As is evident in the preceding chapters, a recurring problem in any attempt to recover a lost theatrical vocabulary of the 1590s and early 1600s is our inability today to distinguish between (1) onstage effects that would have been accepted as verisimilar by the original playgoers and (2) comparable effects that would have been accepted as “real” by figures onstage but, in turn, realized fully only by means of the imaginative participation of those playgoers. With access only to stage directions, dialogue, and the rare eyewitness account, the interpreter today often cannot determine whether a tomb, a forest, a tent, or a prison was represented by verisimilar properties brought onto the stage or, in contrast, was represented by means of dialogue, appropriate actions, costume, and portable properties in conjunction with the imaginary forces of the spectator. Interpretations today, whether on the page or on the stage, can therefore be skewed if the interpreter invokes an elaborate object or effect that was not there in the original (a tree, a tomb, a bed) and at the same time buries some object or effect that would have been obvious, even italicized for the original playgoer (e.g., Romeo's mattock and crow of iron).

As a particularly revealing (and often puzzling) demonstration of the dimensions of the problem, let me turn for a final example to a word – vanish – that recurs in stage directions and related dialogue throughout the period and is to be found in eight stage directions in Shakespeare.