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May. 15th, 2007 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kagekachouAlyssa Howard
ENGL 406
16 May 2007
Who Will Watch the Watchers: Audiences within Shakespearean Comedy
Comedy can put its audience in a uniquely uncomfortable spot. The viewer is asked to enjoy and laugh at what is being presented to them, which seems natural and simple enough. More often than not, however, that from which the audience is asked to derive pleasure is the confusion, humiliation or pain of others: Antipholus of Ephesus being locked out of his own home, Helena’s disbelief at suddenly finding herself loved, Malvolio being tricked into behaving in a way that leads Olivia to believe him to be mad, Touchstone running intellectual circles around the hapless Audrey. Partly helping and partly complicating this dilemma, Shakespeare often includes audiences within these plays, performing the act of watching. These performed audiences vary widely – the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is very literal and given to making snide comments, while Rosalyn provides a very transgressive audience as she interrupts the pastoral "play" of Phebe and Sylvius in order to change the course of the show, and the "accidental" audiences in Much Ado About Nothing are the victims of manipulation. Also, these audiences have an impact even when they, like the real audience to the characters of the play, are not seen by those whom they are watching; the frame that they provide can change the way that the real audience perceives what is happening onstage.
This issue of watching is explored in a variety of permutations, with the balance of power shifting between the staged “audiences” and “actors.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing all contain examples that privilege each. A critical comparison of these examples might make it possible to see if they provide the actual audience any guidance or critique regarding how to watch. Given how the art of watching comedy grows complicated when considering the issues of empathy, comedic cruelty, what is serious and what is funny, and what is staged and what is true, it seems natural to take advantage of the many opportunities Shakespeare provides to watch the watchers.
There are three parties involved in the watched situation: the audience watching the play, the internal watchers within the world of the play and those being watched within the world of the play. For the purpose of clarity, the terms “Real Audience,” “audience” and “performers” are going to be used, respectively. While the situation is not always that of a literal play-within-a-play (though Shakespeare certainly utilizes this device in works ranging from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet), I believe that the self-reflexivity implied in those terms will be useful in describing the instances of watching found within the plays. In fact, this terminology could be most useful in analyzing the scenes that do not feature traditional performances by highlighting how they differ from what is commonly accepted as a proper performance, defining what constitutes a legitimate performance in the process.
Starting on the outside, we have the least intrusive, most literal of the watchers: those who stand by and say nothing, not speaking to or physically acting upon the performers. Using the standards of the Real Audience, the most conventional example of this silent audience would be the wrestling match near the beginning of As You Like It – characters stage a performance in front of other people, who watch it without saying anything of consequence. Rosalind and Celia are not completely silent, for instance, but their respective lines of “O excellent young man!” (I.2.207) and “If I had a thunderbolt in mine eyes, I can tell who should down” (I.2.208-209) are not outside the bounds of the bursts of enthusiasm that one might expect those watching a spectator sport; certainly, that small exchange does not seem to engage the wrestlers in any way, especially considering the fact that two young ladies of the court would most likely not be shouting into a wrestling pit. The lives of the performers and their audiences are comfortably separate here, only meeting once before the performance begins and once after it is finished (though for the main couple of a romantic comedy, the second meeting of Orlando and Rosalind has a funnily “stage door” quality to it – giggling girls egging each other on to speak to the handsome performer they watched earlier). This takes place within the world of the court, overseen by the controlling figure of Duke Frederick, whose paranoia can be easily translated into a theme of watching. In the 2005 WilliamsTheatre production of As You Like It directed by Robert Baker-White, for instance, Duke Frederick always appeared in upper level windows so that he could watch over all of the other characters in the court, a rigidly structured space designed by Andrew Lieberman. The wrestling scene, then, is blatantly about watching in traditional ways. At this point, there is nothing particularly jarring about the situation. The Real Audience is both analogous to and allied with the audience of the play.
The silent audience is seen in other places, both in As You Like It and in other plays, but the balances of power, awareness and sympathy shift in interesting ways. In many cases, the performers are not aware that they are being watched. By virtue of the dual nature of theatre, this again allies the Real Audience with the internal audience: though the Real Performers are aware of the Real Audience, the characters that are being portrayed are unaware that they are fictional characters in a play. The exact nature of this voyeuristic quality is rather dependent on directorial choices, but what is made apparent by these scenes is that the experience of the Real Audience watching the play is changed by the presence of the onstage audience. While these silent watchers can be easily forgotten when reading the text, they are not so easily ignored when they are visible physical bodies on the stage.
This is used in As You Like It, where Rosalind’s interactions with Orlando are often watched by Celia, to highlight the performative nature of many of the scenes, which, in their length and with their convoluted issues of identity, can easily be forgotten. Unlike in Duke Frederick’s court, in the Forest of Arden, Rosalind is a performer, playing the role of Ganymede. When Rosalind first meets Orlando while in her disguise of Ganymede, she completely leaves Celia behind, not acknowledging her presence until the end of the scene when, presumably, all of the actors needed to be gotten offstage. The scene that Rosalind creates is not short, either; she engages in the fecund verbal grandstanding often seen in Shakespeare’s intellectual fools (such as As You Like It’s own Touchstone), drawing Orlando in as her scene partner. Though the talk quickly turns from the subject of time to the subject of love and, though Orlando is at a definite verbal disadvantage, the conversation is lively here – so much more lively than the dialogue shared by Rosalind and Orlando before and after the wrestling scene, where their truer expressions of feelings were spoken but not to each other – Rosalind is not talking to Orlando as herself, the one he loves and who loves him, but as a random resident of the Forest of Arden, a role that she has taken on as a performer. One imagines that it is quite easy for Rosalind to be drawn into her performance. Indeed, while there might be choices made by the director or performer to play up some fumbling on Rosalind’s part, her verbal agility suggests that she gets into her performance quite a bit, crossing the line from actor to character a good distance, if not all the way. The fact that, as previously mentioned, Rosalind seems to forget that Celia is even present until the end of the scene supports Rosalind having been drawn into not just the position of performer but the character being performed – losing balance in that thankless actorly struggle to be immersed in character and in the moment while not forgetting technical issues such as following pre-determined blocking, not falling off the edge of the stage, etc.. The watching presence of Celia, however, provides a way of controlling how the Real Audience is drawn into the moment of bantering between comedic lovers. The possibilities here are many. Celia might be kept mostly out of sight, so that her reappearance at the end is a rude awakening, putting side by side Rosalind telling Orlando “you must call me Rosalind” (III.2.442-443) – something that is easy to accept as true, for the Real Audience knows that Ganymede is, indeed, Rosalind – and Rosalind calling Celia her sister, which the Real Audience knows is part of the role of Ganymede and not true. Alternatively, Celia might be clearly seen watching the entire time, her position as audience bringing her into alliance with the Real Audience, which would allow her visible reactions to Rosalind’s antics to influence the Real Audience’s opinion of the scene it is watching.
