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Since antiquity, narrative has been considered alien to the dramatic mode. For Aristotle (Po. 1449b9–12) tragedy was a representation (mimesis) of an action in the mode of dramatic enactment, not in the mode of narrative, which was to be used only to report improbable or irrational actions that were not to be staged. Other premodern theorists likewise expelled storytelling from drama, showing concern about the credibility of the action and its spatiotemporal location. As Samuel Johnson, much later, was to remark in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765), drama should dispense with narrative, as it is tedious and impedes the progress of the action. Overall, it has rarely been emphasized that narratives not only "do things with words" within drama, but also dilate its visible space toward the invisible offstage—a locus that is an essential ingredient for the action taking place in full view. This is the starting point of Jonathan Walker's excellent book on the oft-obscured role of the offstage in early modern drama, when the stage came to be expanded beyond the boundaries of the visible thanks to complex forms of storytelling.
Book-length studies on narrative in drama began to appear in the late 1980s, including works by Barbara Hardy, Rawdon Wilson, and, more recently, William Gruber and Lorna Hutson, alongside groundbreaking research on the "unscene" and storytelling (such as Marjorie Garber's 1984 study of ineffability in Shakespeare). Walker brings some of these discussions one step further, suggesting from an interdisciplinary perspective three distinct, yet connected interpretations of the "offstage": anything related to the fictional world of drama, but that occurs behind and beyond the visible stage; the physical...