Stage Matters by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Chapter Six

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Hiding in Plain Sight

Eavesdropping and the Physicality of the Stage

Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight

The convention of eavesdropping or overhearing is a well-established one in early modern drama. Bernard Beckerman reports that Shakespeare incorporated an eavesdropping scene in “more than half the plays he wrote.”1 Dramatists from Nicholas Udall to Philip Massinger probably modeled their use of eavesdropping on the plays of the Roman playwright Plautus, whose use of the convention demonstrates innovation within the comedies of his time.2 Eavesdropping gave dramatists a strategy to advance (or complicate) plots through the delivery (or the misdelivery) of knowledge in a clear and efficient way. Yet in all the ways that the convention is clear, efficient, and entertaining for the audience, it does require complex cognitive steps on the part of the audience.3 The eavesdropping scene “is an artificial formulation, obeying its own rules, following its own forms, and judged according to its own context.”4 The audience and the actors form a contract based upon this “artificial formulation.” Playgoers must quickly understand that while they see and hear all the characters on the stage, only some of the characters (the eavesdropping observers) are able to see and hear other characters (the observed). In some cases, playgoers must be able to switch their attention away from the character or characters being observed in order to attend to the comments of the eavesdroppers, basically, placing the observed characters in stasis. The audience must not spend too much time wondering why these characters suddenly stop their conversations or soliloquies. As Jeremy Lopez has shown in his discussion of the aside, this kind of “imping[ing] on an audience’s focus” is risky because the disruption emphasizes the moment’s “theatrical artifice,” yet it creates rewards as the playgoers enjoy the “dramatic irony: the audience and some characters know more than some other characters.”5

As such, the eavesdropping convention places the bodies of the actors under varying, and often simultaneous, types of perception. For example, the bodies of the actors playing the eavesdroppers are in a contested position for the playgoers: visible and audible to them; hidden and silent to the characters on the stage; yet visible and audible to the actors playing those overheard characters, who are awaiting their cues. In “Guarded, Unguarded and Unguardable Speech in Late Renaissance Drama,” James Hirsh carefully outlines the unwritten rules of overhearing. He observes: “These conventions were conspicuously employed in so many plays and became so familiar to experienced playgoers that they could operate implicitly. Dramatists did not bother to spell out the operation of the conventions in every instance.”6 Hirsh claims that the conventions became so ingrained in early modern plays that they inspired artistic creativity and competition.7 Much of this creativity in eavesdropping depends on a playwright’s resourceful use of the stage architecture to aid the audience’s cognition.

Scenes of eavesdropping, planned or unplanned, appear throughout early modern drama, but the earliest instances of it are marked not only by a simplicity of setup, but also by verbal cues to the audience that mark it as an experimental technique.

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