In subsequent scenes, Rosalind not only plays the role of Ganymede, but takes on the role of Rosalind. Orlando, meanwhile, plays the role of Orlando. This casting, so unconventionally straightforward that it is perversely twisted, allows for the romantic scenes between Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind and Orlando-as-Orlando to be reduced to simply being romantic scenes between Rosalind and Orlando. The presence of an audience watching their performances, however, provides resistance to this less complicated viewing and encourages the questioning of how true these interactions are and, if they are more true than the interactions between Rosalind and Orlando’s “real” selves, why that is so and what that implies. This task again falls to Celia, who is again left onstage while Rosalind engages in her verbal antics. In Act IV, scene 1, Rosalind chastises Orlando for being late and lectures him on how a tardy man will end up a cuckolded man, reminding Orlando, when he protests, that “I am your Rosalind” (IV.1.69) – only to be reminded by Celia that “It pleases him to call you so, but he hath a Rosalind of a better leer than you” (IV.1.70-71). Celia then disappears from the text as Rosalind expounds on the nature of love, only to be requested to join the scene when Rosalind wishes to stage a wedding, a third person being needed to marry the couple. Celia protests being drawn into the performance, stating that “I cannot say the words” (IV.1.133). She yields slightly when Rosalind literally feeds her the line that she wishes her to say, Rosalind implying that Celia cannot speak the words because she does not know them; Celia rises to the bait, then disappears from the text again until Orlando leaves. Here, even more strongly than the previous scene discussed, Celia provides resistance against accepting what is being presented as a simple love scene. Not only is she an audience for Rosalind and Orlando’s performances, but she refuses to abandon the role of audience for that of a performer, maintaining the presence an audience-performer relationship in the scene and not allowing the layered identities to collapse in on themselves. Rosalind, on the other hand, seems to have lost herself in her role. After Orlando leaves, Celia criticizes Rosalind for what she has said about women to Orlando, while Rosalind only responds with swooning declarations of how deeply she is in love, even referring to Celia as “Aliena,” the pseudonym that Celia had assumed for the Forest of Arden but on which she does not seem anywhere near as reliant as Rosalind is upon the persona of Ganymede. To Rosalind’s declaration, at the end of a description of how only Cupid can judge the depth of her love, that she will “go find a shadow and sigh till he come”(IV.1.229-230), Celia responds with a comically blunt “And I’ll sleep” (IV.1.231). One should note that by this point in the play, the Real Audience has been watching absolutely nothing happen for quite a while. In the first act, Orlando and Oliver fought, Orlando wrestled Charles, Oliver plotted to have Orlando killed and Duke Frederick banished Rosalind; after that, characters wandered around Arden and talked (and talked about watching people and watched people talking). Shortly after Celia passes this judgment of disinterest, however, Oliver arrives in Arden, setting into motion the series of events that brings the play to its conclusion.
While the relationship between Celia and the Real Audience appears to be one of alliance, it is not necessarily a desired alliance. In her scenes of watching, Celia is outnumbered and marginalized. She serves as a reminder of the true nature of the scenes being prevented, but that reminder might or might not be a welcome one. After all, the performative nature of the interactions that Celia witnesses complicate Rosalind and Orlando’s relationship in ways that are not necessarily comfortable, and if discomfort is engendered by this awareness, there is nothing that Celia does or can do to alleviate this. The level of awareness can range from low to high, but the level of power held by this audience is definitely low; the sympathy and the power lie with Rosalind, the performer. In contrast, the silent audience present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the possessor of power and complete, explicit awareness, while the flat nature of the performers limits sympathy. Due to the interference of Oberon and Robin Goodfellow (more commonly referred to as Puck), Demetrius and Lysander, who had both been in love with Hermia, are now in love with Helena. Helena believes herself to be the subject of cruel mockery, the men’s professions of love eliciting her famous “O spite! O hell!” (III.2.148) monologue, where she berates the two for driving her to tears. Hermia, in the meanwhile, had been abandoned in the woods by Lysander, who had left her find Helena; now, she finds the man she loves, only to have him declare that he loves Helena. This, in turn, causes the hysterical Helena to accuse Hermia of plotting against her with the men, driving a wedge between the two women. It would be difficult to find another scene where more insults are hurled, the verbal abuse only ending when the men exit in order to prepare to fight each other for Helena’s love. The scene is extremely emotionally and verbally violent and prepares itself to segue into actual physical violence. It is also extremely funny – and it is not limited to the four quarrelling lovers, as Oberon and Puck are onstage the entire time, though they do not talk to the four humans. What allows this scene to be comic is the assurance that, despite the hurt and anger and confusion being sincerely felt by the characters, there will not be unfortunate consequences. The Real Audience is aware of the cause of the confusion, and the internal audience becomes aware of the problem by watching the scene. Having been the cause of the current conflict, with their interference with the love potion, the members of the internal audience also have the power to bring about a peaceful resolution. (Of course, the ease with which Oberon and Puck can resolve the situation to their own likings might not sit well with certain members of the Real Audience, but it is unquestionable that the fairies can at least bring order to the current violence, if not complete satisfaction.) This audience is one with which the Real Audience can enjoy a more fruitful alliance – both audience and Real Audience can know that what they are watching is not real and that worry over consequences is unnecessary. The lovers might be in pain at the moment, but it will not last and, knowing that everything is well under control, we can laugh at their confusion from our position of power.
