ABSTRACT
Across many media of performance, audiences and spectators are increasingly a focus of study. Understanding spectatorship, and what it contributes to the meaning of any performance, is now an important topic in film and television studies, and emerging as a focus also for live performance events. Of course, there are various other paths to deducing or hypothesising audience response. Studies of the local context of any particular event may give us clues, as for example with the political circumstances which illuminate Heywood’s Play of the Weather. The effect on the audience is, of course, the end purpose of all drama; but it is also a key to understanding those elements of meaning that are only created in the act of performance itself, and which are often incalculable from the records of how plays were written or staged.
