Audience‐Actor Boundaries and Othello
Audience‐Actor Boundaries and Othello
2011 Shakespeare Lecture
This lecture explores the boundaries between audiences and actors, and what happens when audiences interact with actors and their characters. Its illustrative case is Desdemona's response to Othello. When Desdemona marries Othello she crosses the boundary from audience world to the world of fiction (the world of epic hero, adventure stories, travel narratives). In so doing, she initiates a structure in which things that should be kept separate merge: genre (comedy and tragedy), language (the play has more compound words and paradoxes than any other), characters, plots. The mergings are consistently coded as theatrical: this is a tragedy of theatre boundaries gone wrong. Psychologist Edward Bullough's argument from 1912 about distance in the theatre provides the theoretical framework for this lecture to explore the problems when audiences do not keep stage.
Keywords: Othello, audiences, actors, character, audience‐actor boundaries, theatre
British Academy Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
