Showing Versus Telling: Shakespeare’s Ekphraseis, Visual Absences, and the Cinema

Abstract

Drama offers the storyteller a simple choice about how to communicate each element of the story to the audience: show it, or have a character describe it. The use of both modes within one work is what distinguishes drama from mime, at one extreme, and from narrative recital at the other, but often we may sense that at a particular moment the use of one mode or other is conditioned by practical rather than aesthetic considerations. As a narrative unit the ‘car chase’ is confined to works in the medium uniquely suited to conveying its tension, the cinema, and we should expect drama’s strengths to lie elsewhere. Although physical playing space was limited, the theatre professionals of Shakespeare’s time did not shy away from attempting to represent events which are to be imagined occurring over large areas of space such as a battlefield, and they found a number of techniques to counter the physical limitations of their stage. The Chorus at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Henry V appears to apologize for the theatre’s inability to do justice to the events to be portrayed, but the rest of the play shows impressive ingenuity at representing battles and sieges by jumping from location to location, and by focusing on the Harfleur city-gate before which Henry makes his demands in III.iii.¹