The Shakespearean unscene

Today, metaphors of enactment dominate discussion of Shakespeare. We talk about ‘staging’ and ‘performing’ abstractions: ‘staging history’, for example, or ‘performing nostalgia’. Critics have thus even made a conundrum of the fact that Hamlet ‘stages’ the process of ‘thought’. This lecture will show, conversely, that in the sixteenth century, the real innovation in English theatre was less performative than rhetorical. Influenced by neoclassicism, English dramatists began to use techniques of rhetorical inquiry to supplement theatre’s mis-en-scène. Shakespeare irresistably draws us into imagining offstage ‘scenes’ as part of a drama of the psyche: this is the seductive Shakespearean ‘unscene’.

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