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CHAPTER 1

Toward a Theory of Discursive Spectatorship

Near the turn of the twentieth century, a young Russian journalist began a short piece for the Nizhegorodski listok newspaper with the following description:

Last night I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows. If only you knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life, but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.¹

His observations echo a number of modernity’s oft-cited maladies: a decresence of human experience via exposure to the industrialized workplace and landscape, an anesthetized perceptual habitus owing to urban life’s sensory overstimulation and relentless pace, and subjective erosion augmented by the inexorable force of mass labor’s and culture’s hegemonizing engines. But, although written by the young Maxim Gorky (who became one of Russia’s most outspoken voices against some of these pressures) in late imperial Russia, it is not a day-in-the-life account but a review of the newest invention from the Continent, the Lumière cinematograph.² From Gorky’s description, this novelty does not sound as if it would have much of a draw: why would people go see a lifeless effigy of their already diluted existence? Nor does Gorky mention any compensatory gratifications here—such as those Tom Gunning describes in his theory of “the cinema of attractions”—there are no foreign lands or fantastical fictions.³ Instead, it depicts what for many would be familiar scenes: city streets bustling with people and carriages, trains rushing to various destinations, and a group of men at a bar drinking and playing cards. The only pleasure it seems to offer is the thrill of witnessing another new form of optical wizardry and the concomitant satisfaction of affirming humankind’s relentless march toward “progress” via technological advancement.

Despite his initial description of the less-than-scintillating panorama, Gorky’s narrative suggests that eventually the cinematograph’s spell takes hold of him. While the adjective “grey” predominates in the first paragraph (shown above), the second demonstrates a surprising about-face: “The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances.”⁴ Despite this new medium’s communicative limitations, it manages to create a surprising and novel vraisemblance:

Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight towards you—watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice….

This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague and sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim.⁵

Contrasts abound in Gorky’s account. Despite his claim that the medium creates only a pale facsimile of human existence (“this mute, grey life”), it also encompasses the ability to render mass and acceleration through affect rather than physics. Watching the image of a moving train, Gorky becomes pulled suddenly into incarnate sentience, as the experience renders him acutely aware of his existence as flesh-and-blood organism, “a ripped sack of lacerated flesh and splintered bones.” And, while he similarly imagines the exhibition hall “crushing into dust and broken fragments,” Gorky also becomes newly sensitized to the edifice as reliquary of some of human culture’s most vital pleasures, “women, wine, music, and vice.” This early version of “the movies,” a silent, black-and-white, two-dimensional, mobile, and highly selective narrative form, both enervates and overstimulates Gorky. Although limited to communicating primarily through the visual codes of movement in grayscale, this technology causes him to imagine pain, experience fear, and become absorbed to the extent that he can only describe it through the metaphor of losing consciousness. The “movement of shadows, only shadows” initiates a new level of perceptual acuity in Gorky, one that makes the old (“you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene”)⁶ foreign, strange, new.

Let me turn to a different account of shadows, this time, of the ilk mentioned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“The best in this kind are but shadows” [5.1.208])⁷ and found in sometime actor, playwright, and moralist Anthony Munday’s account of the early modern stage:

For the strangest Comedie brings greatest delectation and pleasure. Our nature is led awaie with vanitie, which the auctor perceiving frames himself with novelties and strange trifles to content the vaine humors of his rude auditors, faining countries never heard of; monsters and prodigious creatures that are not: as of the Arimaspie, of the Grips, the Pigmeies, the Cranes, & other such notorious lies. And if they write of histories that are knowen, as the life of Pompeie; the martial affaires of Caesar, and other worthies, they give them a newe face, and turne them out like counterfeites to showe themselves on the stage. It was therefore aptlie applied of him, who likened the writers of our daies vnto Tailors, who having their sheers in their hand, can alter the facion of anie thing into another forme, & with a new face make that seeme new which is old.⁸

At first glance, the differences between Gorky’s and Munday’s two descriptions seem more abundant than their likenesses. Rather than depicting the familiar (city life, people leaving a factory, transportation methods), Munday describes fantastical portrayals that stretch credulity. Gorky’s account suggests a singular perspective and subjectively isolated experience, whereas Munday’s implies a collective one, both through his use of the plural pronoun—“our” natures and “our” days—and his reference to the amassed “auditors.” A closer look at these accounts, however, reveals certain symmetries. Gorky’s place of exhibition, filled with women, wine, music, and vice, resonates with Munday’s description of the theater crammed full of “rude auditors.” Additionally, Munday understands the theater as a place where vice flourishes and in which women are rendered particularly vulnerable: “The Theatre I found to be an appointed place of Bauderie; mine owne eares have heard honest women allured with abhominable speeches. Sometime I have seene two knaves at once importunate upon one light huswife, whereby much quarel hath growen to the disquieting of manie.”⁹ Despite the “greyness” that pervades much of Gorky’s narrative, the cinematograph provides him with a profoundly, if terrifyingly, embodied experience; Munday also represents London’s professional theaters and plays themselves as exceptionally somatic. His claim that the theater caters to its audiences’ “vaine humors” suggests the early modern period’s understanding of playgoing as an inherently embodied undertaking: “humors” invokes both “mood” or “inclination” and the body’s governing fluids. While Munday mentions plays’ sometimes fantastical plots, he also discusses another genre—the history play—in which “the life of Pompey, the martial affairs of Caesar” are given “new faces, and turn[ed] … out like counterfeits,” which sounds akin to Gorky’s “familiar” scenes made unheimlich: “You anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life.”¹⁰ Indeed, Munday’s description of playwrights as “tailors” (or “play-patchers” as Tiffany Stern calls them)¹¹ brings to mind early filmmaking, which was far more about editing than original narrative. Finally, although the cinematograph is an almost entirely new entertainment technology in the late nineteenth century and plays in the late sixteenth century were not,¹² both Gorky’s and Munday’s descriptions discuss forms of entertainment that are novel to the culture that produces them. The cinematograph is new in that it introduces the quality of movement to photographic representation; the late sixteenth-century theater is new in that it presents secular dramatic material written by professional writers and acted by professional actors for profit. Most significantly, both commentators see these communicative mediums as having the ability to mesmerize their onlookers, transporting them to something akin to an alternative reality. Gorky describes his mind being “invaded” by “strange imaginings” and his consciousness “wan[ing] and grow[ing] dim,” and Munday speaks of the auditors’ “nature” being “led away with vanity.” This potency, according to both commentators, functions like sorcery (or chicanery). Gorky calls it “Merlin’s vicious trick,”¹³ and Munday imagines the playwright as a kind of puppeteer who manipulates not only his art form but his audience: “Our nature is led awaie with vanitie, which the auctor perceiving frames himself with novelties and strange trifles.”

