The purpose of this book is to explain how Elizabethan and Jacobean drama works: what it assumes of its audience and how its audience experiences it and responds to it. If this project is to be successful, a working notion must be developed of what is meant by the term “audience,” and in particular of that term as it applies to a group of playgoers for whom the plays under discussion can be imagined to have been written. That is the aim of this chapter. But the purpose of this book is also to invigorate analytical and theatrical discourse around a body of largely forgotten drama, and if that project is to be successful, the notion of “audience” must be expanded to include modern and even future audiences. The argument thus becomes more a phenomenological than a historical one. That must, for the most part, be the aim of the subsequent seven chapters.

My own audience may wonder then why I begin with a historical approach only to seem to discard it. The reason is this: significant distinctions between a Renaissance audience and a modern audience are, like distinctions between different kinds of audience members in any audience, more frequently made than necessary. Modern audiences can understand and appreciate even the most bizarre conventions of Renaissance drama; this is attested to by the enduring popularity of, and the enduring willingness of directors to work with plays like The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Love's Labors Lost.