Swarthmore College Works English Literature Faculty Works English Literature 2014 Theorizing Audience and Spectatorial Agency Betsy Bolton Swarthmore College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Betsy Bolton. (2014). "Theorizing Audience and Spectatorial Agency". Oxford Handbook Of The Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832. 31-52. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199600304.013.012 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/188 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Literature Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CHAPTER 2 THEORIZING AUDIENCE AND SPECTATORIAL AGENCY BETSY BOLTON Audiences are a problem, and Georgian theatre audiences are more of a problem than many.' Records may yet yield more than we know, but there remain many questions about Georgian audiences that we may never be able to answer. We don’t know how a statistically significant sample of individual spectators responded to topical allusions or scandalous references. We don’t know how permeable in practice were the social boundaries attributed to pit, box, and gallery. We still don’t even know what constituted a ‘good’ house or what defined a ‘brilliant’ audience—though Judith Milhous notes that some of this evidence lurks in the highly