GHOSTS ON STAGE

The affair of the Cock Lane ghost became a spectacle, but the fiction it represented was not of the kind to generate aesthetic experience. The girls in their boarding schools who, the newspapers reported, were too frightened to go upstairs to bed during the height of the scandal were a rarity among a public more inclined to laugh than shudder. For the development of the emotion of fear as the mode of reception proper to fictions of the supernatural we need to look to critical writings on drama and changes in theatrical practice. The naturalistic technique of acting which evolved around the middle of the eighteenth century showed the manner in which ghost-seeing was to be enjoyed: a lesson in subjective sensation. Where the spectre in Cock Lane had begun as a ‘real’ ghost and evolved into fiction, here we will be discussing fictional ghosts which are rendered ‘real’ in the minds of the audience.

In this matter, as over the question of the truth of ghosts, Joseph Addison again appears as an arbiter, showing that different ways of seeing the supernatural were as much the product of specific discursive fields as of personal opinion. We have seen how in the format of the periodical essay, an arena for the display of conscience and civic responsibility, Addison scrupulously wrestled with the epistemological problems raised by a sober supernatural, the object proper to this context. A few years after, in the entirely different context of comic drama, the same writer was able to present in a spirit of laughing cynicism a fraudulent supernatural, with the moral that ‘ghosts’ and sharp practice are generally found together.