The picturesque world stage

The two hundred year old theatrical metaphor encouraged spectators in the eighteenth century to view the world as if it were a stage-set upon which humanity played and watched itself play. This world scene was no neutral backdrop but was itself a source of wonder; moreover, it could evoke strong emotions in the spectator. Even when the theatre of the day was not quite up to the job of pictorially representing the world; nonetheless, in the way it spatially organised figures and scenes, and how it made the spectacle of nature spectacular, it reinforced the idea of theatre in the theatrum mundi. Theatrum mundi expressed an ontological sense of place through its structural relationships of player/ place/spectator, and through its dramaturgy of players and roles. Although the theatrical metaphor suggested a particular spectatorial positioning, to picturesque painters and gardeners, the idea of the world stage no longer had the theological and humanist resonances of theatrum mundi. It emphasised instead the spectacular visuality of the world, but a world that was now safely bounded as a 'view'. However, it was theatricality as an idea, rather than the theatre itself, that influenced how spectators in the eighteenth century viewed the worlds that appeared to them: both microscopically magnified and worlds enlarged through exploration. Theatricality was, if you like, the Zeitgeist of the age and theatre had become, as Baugh, writes 'an available metaphor - a vehicle for the ordering, structuring and criticism of life' (Baugh 1990: 19). For Gilpin and others, who sought an affective representation of the world through painting, theatrical seeing enabled them to put the world they saw into the frame of art. The painters on Cook's voyages - and even more so the engravers that reproduced their work - represented the peoples of the South Pacific in a series of scenes which, for Loutherbourg, could then easily be rendered in the theatre. The artistic frame, in this way, became re-theatricalised. There is, at the heart of the term 'picturesque world stage', a paradox that this essay has attempted to unpack. The late eighteenth-century spectator demanded greater accuracy in the theatrical and artistic representation of the world in keeping with the empiricist ideals of the Enlightenment. Yet, the ontology of the theatrical metaphor suggested that the world that appeared to these spectators was a spectacle placed there to entertain them. Just as a scene played in a theatre could delight so too could views framed as scenes by the 'sensitive' traveller provide similar pleasures. Here the conventions of the picturesque outlined by Gilpin, and argued about and satirised by others, required an artistic rendering of the world at odds with naturalism because pictorial representation of the world depended on theatricalised seeing. No longer was the world a bare platform upon which the 'poor strolling player' strutted his stuff but was now an artfully composed picture engaged in a struggle with the terms of its own representation.