What is seen matters; the scene on the page and on the stage offers itself to view. The eye traces prose along the lines of the page, watches the bodies of performers moving in space on the stage. We grasp Being through an idea produced by a presence that we see. Equally, art anticipates its future consumption by a viewer, and it reflects retrospectively on what happened in the moment of consumption, or what it knows of that happening. In this section, we look at fictions of the presence of consumers and the rival claims to presence at and with the act of consumption offered by novels and plays in their competition for the market of fiction.

It is the presence of an audience that most distinguishes the fiction of the stage from that of the page in the long history of anti-theatrical sentiment and consequent censorship. As late as 1909 the UK Parliament's Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship) stresses that the presence of an audience – and especially the shared experience of affect between them – exacerbates the influence of ideas.

We can see in this early twentieth-century judgement the privileging of a model of art as an act of communication between ‘author’ and ‘audience’. The Select Committee understands ‘what is done and spoken on stage’ as a conduit for a set of ideas.