This intricate and elusive sentence places readers, along with Orlando, in the heart of an impromptu Jacobean audience who have gathered around a makeshift stage (perhaps a pageant wagon or trestle stage) out on the thick ice of the Thames during King James's Great Frost celebration. We, along with the rest of the audience, are just in time to catch Desdemona's death scene from Othello. The sentence describes a performance, is itself a performance, and requires reading as performance. Here the medium is indeed the message; the sentence is what it says and does. Content and form are inseparable. It is syntactically chaotic, describing a chaotic scene, yet the syntax comes to equilibrium just as the scene resolves itself within Orlando himself. Woolf offers readers concrete, active visual images (the actors ‘running’ and ‘tripping’), but switches our attention away from the actors, first to the crowd-turnedaudience, and finally to the ‘point’ of the sentence – Orlando's reception. Therefore, there are multiple subjects, objects, and a three-level audience to do the receiving and to make meaning: the Jacobean crowd, Orlando, and us – the readers. We note that the first-level audience is active; they are ‘stamping’ and ‘whistling’, and their (re)actions when ‘bored’ are interactive, even aggressive. Even the dog intervenes, interrupting both syntax and whatever is taking place on stage. In contrast to this active first-level audience, Orlando passively takes in the entire scene, telescoping from stage to audience but certainly not understanding what is going on, until the end of the sentence when the music of the words ‘stirs’ him. We readers, the third-level audience, take in the action on stage, the actions of the Jacobean audience, and we see that Orlando is ‘stirred’, but the sentence acts on us, just as it does on Orlando, creating impressions and suggestions more than meaning.