well guess accurately when and where it’s going to emerge from the
cloud. This makes it different from thefirst, artistic kind of imagination.
The artist might well be fanciful or creative with her imaginings;
but that is not required of the person who correctly uses imagination to
fill in the gaps in sensory perception. The gap-filling imagination is
certainly required of the theatre audience; but it’s not peculiar to theatre,
or to art in general–as we’ve seen, it’s something we make use of all
the time.
What we’re looking for is what audiences typically do during a thea-
trical performance (but don’t typically do once the performance is over).
And here, it seems, we’re talking about imagining thatfills in gaps, to be
sure, but does so in a less sober manner than the Humean version we just
discussed. In the prologue ofHenry V, the Chorus asks the audience for
help: they must supplement the action with their imagination:
O pardon, since a crookedfigure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’th’receiving earth.
For‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass[...].^46What the Chorus asks of the audience is a kind of gap-filling, to be sure,
but it isn’t the same as what’s required of the plane-spotter. There’s
obviously a difference between imagining the plane in the cloud and
imagining that one man is an army. The kind of day-to-day, spatial
imagination would tell us that there’s one man there (and that he doesn’t
completely evaporate when he exits stage right); it isn’t what we’re doing
when we turn the single man into an army. I do not wish to assign to
Shakespeare (let alone to‘the Chorus’ofHenry V) a particular notion of
imagination, but the Chorus could be asking the audience for help in a
number of different ways. Consider the following three cases:
38 From the World to the Stage