“Is’t real that I see?”: Staged Realism and the Paradox of Shakespeare’s Audience

Among the elements required for theater—actors, action and audience—the responsibility for the “real” is often assigned to actors, who can, by allowing their own experience of imagined events to become co-extensive with their characters’, bring to the stage real emotions based on real experiences. But actors that bring character-based approaches to roles such as Shylock, Hal, Lord Capulet, or Casca can lend coherence to figures animated by their indeterminacy, winning admiration for their characters while debilitating the drama. This essay argues that the experiences of deep engagement that audiences tend to understand as encounters with the “real” depend less on actors or styles of acting than on continuous, often advertised gaps between the presenters and what they represent in performance. Flirtations with failure in performance, including those brought about by inconsistencies in the characters as written, can cast audiences as protagonists in dramas of disclosure: dramas wherein their continued access to the fictional coherence, and even to the fiction itself, is at stake. The essay thus considers a ‘“paradox of the audience” wherein the audience grows more susceptible to fiction as it and its characters break down or admit artifice, ultimately suggesting some ways in which actors might heighten our sense of the real by moderating their own.