Audience/auditors from the Latin audiens (hearing).
Look up Robert Cecil's Hatfield House. This house is, of course, not the theater, but it does provide the modern spectator with an idea of the visual culture influencing the Early Modern theater.
Note the furnishings and portraits.
There is an Elizabethan aesthetic. Part of the dramatic culture or not, we cannot know, but it is rather more difficult to escape one's metacultural dictums.
**afterpieces. Investigate: the dance of death**
Thomas Haywood: theater as "true portrature" becoming "so bewitching a thing . . . that it hath the power to new mold the hearts of spectators" (Apology B4r).
To paraphrase from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Elizabethan theater offered many sights that were to be seen, not spoken (5.2.42-43).
The significance in that modern criticism on the Elizabethan theatre has rested on two central premises:
- The stage was bare
- language was primary
In this way, I would like to establish a critical understanding of how the Elizabethan theater functioned as an aspect of London's visual culture. This, of course, relies on theater's root as "a place for seeing."
To provide some strength to this argument, quite a number of EM tests refer to going to see plays. According to research done by Gabriel Egan, EM texts contained significantly more reference to seeing plays, as opposed to hearing them. Of course, the strength this offers—and there is more, much more in this vein—is negligible, that is just what ones says in reference to plays. Perhaps, but I think of the play as a visual art and the dramatic text as literature. Has that changed?
It is from this period that the term spectator came into wider use. (From the Latin specere, to see, spectare, to watch, and spectaculum, a play.
Tassi notes that the "coexistence of neutral, positive, and pejorative uses of the term spectator indicates that there were conflicting early modern attitudes towards the act of seeing in the theater" (The Scandal of Images 17).
The theory of extramission: espoused by Plato and Euclid, assumed that the gaze acted upon the world, affecting objects.
The theory of intromission: espoused by medieval theorists, assumed that objects struck a mostly passive eye.
To the Elizabethans, vision gave the objects of the world access to the mind. A polluted or corrupt object could be said to infect the eye (read: soul). Sight was potentially dangerous, erotic, and spiritually deviant, as in the medieval phrase libido videndi and the Protestant emphasis on the "idolatrous eye" emphasize.
