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Article published In: Solitude Speech across Languages and Cultures
Edited by Mitsuko Narita Izutsu and Katsunobu Izutsu
[International Journal of Language and Culture 12:1] 2025
► pp. 155–182

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Dramatized internal dialogue in a comedy by Shakespeare

Solitude speech as a socio-cultural, cognitive, and communicative device

 | The University of British Columbia
 | Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
 | Case Western Reserve University
Published online: 5 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00072.hua
Abstract
We analyze the theater performance of a dilemma enacted as dialogic solitude speech, involving fictive interaction (Pascual, E. (2002). Imaginary trialogues: Conceptual blending and fictive interaction in criminal courts. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2006). Fictive interaction within the sentence: A communicative type of fictivity in grammar. Cognitive Linguistics, 17(2), 245–267. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2014). Fictive interaction: The conversation frame in thought, language, and discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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 (see Xiang, M. (2016). Real, imaginary, or fictive? In E. Pascual & S. Sandler (Eds.), The conversation frame: Forms and functions of fictive interaction (pp. 63–86). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar); 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Theoretical framework
    • 3.1Fictive interaction
    • 3.2Conceptual Integration Theory
    • 3.3Fictive interaction blends
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Linguistic cues
    • 4.2Vocal cues
    • 4.3Gestural cues
    • 4.4Depictive (spatial) elements
    • 4.5Blending networks in the solitude speech performance
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (83)
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