...supposed necessity of making the drama credible." But nobody expects drama to be credible in that way. The truth is, that the spectators are always in their...stage, and that the players are only players. They came to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines...

...violation of the unities as presupposing that "any representation is mistaken for reality, " while the truth is that "the spectators are always in their...only a stage, and that the players are only players." Johnson's argument is strangely unequal in that he accomplishes the demolition of the old aesthetics...

...his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Cleopatra . . . The truth is that the spectators are always in their...stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.12 In other words, the dramatic fiction does not set out to deceive the audience by pretending...

...of the inflexible neoclassical position in the well-known passage from his "Preface to Shakespeare": "The truth is, that the spectators are always in their...only a stage, and that the players are only players." 5. I have argued that there is a common metaphysical grounding for the Essay on Criticism and the Essay...

...happening. We believe in it not as reality but as if it were reality. I quote again the often quoted lines: The truth is, that the spectators are always in their...only a stage, and that the players are only players. [...] It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit...

...are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the...only a stage, and that the players are only players < Co/2 3 1 > . They come to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation....

...and literature. What Dr. Johnson had to say about the dramatic unities seems also to apply to novels: The truth is that the spectators are always in their...only a stage, and that the players are only players .... It will be asked how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit...

...Most playgoers, however, are capable of the kind of dual consciousness described by Samuel Johnson: "the spectators are always in their senses, and know,...only a stage, and that the players are only players." 44 If Johnson is correct, spectators would not only have shared Cleopatra's fear, as Davies claims,...

...thought and behaviour in the face of artistic phenomena? Samuel Johnson's eighteenth-century answer was 'The truth is, that the spectators are always in their...only a stage, and that the players are only players' [13.30]. One's knowledge of the nature of an artistic activity, alluded to by Cohen [13.26] and myself...

...Johnson stresses the ficri tiousness of Shakespearean drama, and when he insists that the spectators 'know, from the first act to the last, that the stage...only a stage, and that the players are only players', he is denying that the play asks us to take it for real life.6 Coleridge thinks the spectator - temporarily...