Spectacle

“ So ready a faculty of exultation in the exceeding great glories of taste and touch, of loud sound and glittering spectacle, is a gift of the utmost service to the narrator who craves immense audiences. ”

“ When arrived at the show place, unlike the audience collected to witness any spectacle of human invention, the multitude, with their eyes all bent one way, stood immoveable, and silent as death, till the tumult ceased, and the mighty commotion was passed by ”

“ We are now prepared for what the poet has evidently dressed up with special care, as the imposing spectacle of the second act, intending to overpower the senses of the spectator with a profusion of imaginative wealth, in the same fashion as he managed the Carnival in the first act; with this slight difference, that, whereas there we had a show of masqued realities, here we have a show of real phantoms. ”

“ Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form. ”

“ The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. ”

“ In the speculation of his own good parts, his eyes, like a drunkard's, see all double, and his fancy, like an old man's spectacles, make a great letter in a small print. He imagines every place where he comes his theater, and not a look stirring but his spectator ”

“ the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. ”

“ The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. ”

“ In the spectacle — the visual reflection of the ruling economic order — goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. ”

“ The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system. ”

“ "Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you are doing." ”

“ The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images. ”

“ Everybody who is at all acquainted with theatrical matters knows what a host of shabby, poverty-stricken men hang about the stage of a large establishment—not regularly engaged actors, but [42] ballet people, procession men, tumblers, and so forth, who are taken on during the run of a pantomime, or an Easter piece, and are then discharged, until the production of some heavy spectacle occasions a new demand for their services. ”

“ In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. ”

“ Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of imitation. And these complete the fist. These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact, every play contains Spectacular elements as well as Character, Plot, Diction, Song, and Thought.
But most important of all is the structure of the
incidents. ”

“ The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. ”

“ The release of these four wretched creatures, and conveying them, astounded and bewildered, into the streets so full of life—a spectacle they had never thought to see again, until they emerged from solitude and silence upon that last journey, when the air should be heavy with the pent-up breath of thousands, and the streets and houses should be built and roofed with human faces, not with bricks and tiles and stones—was the crowning horror of the scene. ”

“ The outline of fire, which before was firm and motionless, now wavers and shakes as if it would pass away, as the wind blows the flames back and forth from the great cups by which it is lighted. From near and far the world looks on,—from the Piazza beneath, where carriages drive to and fro in its splendor, and the band plays and the bells toll,—from the windows and loggias of the city, wherever a view can be caught of this superb spectacle,—and from the Campagna and mountain towns, where, far away, alone and towering above everything, the dome is seen to blaze. ”

“ But the pleasure here is not that of Tragedy. It belongs rather to Comedy, where the bitterest enemies in the piece (e.g. Orestes and Aegisthus) walk off good friends at the end, with no slaying of any one by any one.
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The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play--which is the better way and shows the better poet. The Plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents ”

“ But in the scale of emotion and excitement the theatre comes next to fighting, whether you be the author of the play or opera to be given for the first time before the greatest and most critical audience in the world, or the actor, or actress, or singer, who has not yet been heard or seen and of whom wonders are expected on the great night. ”

“ To them, therefore, with the exception of a few startling incidents of real life, the theatre is the only channel through which are ever brought the great sympathies of the world of thought beyond their immediate ken. And thirdly, it follows from all this that the stage is, intellectually and morally, to all who have recourse to it, the source of some of the finest and best influences of which they are respectively susceptible. To the thoughtful and reading man it brings the life, the fire, the color, the vivid instinct, which are beyond the reach of [34] study. ”

“ History thrusts upon the stage at once, or in quick and continued succession, tragedy, and comedy, and farce; and, as we weep, and laugh, and wonder, we must not forget that we are in the theatre, not of fancy, but of truth, and that every event, however slight, every entrance and every exit, possesses a real meaning and a real importance. ”

“ The play begins; with the deepest earnestness the audience listen, and, crowded as they are, preserve the utmost quiet. The glorious drama scene by scene unfolds itself, and passage by passage we recognise the beauties of our great poet. ”

“ Every Movement of the Theatre, by a skillful Poet, is communicated, as it were by Magic, to the Spectators, who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are enflam'd with all the Variety of Passions, which actuate the several Personages of the Drama. ”

