Dramatized internal dialogue in a comedy by Shakespeare: Solitude speech as a socio-cultural, cognitive, and communicative device

We analyze the theater performance of a dilemma enacted as dialogic solitude speech, involving Fictive Interaction (Pascual 2002, 2006, 2014). The scene, from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, represents the conflicting thoughts of character Lancelet as clashing advice from two invisible interlocutors, i.e., Conscience and Fiend. The actor swiftly and constantly shifts viewpoint between the three, employing linguistic, vocal, gestural, spatial, and artifactual signs. We find that: (i) the scene involves intricate conceptual mappings between the theater script, the character’s mental world, and the Here-and-Now of the on-stage performance; (ii) such an imaginary dialogue is particularly suited for theater expression, rendering characters’ thoughts accessible to the audience, who are turned fictive bystanders (cf. Xiang 2016); and (iii) this fictional solitude-speech performance is deeply rooted in the societal norms and values of Shakespeare’s age. We suggest that the interactional structure of inner speech may be as varied as the outer speech that it mimics and emerges from.