Criticism: Making the Plays One’s Own

In much the same way as any natural phenomenon, a theatrical performance can appeal to the senses without being consciously understood.1 Even a play’s most literary qualities — its narrative, structure, language, imagery, its imitation of ordinary speech, and subtextual suggestions — co-exist in an audience’s mind with a sensory experience. Words that are spoken do not function alone but always together with the individual and unique presence of the actors who speak them. All that happens in performance, visible to everyone in the theatre, will supplement and modify whatever a dramatist sets down on paper. Shakespeare was so aware of the physical, temporal, and actor-centred nature of performance that a play may be said to have danced in his mind as he wrote and imagined its more than ordinary existence on a stage. This book has tried to study that dazzling phenomenon and used various ways of grasping this complex and essentially theatrical art. The next step is to assess the consequences of this form of study.