The Pragmatics of Dialogical Asides in Shakespeare

Neither the Folio nor the various quartos of Shakespeare plays contain the stage direction “aside”, which was added to the texts starting from the first editors in the eighteenth century. Modern editions continue to signal this particular theatrical convention to readers, and scholars have defined various categories for it. Among these categories (monological, ad spectatores, and dialogical) this article examines the dialogical aside and the pragmatic strategies it involves, when dialogue becomes hidden, so to say, and particularly guarded (and wary), so as not to be discovered by other onstage bystanders. In this case the noun aside takes on its full meaning: due to a theatrical convention (valid especially in Elizabethan and Restoration drama, but absolutely rejected by the so-called fourth-wall theatre), a character in a multiparty talk chooses only one or more characters as their addressee, thus creating a dialogically privileged group and isolating the remaining bystanders. The article discusses some cases from The Tempest, Henry VI Part 3, and Antony and Cleopatra