A Monster with a Thousand Hands
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A Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection—the spectator—a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation. While audience and film studies have theorized the spectator, these fields tend to focus on the role of twentieth-century media (film, television, and the computer) in producing mass-culture viewers. Such emphases lead to a misapprehension that the discursive spectator is modernity's creature. Fearing anachronism, early modern scholars have preferred demographic studies of audiences to theoretical engagements with the «effects» of spectatorship. While demographic work provides an invaluable snapshot, it cannot account for the ways that the spectator is as much an idea as a material presence. And, while a few studies pursue the dynamics that existed among author, text, and audience using critical tools sharpened by film studies, they tend to obscure how early modern culture understood the spectator. Rather than relying exclusively on historical or theoretical methodologies, A Monster with a Thousand Hands reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry shaped both by changes in entertainment technologies and the interaction of groups and individuals with different forms of cultural production.
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A Monster with a Thousand Hands
The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England
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Chapter 3 explores the nascent role of the dramatic reader’s influence on the discursive spectator. Taking up Lukas Erne’s argument that Shakespeare’s later works were written for both readers and spectators,61 I look in detail at two of Shakespeare’s dramatic romances that are particularly interested in the figure of the reader: Pericles and Cymbeline. Rather than ask how this double focus affected Shakespeare’s writing, however, I focus on how this reimagining of receptive possibilities reinvigorates a particular (and long-standing) tension in the discursive spectator’s shape, which is the play between spectating as a communal or individual activity. Specifically, I revisit a (teleological) bias repeated by early modern and modern theorists of audience: that with the approach of modernity and its attendant subjective and technological revolutions, the viewing collective or audience of the early modern period transforms into the “isolated watcher,” or spectator.62 In addition to making the argument that individual and collective models are in play in the early modern period (and throughout history), I look at the ways in which Shakespeare’s romances, albeit narratives written for the stage, represent spectatorship as a fundamentally individual act, at least if it is being done well. Both Pericles and Cymbeline attempt to model “proper” spectatorship, a practice often tied to reading in both plays. In doing so, they suggest that spectatorial fashioning is not only desirable but possible, a shaping fantasy that parallels the concomitant introduction of certain textual apparatuses used to influence early modern readers in the early seventeenth century. However, this chapter concludes by suggesting how such disciplinary conventions fail as often as they succeed in shaping spectators and how discursive and material spectators as frequently conflict as align.
I continue studying the discursive spectator as an entity poised between the worlds of page and stage in Chapter 4, which traces changes occurring within the descriptive lexicon of spectatorial processes over a thirty-year period. I revisit the archive of the Jacobean court masque, a site widely identified as a flashpoint for the evolution of a more spectacularized theatrical practice and visually oriented spectator. Critics have tended to focus on Inigo Jones’s innovations in set design and lighting as the primary catalyst for this turn. Jones’s stagecraft, however, was not exported onto the public stage until the 1630s (and not consistently until the Restoration), while changes in descriptions of viewers and viewing practices are evident in the first decade of the seventeenth century. I argue that Jones’s collaborator and artistic rival, Ben Jonson, played the more significant role in generating these discursive changes. The concatenation of Jonson’s practical need to find a descriptive lexicon for Jones’s stagecraft and his anxiety that the masque’s spectacle consistently trumped its poetry generates one of the more profound changes to the seventeenth-century discourse on spectatorship: the representation of looking and listening as separate, even oppositional, interpretive activities.
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