Content Warnings and Stage Directions

I recently saw a couple of writers discussing how to handle content warnings in their work. They both agreed that forewarning readers of sensitive themes was a good idea but had different thoughts about how this could best be achieved in practice.

One writer was arguing that the convention of listing content warnings at the start of a text was too blunt and decontextualised, worse that it could spoil the reading experience if the mere mention of a particular theme was a spoiler. The other argued that this bluntness is exactly the point and that if warnings are too subtly laced throughout the body of a text it might a) take an affected person longer to find them and b) be easier for them to miss.

I’m not an expert on this issue but what I do know a lot about is another debate that centres around the issue of whether information should be made implicit or explicit in a literary text: this is the role of stage direction in theatre.

After the printing press made the mass production of play texts possible and theatre arrived at the golden age of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, selling scripts became another way to make money from a piece of drama. A sizeable quantity of printed plays survive, giving an insight into the use of stage directions in the period.

The function of a stage direction is to help an actor know what they are supposed to be doing, and there are different schools of thought about how much guidance they need. As a writer you could decide to signal only the most important details, the entrances and exits, or actions that must happen at a specific moment in the scene, for example:

Flomber eats the cake

You could give a bit more detail about the way in which these actions should be performed by adding adverbs and the like:

Flomber eats the cake trustingly

Or you could explain two things that need to happen simultaneously:

Flomber eats the cake trustingly as Count Repulsulent twirls his moustache and cackles to himself.

If you want a character to say something to the audience that the other characters can’t hear, you could write ‘aside’:

Count Repulsulent

(Aside) Little does he know, I’ve laced his cake with Diarrhoea Beans

And you could even get technical and tell your actor where they ought to stand:

Flomber

(staggering upstage)

A loo! A loo! My kingdom for a loo!

Early modern playwrights are pretty sparing with their stage directions on the whole. They tend to avoid pointing out something that an actor needs to do, instead making these actions obvious from the dialogue itself. This is called an ‘implied stage direction'.’

For example, instead of writing out in full:

[PONTEFLAX places the crown on HINGLEWRANGLE’s head]

You could imply that Ponteflax is doing this through what he says:

Ponteflax

But lo! Thy brow is bare of ornament

Like hamster sitting lonely and unwheeled

Behold! I place the golden discus thus

May royal thoughts run rings within its round.[1]

Implied stage directions suit the wordy style of drama which was popular in early modern England, where language was already doing the heavy lifting of creating the scene. The larger public theatres, like The Globe, were lit by the sun and used minimal staging and props which is why characters are constantly explaining their surroundings with words to the effect of ‘goodness, what a mighty army I can see before me here in France…’ or ‘wow what a dark gloomy night on a castle wall this is.’

Implied directions also make life easier for the printers who have a bit less tricky formatting to do. Remember that, in the days of the printing press, each alphabet was a physical sets of metal letters stored in its own special tray in the printing workshop. You had to physically go and get another set if you wanted to change the size, or the style of font or switch to italic. Look at this bit of Shakespeare’s First Folio for example, showing the opening of Othello:

We get information about who enters the stage, and nothing more. The characters immediately start speaking.

Conversely, if you crack open a twentieth century play you’re far more likely to get something from the opposite end of the spectrum. Try the following stage direction from the beginning of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953):

That’s not the half of it, Miller sometimes interrupts a scene to give pages of character notes to the reader — and he is thinking of the reader here, expecting that we will want to sit and ruminate on all these nuances of subtext that he drags back into text. How much of this information is preserved in the actual performance when the audience doesn’t have the printed book in hand is moot.

Differences in stage directions thus reveal completely different philosophies about who and what theatre is for as well as the priorities of a particular playwright. They speak to the practical constraints and possibilities of a theatrical style which can be affected by something as simple as the design of a theatre or whether or not soliloquies are in vogue.

I generally prefer the early modern model. As a playwright myself I’ve enjoyed giving my actors and directors the freedom to explore their own interpretations of my text. Overly prescriptive instructions about movement, tone, and subtext take some of the agency of the other creatives away.

Because content/trigger warnings have a very different purpose, the argument that they should be exhaustive, clear and separated from the central text is much more persuasive. When you’re protecting a vulnerable person from having a panic attack, the stakes are higher than whether or not a chair is in the right place on stage or the actor playing the clergyman raises an eyebrow at just the right moment (sorry, Miller).

Some people still hate all content warnings on principle, but an argument in their favour which has nothing to do with ethical responsibility is that any paratextual material that frames a piece of storytelling is absolutely vital for literary historians as they attempt to parse a bygone culture, its fixations and concerns. It will be fascinating for scholars in the future to read our content warnings, just as it would be incredible to know in black and white what caused Shakespeare’s audiences the most trepidation:

‘Content warning for: witchcraft, husband-murder, reference to the pox, shipwrecks and Catholicism.’

Also, from an even more selfish perspective, content warnings can be absolutely brilliant for marketing. When I went to see Lucy Bailey’s production of Macbeth at the Globe, there were signs outside warning people heading to the theatre that those ‘of a nervous disposition’ might be troubled by the violent nature of the content — to the obvious delight of the schoolchildren queuing up outside. This a trick straight out of horror movie marketing, and also reminds me of the scene in Father Ted when the priests protesting the ‘very immoral’ film end up filling the cinema just by warning people about all the lurid details of the plot.

So there you go, two discussions of how to communicate the information that frames a fictional text, one very modern and one as old as the stage itself. Did I frame this as an article about content warnings just to trick you into reading about the history of stage directions?

(A guilty pause)

[Exit REBEKAH hurriedly, stage right]

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[1] All quotes in this article thus far are from the work of a lesser playwright whose name has rightly been forgotten.