The inevitable result of the close proximity of the audience's emotions and the emotions of the works is different degrees of emotional resonance.

Diderot appealed to the dramatic poet to touch the hearts of the audience with serious and decent emotions, saying: "O poet! Are you sensitive? Buckle this string, and you'll hear it sound, vibrating in all hearts. To borrow this metaphor from Diderot, when the plot develops to a certain point, the artistic strings plucked by the dramatist and the heartstrings of the audience vibrate together at a similar frequency, which is emotional resonance.

Stanislavsky vividly describes the situation when it comes to resonance:

The audience, drawn into the creation, can no longer sit there calmly, and the actor no longer pleases him. At this moment, the audience is immersed in the stage and participates in the creation with emotions and thoughts. By the end of the show, he couldn't recognize his emotions clearly.

Some artists don't want the audience to get to the point where they can't even understand their emotions, but no artist can completely ignore the audience's empathy.

Li Yu said, "Drama and literature are watched with those who read and those who do not read, and they also watch with women and children who do not read", so no matter what artistic measures, we must "enjoy the elegance and the vulgar, and appreciate the wisdom and the foolish." Li Yu touches on an important condition for theatrical resonance: the ordinalization and universalization of theatrical emotion.

This question was complicated and unusually complicated during the European classical period. Especially in French classical drama, the strict boundaries and cumbersome etiquette of real life are all brought to the stage, and once the grand upper class enters the play, it is not allowed to be sandwiched into the slang emotions of the common people, on the contrary, the common life can only enter the comedy, and it is not allowed to express tragic feelings. Such a division has seriously damaged the infectious function of drama among the vast audience. For this reason, the Enlightenment, who challenged classicism, took the generalization and universalization of theatrical emotions as their own fighting banner. One of the topics they most often talked about was how to describe the emperors and nobles emotionally.

In the Hamburg Drama Review, Lessing noted:

The names of princes and heroes can bring magnificence and majesty to a drama, but they cannot be moving. The misfortunes of those around us naturally invade our souls deeply. If we feel sympathy for kings, it is because we treat them as human beings, not as kings. Their position often makes their misfortunes important, but it also makes them boring.

If wealth and glory and court etiquette turn man into a machine, then the writer's task is to turn this machine into a man again. True queens can be carefully crafted and pretended to speak, whatever they want. However, the queen of the writer's pen must speak naturally.

18th century German Marquis de Berott Opera House

Beaumarchais, a dramatist of the French Enlightenment, agreed with Lessing in his opinion:

We are happy to be psychologically the "henchmen" of the unfortunate prince, because his sorrows, his tears, his weaknesses, seem to bring his place in life closer to ours...... If we feel sympathy for the characters in the tragedy, it is not because they are heroes and emperors, but because they are unfortunate people.

All in all, in the eyes of the Enlightenment, it is not a person of some noble status who can enter the play, on the contrary, only when these "noble characters" have the heart of an ordinary person and have an emotion that can communicate with ordinary people, can they enter the play and achieve emotional effects.

The question of whether or not to write about ordinary emotions is very simple and clear today, but in creative practice, the generalization and universalization of emotions is still a common topic.

It is the responsibility of the dramatist to turn the emotion of the work into an emotion that can be approached and understood by the audience, so that it can be realized in the theater and in the hearts and minds of the audience. In concrete artistic practice, it is necessary to prevent "partiality" and "hypocrisy".

The so-called "partiality" refers to the fact that the emotional form is too trapped in a corner of life and is difficult to be understood by the audience outside the corner. For example, there are some peculiar hobbies and preferences that exist in life, but are not suitable for the experience of millions of normal audiences in the theater. If we want to make them present on the stage with a positive emotion, it is necessary to sort out the most basic reasons and logic for the hobbies and preferences of the people in the play, so that the ordinary audience can get emotionally close.

The so-called "hypocrisy" refers to the fact that the super-concentration state of a certain emotion makes it lose enough internal basis, and it is difficult for people to feel it. In the field of artistic creation, we often see that the audience is beginning to applaud the protagonist on the stage, but somehow the protagonist is seriously ill and insists on not going to the doctor, or insists on taking a dangerous night road for something that is not urgent; Or for a love object who has not much emotional foundation to speak of and has been missing for many years, he will not get married for ten or twenty years...... In this way, most viewers will not be able to understand it, and there will be no resonance.

A proper emotion that is neither "partial" nor "pretentious", if it loses the limit of indulgence in the process of unfolding, it will still lose the audience's resonance.

How can the limits of indulgence be mastered? With a careful prediction of the audience's emotional heat. When dramatists have learned the basic methods of expressing emotions, they often unilaterally call for wind and rain and pour out emotions to the audience. Only those experienced veterans will carry out controlled and moderate treatment of theatrical emotions on the basis of predicting the audience's emotional heat. It is said that a local drama in Shanxi Province has a plot in which a young man is wrongfully tied to the court and faints, and his fiancée rushes desperately to comb his hair. Her movements, calm and slow, even have a little bit of the shyness of the girl who has not passed through the door when she first touches the male body, but it is difficult for the audience not to be moved. This is a good example of emotional resonance achieved with emotional control.

There are many more examples of forcing the audience to resonate and the result backfires, which Stanislavsky calls the artisanal requirement of straight lines. The artisanal dramatist, he said, "expresses excitement and hysteria, cheerfulness and debauchery, neuroticism and madness, fainting and pharynge, modesty and twisting." In Stanislavsky's view, this form of expression is due to the absence of experience, but it may also be the loss of necessary control due to experience. As Brooke puts it, "The actor in the midst of passion has become a slave to that passion, and he cannot break free from it if the slightest subtle change in his lines requires something new to adapt to it." In this way, of course, it is difficult to involve the emotions of the audience, because he has occupied the emotions of the theater too much and too fiercely, and the emotions of the audience are in an extremely passive state, and there is little room for intervention.

Giving up territory for the audience's emotions is the key to empathy.

According to the thinking principle repeatedly stated in this book, the purpose of all actions on the stage is to the audience, and the presentation of dramatic emotions is of course to arouse the audience's emotional investment. When the audience's emotions are finally aroused, there is not enough time and space for them to circulate, and it still has no place to exist, so it still cannot exist. In this case, there is not the slightest possibility of emotional resonance.

Even if the emotional choice of glorifying the beautiful and exposing the ugly is as simple as that, it is important to leave room for the viewer to praise and hate on their own, rather than for the artist to take care of it. Covering too much will not only make the audience's feelings lose their initiative, but also have the opposite effect. For example, as the French playwright Gaunay put it, if the punishment of criminals on stage is too cruel, it will make the audience feel too harsh, and cause a reversal of sympathy. There seem to be very few first-rate works in the history of modern theatre that violate the norms that Gao Naiyi put it, and generally do not show or describe what kind of torture is to be inflicted on criminals. At this point, the dramatist cannot accommodate the demands of some audiences for "resentment". In fact, the plot of the drama has developed to such an extent that the audience has already emotionally punished the offender.

Wolfgang Wagner, Valkyrie

The audience's emotions are like a scale, and the artist has no freedom to dispose of emotions as he pleases. It should be seen that in the open and dark space in front of the stage, the emotions of the audience are slowly accumulating through careful scales. It is only by respectfully being sensitive to the presence of this vast emotional entity that it is possible to resonate with the stage.