Ontologies of Play: Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama

Abstract

Ontologies of Play:Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama Clare Wright In his contribution to Shakespeare's Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, Mark Rylance describes how the reconstructed Globe has affected modern performance practice. Shakespeare's plays, he suggests, only really come to life in the Globe when "there is a sense of dialogue with the audience," when actors "speak and move with [them] in the present" (106–7). As a director, therefore, it became paramount to say to the actors, "Don't speak to [the audience], don't speak for them, speak with them, play with them" … it was not just about speaking, it was about thinking of the audience as other actors, and not only when you were projecting onto them the role of the helpful crowd […] it was more about the fact that anything they did was like another player on the stage doing something. (Rylance 106–7) These comments are obviously valuable as evidence of a distinctive "Globe performativity" (Worthen 84), but they also, and perhaps more significantly, call into question a central critical paradigm: specifically, the ontological relationship between audience and play. This relationship is often figured in terms of the distinction between a "play world" and the "real world," implying that dramatic characters and events occupy a time and space (a reality) ontologically separate from that of the audience. Rylance's comments about the actor-audience relationship at Shakespeare's Globe, however, seem to contradict this paradigm, which underpins much of our thinking about early English dramatic form, technique, and effect. In this article, I want to explore further the potential disjunction between modern and early concepts of dramatic ontology and to test current [End Page 187] paradigms against the evidence from early English playtexts and records. In doing so, I will suggest that the continued use of the play-world-real-world paradigm in early drama studies is indicative of an enduring, if unconscious, conceptual bias towards post-nineteenth-century spatial and dramaturgical aesthetics and illustrate the incompatibility of this model with the extant evidence of early dramatic practice. Because early modern playwrights and players were building on an earlier performance tradition, I will, however, venture back into the dramatic heritage of early modern playhouses to explore late-medieval drama and its contexts. If the later commercial theaters were adapting earlier dramaturgical strategies, then it is also likely that they and their audiences similarly assumed earlier ideas about the relationship between audience and play. For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on vernacular biblical plays, in part because of their frequent use as starting points for critics drawing connections between medieval and early modern dramatic praxis, but also because this is where the current paradigm most obviously breaks down, calling into question its use in other early dramatic modes. Modern Theatrical Paradigms In her landmark book Space in Performance, Gay McAuley proposes that the "space the spectator is watching during performance … is always both stage and somewhere else" to the extent that the stage fictionalizes "whatever is presented on it" (27–28). McAuley is here describing the supposed ontology of play in a "conventional" theater space; that is, a purpose-built, indoor theater with a clearly-defined stage, the majority of which projects back from the audience, perhaps behind a proscenium arch. Even though the "spectators are aware of their own reality" in such a space, McAuley writes, "they dismiss or relegate to a lower level of awareness of this knowledge in order to enter fully into the emotions of the fiction" (253). The architecture of many modern theaters, then, frames the action taking place on the stage as distinctly separate from that in the auditorium, its location and time, a conceptual relationship that seems to spill out into other modern spatial configurations, so that even when audiences are positioned spatially proximate to performers, for example, there is still a perceived separateness, an "audience/actor (us/them) relationship" (Machon 26).1 In recent years, this relationship has been questioned, challenged, and politicized by both critics and practitioners.2 My concern here, however, is not to engage with these debates, but to highlight the model's influence [End...