Asides and Audience Participation in Restoration Theatre

Abstract

Some scholars argue that Restoration era theatrical asides—where actors break character and address the audience directly—are problematic because they interrupt the flow of dialogue between characters. Scholars have commented that audiences had to suspend their disbelief, forced to watch actors on stage freeze and purposely ignore what another actor was saying when an aside was being delivered.  What was different about the way asides were performed? And because of this space they inhabit outside the regular play, should asides be analyzed separately, as a kind of paratext?  If so, it is possible that one might want to take this argument further and consider Restoration era audiences as a kind of paratext too. With their close proximity to the stage, background knowledge of actors lives, and their habit of interacting with the actors throughout the play (including sometimes throwing fruit), the audience’s presence always made a difference in the performance.  Recent research by neuroscientists that measured heart rates and skin responses of audience members during modern stage productions has found that the audiences heartbeats responded to shows in unison, speeding up and slowing down at the same rate, which, they argue, breaks down social differences and brings people together.  In that way, a harmonized restoration era audience may have created a kind of character of itself that was part of the experience, and yet outside the text.  I will argue that the both the aside and the audience belonged somewhere between the play and the paratext that surrounded it.