While these silent audiences allied the Real Audience with the internal audience, such is not always the case. Sometimes the internal audience, which in previous examples had been in possession of more awareness and power than the performers (and sometimes more than even the Real Audience), is the object of comedy. The last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a bungled performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, but the comedy comes not only from the acting troupe’s incompetence but from the failure of the relationship between the performers and their audience. Snug, for example, completely misunderstands the relationship that the audience has to the performers when he assures them “that I, as Snug the joiner, am/ A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam” (V.1.238-239), not allowing the audience to have any willing suspension of disbelief. Theseus’ speech at the beginning of the act, however, where he states that
I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact. (V.1.2-8)
After this critique of fantasy, regarding a story that is actually true in the world of the play, it is difficult to believe that Theseus, the king of Athens and, thus, leader of the group that compromises the internal audience, would be a very appreciative audience member even if the performers were more competent. The performers are hilariously bad, though, and the Real Audience can join the audience in Athens in laughing at them – though the Real Audience can also feel superior to the court audience of Athens, which is aware of the limitations of the hapless performers but unaware of its own limitations, with how its members had been the unintentional performers for a more powerful fairy audience. Nothing being at stake here, sympathy is not an issue. The Real Audience is given the pleasure of laughing at the foibles of both the performers and the audience, both the low and the high.
The usually-powerful audience becomes a target of laughter again in Much Ado About Nothing. Here, though, the lack of awareness is completely on the part of the audience: the audiences knows that it is audience and the performers know that they are performers, but while the performers are aware of the identity of their audience, the audience is ignorant of both the performers’ self-awareness and the performers’ awareness of their audience. It is, in a way, the opposite situation of Midsummer’s Pyramus and Thisbe: while Midsummer’s acting troupe comically made sure that their audience never forgot that they were only performers, Beatrice and Benedick are completely unaware that what they are seeing is a performance – they are the audience that is unable to distinguish performance from reality. It is this unawareness, in characters who so highly prize their intelligence and wits, that is so funny. And not only are Beatrice and Benedick unaware – they believe that they hold the power as eavesdropping audience members, when it is, in fact, those whom they believe they are outsmarting who possess the power of “love gods” (II.2.377). In Benedick’s case, the character positioning himself as audience in the first place is humorous: musing upon love, he hears the Prince and Claudio approaching and exclaims “Ha! The Prince and Monsieur Love! I will hide me in the arbor” (II.3.35-36), something that few would consider to be a natural, logical reaction. Kenneth Branagh’s movie adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing took the opportunity to play up the humor of the act of being a hidden audience, with exaggerated movements and facial expressions in the eavesdropping sequence that highlight the lightness of the situation. On the subject of lightness, in another similarity to the humor of Midsummer, there are no horrible consequences that could result from this failure of the Beatrice and Benedick in their roles as audience members. It is a common interpretation that Beatrice and Benedick are in love with each other before they have their “epiphanies” while eavesdropping, making the trick into something that only allows them to acknowledge what is already true. Even if they did not necessarily entertain romantic feelings toward each other before the eavesdropping scenes, one can imagine worse scenarios than two clever, headstrong characters falling in love with each other. From this failure of Beatrice and Benedick as audience members, the Real Audience gains the pleasure of laughing at their lack of awareness while knowing that the power-holding performers bear no ill-will toward their audience and that the only consequence of this misunderstanding seems to be love, which is generally encouraged quite strongly in the comedies.
It would seem from these examples that the failure of the audience is a reliable source of humor, perhaps partly due to how it enables the Real Audience to laugh at an audience less successful than itself. Within Much Ado About Nothing itself – the very play whose comic set pieces are failed audiences – however, the failed audience nearly becomes a source of tragedy, definitely creating dramatic tension rather than generating laughs. Much Ado verges on tragedy, with Claudio’s cruel denunciation of Hero, because of Claudio and the Prince’s failure as and audience. It is, in fact, the same failure seen earlier in the play: the audience in unaware that what they are witnessing is only a performance. What differs here is the gravity of the consequences and the location of the power. The consequence of this misunderstanding is the breaking off of a wedding, what is the traditional romantic comedy’s equivalent to a happy ending. Again, the audience mistakenly believes that it has the power. This time, though, most of the power is held by a strange figure: Don John, an unwatched performer. All of his conversation with Claudio and the Prince is a performance to him; the attentions of Claudio and the Prince, however, are focused on the performance of Hero’s infidelity. In this way, Claudio and the Prince’s failure as audience could be viewed as even more severe than just not recognizing what they are watching as a performance – they do not even know what it is they should be watching. With this massive failure and the bulk of the power in the hands of a malicious individual who is neither watcher nor watched, what was once a formula for humor has become the set-up for tragedy.
This tragedy continues after the Claudio-Hero wedding disaster. The Friar suggests a performance to rectify the situation, where Hero and her family pretend that she has died in order to elicit grief from Claudio. As with the preceding situations, Claudio and the Prince are unaware that what they are watching is a performance. Here, Claudio and the Prince again lack awareness, but because of the situation, they hold the power. Thus, when they react incorrectly, there is nothing that can be done to stop them. In a twisted version of the last act of Midsummer, a tragic story is performed with a comic reaction – Claudio and the Prince comment upon the performance to Benedick with witty banter. They even ask Benedick, who refuses to be comedic, “Wilt thou use thy wit?” (V.1.137). Benedick, however, has his charge to kill Claudio, and the scene seems to be taking a turn toward the violent, such as in Midsummer – only this time, there is no all-powerful fairy watching over the scene with the ability to painlessly make everything right. What saves the play from tragedy is the entrance of Dogberry. Comical and confusing as he is, Dogberry is a figure of the law, a holder of power, and he brings awareness to the malicious situation that began it all, with Borachio confessing that “I have deceived even your very eyes” (V.1.242). Before that awareness, the Prince had been sniping that “What a pretty thing man is when he goes in doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!” (V.1.211-212), but after Borachio’s confession, the tone changes to the Prince asking Claudio “Runs not this speech like iron through your blood?” (V.1.255). Ironically, the Prince and Claudio’s dialogue becoming tragic makes the play less tragic for the Real Audience. The internal audience is now successful, in the sense that, now that it has awareness regarding the performance with the malicious interloper, it can respond properly to the tragic performance it has watched. Power is now in the hands of the performers, who wish for a happy, married ending.