How might we read these similarities? As proleptic? As a form of transhistorical continuity in terms of audience reception? Perhaps. Alternatively, these two commentaries, much like the epigraphs with which this book begins, demonstrate another kind of connection, one that is discursive rather than affective or material. Certainly, discursive tendencies can be discerned between these writers and their historical contemporaries. The version of Gorky’s article cited above appears in a contemporary scholarly collection that collates it with other early twentieth-century articles that review the Lumière cinematograph. The editors attribute the manifold parallelisms between Gorky’s description and others’ (for example, O. Winter’s 1896 article on the cinematograph for New Review and an unattributed 1898 article for Punch articulate the machine’s effect in ways that echo Gorky with surprising precision)¹⁴ to discursive influences, or “schools of critical thought” such as “the photographic and scientific community, the entertainment sector, and … most vividly, the general press and general public.”¹⁵ As for Munday, some scholars have claimed that the “plaigiaristic” nature of the antitheatricalists’ writings makes them unworthy of serious consideration.¹⁶ My interest in these iterations, however, is not in gauging their originality as a means of determining either their earnestness or worth; rather, I take them as traces of the Western entertainment spectator’s discursive history, a history to which Gorky and Munday are subject. That is to say, many of the homologies between their claims, such as their agreement that popular mass entertainment “tricks” its audiences into confusing the fictional with the real, have had a potent and transhistorical hold on the Western cultural imaginary. Both authors, however, are not mere repositories and perpetuators of this history but contributors to it. For, while Munday and Gorky repeat certain “tenets” of mass culture, they adapt others to fit the descriptive needs engendered by their particular historical, cultural, and technological moment. Pulled between these two modes of representation (the chronic and the adaptive), these two social critics’ interpretations similarly display twinned anxieties. One prevalent concern is iterative: it centers on a culturally inculcated view that entertainment “spectacles” have a profound, perhaps irrevocable, impact on those who watch them. The other, and less immediately apparent, is adaptive: both critics endeavor to find adequate terminology to describe the experience these novel diversions create and the sort of interaction they invite or produce (a lexical challenge suggested by both writers’ excessive use of metaphor). A pattern emerges that links these two writers, immutably separated by time and space: both bear witness to cultural moments where a need arises to resurrect long-standing cultural myths about spectators while finding new ways to understand, discuss, and represent the act of spectatorship.

The link I have outlined here is a tenuous one: large, loose and, some might even say, naïvely ahistorical. I begin with this connection, however, to highlight the continuities across time in the spectator’s discursive history, ones that have been obscured by critics’ tendency to highlight the differences between modern and premodern spectatorial practices, practices they imagine as being initiated and shaped by technology and exhibition. Consider, for example, Andrew Gurr’s claims about the essential differences between early modern and contemporary audiences:

“Audience” is a collective term for a group of listeners. A “spectator” is an individual, seeing for him or herself. Modern playgoers are set up, by their physical and mental conditioning, to be solitary spectators, sitting in the dark watching a moving picture, eavesdroppers privileged by the camera’s hidden eye. In fundamental contrast, the early modern playgoers were audiences, people gathered as crowds, forming what they called assemblies, gatherings or companies. They sat or stood in a circle round the speakers who were enacting what they came to hear and see. An audience comes to hear, and therefore it clusters as closely as possible around the speaker. Spectators come to see, and so they position themselves where they can confront the spectacle.¹⁷

Although Gurr begins by comparing early modern and modern playgoers, he moves quickly to associating modern spectators with film, saying they are “eavesdroppers privileged by the camera’s hidden eye.” His elision of film and theater, or more accurately, his tacit claim that “modern” spectators are shaped by cinema, illustrates the ways that studies of spectatorship (and even the term spectator itself) has been overdetermined as a modern phenomenon. Despite the fact that he later acknowledges the use of spectator by early modern writers, Gurr makes the case here that by and large, the term is anachronistic as a referent for early modern theatergoers. Like many cultural theorists, Gurr understands twentieth-century spectatorship as image-rather than language-driven, fostering a sense of private, even voyeuristic looking and interactive only in a virtual sense.

Gurr’s demarcation points to a question that drives much of this study: how did early modern playwrights see the difference between “an audience” and “spectators”? Did they adhere to Gurr’s neat sensory and subjective taxonomies, or were they less clear about such differences? Why did the term spectator appear in the English language during the late sixteenth century at all: what conceptual work might it signify? In order to begin addressing such questions, I explore some of the term’s earliest instances and contexts in order to trace certain discursive threads that begin to coalesce around the figure of the spectator during the final decades of Elizabeth I’s reign. Three of the most widely repeated conventions are as follows:

• Spectatorship constitutes a dynamic exchange between the theatrical event and the individuals experiencing it. Frequently, it is portrayed as a violent, even traumatic, experience.

• Spectatorship suggests a collective experience shared by a community of interpreters. The energies generated by this community are believed to contain a creative spark that imitates or mimics the divine.

• Spectatorship is not an experience relegated to the sensory binary of audial-visual, but is imagined and articulated as one that activates multiple senses for the spectator.

Although distinct, these “tenets” do not exist in isolation. Rather, they intersect at a larger early modern concern about the spectator, one still highly topical at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each of these concepts represent an initial attempt by early modern writers to articulate the theater’s unique ability to create something that could (a) seem more real to the spectator than reality itself, and (b) cause the spectator to want (or even at times attempt) to inscribe this alternative reality onto the world in which he or she lived. In other words, what was it about the particular interaction between theatrical performance and the theatrical spectator that opened up a space where the imaginary could, even if only temporarily, become confused with or mistaken for the real? To use a contemporary analogy, film and television are often seen as particularly effective mechanisms for the dissemination of ideology because of how they manipulate the viewer’s point of view. Techniques such as continuity editing, camera angle, and film speed create a uniquely “real” experience for the spectator, one designed to enhance perceptual experience and detail. But the early modern professional theater, using what we would today call “minimalist” sets and other nonrealistic conventions (such as having boys play women and the doubling and tripling of roles), would seem to provide clear signposts of the theater’s fictionality. As Philip Sidney points out in his Apologie for Poetrie, “What child is there that, coming to a play and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?”¹⁸ Clearly the potency of the theatrical experience for the early modern spectator was not based on the sort of verisimilitude created by modern viewing technologies. Was it, then, that the theater engaged the spectator’s imagination through completely different channels, or was it that verisimilitude itself meant something different to the early modern spectator?

The three concepts of spectatorship outlined above provide a starting point for exploring these questions. Rather than attempting to excavate actual spectatorial experience, I assess how those who thought and wrote about this figure imagined and tried to articulate and control that experience. As with the case of Gorky, some of this narrative comes from “real” or perceptual experience. Many of the individuals writing about the theater (whether for or against) were themselves theatergoers; certainly Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights attended the theater, and many of the “antitheatricalists” were former playwrights and actors. Some of the narrative, however, comes from preexisting ideas about the spectator that arrives in the sixteenth century through oral (folklore, gossip, sermons) and written discourse (moralist and philosophical treatises, romance, and classical drama). Therefore, while my project seeks to articulate an early modern theory of discursive spectatorship that is my own, the ideas from which it is constructed are theirs. Found in a range of late sixteenth-century writings on and for the theater, these texts grapple with the figure of the spectator and the “new” experiences of looking that developed alongside the rise of the professional theater in early modern England. For those writing against the theater, the sorts of interpretive exchanges that occurred in the playhouse were seen as potentially subversive and ultimately detrimental to the individual and society. For those invested in and writing for the stage, this dynamic was not only celebrated but, as my later chapters explore, feared, as the energies generated when spectators and drama met in the theater were not easily predicted or controlled. Before turning to those writers who were engaged actively in this debate, I first visit the site where the term spectator emerges: a prose romance penned by one of the most spectacular figures of the Elizabethan court.

