Shakespeare's Secular Theatre: A Provocative Defence of the Actor and Spectator

Compared to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare seems far more discreet, or even removed from the controversy about the theatre. But appearances can be deceiving: although less visible and more oblique, his responses to the attacks against the stage are nonetheless present in his plays. Against the enemies of the stage who identify theatre as a source of profanation and pollution of bodies and souls, most of the defenders emphasize the virtuous exemplarity of performance. Shakespeare responds in a provocative manner and elaborates another conception of theatre, involving the actor as well as the spectator. A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It and Hamlet reproduce the theatrophobic accusations against actors and the contamination of the spectator by the passions performed on stage. Yet even as he accumulates elements of accusatory discourse, the playwright displaces the terms in order to think through the emotional (and thus necessarily impure) experience of theatre and give it a social and moral function: the actor's art turns into a form of magic devoid of supernatural qualities and the spectator's reception is redefined as intelligence through emotions.