Awareness and power seem to need to reside with the same party for there to be enough security for comedy. This is pushed to an extreme, however, with an entity displayed very prominently in a couple of the plays: the transgressive audience. This transgressive audience is not only aware of the performance that it is watching, but it exercises a large amount of power over the performance. There seem to be two principal ways of exerting this power: by creating its own role as audience by giving itself a performance to be watched and by forcibly joining the performers. In the first of these two sub-categories, awareness and power are both held by the audience, something that, given what has been examined so far, one might guess would contribute to a sense of security, the Real Audience being able to ally itself with a powerful proxy. Looking at the progression of the self-created audience in Twelfth Night, however, while seemingly the opposite of the powerless silent audience, this ally is not necessarily welcomed, either.
Twelfth Night's comic subplot of Malvolio is completely the work of a self-created audience. Maria writes a letter for Malvolio to find, and Toby, Andrew and Fabian hide to watch the way that Malvolio reacts to that letter. Notably, when Toby, Andrew and Fabian first establish themselves as Malvolio's audience, Malvolio puts on a performance without any prompting.
• The silent audience
o MND: Oberon and Puck watching the lovers’ quarrel
bookended by audience interference; quarrel is due to Puck applying the love potion on Oberon’s orders and is followed by Oberon ordering Puck to fix the mix-up
audience in position of power above the “performers,” reducing the importance of what is happening because it is not “real” (despite what the performers say and feel) and can be easily changed
o TN: Maria and Toby watching the Fool perform as Sir Topas for Malvolio
is this audience even necessary?
o AYLI: watching the wrestling... sort of.
audience does speak, but only a few short lines
performers don’t speak at all, know that they are performing
audience and performers meet after the show is over... and fall in love!
o AYLI: Celia when Rosalind first meets Orlando as Ganymede in Arden
o AYLI: Celia at Rosalind and Orlando’s “wedding”
Rosalind invites Celia to participate, but feeds Celia her lines; Celia had at first insisted that “I cannot say the words,” only says two short lines
Celia criticizes Rosalind afterward
• The failed audience
o humorous
MND: failed performance of Pyramus and Thisbe
• performers don’t understand how the audience works; constantly reassuring audience that they are only performers and it is not real
• audience constantly mocking the perfomers
• exception of Hippolypta, “Beshrew my heart but I pity the man” (305)
MAAN: Beatrice and Benedict’s staged eavesdropping
• perfomers position themselves as “love gods” (II.2.377)
• audience knows that it is audience, does not know that performers are performers (what MND performers took caution against)
• audience believes that it has the power, is mistaken
• with Benedict, just the fact that he is audience is funny (“Oh, here come Claudio and the Prince. Hey, I’ll hide!” what’s up with that, Benedict)
o tragic
MAAN: Claudio and Prince being shown Hero’s “infidelity”
• not actually seen onstage
• “If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know. If you will follow me, I will show you enough, and when you have seen more and heard more, proceed accordingly.” Don John
• audiences knows that it is audience, does not know that performers are performers
• same as humorous failed audience in the same play, very different consequences
MAAN: Claudio and Prince’s reaction to news of Hero’s “death”
• Claudio and Prince don’t know they are audience
• Claudio and Prince treat it like a comedy; after Leonato and his brother exit and Benedick enters seriously, Claudio ask Benedick “Wilt thou use thy wit?”
• Claudio and Prince refuse to take situation seriously until Dogberry brings Borachio, who confesses; plays becomes a tragedy for Claudio – so the internal audience is now successful – the Real Audience is reassured
• The transgressive audience
o audience self-creation
TN: Toby, Fabian and Andrew watching Malvolio read Maria’s letter
• majority of Real Audience finds some humor here, feeling of Malvolio bringing it upon himself, making himself the entertainment
TN: Toby, Fabian and Maria witnessing Malvolio’s “madness”
• less comfortable for Real Audience; internal audience exercising large amount of power over its performer
TN: The Fool performing as Sir Topas for Malvolio
• the Fool dividing himself into audience (Fool) and performer (Sir Topas)
• Sir Topas tells Malvolio things that are not true (that is it not dark, etc.); seems cruel to some members of Real Audience
• main divide happens after Fool’s audience of Maria and Toby has left (does the Fool require an audience?)
o audience turned performer
TN: The Fool performing as Sir Topas for/with Malvolio
• this performer (Sir Topas) is completely under the control of the audience
AYLI: Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone call to Corin after eavesdropping on Corin and Sylvius
• started out as a well-behaved audience, watching quietly, then afterward telling how they related to what they had just watched
• Celia is the one who asks that they interfere, for practical reasons (food)
• join the “stage” with Corin – go from just wanting food to buying the cottage, pasture and flock
AYLI: Rosalind and Celia eavesdrop on Jaques and Orlando, then Rosalind calls to Orlando
• again, start out as a silent audience
• Rosalind performing Ganymede
AYLI: Jaques watching Touchstone and Audry, then interfering to make sure they have a proper wedding
• Martext: “Truly, she must be given, of the marriage is not lawful.”
Jaques: “Proceed, proceed. I’ll giver her.”
