ABSTRACT
In order to complete the meaning of a play it is necessary to have an audience. Each audience brings to a performance a series of assumptions and preconceptions, its own concerns and its own ways of making meanings. A skilful playwright understands this, and understands too that a play's meaning is created in the interaction between what an audience already knows and what it is offered by the play it sees. This chapter explores way in which the different audiences for whom William Shakespeare was writing may have conditioned what he wrote. It focuses on the idea of performance of plays at the court of King James. King Lear and Macbeth are plays whose structures derive in part from being written in the expectation of being performed at court. And if in King Lear Shakespeare presents an ambivalent attitude towards King James, in Macbeth he effectively inscribes James himself as a kind of ghostly and heroic presence within the play.