“ Theatre lets us stand apart from the flow of life: to feel pity and understanding and empathy; to smile at human foibles and to weep at human tragedies. Theatre is an art form for all seasons and all moods. ”

“ The phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted in the minds of most people by early visits to the theatre. They get used to the fantastic gestures, the flamboyant emotions, the weird mouthings, melodious snortings, agonising yelps, lip-gnawings, glaring horrors, and other emotional symbolism of the stage. ”

“ In the evening they go into the theatre, and see and hear the life of the day artificially put together, prettily set off, interwoven with a story, removed from reality by the masks, and brought near to it by manners In all this they take a childish delight, and again shout and clap, and make a noise. ”

“ The literature of the stage shows us with startling distinctness how in the world of the playwright there frequently went, along with the deepest and most original thought a revolting ferocity of manners, and along with a lofty sense of the beautiful and the pure a crude love of violence, a revelling in blood, a thirst for wanton outrage and low excitement. ”

“ A drama simple and vigorous, played throughout the countryside, where the energy of talent, the creative power which lies in the heart, and the youthful imagination of an entirely new people will do away with mere physical means, sumptuous stage-settings, and costumes, without which the feeble dramatists of this outworn age cannot move. ”

“ The theatre, which embodies so distinctively the peculiar essence of play that its performances have appropriated the name, takes us in a couple of hours through the epitomised experience of many persons extending over many years in circumstances far removed from our individual lives. Poetry, novels, biographies, histories, painting, music, and all the forms of art perform for us this same function. ”

“ As this great society has among its members organ-builders, sculptors, and gilders, so, assuredly, there are some who patronise the stage with learning and taste; and, just as they decorate their churches with appropriate ornaments, these clear-sighted men take advantage of the world's sensual eye by an imposing theatre. ”

“ The theatre has often been at variance with the pulpit: they ought not, I think, to quarrel. How much is it to be wished, that in both the celebration of nature and of God were entrusted to none but men of noble minds! ”

“ He that beholds with understanding eyes can see beneath the thin veil of the commonplace, the romance, the tragedy and the broad comedy that is being played upon the world’s stage by the actors great and little who tread the boards of the Theater of the Universe. ”

“ And not only does literature compete with the stage. Music, and other accomplishments of private life, are also now resorted to, for the purpose of furnishing an innocent amusement to the family circle—an amusement less attractive, perhaps, than the theatre, which, with all its errors, has still a powerful inherent charm, but preferred, nevertheless, as making up in simplicity, harmlessness, and cheapness, what it wants in the power of excitement. ”

“ As in a theatre, after the overture is played, the first thing shown to the audience is the scene in which the action of the drama commences, so let our first words be devoted to the locality in which the story opens. ”

“ The world’s a theatre, the earth a stage, ”

“ It is a religion of the imagination; all the arts of the imagination are pressed into its service; architecture, painting, sculpture, music, have lent all their charm to enchant the senses and impose on the understanding by substituting for the solemn truths of God's Word, which are addressed to the understanding, the fictions of poetry and the delusions of feeling. The theatre is a daughter of this prolific mother of abominations, and a child worthy of its dam. ”

“ How few faces does any one of us know that frankly radiate the great passions and moods of human nature! What little is left of this ancient tremendous drama is the poor pantomime of the stage. Search crowds, search {114} the streets. See everywhere masked faces, telling as little as possible to those around them of what they glory in or what they suffer. Search modern portrait galleries. ”

“ A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action. ”

“ If at the theatre you see a drama represented, and you feel impelled to judge within yourself whether this or that character is well played—whether the gestures, the expression of face, and the inflections of voice are such as properly belong to the character, and accord with the affections that move him, or the passions which agitate him—then hope. ”

“ These traps of scene, of situation, of climax, of acts and tableaux or of whatever they are, require to be set and adjusted with the utmost nicety and skill so that they will spring at the precise instant and in the precise manner to seize and hold the admiration—sympathy—interest—or whatever they may be intended to capture, of an audience. ”

“ Following the example of the illustrious model, whose style we consider it no humility, but rather an audacity, to imitate, we will suppose the recital to be made some time after the event has occurred, and we will imagine some veteran stage manager giving directions for, or superintending the rehearsal of, a grand dramatic representation of one of the grandest and—if we may be allowed the privilege of a literary smasher in coming a word—the dramaticest battles in English history. ”