Reply to Catherine Belsey and Jonathan Goldberg

Abstract

ATHERINE BELSEY'S RESPONSE is limited to Discovery No. 2, with which I had not associated her, and it turns out that our views on the subject are not so far apart. Most of her argument in fact is concerned with qualifying my case against this discovery rather than trying to refute it. She points out that some plays in this period are not illusionist, which is certainly true, although she could have chosen better example, such as Dekker's The Whore of Babylon or Middleton's A Game at Chess, which, unlike England's Joy, really was in the professional repertoire.' She also points out that some illusionist plays of the period contain nonillusionist moments, which is also certainly true; indeed such moments (not as many, no doubt) can be found in the later drama of what she calls nineteenthcentury illusionism. But I was not arguing that every Renaissance play was illusionist at every moment. I was trying to refute the claim of the critics that these plays--mainly because of the antimimetic or effect of the theatrical conventions--could not be illusionist or empathetic (note their use of terms like always, endemic, never, and unable), and to disprove universal negative it is not necessary to prove universal positive. She acknowledges that the evidence I presented proved a play might so simulate reality that the audience were moved to intense emotion, so on this crucial point she is on my side against these critics. Of course I argued that my evidence proved not only that illusionist/empathetic drama was possible in this period, but that it was the dominant mode. And on this further point I think Belsey misses the full significance of the quoted passages. She limits their significance to the fact that they not mention the claimed distancing effect, which I admit would be rather weak evidence. But they do much more than that; they directly contradict this claim by showing that audiences were not distanced from the action but were emo-