Why did playgoers have to rely on their imaginations when viewing Shakespeare's productions?

Answer 1

Actually, all stage plays require the audience to use their imaginations. The audience must set aside their certain knowledge that what they are looking at is a stage, not Uncle Vanya's living room, that the woman they are looking at is not really Blanche Dubois, that when all those guys kill Julius Caesar, the guy they are stabbing is not really hurt, and you can watch him getting killed again Sunday afternoon if you want.

Aristotle figured that it was too much of a strain on people's imagination to imagine that the stage was Athens and then reimagine it as Thebes, or to imagine that what was going on was not happening in real time, so you can see one thing and a minute later something that happens months later. Shakespeare had no such compunction. Playwrights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries figured that people needed to see an exact replica of some house in Sweden to be able to imagine what was going on in an Ibsen play. They spent a lot of time building complicated sets with piles of props to create an illusion of reality. Shakespeare didn't bother with that.

Shakespeare knew that the audience can imagine anything if the actors are persuasive enough. There is no way that he could stage a realistic battle on a wooden thrust stage with a small company of actors. But if the audience needs to imagine they are on a battlefield watching the battle of Agincourt when all they see is a stage and half a dozen men with pikes, they'll do it. That is what he invites them to do at the beginning of his play Henry V.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

Into a thousand parts divide one man

To make imaginary puissance. Think,

When we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth

For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times

Turning the accomplishments of a lifetime

Into an hourglass.