ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of audiences’ experiences in different kinds of Victorian texts: fictional narratives, reviews and essays. In this context, it investigates early theater livecasts as precursors of today’s digital streamings of theater productions. Selected wired theater productions are regarded as transmedial because they are made up of the implicit experiences of corporeal performance and an explicit one of the auditory broadcast performance. Crucially, the reviews and short essays present the livecasts as experiences that are centered on the listeners’ perception. Taking a historically-oriented approach, I am interested in the ways in which early forms of transmitted theater represented a form of transmediality that afforded an experience of liveness and of being an audience member that translated into an extended engagement with the livecast opera or theater play.
