"[The Floating Opera was a]  showboat that used to travel around the Virginia and Maryland tidewater areas....The boat wouldn’t be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would  sit along both banks.  They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they’d have to wait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there.  To fill in the gaps they’d have to use their imaginations, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver.  Most of the time they wouldn’t understand what was going on at all, or they’d think they knew, when actually they didn’t. "

                                                                             -John Barth, THE FLOATING OPERA