“The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible”: Shakespeare and the Politics of Perception
When Prospero commands Ariel, “Be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible / To every eyeball else”, the audience beholds personifications of the constraints that invisibly determine their lives too. The effect of such visualizing strategies is to empower the audience by revealing the unsee...
Salvato in:
| Pubblicato in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare, |
|---|---|
| Autore principale: | |
| Natura: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lingua: | Anglais |
| Pubblicazione: |
Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare
2015
|
| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Riassunto: | When Prospero commands Ariel, “Be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible / To every eyeball else”, the audience beholds personifications of the constraints that invisibly determine their lives too. The effect of such visualizing strategies is to empower the audience by revealing the unseen forces that disempower them in the world beyond the theatre. Shakespeare’s drama furnishes a perfect example of what Peter Brook calls “The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible”: a theatre in which we are able to perceive “the invisible currents that rule our lives”. Shakespeare grasped long before Rancière the crucial part played in preserving hegemony by “le partage du sensible”. His plays are intrinsically political insofar as they are “forms of visibility”, whose value lies in their capacity to expand the scope of the perceptible by rendering visible, “from the standpoint of what is common to the community”, methods of division and exclusion that would otherwise remain unseen. They seek, through a radical reconfiguring of perception, an “egalitarian distribution of the sensory” as a precondition of “the political redistribution of shared experience”. |
|---|