• cannot let things be unlawful
AYLI: Corin fetches Rosalind and Celia to watch Sylvius and Phebe, and Rosalind interferes again
• Notable?
o Humorous when the proper role of an audience is not understood, but if consequences are possible, an ill-working audience can have bad ones (in which case, the situation is saved by something causing the audience to function the way that it was intended to)
o Most disturbing: Malvolio in the madhouse, where audience is in multiple positions, including position of power
o Weirdness of AYLI – eavesdroppers/watchers unable to control themselves and interfering – usually Rosalind, who, by the end, seems as though she’s in control of everything... but results in a very odd last scene
o Epilogue acknowledgement of audience reassuring? Explicitly demonstrates the fact that the Real Audience is not actually watching without permission
ENGL 406
16 May 2007
Who Will Watch the Watchers: Audiences within Shakespearean Comedy
Comedy can put its audience in a uniquely uncomfortable spot. The viewer is asked to enjoy and laugh at what is being presented to them, which seems natural and simple enough. More often than not, however, that from which the audience is asked to derive pleasure is the confusion, humiliation or pain of others: Antipholus of Ephesus being locked out of his own home, Helena’s disbelief at suddenly finding herself loved, Malvolio being tricked into behaving in a way that leads Olivia to believe him to be mad, Touchstone running intellectual circles around the hapless Audrey. Partly helping and partly complicating this dilemma, Shakespeare often includes audiences within these plays, performing the act of watching. These performed audiences vary widely – the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is very literal and given to making snide comments, while Rosalyn provides a very transgressive audience as she interrupts the pastoral "play" of Phebe and Sylvius in order to change the course of the show, and the "accidental" audiences in Much Ado About Nothing are the victims of manipulation. Also, these audiences have an impact even when they, like the real audience to the characters of the play, are not seen by those whom they are watching; the frame that they provide can change the way that the real audience perceives what is happening onstage.
This issue of watching is explored in a variety of permutations, with the balance of power shifting between the staged “audiences” and “actors.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing all contain examples that privilege each. A critical comparison of these examples might make it possible to see if they provide the actual audience any guidance or critique regarding how to watch. Given how the art of watching comedy grows complicated when considering the issues of empathy, comedic cruelty, what is serious and what is funny, and what is staged and what is true, it seems natural to take advantage of the many opportunities Shakespeare provides to watch the watchers.
There are three parties involved in the watched situation: the audience watching the play, the internal watchers within the world of the play and those being watched within the world of the play. For the purpose of clarity, the terms “Real Audience,” “audience” and “performers” are going to be used, respectively. While the situation is not always that of a literal play-within-a-play (though Shakespeare certainly utilizes this device in works ranging from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet), I believe that the self-reflexivity implied in those terms will be useful in describing the instances of watching found within the plays. In fact, this terminology could be most useful in analyzing the scenes that do not feature traditional performances by highlighting how they differ from what is commonly accepted as a proper performance, defining what constitutes a legitimate performance in the process.
Starting on the outside, we have the least intrusive, most literal of the watchers: those who stand by and say nothing, not speaking to or physically acting upon the performers. Using the standards of the Real Audience, the most conventional example of this silent audience would be the wrestling match near the beginning of As You Like It – characters stage a performance in front of other people, who watch it without saying anything of consequence. Rosalind and Celia are not completely silent, for instance, but their respective lines of “O excellent young man!” (I.2.207) and “If I had a thunderbolt in mine eyes, I can tell who should down” (I.2.208-209) are not outside the bounds of the bursts of enthusiasm that one might expect those watching a spectator sport; certainly, that small exchange does not seem to engage the wrestlers in any way, especially considering the fact that two young ladies of the court would most likely not be shouting into a wrestling pit. The lives of the performers and their audiences are comfortably separate here, only meeting once before the performance begins and once after it is finished (though for the main couple of a romantic comedy, the second meeting of Orlando and Rosalind has a funnily “stage door” quality to it – giggling girls egging each other on to speak to the handsome performer they watched earlier). This takes place within the world of the court, overseen by the controlling figure of Duke Frederick, whose paranoia can be easily translated into a theme of watching. In the 2005 WilliamsTheatre production of As You Like It directed by Robert Baker-White, for instance, Duke Frederick always appeared in upper level windows so that he could watch over all of the other characters in the court, a rigidly structured space designed by Andrew Lieberman. The wrestling scene, then, is blatantly about watching in traditional ways. At this point, there is nothing particularly jarring about the situation. The Real Audience is both analogous to and allied with the audience of the play.
The silent audience is seen in other places, both in As You Like It and in other plays, but the balances of power, awareness and sympathy shift in interesting ways. In many cases, the performers are not aware that they are being watched. By virtue of the dual nature of theatre, this again allies the Real Audience with the internal audience: though the Real Performers are aware of the Real Audience, the characters that are being portrayed are unaware that they are fictional characters in a play. The exact nature of this voyeuristic quality is rather dependent on directorial choices, but what is made apparent by these scenes is that the experience of the Real Audience watching the play is changed by the presence of the onstage audience. While these silent watchers can be easily forgotten when reading the text, they are not so easily ignored when they are visible physical bodies on the stage.
This is used in As You Like It, where Rosalind’s interactions with Orlando are often watched by Celia, to highlight the performative nature of many of the scenes, which, in their length and with their convoluted issues of identity, can easily be forgotten. Unlike in Duke Frederick’s court, in the Forest of Arden, Rosalind is a performer, playing the role of Ganymede. When Rosalind first meets Orlando while in her disguise of Ganymede, she completely leaves Celia behind, not acknowledging her presence until the end of the scene when, presumably, all of the actors needed to be gotten offstage. The scene that Rosalind creates is not short, either; she engages in the fecund verbal grandstanding often seen in Shakespeare’s intellectual fools (such as As You Like It’s own Touchstone), drawing Orlando in as her scene partner. Though the talk quickly turns from the subject of time to the subject of love and, though Orlando is at a definite verbal disadvantage, the conversation is lively here – so much more lively than the dialogue shared by Rosalind and Orlando before and after the wrestling scene, where their truer expressions of feelings were spoken but not to each other – Rosalind is not talking to Orlando as herself, the one he loves and who loves him, but as a random resident of the Forest of Arden, a role that she has taken on as a performer. One imagines that it is quite easy for Rosalind to be drawn into her performance. Indeed, while there might be choices made by the director or performer to play up some fumbling on Rosalind’s part, her verbal agility suggests that she gets into her performance quite a bit, crossing the line from actor to character a good distance, if not all the way. The fact that, as previously mentioned, Rosalind seems to forget that Celia is even present until the end of the scene supports Rosalind having been drawn into not just the position of performer but the character being performed – losing balance in that thankless actorly struggle to be immersed in character and in the moment while not forgetting technical issues such as following pre-determined blocking, not falling off the edge of the stage, etc.. The watching presence of Celia, however, provides a way of controlling how the Real Audience is drawn into the moment of bantering between comedic lovers. The possibilities here are many. Celia might be kept mostly out of sight, so that her reappearance at the end is a rude awakening, putting side by side Rosalind telling Orlando “you must call me Rosalind” (III.2.442-443) – something that is easy to accept as true, for the Real Audience knows that Ganymede is, indeed, Rosalind – and Rosalind calling Celia her sister, which the Real Audience knows is part of the role of Ganymede and not true. Alternatively, Celia might be clearly seen watching the entire time, her position as audience bringing her into alliance with the Real Audience, which would allow her visible reactions to Rosalind’s antics to influence the Real Audience’s opinion of the scene it is watching.
