This dissertation examines the concept of imagination – in the human mind and on the stage. The scope is twofold: On the one hand, to examine the cultural history of imagination in a European context; on the other hand, to analyze the cultural enactment of imagination in the drama text as potential performance with the audience as active co-players. The dissertation’s examination of the cultural history of imagination via three selected periods uncovers a very complex, variable and diverse conception of imagination: From the perception of imagination in the Renaissance as a reproductive but potentially distorting and corrupt mirror; over the idealist and romantic view of imagination as a productive, creative force, like a lamp by whose divine light new insights could be illuminated; to the existentialist, phenomenological, modernist understanding of imagination as simultaneously intentionality and nothingness. This analysis of the context and theory of imagination forms the basis of three analyses of the imagination in text and practice. Via dramaturgical close readings of three dramas of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Ionesco respectively, the dissertation examines both how the spectator’s imagination is activated, and how the insight into the history of imagination may uncover hitherto unnoticed thematic layers in the text.