We attempt to make the past ‘present’ by presenting it in space, as though it were happening again and before us, before our eyes. We long for the past to be present to us, tangible. Museum exhibitions, re-enactment, historical fictions on stage and screen, the material turn in humanities scholarship, all – as Gumbrecht terms it – expand the range of the present. ‘Presentification’ consists of ‘techniques that produce the impression (or, rather, the illusion) that worlds of the past can become tangible again’. The turn to the corporeal, the material, and away from the spirit, the abstract, is a symptom of the fear of an imperilled future over which our imaginings and anticipations appear to have little purchase:

Presentification extends the possibility of being with the dead and touching the objects of the world. And we have seen it present itself most often and recurrently in those moments in prose and drama where a ghost appears and when persons appear to become puppets. Between life and death, between being persons and ideas (the ghost), or between being persons and machines (puppets), the not-quite-not-personhood of these figures presents to their audience the productive tension of unconcealment and withdrawal that is ‘Being’. The importance of the imagining of an audience, a collectivity to be with even in difference – and hence the difficulty of dislodging the theatre as the primary space of presence – is evident in the urge to seek out companionship that inevitably accompanies the encounter with ghosts. Conversely, the encounter with puppets tends to produce a desire to assert individuality and eccentricity, an ability to reflect on one’s quirkiness not shared by mechanical forms of being.

Let us look more closely at two such moments, one describing an encounter with a fictional ghost and another an encounter with fictional puppets, to understand better the ways that, in the eighteenth century, non-corporeal beings in and of the theatre prompt a compulsion to be with others.