In subsequent scenes, Rosalind not only plays the role of Ganymede, but takes on the role of Rosalind. Orlando, meanwhile, plays the role of Orlando. This casting, so unconventionally straightforward that it is perversely twisted, allows for the romantic scenes between Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind and Orlando-as-Orlando to be reduced to simply being romantic scenes between Rosalind and Orlando. The presence of an audience watching their performances, however, provides resistance to this less complicated viewing and encourages the questioning of how true these interactions are and, if they are more true than the interactions between Rosalind and Orlando’s “real” selves, why that is so and what that implies. This task again falls to Celia, who is again left onstage while Rosalind engages in her verbal antics. In Act IV, scene 1, Rosalind chastises Orlando for being late and lectures him on how a tardy man will end up a cuckolded man, reminding Orlando, when he protests, that “I am your Rosalind” (IV.1.69) – only to be reminded by Celia that “It pleases him to call you so, but he hath a Rosalind of a better leer than you” (IV.1.70-71). Celia then disappears from the text as Rosalind expounds on the nature of love, only to be requested to join the scene when Rosalind wishes to stage a wedding, a third person being needed to marry the couple. Celia protests being drawn into the performance, stating that “I cannot say the words” (IV.1.133). She yields slightly when Rosalind literally feeds her the line that she wishes her to say, Rosalind implying that Celia cannot speak the words because she does not know them; Celia rises to the bait, then disappears from the text again until Orlando leaves. Here, even more strongly than the previous scene discussed, Celia provides resistance against accepting what is being presented as a simple love scene. Not only is she an audience for Rosalind and Orlando’s performances, but she refuses to abandon the role of audience for that of a performer, maintaining the presence an audience-performer relationship in the scene and not allowing the layered identities to collapse in on themselves. Rosalind, on the other hand, seems to have lost herself in her role. After Orlando leaves, Celia criticizes Rosalind for what she has said about women to Orlando, while Rosalind only responds with swooning declarations of how deeply she is in love, even referring to Celia as “Aliena,” the pseudonym that Celia had assumed for the Forest of Arden but on which she does not seem anywhere near as reliant as Rosalind is upon the persona of Ganymede. To Rosalind’s declaration, at the end of a description of how only Cupid can judge the depth of her love, that she will “go find a shadow and sigh till he come”(IV.1.229-230), Celia responds with a comically blunt “And I’ll sleep” (IV.1.231). One should note that by this point in the play, the Real Audience has been watching absolutely nothing happen for quite a while. In the first act, Orlando and Oliver fought, Orlando wrestled Charles, Oliver plotted to have Orlando killed and Duke Frederick banished Rosalind; after that, characters wandered around Arden and talked (and talked about watching people and watched people talking). Shortly after Celia passes this judgment of disinterest, however, Oliver arrives in Arden, setting into motion the series of events that brings the play to its conclusion.
While the relationship between Celia and the Real Audience appears to be one of alliance, it is not necessarily a desired alliance. In her scenes of watching, Celia is outnumbered and marginalized. She serves as a reminder of the true nature of the scenes being prevented, but that reminder might or might not be a welcome one. After all, the performative nature of the interactions that Celia witnesses complicate Rosalind and Orlando’s relationship in ways that are not necessarily comfortable, and if discomfort is engendered by this awareness, there is nothing that Celia does or can do to alleviate this. The level of awareness can range from low to high, but the level of power held by this audience is definitely low; the sympathy and the power lie with Rosalind, the performer. In contrast, the silent audience present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the possessor of power and complete, explicit awareness, while the flat nature of the performers limits sympathy. Due to the interference of Oberon and Robin Goodfellow (more commonly referred to as Puck), Demetrius and Lysander, who had both been in love with Hermia, are now in love with Helena. Helena believes herself to be the subject of cruel mockery, the men’s professions of love eliciting her famous “O spite! O hell!” (III.2.148) monologue, where she berates the two for driving her to tears. Hermia, in the meanwhile, had been abandoned in the woods by Lysander, who had left her find Helena; now, she finds the man she loves, only to have him declare that he loves Helena. This, in turn, causes the hysterical Helena to accuse Hermia of plotting against her with the men, driving a wedge between the two women. It would be difficult to find another scene where more insults are hurled, the verbal abuse only ending when the men exit in order to prepare to fight each other for Helena’s love. The scene is extremely emotionally and verbally violent and prepares itself to segue into actual physical violence. It is also extremely funny – and it is not limited to the four quarrelling lovers, as Oberon and Puck are onstage the entire time, though they do not talk to the four humans. What allows this scene to be comic is the assurance that, despite the hurt and anger and confusion being sincerely felt by the characters, there will not be unfortunate consequences. The Real Audience is aware of the cause of the confusion, and the internal audience becomes aware of the problem by watching the scene. Having been the cause of the current conflict, with their interference with the love potion, the members of the internal audience also have the power to bring about a peaceful resolution. (Of course, the ease with which Oberon and Puck can resolve the situation to their own likings might not sit well with certain members of the Real Audience, but it is unquestionable that the fairies can at least bring order to the current violence, if not complete satisfaction.) This audience is one with which the Real Audience can enjoy a more fruitful alliance – both audience and Real Audience can know that what they are watching is not real and that worry over consequences is unnecessary. The lovers might be in pain at the moment, but it will not last and, knowing that everything is well under control, we can laugh at their confusion from our position of power.
