ABSTRACT
Detachment and engagement are of course crucial in a theater audience's experience. Engaged by what is taking place before him, the spectator is in some sense rapt out of himself, snatched by the poet "To Thebes, to Athens, when he will and where"—as Pope says, translating Horace in To Augustus. All of Shakespeare's plays show him keenly aware of the processes of audience engagement, and in a few instances he seems actually to make the nature of those processes part of the subject matter of his scene. Petruchio's stratagem is thus more than an entertaining stage device. It parodies the idolatrousness of romantic love which, as Theseus says, is always seeing Helen in a brow of Egypt; but it also reflects love's genuine creative power, which can on occasion make the loved one grow to match the dream. Touchstone is a good reminder that Shakespeare's plays exhibit foolery of two kinds, the dry and the sly.
