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"HENCE! HOME, you idle creatures get you home:/ Is this a holiday?'' (1.1.1-2). Flavius upbraids ''certain Commoners'' at the start of Julius Caesar. The abrupt opening sets the scene of busy Rome and its tensions between ruling and plebeian classes. At the same time, however, the audience in the theater are themselves being deliciously berated. The audience are also ''idle creatures'' attending the play instead of working. To be an audience, perhaps, is to necessarily be ''idle''; watching plays is something done in leisure time. Flavius's metatheatrical joke capitalises on a latent shared suspicion that watching plays is unproductive, passive, voyeuristic. If to be skilled is to be skilled at something, and if to be in the audience is to be idle, then there might be no point in pursuing a discussion of audience ''skill.''
However, the very participation in the metatheatrical joke aligning the berating of the plebeians in the play with the upbraiding of the audience at the Globe Theatre demands cognitive dexterity, social awareness, and emotional versatility (to laugh at oneself). Jeremy Lopez has written that ''Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was extremely self-conscious'' in terms of its metatheater and ''non-naturalistic mode of drama.'' He adds that ''it demanded an equal self-consciousness from its audience.''1 The metatheatricality of the surviving texts of the plays suggests that audience selfconsciousness was integral to the theatrical dynamic; in turn, interpreting and exploiting this dynamic has become central to the work of the new Shakespeare's Globe.
In this discussion of Julius Caesar and the work of its audiences I shall use the production of Julius Caesar directed by Mark Rylance at the Shakespeare's Globe in 1999. I draw upon my own observations, as well as the useful study of the rehearsal and performance run carried out by Eva Koch-Schulte. Koch-Schulte notes that: ''looking closely at the text of Julius Caesar it becomes obvious that the drama supports this tendency [for the actors to make frequent eye contact with the audience] by offering numerous opportunities for the players to directly address their audience.''2 The effect of the direct address and eye contact is to establish (intermittently at least) that ''actor and audience share their common knowledge about the existence of a world outside the dramatic world.'' Koch-Schulte goes...