The Active–Passive Spectator and the Rhetoric of Violence

Gurr’s claim that the collective term audience triumphed over the solitary spectator in early modern references is only partly accurate. While audience may have been used more frequently than spectator, both are found regularly in writings about the stage and other forms of early modern spectacle.¹⁹ The term first appears in the sixteenth century: the Oxford English Dictionary cites Philip Sidney as the first Anglophone author to use spectator in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.²⁰ It appears with greater frequency as the late sixteenth century (and playgoing culture) progresses, and, by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, is used regularly to refer to theater audiences and other groups gathered together for the purpose of looking. For early modern writers who settled on spectator as another way of representing the “audiences,” “beholders,” and “onlookers” of their culture, this term did not evoke the same sorts of meaning we assign it from our twentieth-century critical perspective. But how did it function for them? Gurr suggests it filled a particular need in the vocabulary of playwrights concerned with the interpretive tension between looking and listening, particularly by those who used it to deride audiences that preferred the visual side of stagecraft to linguistic artistry. Citing Ben Jonson as chief among detractors of those who come primarily to look rather than listen, Gurr states, “Every time Jonson called his auditors ‘spectators,’ as he almost invariably did, he was covertly sneering at the debased preference for stage spectacle rather than the poetic ‘soul’ of the play, which he claimed they could only find by listening to his words.”²¹ Jonson, of course, is something like an early modern version of Mikey from the Life cereal commercials of the 1970s—he hates everything—and therefore is not the most objective of cultural witnesses. But Gurr claims that Jonson is by no means the only critic of the “barren spectators”; apparently, many of Jonson’s contemporaries shared the view that poetry was losing out to spectacle.²²

In claiming, however, that even in the early modern period the term spectator was tied inextricably to the visual, Gurr contradicts his initial claim about the difference between Renaissance audiences and contemporary ones. If early modern playgoers “were audiences,” and an audience “comes to hear,” why did there emerge a need for a term that separates lookers from listeners? Neither Sidney nor Edmund Spenser, two of the earliest English writers to use the term, wrote for the stage; therefore, it is unlikely that the competition between sight and hearing that obsessed Jonson and his contemporaries would have held the same charge for them.²³ Gurr himself expresses some confusion over Sidney’s use of spectator, since he assumes the poet would naturally privilege hearing over seeing: “Curiously the first writer to use the term ‘spectator’ appears to have been that most critical of educated and gentlemanly playgoers, Philip Sidney.”²⁴ Gurr does not delve further into this question, making it seem as though “spectator” was simply another neologism generated during a particularly fecund epoch for the English language. However, spectator functions neither as a mere writerly synonym nor a term coined to designate a particular sort of playgoer. Unlike other neologisms of the period that spring fully formed into the English language, spectator is a translation and a very literal one at that. Before Sidney’s rendition, the Latin spectator was usually translated as “beholder” or “looker-on.”²⁵ For example, in an account of the festivities orchestrated for the Duc d’Alencon’s visit to Antwerp in 1582, Arthur Golding translates those that stand and watch the extravagant spectacles as “beholders.”²⁶ Sidney uses beholders seventeen times in the Arcadia, whereas spectator appears only twice. The question is, why did it appear at all? What representational lacuna does spectator fill for Sidney?

Similar to Golding’s usage, Sidney’s uses beholder to describe onlookers; for example, in Book I, beholders describes those who watch the portrait pageant held by Phalantus of Corinth to choose the most beautiful of eleven noble women. His first use of spectator, however, occurs during a narrative detour in which Sidney attempts to elucidate a complex dynamic of witnessing, one generated by a singular perspective and charged with psychic drama. Having lost his kingdom through his bastard son’s treachery, the usurped king of Paphlagonia (Leonatus) provides his betrayal’s backstory through narrative flashback. The “real-time” action begins when Leonatus’s recreant son Plexirtus discovers that his father and younger (and legitimate) brother are still alive and have reunited. In something of a panic, Plexirtus sets out to find and kill them: “But by and by the occasion was presented: for Plexirtus (so was the bastard called) came thether with fortie horse, onely of purpose to murder this brother; of whose comming he had soone advertisement, and thought no eyes of sufficient credite in such a matter, but his owne; and therefore came himself to be actor, and spectator.”²⁷ In terms of signification, Sidney’s use of spectator appears to function in contradistinction to actor, an entity that represents the passive and impressionable side of this subjective equation. As both actor and spectator, Plexirtus should form a holistic spectatorial entity, an interpretive version of Aristophanes’s sexually unified originary beings.²⁸ Instead, the two terms butt up uncomfortably against one another in the phrase, creating a sense of fragmentation rather than unity. In part, the narrative itself generates this dynamic. We already know that Plexirtus is a study in contradictions: he seems loyal, humble, and temperate but in reality is duplicitous, proud, and ambitious. But the interpretive yin and yang that Sidney seems to want to portray here feels odd, in large part because he tries on the new term spectator rather than using the tried-and-true beholder, a substitution that hints at a desire to represent something other than neatly opposing modes of interaction. What that is, exactly, is unclear; however, a kind of anschauung undergirds both actor and spectator here. Plexirtus does not merely set out to get rid of his annoying little brother but sets out to see what he needs to see: he “thought no eyes of sufficient credite in such a matter, but his owne.” Plexirtus is “actor” in that he seeks to confront the sight of his younger brother’s material reality; he is “spectator” in that his witnessing this physical entity is the sine qua non for Plexirtus’s subjective and psychic alteration from king into illegitimate usurper. The visual, then, becomes the epistemological channel that bridges the active and passive modes occupied by “actor” and “spectator” in this passage. Perhaps, as Gurr claims, the emergence of spectator as a term reflects a corresponding rise or reaffirmation of sight as the preeminent sense through which individuals came to know the world in the late sixteenth century. However, a question remains as to why Sidney did not rely on the more customary beholder, a term that would have evoked visual experience equally well.

One possibility is that Sidney attempts to express a relationship between acting and looking organized around a schema other than that offered by oppositional or complementary polarities. His statement that Plexirtus became “actor, and spectator” follows an equally enigmatic lead-in phrase: “and therefore came him selfe to be actor, and spectator” (my italics). On the one hand, Plexirtus’s “coming to be” is literal in that he comes in his own person to see for himself what he has heretofore only heard. On the other hand, the phrase “came him selfe to be” gives the figurative sense that a transformation has taken place in Plexirtus, not one that is physical or moral but experiential. Plexirtus’s actions here follow a specific, if empirically topsyturvy, trajectory in this passage: he does not see and then desire but desires and then sees. The reverse cause and effect described here seems to initiate a particularly powerful generative force, one that, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase about subjectivity in the period, is “resolutely dialectical” in nature.²⁹ When Plexirtus comes to be actor and spectator, he undergoes a transformation that is neither enacted upon him by outside forces (such as God or nature) nor completely generated by his imagination or psyche. Rather, the act of “coming of himself to be” necessitates being active and passive simultaneously. It is a chaos of agency, a collision of imaginative and experiential selves, a doing and a being done to. Rather than expressing polarities of experience (active/passive), Sidney struggles to express what happens when these seemingly divergent energies are yoked together, a struggle revealed in the very structure of the phrase. Sidney describes Plexirtus’s active transformation (the creation of himself as both actor and spectator) through the passive voice: he “comes to be.” When Sidney transports the term spectator, then, from one language to another virtually unchanged, it is not because he is running low on vocabulary but because he is trying to communicate something more turbulent and more subjective than beholding designates.

