A Stage is All the World

Abstract

Theatre is the least literary and most social of all the verbal arts. The poet or story-teller (unless he is working in an oral tradition) completes his work and the reader is then merely the recipient of his creation; but a play is not really complete until it is performed and the performance requires both actors and spectators, for without an audience there can be no real theatre.¹ Drama is therefore essentially a group activity and the two milieux in which it flourished in the Middle Ages were the civic and religious communities, the city and the church.

The dog who preferred the reflection of his bone in the water to the bone itself, though from a practical point of view he made a lamentable mistake, was aesthetically justified.

(Havelock Ellis)