While these silent audiences allied the Real Audience with the internal audience, such is not always the case. Sometimes the internal audience, which in previous examples had been in possession of more awareness and power than the performers (and sometimes more than even the Real Audience), is the object of comedy. The last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a bungled performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, but the comedy comes not only from the acting troupe’s incompetence but from the failure of the relationship between the performers and their audience. Snug, for example, completely misunderstands the relationship that the audience has to the performers when he assures them “that I, as Snug the joiner, am/ A lion fell, nor else no lion’s dam” (V.1.238-239), not allowing the audience to have any willing suspension of disbelief. Theseus’ speech at the beginning of the act, however, where he states that
I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact. (V.1.2-8)
After this critique of fantasy, regarding a story that is actually true in the world of the play, it is difficult to believe that Theseus, the king of Athens and, thus, leader of the group that compromises the internal audience, would be a very appreciative audience member even if the performers were more competent. The performers are hilariously bad, though, and the Real Audience can join the audience in Athens in laughing at them – though the Real Audience can also feel superior to the court audience of Athens, which is aware of the limitations of the hapless performers but unaware of its own limitations, with how its members had been the unintentional performers for a more powerful fairy audience. Nothing being at stake here, sympathy is not an issue. The Real Audience is given the pleasure of laughing at the foibles of both the performers and the audience, both the low and the high.
The usually-powerful audience becomes a target of laughter again in Much Ado About Nothing. Here, though, the lack of awareness is completely on the part of the audience: the audiences knows that it is audience and the performers know that they are performers, but while the performers are aware of the identity of their audience, the audience is ignorant of both the performers’ self-awareness and the performers’ awareness of their audience. It is, in a way, the opposite situation of Midsummer’s Pyramus and Thisbe: while Midsummer’s acting troupe comically made sure that their audience never forgot that they were only performers, Beatrice and Benedick are completely unaware that what they are seeing is a performance – they are the audience that is unable to distinguish performance from reality. It is this unawareness, in characters who so highly prize their intelligence and wits, that is so funny. And not only are Beatrice and Benedick unaware – they believe that they hold the power as eavesdropping audience members, when it is, in fact, those whom they believe they are outsmarting who possess the power of “love gods” (II.2.377). In Benedick’s case, the character positioning himself as audience in the first place is humorous: musing upon love, he hears the Prince and Claudio approaching and exclaims “Ha! The Prince and Monsieur Love! I will hide me in the arbor” (II.3.35-36), something that few would consider to be a natural, logical reaction. Kenneth Branagh’s movie adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing took the opportunity to play up the humor of the act of being a hidden audience, with exaggerated movements and facial expressions in the eavesdropping sequence that highlight the lightness of the situation. On the subject of lightness, in another similarity to the humor of Midsummer, there are no horrible consequences that could result from this failure of the Beatrice and Benedick in their roles as audience members. It is a common interpretation that Beatrice and Benedick are in love with each other before they have their “epiphanies” while eavesdropping, making the trick into something that only allows them to acknowledge what is already true. Even if they did not necessarily entertain romantic feelings toward each other before the eavesdropping scenes, one can imagine worse scenarios than two clever, headstrong characters falling in love with each other. From this failure of Beatrice and Benedick as audience members, the Real Audience gains the pleasure of laughing at their lack of awareness while knowing that the power-holding performers bear no ill-will toward their audience and that the only consequence of this misunderstanding seems to be love, which is generally encouraged quite strongly in the comedies.
It would seem from these examples that the failure of the audience is a reliable source of humor, perhaps partly due to how it enables the Real Audience to laugh at an audience less successful than itself. Within Much Ado About Nothing itself – the very play whose comic set pieces are failed audiences – however, the failed audience nearly becomes a source of tragedy, definitely creating dramatic tension rather than generating laughs. Much Ado verges on tragedy, with Claudio’s cruel denunciation of Hero, because of Claudio and the Prince’s failure as and audience. It is, in fact, the same failure seen earlier in the play: the audience in unaware that what they are witnessing is only a performance. What differs here is the gravity of the consequences and the location of the power. The consequence of this misunderstanding is the breaking off of a wedding, what is the traditional romantic comedy’s equivalent to a happy ending. Again, the audience mistakenly believes that it has the power. This time, though, most of the power is held by a strange figure: Don John, an unwatched performer. All of his conversation with Claudio and the Prince is a performance to him; the attentions of Claudio and the Prince, however, are focused on the performance of Hero’s infidelity. In this way, Claudio and the Prince’s failure as audience could be viewed as even more severe than just not recognizing what they are watching as a performance – they do not even know what it is they should be watching. With this massive failure and the bulk of the power in the hands of a malicious individual who is neither watcher nor watched, what was once a formula for humor has become the set-up for tragedy.
This tragedy continues after the Claudio-Hero wedding disaster. The Friar suggests a performance to rectify the situation, where Hero and her family pretend that she has died in order to elicit grief from Claudio. As with the preceding situations, Claudio and the Prince are unaware that what they are watching is a performance. Here, Claudio and the Prince again lack awareness, but because of the situation, they hold the power. Thus, when they react incorrectly, there is nothing that can be done to stop them. In a twisted version of the last act of Midsummer, a tragic story is performed with a comic reaction – Claudio and the Prince comment upon the performance to Benedick with witty banter. They even ask Benedick, who refuses to be comedic, “Wilt thou use thy wit?” (V.1.137). Benedick, however, has his charge to kill Claudio, and the scene seems to be taking a turn toward the violent, such as in Midsummer – only this time, there is no all-powerful fairy watching over the scene with the ability to painlessly make everything right. What saves the play from tragedy is the entrance of Dogberry. Comical and confusing as he is, Dogberry is a figure of the law, a holder of power, and he brings awareness to the malicious situation that began it all, with Borachio confessing that “I have deceived even your very eyes” (V.1.242). Before that awareness, the Prince had been sniping that “What a pretty thing man is when he goes in doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!” (V.1.211-212), but after Borachio’s confession, the tone changes to the Prince asking Claudio “Runs not this speech like iron through your blood?” (V.1.255). Ironically, the Prince and Claudio’s dialogue becoming tragic makes the play less tragic for the Real Audience. The internal audience is now successful, in the sense that, now that it has awareness regarding the performance with the malicious interloper, it can respond properly to the tragic performance it has watched. Power is now in the hands of the performers, who wish for a happy, married ending.