The disruptive rhythms generated by this primal chaos of dasein offer a kind of cultural seismograph, one that gauges moments during which the discursive spectator gains (or, more accurately, regains) traction in a given historical period. In 1584, when Sidney grasps for a signifier that encapsulates late sixteenth-century dynamics of reception, particularly those surrounding fictional representation, the sixteenth-century English incarnation of the spectator is still inchoate in form and concept but rapidly materializing in various discourses found in the period. Several other late Elizabethan writers echo Sidney’s use of the term in that they use it to describe an event that changes the viewing subject’s identity in some fashion. In his epic romance Vertue’s History, Francis Rous describes a scene of exquisite horror:

Of bloody gusts, and those vermilion swordes,

Which dide themselues in brothers broken hearts,

How swimming blood in streets made flowing fords,

And ruthfull turmoyles rose in diuers parts

I meane to sing.³⁰

He then calls upon a nameless “spectator” to avenge these wrongs: “Which while these things were done spectator [sic] stoode: / Lift up blacke Nemesis thy glowing eyes.” Again, the observer described here is one who is called to occupy the positions of both actor and spectator, to witness and then avenge. Even closer to Sidney’s usage is the example found in Samuel Daniel’s Poetical Essays: “O faithlesse Cosen, here behold I stand / Spectator of that act my selfe haue plaid.”³¹ Daniel’s speaker addresses his cousin who has betrayed him (“thou dost me wrong / T’usurpe the government I held so long”), and, while the narrative situation is a reversal of Plexirtus’s, his spectatorial positioning is similar in that it is only in the seeing of his betrayer that the reality of his new identity (betrayed, powerless) becomes fully realized.³²

There is another connection between these examples in that they all describe acts of violence. Sidney’s spectator sets out to see, then murder, his father and brother; Rous’s witnesses a bloodbath, and Daniel’s has been betrayed and overthrown by a family member. These scenarios do not simply describe instances of witnessing violence; rather, they suggest a process whereby this witnessing causes the subject to alter not only at the internal, psychic level (à la psychoanalysis) but at the manifest, social one. When Plexirtus sees his father and brother, he is forced to see himself as a traitor and parricide (a destiny he intends to fulfill) rather than as a legitimate ruler. Rous’s spectator witnesses actual violence, an experience that turns him into “Nemesis,” the classical goddess of vengeance. And Daniel uses the term spectator to describe the moment where Richard II realizes he is no longer king of England—the moment that Shakespeare portrays by having Richard call for a looking glass because he cannot imagine he will recognize himself bereft of his majesty and having relinquished his divine right. In addition to describing an action that demands a play between active and passive modes of interaction, it seems that spectator also suggests a viewing subject that is altered by what she or he sees, not gently or subtly, but suddenly and violently.

While none of the above examples specifically references the theater (although Daniel’s uses a theatrical metaphor), each seeks to describe a sort of looking that produces similar cathartic effects that dramatic performance was imagined to produce. These writers’ use of the newfangled spectator suggests their efforts to articulate certain shifts occurring around the figure of the beholder. Whereas Sidney, Rous, and Daniel describe an interpretive site involving concurrent modes of active and passive interpretation that result in psychic trauma, others try to elucidate the convergence of individual and group consciousness that the theater could facilitate. This play between individual and communal forms of address was not unique to the theater but was related to that which took place in various other contexts, such as public executions and the Anglican Mass. Indeed, one of the most common complaints that city magistrates and clergy alike made against the theater was that it drew people from the churches and into the theaters, a charge that was taken seriously enough to result in the 1569 banning of plays on Sundays. Of equal concern, however, was the belief that the theater, like the Mass, harnessed the combined imaginative and affective energies on which it drew in ways that could animate narrative to the point where it came dangerously close to reality. This generative potency was one point on which both late sixteenth-century protheatrical and antitheatrical treatises concur; as Charles Whitney has put it, the theater’s potency was largely understood as both “a challenge to be overcome [and] a positive resource, a part of what energized a theater and extended its impact beyond the time and place of performance.”³³ And, although anti- and protheatrical writers differed on whether this was a quality to celebrate or fear, both see the spectator as a catalyst that ignites the spark of life inherent in stage drama, an ability that imitates, even challenges, the prerogative of divinity itself.

Words Meet Flesh: Communities of Theatrical Looking

The stage’s ability to tap into the imaginative potency inherent in any given audience made it a cause for civic and ecclesiastical concern. However, a more immediate and acute problem was the theater’s ability to draw crowds out of the churches and into the playhouse. Complaints of this nature can be found in the Stationers’ Register from the 1590s, stating that plays withdrew “all sorts in general from their daily resort to sermons and other godly exercise.”³⁴ Often the subject of sermons and other forms of moralist literature, this cultural anxiety pervades Anglican preacher John Northbrooke’s 1577 screed against “idle pastimes”: “And by the long suffring and permitting of these vaine plays, it hath stricken such a blinde zeale into the heartes of the people, that they shame not to say and affirme openly, that Playes are as good as Sermons, and that they learne as much or more at a Playe, than they doe at Gods worde preached. God be mercifull to this Realme of Englande, for we begynne to haue ytching eares, and lothe that heavenly Manna, as appeareth by their flowe and negligent comming unto Sermons, and running so fast, and so many, continually unto Playes.&c.”³⁵ Northbrooke’s tendency toward hyperbole is hardly unique among antitheatrical writers; for example, William Burton’s 1595 sermon contains similar rhetoric: “As wise as they are, they can be at playes by candlelight, & heare them vntil midnight, and that without any inconvenience too, and sweare by their trothe they finde more edefying in one play, then in twenty sermons.”³⁶ Northbrooke’s metaphorical tendencies, however, demonstrate a level of expressiveness not seen in other iterations of the theater-as-replacement-for-the-Mass discourse.³⁷ For example, Northbrooke’s claim that the English “lothe” the heavenly manna that is the word of God parallels the intractable Elizabethans with the ungrateful Israelites, who, when God fed them with heavenly food while they wandered the desert, complained of the monotony of their divinely-provided diet: “And the mixed multitude that was among them fell to lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? / We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: / But our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.”³⁸ Like the Israelites before them, the English risk God’s favor by pursuing the spices of life and valuing earthly pleasures (even those enjoyed under the yoke of physical or spiritual enslavement) over freedom.

In inferring this connection between the English and the Israelites, however, Northbrooke gestures toward something that exists at the core of the way early modern culture imagined theatrical spectatorship. By comparing the English, who run from the church and into the theater, to the Israelites, who eschew the food of God and long for well-fed slavery, Northbrooke delineates English theatergoers as a unique community of believers, even if their belief constitutes heresy. Such kinship manifests not only through ties of race, culture, nation, and religion, but is forged anew through a “blind zeal” for the theater. Northbrooke’s articulation of the theatergoing public as a community is reinforced through his portrayal of England’s playgoers as a people who speak and think as one: “They shame not to say and affirm openly that players are as good as sermons, and that they learn as much or more at a play than they do at God’s word preached.”³⁹ The fact that a similar dialogic form is used in the biblical passage from which Northbrooke’s metaphor derives (the Israelites are depicted as collectively voicing their complaint) does not, I would argue, render it unimaginative or derivative. Rather, Northbrooke selects material that reflects something about the theatrical spectator that he intuits and indirectly expresses.

