Sex on Stage: How Does the Audience Know? (Dovizi da Bibbiena, La Calandra, III.10; Shakespeare, Henry V, V.2)

Throughout the history of European theatrical poetics the relation between the representation onstage and the audience’s perception has been one of its central issues. Questions as to how the audience perceive what is happening on the theater’s stage, and how this perception in turn is connected with the techniques and skills applied by the actors, haunt the whole range of theatrical discourse from antiquity onwards. Ever since Plato’s and Aristotle’s famously contrary opinions on this matter, the medial effects of performance have been at the heart of theatrical disputes;1 consequently, they have been linked to basic anthropological and epistemological questions – questions, that is, concerning human ways of perception, of gaining knowledge and understanding, and especially the disruptive and/or enabling effects of representations and emotions in this process.2