6 - The Audiences
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
SOCIAL ATTITUDES TO PLAYGOING
Crowd psychology has gained an enormous amount of attention in the twentieth century. Political, religious and racial riots have had their own interest for psychologists in a century when, as Eric Hobsbawm declared, new technology in and out of wars through the years from 1914 to 1991 killed far more ordinary people than the old world had ever tried to. What generated crowd disturbances excited many besides the governments wishing to stop them. No psychologist, however, has yet thought to look at theatre audiences as crowds. Since the technology of theatre in the centuries since Shakespeare has aimed to turn audiences into passive watchers invisible to the actors, and silent except for occasional bursts of laughter, audiences have not been thought of as crowds. Reviewers now give voice to their individual reactions to plays in newspapers and other media, thinking of audiences only as assemblies of individuals with private interests, sharing little with other audience members. A few audiences have occasionally reacted as angry crowds to plays, as Yeats found at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and as the governments of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia found in the 1930s when for diametrically opposed political reasons productions of Coriolanus provoked riots in Berlin and Moscow. Psychologists do not consider theatre audiences to be crowds, so even the new focus by theatre teachers and theoreticians on what is usually called performativity has ignored this fascinating new territory for study.
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- Information
- The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 , pp. 258 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009