The Play in the Mind’s Eye
Anglophone criticism of English Renaissance drama largely assumes the irrelevance of sixteenth-century continental critical debates on how to achieve verisimilitude. This chapter argues that English dramatists’ rejection of the Aristotelian unities was not in itself a solution to the problems of making theatre imaginatively compelling: all the challenges discussed by Italian critics were also challenges for English dramatists. Their plays manipulate what we might call the ‘unscene’, whereby the audience infers and imagines characters’ past histories, motives, offstage locations, and inner lives. Shakespeare and other dramatists invite us to supplement and make sense of what we actually see onstage by their use of the topics of ‘circumstance’: topics of time, place, cause, and manner which, in the period’s rhetorical and dialectical traditions, were used to give narratives and descriptions an imaginative liveliness known as enargeia or evidentia. This account is supported by the contemporary critical witness of William Scott.