Vision and Imagination in the Renaissance Theatre

To see what lacks representation on stage is a fully creative act that the spectator performs thanks to his or her imagination, as (s)he is called to retrieve via memory what is objectively absent from the scene. The Renaissance audience accomplished such a creative act by making use of rhetoric and figurative arts. However, it is pre-eminently words that trigger and support the imagination, as Shakespeare’s drama best exemplifies. Both in the Elizabethan drama and in the Italian Renaissance theatre, with its perspectival vision, the spectator’s creative act takes place in an ideal space where the stage space turns into the locus of stereoscopic vision. Consequently, the creation and consumption of the vision originates first and foremost in drama (comedy and tragedy). The psychological, aesthetic, and anthropological mechanisms at the heart of vision, and the fruition of the images deriving from words, can be found as operating within the dramatic text, from the point of view of both the playwright and of the spectator/listener, in a direct relationship of cause and effect. Religious and especially Jesuitical drama, whose theatrical experience aims at discovering a correspondence between words and images, testifies to the visual power of the theatre.