The theater’s popularity, however, raised a more profound metaphysical issue than the fact it resulted in poor church attendance. The communal force Northbrooke’s early treatise suggests was noted by both the theater’s proponents and detractors. Whereas the antitheatricalists saw this force as one that needed rechanneling back into the devotional sphere, those who wrote for the stage tended to imagine it as a force that could make or break the theater’s creative and financial success. Whether playwrights imagined their playgoers primarily through these mercenary terms is unclear; however, they often articulated the spectatorial energy generated between audience and performance as one that contained something ineffable and incredibly potent. Thomas Nashe’s 1592 social satire, Piers Penniless His Supplication to the Devil, suggests this generative ability: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!”⁴⁰ Nashe describes a traditionally Aristotelian catharsis here in that he describes a spectacle (the bleeding Talbot) that creates a burst of emotion in the onlookers. These spectators, however, play a large role in creating what they see, as Nashe’s rendition imagines the onlookers’ collective response as the animating force behind Talbot’s revivification. While Nashe restricts the “miracle” of Talbot’s resuscitation to the sphere of theatrical make-believe (a device Shakespeare will push to its limits in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale), his metaphor of the body “new embalmed” with the spectators’ tears smacks as much of baptism as of funerary rite, of bestowing new life as of raising specters from the past.

Although Nashe here speaks as a proponent of the theater, he follows antitheatricalist discourse in partaking of devotional imagery to craft his defense. Drawing on the iconic image of the wounded-then-resurrected body as a metaphor for the potency of the theatrical experience, Nashe may simply be throwing the antitheatricalists’ high-flown rhetoric back in their teeth via the mechanisms of satire. Entitled “The Defence of Plays,” this segment of Piers Penniless responds directly to the flurry of antitheatrical tracts generated during the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Although Nashe stops short of definitively referencing the paradigm of Christian martyrdom, his description of Talbot through terms that emphasize both corporeal ephemerality (entombment, embalmment, bones, and blood) and the capability of transcending such limitations (triumph, joy, and new life) contains resonances from biblical renditions of Christ’s burial and resurrection. What better way to contest, even enrage, moralist critics of the theater than this skillfully veiled blasphemy used in praise of the theater and, moreover, by using an image saturated with popish resonances?

There may, however, be more at work here than Nashe’s wit. The Christian echoes found in this passage owe more to the Church’s performative traditions than its scriptural ones. Although all of the four gospels contain a scene where the Marys go to anoint Jesus’s body (only to find it missing), this moment is glossed over rather quickly in each.⁴¹ This narrative was, however, a popular one within the tradition of liturgical drama, which elaborated and expanded on it to include responses from the congregation. Consider this version from a twelfth-century Easter Mass:

To them let the deacon representing the angel answer, saying:

Whom do you seek, O trembling women, weeping at this tomb?

And they to him:

We seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.

To them let him add:

He is not here whom you seek, but going quickly tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus is risen.

After this, as they draw near, let him rise and raise up the curtain and expose the sepulchre to view, and say to them:

Come and see the place where the Lord had been laid, alleluia, alleluia …

This said, let the whole community sing together, saying:

Tell us, Mary, what did you see on the way?

And let one of the three who visited the sepulchre say in a clear voice:

I saw the sepulchre of the living Christ, and the glory of his rising.⁴²

Of course, it is unlikely that Nashe had any familiarity with this particular text or with liturgical drama at all: it seems to have largely disappeared from the Mass even before the English Reformation.⁴³ However, Nashe’s portrayal of Talbot’s onstage revivification shares something with the Visitatio Sepulchri other than tearful onlookers and a martyr who triumphs over death: both illustrate an innate understanding of the importance of the spectators’ role in the (re)generative process itself. In each case, of course, this process is imaginative. The spectators witness only a re-creation rather than an actual creation. This caveat, however, should not lessen the force generated by this act: as David Bevington points out, liturgical dramatization “was not intended as a mere imitation of an action, but as a demonstration of the living reality of Christ’s resurrection.”⁴⁴ In order for this demonstration to work, however, the presence of the congregation was essential. Composed of both imagination and faith, their participation is “the living reality” found in the ritual. Nashe describes his theatrical spectators through similar, if more secular, terms. Like the congregants who come to witness and participate in the ritual reenactment of Christ’s death and rebirth, Nashe’s spectators come to see the dead Talbot live, speak, and, indeed, die again. And, although one instance constitutes a religious ritual and the other an afternoon’s entertainment, in both cases it is the convergence of the spectators’ shared emotion and cultural beliefs that transforms a simple mimetic act into something that contains the spark of life itself.⁴⁵

That the professional theater became a site where certain cultural conflicts previously negotiated largely through Catholic ritual were revisited and reevaluated has been argued previously.⁴⁶ However, the ways in which these changes played a role in shaping discourses about theatrical spectatorship has not been sufficiently explored. Part of the communicative need that the term spectator fills is the idea of an individual engaged in a secularized hermeneutic, one who could both partake in the emotion generated through the shared presence of other spectators while also engaging in a unique “individual” experience.⁴⁷ Thomas Kyd’s narrative framing of his highly popular play The Spanish Tragedy suggests this dialectic. When Andrea’s ghost sits down with Revenge to watch “the miserie” of the play unfold, they become part of the interpretive community the play’s audience constitutes. Yet they also remain individual forces, ones that create meaning inside the play in that they participate in its creation both structurally and narratively. Kyd returns to this framing device periodically throughout The Spanish Tragedy. Like any bored onlooker, Revenge falls asleep during the lengthy third act, and Andrea throws a fit when he thinks things are not going quite the way he wants: “Awake, Revenge, or we are woe-begone!” (3.15.17).⁴⁸ But for every moment in which these characters perform stereotypical behaviors associated with inattentive or overly invested audience members, there is another in which they actually motivate certain actions within the play. Andrea’s desire for divine justice sets the revenge plot in motion, and his call for aid is answered by none other than Revenge: “Be still Andrea; ere we go from hence, / I’ll turn their friendship to fell despite / Their love to mortal hate, their day to night” (1.5.5–7).⁴⁹ How, exactly, Revenge accomplishes this is left unclear, as the play does not show him doing anything except watching and taking catnaps: it seems his very presence is sufficient to set events in motion. Through the act of spectating, Andrea and Revenge can bring to life “the mystery” and the tragedy of life, or, when metadramatically considered, the play itself.

I am not suggesting this framing device is crafted merely (or even primarily) as a meditation on the spectator. Seneca’s Thyestes, which clearly influenced the content and structure of Kyd’s play, also begins with a postmortal conversation between a ghost and a personified minor deity.⁵⁰ As Megaera (one of the Furies) drags Tantalus from his insatiate existence, she calls on Thyestes to “vexe” his mortal house with “rage of furyes might.”⁵¹ Tantalus is initially a completely unwilling participant; despite Megaera’s command, he tries to flee back to his lake of eternal torment. Finally, tortured into submission, he enters his grandson’s house to continue the cycle of despair his own actions initiated long ago.⁵² Numerous differences exist between the Senecan narrative and Kyd’s play. Rather than remaining onstage to watch and comment on the action, Tantalus and the Fury disappear after the first scene and do not return. Tantalus is also forced to participate in a divine act of vengeance against his family rather than being granted the honor of watching his own personal vendetta acted out in the mortal realm. Kyd’s alterations to Seneca’s model cannot, of course, be traced to a single influence or cause, but I would argue that the changes he makes to the immortal characters’ roles respond to the period’s shifting ideas about the theatrical spectator. In extending the role of the framing narrative to one that remains physically and dialogically present for the entirety of the play, Kyd comments on the nature of the early modern theatrical space itself. But his commentary is not about the stage exactly; that is, it is not about what can be created on the platform at the Curtain or the Rose. Rather, Kyd dramatizes an extradiegetic space, one related to the new and relatively uncharted territory evolving for the theatrical spectator. Occupied by Andrea and Revenge, this spectatorial terrain is essentially a medial one. It is neither heaven nor hell; it calls neither for direct action nor quiescent acceptance from its participants. Shaky ground though it may seem, this emergent space is imagined as offering a certain amount of fluidity in terms of spectatorial positioning. In it, one can be (in Sidney’s terms) both actor and spectator, or, in Kyd’s implicit articulation, both a member of the community of interpreters and a unique interpretive subject.

