ABSTRACT
Theatre is the most public of arts, transacted among persons, before persons, in some shared civic space. The pervasive use of theatre as a trope for all sorts of inward processes, faculties and activities, if it goes against the overt nature of theatre as public, interpersonal event, also picks up something essential about it, namely, that in some sense or senses, the theatre wants to go in. The devisers of these two “theatres” could not be more unlike: one, Giulio Camillo, was a sixteenth-century practitioner of Hermetic-Cabalistic magic; the other, David Hume, was an eighteenth-century rationalist philosopher. The design was never realized, the theatre never built. Hamlet famously likens acting to “a mirror up to nature,” a figure that lays stress on theatre’s out-and-about, world-surveying character.
