Stages and Playgoers demonstrates the long, vital tradition of dialogue between stage and audience from medieval, through Tudor, to Jacobean drama. Janet Hill offers new insights into techniques of addressing playgoers from the stage and how they might have operated under particular staging conditions. Hill calls this dialogue open address, a term that takes in a range of speeches often called asides,
monologues, and soliloquies. She argues that open address is a strategy that challenges playgoers, asking for answers that lie outside the stage in the playgoer/playhouse world.