Gluttonous Eyes and Ticklish Ears: The Spectator’s Synaesthesia

Northbrooke’s early attack on the professional theater spearheaded a deluge of similar critiques. As the sixteenth century came to a close, these focused less on the general evils committed by London’s populace and more on those committed at the theater, particularly via its detrimental influence on those in attendance. As Jeremy Lopez has pointed out, one of the most pervasive rhetorical devices for critiquing the theater was the dietary metaphor.⁵³ For example, Northbrooke succinctly metaphorizes scripture as “manna from heaven,” and earlier in his treatise, he represents the problem of church attendance as a sort of a feast or famine binary: “The Church is alwaye emptie and voyde, the playing place is replenished and full: we leave Christ alone at the aultar, and feede our eyes with vaine and unhonest sights, and with filthie and uncleane playes.”⁵⁴ His use of the idiomatic expression “feede our eyes” is particularly apt considering the subject matter. After all, Christ himself used a gastric metaphor to express the most profound of metaphysical transformations, when he tells his bewildered disciples, “Take, eat; this is my body.”⁵⁵ In describing the flock’s departure from Christ’s altar to feast on the epicurian pleasures offered by the professional theater, Northbrooke draws attention to the communal nature that both the liturgy and the theater were understood to share but positions them as antithetical.⁵⁶ The fellowship offered at the modest table of Christ is, in effect, broken by the desire to feast in gluttony at the trough of the professional stage. At the same time, Northbrooke plays off a sensory prejudice extant since antiquity, which considers sight and hearing as “higher” planes of sensory experience while taste and smell are “lower” forms.⁵⁷ By aligning theatrical and gustatory experience, Northbrooke reinforces his initial condemnation of the theater. Not only does it lead one away from the divine realm and into the merely appetitive, but it does so by appealing to the lowest rungs of the sensory register.

In conflating high (sight) and low (smell and taste) sensory experiences, Northbrooke initiates a mixed metaphor that becomes something of a touchstone in antitheatricalist discourse. Stephen Gosson offers a more elaborate version in his 1579 The Schoole of Abuse:

There setchey abroche straunge consortes of melody, to tickle the eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence; and wanton speache, to whet desire too inordinate lust. Therefore of both barrelles, I iudge Cookes and Painters the better hearing, for the one extendeth his arte no farther then to the tongue, palate, and nose, the other to the eye; and both are ended in outwarde sense, which is common too us with bruite beasts. But these by the privie entries of the eare, slip downe into the hart, & with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue should rule the roste.⁵⁸

Like Northbrooke, Gosson begins with a common sensory idiom to begin his metonym. He also brings together taste and sight by yoking together cook and painter in order to emphasize the theater’s power to appeal to man’s baser sensory appetites. There are, however, two key differences between the metaphors. The most immediately obvious is the extreme to which Gosson takes his comparison; it is a synaesthetic maelstrom compared to Northbrooke’s brief and tidy idiom. In Gosson’s account, sight and hearing are nearly personified: melodies “tickle” the ear, the sense is “ravished,” and sight is lent a sort of consciousness in that it can be “flattered.” Later, he claims, “I judge cooks and painters the better hearing,” a somewhat bewildering (if surprisingly playful) way of describing a rather puritanical anxiety about the theater as a sort of Hamlet-like poison poured into the ear. Less immediately apparent is Gosson’s downgrading of sight in the sensory hierarchy to a rung somewhere closer to the ones that taste and smell occupy. Claiming that those arts directed at taste, smell, and sight have, as their end point, the stimuli of the “outward sense” at which they are directed, Gosson states that it is drama’s use of language that makes it particularly dangerous. In targeting the ear, playwrights wield a weapon that is far more subtle, as it is through this orifice that they gain access to the deep recesses of the spectator’s heart and mind. Whereas Northbrooke understands the eye as the primary portal through which temptation and corruption enters the spectatorial vessel, Gosson sees the ear as the more vulnerable aperture.

Perhaps these discrepancies result from the different foci of the two passages. Northbrooke expresses a distinctly religious concern posited through Christian imagery, whereas Gosson addresses a more nationalistic and gendered set of anxieties through secular terms: “Our wrestling at arms is turned to wallowing in ladies’ laps; our courage to cowardice; our running to riot, our bows to balls, and our darts to dishes. We have robbed Greece of gluttony, Italy of wantonness, Spain of pride, France of deceit, and Dutchland of quaffing.”⁵⁹ Perhaps they are related to Gurr’s claim that the late sixteenth-century stage was a place where English culture began transitioning from one that was equally sensitive to audial and visual stimuli, to one that, at least within the realm of the theater, privileged sight over sound. Neither of these explanations, however, adequately addresses the way in which these two writers commingle sight and hearing with taste, smell, and touch in order to illustrate the mechanisms of engagement the theater exploits. Rather than describing the theatrical experience as one that pulls the spectator between the poles of audial and visual experience, Northbrooke and Gosson imagine it as a site of sensory interplay, even chaos, one that Carla Mazzio aptly designates as a kind of synaesthetic disorder.⁶⁰ Although the antitheatricalists do imagine this sensory intermingling as a sort of malaise fostered by the theater, they do not imagine it as a distressing experience for the spectator. Instead, it seems they see it as an encounter that allows for a vertiginous loss of self in a somatic tangle, one they fear the spectator finds uniquely pleasurable.

Mazzio reads this sensory phenomenon as related to the overlooked significance of touch in early modern scholarship, claiming that touch “disrupted the boundaries between the senses themselves.”⁶¹ Making the argument that Gosson’s metaphor can be unpacked if we consider touch as its connective tissue, Mazzio contributes to a larger scholarly discourse surrounding sensory hierarchies in the Renaissance, which have gone some way toward excavating the ways that the “lower” senses of touch, taste, and smell dictated lived experience in the early modern world.⁶² These studies provide a useful corrective to the often a priori scholarly assumption that one’s worldview in the early modern period (as well as in our own) is dictated mostly by what one sees. But it also leads to a phenomenological question: was the synaesthesia described by Northbrooke and Gosson a sensation they had actually experienced while at the theater? Did they understand the combination of verse, singing, costume, gesture, vocal inflection, stage properties, live bodies, and that elusive thing we call imagination as conspiring to create a truly multisensory experience? If not, what is it about the multisensory metaphor that for many of the antitheatricalists at least, captures something essential about what happens to the spectator when he or she engages with a play?

