Teaching Spectatorship: Essays and Poems on Audience in Performan ...

While I do not advocate for audience protests on the level that Blackadder describes, I am interested in countering the passivity of current audience practice through a more engaged and interactive model of spectatorship that is proposed in later chapters.

Moving backwards in time, Fisher’s (2003) essay on audience behavior in 18th-century London highlights both what has been lost and what has been gained in the modern pacification of AIP. Her study is very thorough, drawing on newspaper reports, journals, and diaries of actors, producers, and spectators to produce a portrait of theatregoing at that time. Clearly, audiences then held much more power to shape and control performances according to their will than they do now. Actors and producers often had to interrupt performances to appeal to patrons; arguments erupted both in the house and between performers and spectators; apologies or remonstrations were offered and were either accepted or denied; actors were loudly lauded or condemned. It was not uncommon for an actor to be called upon to repeat a favorite speech or scene for the audience (an historical precursor to instant replay!) Up until the turn of the 19th century, it was still common practice for some audience members to sit on stage, thus allowing for even more disruption or participation, depending upon your point of view. Such audience behavior is very similar to that which had occurred in Elizabethan theatre, and can be traced back to the roots of European theatre practice in ancient Rome and Greece. Fisher (2003) sees the historic relation between actor and audience as one of servant to master, where the onus was on the performer to please the audience, or else risk censure. She suggests that what happened in the 19th and 20th centuries was a reversal of this power relation, such that actors became the masters, and audiences took on the more servile roles.