결과등록시 초록은 학술논문에 게재되어 있는 주초록으로 대체하였음.
본 논문에는 별도에 목차가 없음.

결과등록시 초록은 학술논문에 게재되어 있는 주초록으로 대체하였음.
본 논문에는 별도에 목차가 없음.

This article is a study of four modern dramatists' artistic consciousness and techniques for audience response; T. S. Eliot, Peter Shaffer, Sam Shepard, and Samuel Beckett. They indicate the complexity of their interest in the audience's rel ...

This article is a study of four modern dramatists' artistic consciousness and techniques for audience response; T. S. Eliot, Peter Shaffer, Sam Shepard, and Samuel Beckett. They indicate the complexity of their interest in the audience's relationship with performance rather than with specific dramatic texts.

Though the action of Murder in the Cathedral is centered on Becket's martyrdom, it is to a great extent dependent on the Chorus. The Chorus of the poor women of Canterbury acts as the commentator as well as congregational representative for the audience, and for the religious conscience of humanity. Eliot makes the Chorus coexistent with his theatre audience, who would take their cue from the Chorus which shows the audience how they should react. Eliot encourages his audience not just to witness the events on stage but to join the Chorus, which represents the unified development towards consciousness.

Shaffer, in Equus, makes the narrative structure using flashback scenes mediated by the psychiatrist, acting as an omniscient narrator. Through a series of conceived monologues Dysart directly addresses the audience, who supplies a neutral sympathetic ear for him. For the action of the play on the audience is analogous to that of the play's psychiatrist on his patient, the processes of discovery of the play draw the audience into Dysart's 'black cave of the Psyche' to explore the real motives behind its normal existence. And by the use of ritualistic elements of the play and by the modulation from acting to observing to acting repeatedly, Shaffer leads his audience to participate at several levels, observing, thinking, interpreting, and experiencing.

In Buried Child, the true story may not be told and the characters finally remain unknown quantities. Shepard frustrates the audience's ability to resolve the action of the play, though it involves the apparent revelation of the family's secret. Shepard instead explores the primacy of the image in the audience's construction of meaning by the use of a character who serves as an objective presence. As an outsider with no familial ties Shelly forces the discovery of the secret that binds the family together. Her objective viewpoint provides the audience with a perspective from which the reality of this family's life can be judged, for her process of coming into knowledge is similar to that of the audience.

A routine endlessly repeated by the characters and the thematic elements of the title, ending and playing, suggest a circular structure of Endgame as a whole. Beckett's metafictional characters, being locked in the dynamic between a continual invitation to closure and renewed opening, are acting out a game, playing repeated roles for all entities to escape the agony of existence. And while the game is being played by the characters, Beckett makes another exist in progress between his characters and the theatre audience. When the audience gives itself to the game, its separate identity in the experience of the play becomes the incomparable reality of the play. Beckett's point is the metadramatic strategies guiding the audience's metaexperience of one's own communicative acts.

Four playwrights, provoking particular expectations and responses within the audiences, try to make them conscious of what is being done to them and of their role in a living theatre. If the nature of the audience changes from passive viewer to active creator of the theatrical event, then so does the cultural status of the theatrical event.