In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

What Happens in Hamlet? Exploring the Psychological Foundations of Drama Daniel Nettle Introduction Performing the imaginary is big business. According to the British government’s Social Trends survey, 23 percent of Britons over fifteen went to a play in 1999. No data are given on how often they went, but even assuming that the average was only twice, that would be 22 million visits, not counting children’s theater. The cinema was even more popular, with 56 percent of adults visiting, and a total of 128 million visits. And this misses out the most significant source of drama in contemporary Britain. The average person watches 25.5 hours of television per week. A brief calculation using the television listings guide suggests that between 24 and 30 percent of the output time of the main channels is devoted to drama, depending on the day of the week. This amounts to an estimated 7 hours of drama per week from television for the average person, giving a yearly total of 364 hours. Adding theater, film, and television sources together, we can estimate that in 1999 the average Briton spent 369 hours immersed in some kind of dramatic performance. This is roughly 6 percent of all waking life. The compelling popularity and widespread consumption of drama raises important questions. First, one might ask why so many people should be spending time engrossed in worlds of fiction performed in this way. This question is all the more compelling when raised from an evolutionary perspective. Hard-nosed Darwinism seems to suggest people should be ceaselessly preoccupied with the perpetuation of their genes. So is drama helping them to do this? Or is it like a virus, which creeps under their defenses and colonizes their attention? Second, it is clear that some dramas are more enduringly popular than others. Some plays have held the stage for many generations; some films are endlessly revived, while many others are instantly forgotten. So what features do dramas have that are found compelling and ensure their survival and reenactment? Are there features that make some stories adept at survival in the pool of stories? 56 It may be necessary to broach the first and second sets of questions together. After all, it is not nonveridical representations in general that humans appear predisposed to attend to but very specific classes of such representations which may, of course, vary across time and place but could turn out to have universal elements . We cannot, therefore, consider why drama in general captivates the human mind except by looking at particular successful examples of the genre. On the other hand, to understand why some particular stories have captivated humankind more than others, we will also need to consider the origins and functioning of drama in general. The two questions are two parts of the same problem . In this essay, then, I will discuss evolutionary foundations of the success of drama. By “drama,” I will mean “the performance of fictional narratives in which actors personate individual protagonists from a first-person perspective.” This covers all media—film, television, stage—and all genres—comedy, satire, action, and so on. Crucially, all dramas include some notion of mimesis—that is, imitation —however stylized, of human social behavior. In sections two of this essay, I will consider what an evolutionary theory of the foundations of drama might look like. Known facts about the evolved mind lead to a certain number of general predictions about the dramatic form. Next, I set the evolutionary account against some more traditional notions about how drama works, finding considerable common ground between these two, independently derived bodies of knowledge. Following this discussion, I outline a typology of dramatic genres that draws both on literary analysis and evolutionary considerations. The dramatic mode actually shows remarkable continuity over more than 2000 years, and thus generalizations over its whole history appear possible . I do not here consider whether the same typology would be useful in dealing with non-Western dramatic traditions, though the logic of my claims is that it would. I conclude by stressing the potential consilience of traditional literary and cultural concerns and evolutionary psychology. Before launching into the account, though, I must set the theoretical context for the discussion by considering the relationship of Darwinian evolution to culture. Theoretical Background HAMLET: The purpose of playing . . . both at the first and now, was and is as ‘twere to hold the mirror up to nature. William Shakespeare, Hamlet CLOV: There’s no more nature. HAMM...

Share