ABSTRACT
Once the transposition of a story to the stage has been made, the pleasure the resultant play can give will depend upon two things: its fidelity to life as the audience knows it and, less immediately recognised but in the end of supreme importance, the satisfaction to be had from its formal qualities as an independent artefact. This chapter is concerned primarily with the mimetic aspect of drama, and so with some of the host of minimal characters in Shakespeare’s plays that result from his holding up the mirror to a hierarchical society in which all undertaking by the leading figures, from ordering dinner to conquering a country, depend upon executive forces: servants, officers, factions, armies and other active extremities of the body politic, down to ‘the great toe of this assembly’.