Awareness and power seem to need to reside with the same party for there to be enough security for comedy. This is pushed to an extreme, however, with an entity displayed very prominently in a couple of the plays: the transgressive audience. This transgressive audience is not only aware of the performance that it is watching, but it exercises a large amount of power over the performance. There seem to be two principal ways of exerting this power: by creating its own role as audience by giving itself a performance to be watched and by forcibly joining the performers. In the first of these two sub-categories, awareness and power are both held by the audience, something that, given what has been examined so far, one might guess would contribute to a sense of security, the Real Audience being able to ally itself with a powerful proxy. Looking at the progression of the self-created audience in Twelfth Night, however, while seemingly the opposite of the powerless silent audience, this ally is not necessarily welcomed, either.
Twelfth Night's comic subplot of Malvolio is completely the work of a self-created audience. Maria writes a letter for Malvolio to find, and Toby, Andrew and Fabian hide to watch the way that Malvolio reacts to that letter. Notably, when Toby, Andrew and Fabian first establish themselves as Malvolio's audience, Malvolio puts on a performance without any prompting.
• The silent audience
o MND: Oberon and Puck watching the lovers’ quarrel
bookended by audience interference; quarrel is due to Puck applying the love potion on Oberon’s orders and is followed by Oberon ordering Puck to fix the mix-up
audience in position of power above the “performers,” reducing the importance of what is happening because it is not “real” (despite what the performers say and feel) and can be easily changed
o TN: Maria and Toby watching the Fool perform as Sir Topas for Malvolio
is this audience even necessary?
o AYLI: watching the wrestling... sort of.
audience does speak, but only a few short lines
performers don’t speak at all, know that they are performing
audience and performers meet after the show is over... and fall in love!
o AYLI: Celia when Rosalind first meets Orlando as Ganymede in Arden
o AYLI: Celia at Rosalind and Orlando’s “wedding”
Rosalind invites Celia to participate, but feeds Celia her lines; Celia had at first insisted that “I cannot say the words,” only says two short lines
Celia criticizes Rosalind afterward
• The failed audience
o humorous
MND: failed performance of Pyramus and Thisbe
• performers don’t understand how the audience works; constantly reassuring audience that they are only performers and it is not real
• audience constantly mocking the perfomers
• exception of Hippolypta, “Beshrew my heart but I pity the man” (305)
MAAN: Beatrice and Benedict’s staged eavesdropping
• perfomers position themselves as “love gods” (II.2.377)
• audience knows that it is audience, does not know that performers are performers (what MND performers took caution against)
• audience believes that it has the power, is mistaken
• with Benedict, just the fact that he is audience is funny (“Oh, here come Claudio and the Prince. Hey, I’ll hide!” what’s up with that, Benedict)
o tragic
MAAN: Claudio and Prince being shown Hero’s “infidelity”
• not actually seen onstage
• “If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know. If you will follow me, I will show you enough, and when you have seen more and heard more, proceed accordingly.” Don John
• audiences knows that it is audience, does not know that performers are performers
• same as humorous failed audience in the same play, very different consequences
MAAN: Claudio and Prince’s reaction to news of Hero’s “death”
• Claudio and Prince don’t know they are audience
• Claudio and Prince treat it like a comedy; after Leonato and his brother exit and Benedick enters seriously, Claudio ask Benedick “Wilt thou use thy wit?”
• Claudio and Prince refuse to take situation seriously until Dogberry brings Borachio, who confesses; plays becomes a tragedy for Claudio – so the internal audience is now successful – the Real Audience is reassured
• The transgressive audience
o audience self-creation
TN: Toby, Fabian and Andrew watching Malvolio read Maria’s letter
• majority of Real Audience finds some humor here, feeling of Malvolio bringing it upon himself, making himself the entertainment
TN: Toby, Fabian and Maria witnessing Malvolio’s “madness”
• less comfortable for Real Audience; internal audience exercising large amount of power over its performer
TN: The Fool performing as Sir Topas for Malvolio
• the Fool dividing himself into audience (Fool) and performer (Sir Topas)
• Sir Topas tells Malvolio things that are not true (that is it not dark, etc.); seems cruel to some members of Real Audience
• main divide happens after Fool’s audience of Maria and Toby has left (does the Fool require an audience?)
o audience turned performer
TN: The Fool performing as Sir Topas for/with Malvolio
• this performer (Sir Topas) is completely under the control of the audience
AYLI: Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone call to Corin after eavesdropping on Corin and Sylvius
• started out as a well-behaved audience, watching quietly, then afterward telling how they related to what they had just watched
• Celia is the one who asks that they interfere, for practical reasons (food)
• join the “stage” with Corin – go from just wanting food to buying the cottage, pasture and flock
AYLI: Rosalind and Celia eavesdrop on Jaques and Orlando, then Rosalind calls to Orlando
• again, start out as a silent audience
• Rosalind performing Ganymede
AYLI: Jaques watching Touchstone and Audry, then interfering to make sure they have a proper wedding
• Martext: “Truly, she must be given, of the marriage is not lawful.”
Jaques: “Proceed, proceed. I’ll giver her.”
• cannot let things be unlawful
AYLI: Corin fetches Rosalind and Celia to watch Sylvius and Phebe, and Rosalind interferes again
• Notable?
o Humorous when the proper role of an audience is not understood, but if consequences are possible, an ill-working audience can have bad ones (in which case, the situation is saved by something causing the audience to function the way that it was intended to)
o Most disturbing: Malvolio in the madhouse, where audience is in multiple positions, including position of power
o Weirdness of AYLI – eavesdroppers/watchers unable to control themselves and interfering – usually Rosalind, who, by the end, seems as though she’s in control of everything... but results in a very odd last scene
o Epilogue acknowledgement of audience reassuring? Explicitly demonstrates the fact that the Real Audience is not actually watching without permission