Difficult to parse, the multisensory metaphor can function on both the figurative and literal planes. The word metaphor, from the Greek metapherein, means “to transfer,” and in this sense, the antitheatricalist metaphor functions straightforwardly in that it transfers the sensibilities of one organ of perception to another: the ears feel, the eyes taste.⁶³ In this respect, Mazzio’s claims about touch are persuasive: the senses become so close that they actually make linguistic and (perhaps) experiential contact. Metaphor, however, is more than a mere figurative conduit; it is often used to express evanescent, difficult, or as yet unarticulated concepts, or as one critic puts it, “Metaphor is the dreamwork of language.”⁶⁴ This innate ambiguity makes metaphor an especially apt vehicle for describing an event that cannot be seen but can only be intuited or felt. If the antitheatricalists are trying to put into language—to make visible—what occurs within the theatrical spectator when he or she watches a play, this interaction can only be represented, hence known, through approximations.

The work performed by the multisensory metaphor in late sixteenth-century accounts of the theater, then, happens somewhere between what it allows for figuratively via substitution and what it allows writers to express about what specifically is unique about the early modern theatrical experience. Like much of antitheatrical discourse, synaesthesia has a long history in Western thought; like much of the antitheatricalists’ rhetorical and conceptualizations, this one is indebted to its classical precedents. While the Oxford English Dictionary cites 1891 as the term’s first use in psychology, and 1901 in literary criticism,⁶⁵ Daniel Heller-Roazen traces synaesthesia back to classical philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s concept of the “common sense”:

The distant origin of the modern “synaesthesia,” the Greek term was no neologism when the thinkers of late Antiquity bestowed upon it a technical sense in the doctrine of the soul. In the classical varieties of the language, admittedly, the noun appears to have constituted something of a rare expression; but it is not without significance that the verb from which it was drawn, sunaisthanesthai, can be found in two passages of Aristotle’s own treatises. Formed by the addition of the prefix “with” (sun-) to the verb “to sense” or “to perceive” (aisthanesthai), the expression in all likelihood designated a “feeling in common,” a perception shared by more than one.⁶⁶

This “common sense” may appear tangential to the antitheatricalist usage, which more closely follows Galen’s concept of sunaisthēsis as a sensation “that reaches a single body all at once, while consisting, in effect, of multiple physiological affections.”⁶⁷ However, the idea of the communal extant in Aristotle’s formulation lingers quietly in antitheatrical discourse, particularly in its presentation of the theater as a force capable of rapidly generating spontaneous (if highly unstable) forms of community. Steven Mullaney has recently argued that the early modern theater “embodied thoughts, contradications, and social traumas of its audiences—and that could serve as a catalyst for the making of various publics and counterpublics, imagined communities, and collective identities.”⁶⁸ Like many arguments about early modern audiences, particularly those focused on unearthing early modern spectatorial responses, Mullaney’s glosses over the discursive history of this narrative. The antitheatricalists seek refuge in the spectator’s discursive past at this historical moment precisely because of social concerns about the theater as a heterogeneous physical space in which different classes and genders mingle indiscriminately and an imaginative space in which individual viewers merge into a potent, affectively connected entity. The sensory fluidity expressed via the multisensory metaphor allows for the expression of a (recurrent) historical anxiety over the spectator’s supposedly unbounded involvement in what she or he sees. At the same time, it attempts to represent the “effects” of the professional theater on those who watch it, one of which is articulated, via the multisensory metaphor, as a state of imaginative and affective rapture.

Regardless of whether early modern theatergoers were inclined toward synaesthesia at the theater or otherwise, the multisensory metaphor’s discursive circulation becomes apparent when one considers the ways in which both antitheatricalists and playwrights engage it. For every naysayer, there is a proponent who responds in kind:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, not his heart to report what my dream was.⁶⁹

Bottom’s much-discussed bungling of Corinthians 2:9 aptly demonstrates the synaesthetic metaphor’s discursive saturation; as Jennifer Waldron states, “Shakespeare cleverly manipulates the same kind of perfectionist Protestant tropes as did these antitheatrical writers.”⁷⁰ When Northbrooke speaks of visual gluttony, Gosson of feeling ears and hearing palates, or Shakespeare of hearing eyes and speaking hearts, they may not literally suggest that the theatrical spectator experiences sensory substitution, fusion, or confusion. Rather, they participate in a discursive tradition, one newly invigorated by the early modern professional theater. But, as with other antitheatricalist tautologies, this one should not be dismissed as simply a colorful turn of phrase that becomes a rhetorical banner under which early modern cultural critics and proponents of the theater mobilize. While these articulations of multisensory experience remain deeply rooted in a discursive tradition, they also demonstrate innovation in honing their subject by focusing on a particular cause of synaesthesia (the professional theater) and in deploying synaesthesia as a literary device.

* * *

All three tenets discussed above illustrate another, related strain extant in sixteenth-century spectatorial discourse. Like the play between active and passive (or violent and complacent) and communal and individual that the theater supposedly facilitated in the spectator, the multisensory metaphor similarly suggests the possibility of movement between phenomenological (what one sees and hears) and associative (other sensory experiences seeing and hearing can invoke) modes of experience. In doing so, it exposes another space where theater’s detractors understood the spectator as particularly vulnerable. Not only was the theater understood to erode the boundaries between perceptory modalities; it facilitated a possible further categorical breakdown between real and imaginary. Religious and civic voices alike echoed this particular complaint against playgoing, claiming that life, in truth, often imitated art. In addition to addressing the problem that the theater lured men away from their work and their God, a lord mayor’s petition against playgoing, dated February 25, 1592, states, “The youth is greatly corrupted and their manners infected by the wanton and profane devices represented on the stages.”⁷¹ Earlier critics such as Plato and Augustine believed that the theater cultivated undesirable tendencies in the spectator because it enacted mimesis: its aim was simply to imitate the already less-than-absolute or ersatz world created by man. Sixteenth-century commentators, however, feared that the theatrical experience could (and ultimately would) cause the spectator to lose the ability to separate the factual (the social order as it existed) from the fictional (the world as it might otherwise be). And, while these anxieties were consistently posited through language that emphasized the spectator’s vulnerability and intellectual and moral frailty, such phrasing often was juxtaposed with the language of agency and imaginative fecundity. Anthony Munday’s A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theaters illustrates this paradox of the spectator as an entity both vulnerable to influence and willful in her inscription of individual desire:

This inward fight hath vanquished the chastitie of manie women; some by taking pittie on the deceitful teares of the stagelovers, have bene mooved by their complaint to rue on their secret frends, whome they have thought to have tasted like torment; some having noted the ensamples how maidens restrained from the marriage of those whome their frends have misliked, have there learned a policie to prevent their parents, by stealing them awaie; some seeing by ensample of the stage plaier one carried with too much liking of an other man’s wife, having noted by what practise she hath bene assailed and overtaken, have not failed to put the like in effect in earnest, that was afore showen in jest.⁷²

It is the inward fight that vanquishes, the imaginative self, gestated through acts of playgoing, that battles the moral one established and reified through forms of sociocultural discipline. The chaste woman becomes a whore in an instant; the jest written for a simple laugh turns deadly. Like Nashe’s half-ludic, half-horrific image of the bleeding Talbot, Munday’s account shows a world where the impossible can occur in a moment’s time and sometimes even the participants are not entirely aware of what they do. It is no accident that Gosson, himself a former playwright, references the Christian doctrine of free will in his refutation of stage playing. Chastising those women who display themselves in the dangerously public space of the theater, he warns, “Thought is free: you can forbidd no man, that vieweth you, to noate you, and that noateth you, to judge you, for entring to places of suspition.”⁷³ While his anxiety about women’s mobility outside the patriarchically controlled sphere of the home is not unique, Gosson’s opening gambit of “thought is free” articulates a new danger generated by the collision of theatrical spectacle and spectator. It is no longer free will that leads “the simple gazer” astray but “free thought” or interpretive license.

