Ambiguity and Audience Response

Abstract

Ambiguity and Audience Response FELIX BUDELMANN, LAURIE MAGUIRE, AND BEN TEASDALE In Milton’s Paradise Lost, ambiguity is the tool of the devil. Satan’s “ambiguous words” are “replete with guile,” functioning as a linguistic Venus (or Eve) fly-catcher (v.703 and VI.568; ix, 737).1 By contrast, in 20th-century poetry and criticism, ambiguity becomes the highest good, the mark of the great creator. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was the work that established polysemy as the semantic shibboleth that distinguishes great poets and great poetry from lesser poets and their poetry. Consequently, Empson’s interest is in the poet: even as he analyses how poetic language, “ambiguous and with double sense deluding” (Paradise Regained i.435), affects the reader, his focus is on creation rather than reception. His seven types of ambiguity are seven kinds of things that authors and texts do. But the text is not the only place where ambiguity resides. In much thinking about literature in the latter parts of the twentieth century, ambiguity inserts itself in the reading process. For Wolfgang Iser, the doyen of reader response, “the blank in the fictional text induces and guides the reader’s constitutive activity.”2 Reading—all reading, and especially reading of literary texts—is an exercise in ambiguity. This fundamental interpretative stance is mirrored in much thinking about theater, a genre in which the receiver is visibly present. This is how actor Richard McCabe, playing Iago, describes the final moment of Michael Attenborough’s production of Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999: Our production ended in a tableau, with the three dead bodies in the foreground and myself at the rear of the stage, heavily guarded arion 23.3 winter 2016 and with my back to the audience. As the lights went down, I would turn slowly and regard the bodies in profile, with a deliberately neutral expression in my face. This, as I discovered through the run, was regarded variously as being sorrowful, triumphant, bewildered or empty—which shows how an audience will supply any ambiguity with an interpretation.3 Greg Doran aimed for a similar effect at the end of his production of Othello for the RSC in 2004, as Antony Sher [Iago] explains: Iago was left in a sitting position after Othello wounded him; handcuffed , head bowed. Then … just before a snap black out, we had Iago suddenly look up, confronting the audience with his eyes. Greg wanted the moment to be a strange, final aside, enigmatic, open to your own interpretation. [our italics]4 The effects of ambiguity on audiences prove a fascination for theater practitioners. In this essay, we want to develop the shift in focus from Empson’s poetry on the page to McCabe’s / Doran’s audience response to drama by experimentally assessing and analyzing the reactions of a live audience. We had run an experiment on a live audience with live theater once before when, for an article on character, we commissioned stagings of Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s King Lear.5 For our second experiment , on ambiguity, we used film extracts from two ancient Greek and two Shakespeare plays—Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Ajax, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter’s Tale—to test how audiences process ambiguity in the theater. An audience of 72 participants watched four film extracts, each of which was approximately five minutes in duration; the auditorium was purpose-built for film projection and the viewing experience was commensurate with that of a movie theater. After each extract, the audience members filled in a questionnaire. This article reports and analyzes what we found. Before setting out what we did, it is as well to make clear what we (deliberately) didn’t do. This is not an essay about textual ambiguity and audience response 90 ambiguity. We do not emulate Empson, either by theorizing textual ambiguity in general or by analyzing individual texts. Even less do we try to use audience responses to arrive at objective truths about the texts. The texts are not our chief interest here. Nor, secondly, is this an essay about the locus—or rather loci—of ambiguity in drama. We do not...