Abstract
Theatre as a medium is a specially suitable channel for conveying an impression of truth. In many ways, therefore, writing for the theatre helped Shakespeare to authenticate his historical fictions. In performance, historical plays provide a peculiar historical experience, entirely different from the one provided by the reading of history books, since in the theatrical situation éleos and phòbos, pity and fear, are things that happen in the here and now, and are simultaneously and collectively experienced. The theatrical medium, then, while imposing restrictions, allows opportunities that are unknown to the narrational medium: while a narrator will have to state and argue the truth of the facts reported, a dramatist can rely on the reality effect of the performance to induce belief in the truth of what is represented.1
… in open presence
Thomas Nashe
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Notes
T. Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. R. H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941), B3, B4. Heywood’s Apology was published posthumously in 1612.
W. N. Dodd discusses a strategy of attention control that he terms ‘alignment’, by which the spectators are placed in a reception position which aligns them with one of the characters and makes them apprehend things with or alongside him or her. ‘Positioning’ and ‘packaging’ are, according to Dodd, strategies of attention control underlining a cause—effect relationship between two different events or emotions by exploiting the scene as a cognitive unit. ‘Shakespeare’s Control of Audience Reaction’, in K. Elam (ed.), Shakespeare Today: Directions and Methods of Research (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1984), pp. 134–49.
But see the opinion of A. Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
I use ‘popular’ in the sense defined by M. Hattaway, namely as a function of the plays’ ‘appeal to the whole spectrum of Elizabethan society’, in The Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 1.
S. Gosson, The School of Abuse, in A. F. Kinney (ed.), Markets of Bawdry. The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), p. 97. In his defence of plays, Nashe affirmed, against this argument, that spending the afternoon in a public playhouse keeps people from sloth and crime (op. cit., pp. 211–12). The preoccupations of the authorities as concerns collective attendance may be explained by Kastan’s remark that ‘in the theatre images of authority become subject to the approval of an audience’ (’Proud Majesty …’, 466–7).
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© 1996 Paola Pugliatti
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Pugliatti, P. (1996). The Contribution of the Theatrical Medium. In: Shakespeare the Historian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373747_5
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