That the theater could open up a space of phenomenological instability was an idea shared by theater’s proponents. While the antitheatricalists understood this potential as one that placed the spectator in spiritual and sometimes physical jeopardy, those on the opposing side claimed this quality was what made the theater an ideal mechanism for disseminating social, moral, and civic values to a wide audience. Replying to Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, Thomas Lodge claims that the long-standing aim of theater is to provide a mirror through which men are shown their worldly infirmities, and in doing so, it opens the door for self-rapprochement and reform: “For sayth [Horace] ther was no abuse [depicted in plays] but these men reprehended it. a thefe was loth to be seene one there spectacle, a coward was never present at theyr assemblies, a backbiter abhord that company … a harlot woulde seeke no harbor at stage plais, lest she shold here her owne name growe in question: and the discourse of her honesty cause her to bee hated of the godly.”⁷⁴ Philip Sidney offers a similar defense of the theater, stating that its mimetic powers naturally created analogies between the macrocosm of character typologies and the microcosm of spectator as individual-in-the-world: “The Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth, in the most ridiculous & scornefull sort that may be. So as it is impossible, that any beholder can be content to be such a one.”⁷⁵ As late as 1612, Thomas Heywood is still defending his craft using similar logic, if more high-flown terminology: “So bewitching a thing is liuely and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”⁷⁶

It may seem as though the agential and sensory confusions particular to drama are disruptions that speak only to how the theater communicates with its audience. But both antitheatricalist and protheatricalist ideas about the spectator link the concepts of sensory and subjective fluidity through the rhetoric they use to describe these interpretive phenomena. Although each uses different formulations to describe how theatrical spectatorship “worked”—how it communicated with or to its audiences, preyed on or activated their imaginations, and authorized or damned them—they express and explain these dynamics both through metaphor and as metaphor. Sometimes, as in the case of Northbrooke’s and Gosson’s sensory metonym, metaphor is used both as the rhetorical mode of expression and as a crucial component of the thing being expressed. Others see it as a major key in which drama plays on the instrument of spectatorial imagination. Munday, Lodge, and Sidney all see metaphor as a mode intrinsic to both dramatic communication and spectatorial interpretation in that what is shown through the world onstage is then transferred by the individual to him- or herself and the world that he or she occupies. The clearest articulations of this principle, however, are found in the writings of early modern playwrights themselves. As early as 1566, George Gascoigne prefaces his Supposes by providing the law students for whom it was written with an “explanation,” not only of his play but of drama in general: “But, understand, our Suppose is nothing else but a mistaking of the imagination of one thing for another” (my italics).⁷⁷ Thirty years later, Shakespeare opens his final play of the Henriad by similarly addressing the Bankside audiences:

And let us, ciphers to this great account

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies.⁷⁸

This “metaphorical principle” then is one inextricably linked to the period’s ideas about how theatrical spectatorship functioned and why it was so potent, addictive, and potentially dangerous to both individuals and society itself.

As the sixteenth century moved toward a close, the theater’s cultural foothold became more secure. Correspondingly, the antitheatricalist movement diminished to the point of near silence. With two notable exceptions, post-Elizabethan treatises against the theater go out with more of a whimper than a bang. The two surviving tracts from the Stuart period (I. G.’s 1615 A Refutation of the Apology for Actors and William Prynne’s 1633 Histrio-mastix), while similar in style and form to those written in the last decades of the sixteenth century, demonstrate some shifts in the spectator’s construction within the seventeenth-century cultural imaginary. While not interested in precise demographic specimens, these later treatises describe spectators that are already becoming taxonomized through stereotypes. Whereas Northbrooke and Gosson describe the theater’s siren call ensnaring the elusive essence of men’s souls, I. G. and Prynne portray a character that sounds suspiciously like the ubiquitous groundling. I. G. claims that early modern theater audiences are made up of “in general the vulgar sort,” while Prynne delineates them more specifically as “ordinary Spectators, what are they but ridiculous, foolish, vaine, fantasticke persons, who delight in nothing more then toyes and vanities?” (original italics).⁷⁹ Such typecasting was not limited to antitheatricalist discourse; playwrights took full advantage of circulating spectatorial stereotypes to create cutting-edge humor that walked a fine line between satirical in-jokes for and outright mockery of their audiences.⁸⁰

As literary representations of the spectator transitioned from elusive substance to stock characters, other changes appear as well. The idea that the spectator was a site where certain experiential polarities (such as active vs. passive and collective vs. singular), as well as the full spectrum of the senses were engaged simultaneously does not disappear during the seventeenth century, but other competing, even contradictory models develop alongside them. For example, the multisensory metaphor becomes largely condensed during the seventeenth century. Instead of describing the theater as a place where the senses conjoin in cacophonous harmony, playwrights and antitheatricalists begin to articulate the spectatorial experience as one dominated by the eye and ear. I. G. condemns “the profane spectacles presented in the theaters, to the as [sic] profane sights of all that go to be spectators of them,” and Prynne separates the dangers of the playhouse into that which hurts the eyes (such as viewing lewd, impious, or tyrannous acts and effeminate and lavishly dressed actors) and that which injures the ears (blasphemy, obscenities, and love songs).⁸¹ But while the earlier synaesthetic metaphor fades, the premise behind it—that the theater has the power to construct an experience for the spectator that causes the line between imaginative and physical perception to bend, if not quite break—does not. Unlike Gurr, who sees the sensory division of sight and sound as a place of contest between poetry and spectacle, I see these later paraphrases of the multisensory metaphor as an impulse to control the evanescent spectator and the unwieldy interpretive energies this figure was thought to be capable of generating.

The following chapters focus on how a particular group that had a vested interest in the spectator imagined and attempted to shape this figure. Like the antitheatrical polemicists, early modern playwrights exhibited an anxiety that the spectator could not be known or effectively controlled. But they also demonstrated a desire to encourage and harness this energy, for it was, finally, the lifeblood of their trade. Whereas late sixteenth-century writers focused primarily on “what” and “how” questions about spectatorship (such as what made theatrical spectatorship a unique type of interaction and how the theater communicated with the spectator), by the seventeenth century, playwrights were experimenting with ways of influencing and shaping real spectators via their product. The discursive spectator, therefore, has a stronger presence in drama during the seventeenth century than it had previously, particularly in two genres: the dramatic romance and the court masque. While not new, these forms are rich sites of generic and formal experimentation during the seventeenth century’s early decades; both also reached new heights of popularity during that period. But before turning to the work of two playwrights, Shakespeare and Jonson, whose work in these respective genres were popular successes, I look at one of the period’s documented failures, Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Beaumont’s play holds a mirror up to the early modern audience by dramatizing the behaviors of two citizens attending the theater. Harmless though this might seem, Beaumont’s bitingly satirical portrayal was not met favorably: the dedicatory epistle written for the play’s publication claims that it was “utterly rejected” at its premiere. Knight offers a rare extant instance of an early modern play that both takes the spectator and spectatorial resistance as its principal subject and is met with actual resistance from its audience. As such, the play is the site of a collision between the discursive and the phenomenological spectator, one that bears traces of the subjective conflict that Knight parodies: the moment where the real viewer faces a reflection over which she or he has no immediate control and does not recognize.