Theartre as Virtual Reality Media
――Concerning Pierre Corneille's L'Illusion comique――
1999 Volume 37 Pages 365-383
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1999 Volume 37 Pages 365-383
Some philosophers conceive today that the present popularity of the media of virtual reality is connected with the collapse of the judgement of value at a deep level. A similar complex phenomenon was found at the dawn of the Modern Age. The theatre, which invented the technique of perspective scenery, functioned in a sense as a sort of VR medium. We can verify this fact in the case of P. Corneille's L'Illusion comique (1635-6), which has a very specific structure of the double “theatre within theatre”.
In those days Skepticism prevailed among European intellectuals. For them the world ―the medieval cosmos― seemed to be transformed into a kind of simulacrum of theatre, not vice versa. L'Illusion comique represents this transformation by means of the double structures of theatre within theatre, i. e. virtual reality. Therefore, it can be undertood to be a formative apparatus of the modern world, as J.-M. Apostolides says.
