from near the beginning of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Algernon has just told his friend Jack that he has invented another friend, called Bunbury. Whenever Algernon wants to get out of a social engagement he conveniently pretends that Bunbury is ill, and that he must visit him. Then, a little later, Lady Bracknell arrives and reminds him that he is invited to dinner with her that evening:

(Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1)

Using the doubled discourse architecture of drama, explain what the audience knows at the end of Algernon's second speech, how this is different from what Lady Bracknell knows, and what it tells the audience about Algernon.

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