Audience
The popular sermon was delivered in local churches, to people of high and low estate. When the churches were too small to contain the audience, the sermon was then moved to the public green. In either setting, the audience was usually unconstrained and could be rude and discourteous to the preacher. It was not uncommon for the people in attendance to move freely about and socialize with one another, address the friar, or walk out on the friar in the middle of his sermon. Thus, to keep the attention of the people, the popular sermon needed to be short and include elements which the people could relate to or find interest in. The friar might tell an anecdote, use folklore or verse sermon. To help make a point, it was not uncommon for the friar to embellish concerns of good and evil. The friar would use the occasional large word or a word from a foreign language to impress the lewd audience. The result was a vibrant, creative and well-received sermon.
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Famous quotes containing the word audience:
“The Taylor and the Painter often contribute to the Success of a Tragedy more than the Poet. Scenes affect ordinary Minds as much as Speeches; and our Actors are very sensible, that a well-dressed Play has sometimes brought them as full Audiences, as a well-written one.... But however the Show and Outside of the Tragedy may work upon the Vulgar, the more understanding Part of the Audience immediately see through it, and despise it.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man’s encounter with God is how he shall make the experience—which is both natural and supernatural—understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today’s audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)