Abstract

This thesis examines the ontological, temporal, and narrative status of stage-directions in dramatic texts, arguing that they cannot be adequately interpreted as pragmatic instructions, paratextual supplements, or authorial indices. Against approaches which treat drama primarily through narrative, performative, or evental frameworks, the thesis asks how dramatic worlds appear, persist, and fracture. While influential philosophical readings have foregrounded discontinuity and suspension, this study argues that such models fail to account for the formal role played by stage-directions in structuring dramatic worldhood itself. The thesis proposes instead that stage-directions function as signifying cuts: formal inscriptions that interrupt continuity and mediate access to dramatic worlds by generating autonomous spatial and temporal relations. Through their projection beyond the dramatic page and their structural exteriority to performance, stage-directions reshape narrative temporality and dramatic ontology without resolving the gap between text and stage.

The argument begins by tracing the historical emergence of stage-directions as contested sites of authorship following the rise of the director, and by situating this emergence within a philosophical critique of speech-act theory, narratology, and dramatic theory. It demonstrates how dominant models fail to account for the parallax of voices and temporalities produced by the spatial and temporal disjunctions inscribed on the dramatic page.

Building on this groundwork, the thesis develops a psychoanalytic reading of Elizabethan stage-directions through Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze. Ambiguous and contradictory directions are reinterpreted as symptomatic inscriptions through which theatre stages its own unconscious, exposing the dramatist’s displacement within the symbolic field while giving form to lack, misrecognition, and remainder in figures such as the notorious “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

The argument then shifts from subjectivity to structure through a Derridean reading of Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Here, architectural and material stage-directions operate parergonally, corrupting their own referents and producing narratives of spacing rather than stable scenic cues. Stage-directions emerge as dramatic artefacts that defer and displace the relation between material form and textual inscription.

Finally, the thesis offers an ontological re-determination of stage-directions through a structurally temporal reading of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Drawing on modal realism and four-dimensionalism, it argues that the play’s world is generated not through continuous action or evental rupture but through temporal slicing. Characters appear as momentary person-stages, and continuity emerges only as an effect of repetition. Godot persists not as a world we enter, but as a sequence of signifying cuts through which world and subject appear as if whole.