Читать книгу Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater - Matteo A. Pangallo - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?”

The Early Modern Idea of Playgoers as Playmakers

While “standing by as a spectator” of the calamitous performance of Barton Holyday’s Technogamia before King James on August 26, 1621, a man known only as “Hoskins of Oxford” decided to share with the rest of the audience his opinion of the play. An actor delivered what must have struck Hoskins as the perfect setup: “As at a banquett some meates haue sweet some saore last—.” Before the actor could continue, Hoskins “rime[d] openly to it”: “Euen soe your dubllett is to short in the waste.”¹ What was the effect of Hoskins’s addition to the play? There is no record of how the audience members—including James—responded to this intrusion, though given how bored they had become, it is not difficult to imagine that the nonsense quip was met with laughter.² Though the play is generically an academic allegory, the audience that night saw it as a dull tribulation that was, Anthony à Wood explained, “too grave for the king, and too scholastic for the auditory.”³ After the second act, James tried to sneak out, but his advisers urged him to stay in order to avoid giving offence. He remained, “tho’ much against his will,” and took a nap. The performance lasted the entire night, and when day broke many audience members were found to have slipped out in the dark.

The question of what effect Hoskins’s addition had on the play draws a distinction between the play as its audience experienced it, that is, as a performed event shaped in the moment by audience response, and the play as we experience it today, as a written text insulated from such response. The audience on August 26, 1621, saw a different Technogamia from what we will find in the quartos of 1618 and 1630, not simply because Holyday revised the text for the event (Wood notes that Holyday made “some foolish alterations” for the royal performance) but because the audience’s experience, and hence understanding, of the play derived from the specific context of that tedious evening. Part of that context, and a part to which modern readers would be oblivious if not for the anonymous witness who recorded the event, was Hoskins. That evening, his interjection added levity by adding new text, by collaborating with Holyday (against Holyday’s will) to change the audience’s reception of the play. Hoskins’s addition to Holyday’s play was minor, but it undercut the dramatist’s generic objective by converting seriousness into humor. This generic conversion, in fact, remained part of the historical memory of that long night: one later satire on the performance—recorded in a commonplace book held by the Folger Library—recalls how what was meant “tragically” came off as “Comicall.”⁴ Hoskins’s nonsense contribution to Technogamia was not relevant to the play or the play’s purpose as designed by Holyday, but for one brief moment, and perhaps longer, it changed the play that the audience received. For readers of the printed script of Technogamia, the play was made entirely by Barton Holyday. For the audience of Technogamia on August 26, 1621, the play was made by many contributors, including the spontaneous, collaborating playgoer Hoskins.

Not all such audience intrusions contradict the dramatist’s intentions, but they always have the effect of appropriating to the consumer a degree of authority over the dramatic event. At the first performance of amateur dramatist Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (ca. 1635) at the Blackfriars, an audience member interrupted the play and “cried out upon the Monsterousnesse and Impossibilitie” of the “indecorum that appear’d … in the Part of Cleander, who being represented a Person of seventeen yeares of age, is made to speak words, that would better sute with the age of thirty”; Viscount Falkland was in attendance, however, and “this Noble Person, having for some time suffered the unquiet, and impertinent Dislikes of this Auditor … forbore him no longer, but (though he were one he knew not) told him, Sir, ’tis not altogether so Monsterous and Impossible, for One of Seventeen yeares to speak at such a Rate, when He that made him speak in that manner, and writ the whole Play, was Himself no Older.”⁵ The contest between the “auditor” and Falkland displays two different types of audience response: the first, opposing the terms of the fiction that has been written for him and proposing an alternative; the second, confirming those terms. Even Falkland’s interjection, however, stops the play in order to impose spectatorial control, and it implies that the only grounds upon which the performance can proceed is the open demonstration of spectatorial approval. As Preiss puts it, “If the play continues after this outburst, it does so on his [that is, Falkland’s] authority, not the poet’s; ‘He that … writ the whole Play’ is not the one who makes it.”⁶

Audience members at a play can become creative participants whose engagement with the performance might change that play, either for themselves alone, through internal interpretation, or for the rest of the audience, through external response. Indeed, as Preiss argues, the very essence of what makes an event “theatrical” is that it “convert[s] reception into production.”⁷ In effect, playgoers must be collaborators in the process of making meaning out of a performed script, that is, in the process of playmaking. Sometimes that contribution might conform to and complete the playwrights’ and players’ intentions, resulting in no significant divergence from the play’s authorial meanings. Preiss points out that often spectators applauding, laughing, or crying in the middle of a performance, though interrupting the theatrical event, nonetheless reinforce the intended generic and aesthetic goals of the scripted play.⁸ At other times, however, the responses and meaning-making of the playgoer challenge or even contradict those goals, resulting in a new play made by the receiver through the acts of interpretation and response, just as a playwright might rewrite another playwright’s text, or as an actor might, through performance choices, inflect or alter a playwright’s text.⁹ Examples of early modern playgoers’ participation changing a play demonstrate that audience members held significant potential control over the rest of the audience’s reception and understanding of the play. As noted in the Introduction, given our historical distance from the playhouse and our need to resort to written scripts of plays, scholarship has largely privileged the enduring words of the dramatist as “orchestrators” of audience experience; however, accounts of actual audience experience show that playgoers, through interpretation and intrusion, also orchestrated the play. This chapter historicizes this theoretical commonplace of performance studies within the context of the early modern stage, looking to evidence of how the idea of the participatory, playmaking audience was viewed in the period. Commentators’ complex and varied attitudes toward this concept indicate that it was deeply embedded within early modern theatrical culture and consistently under negotiation by agents of that culture.

“It is not … the Herb that makes the Honey [but] the Bee”: Reception Response in the Early Modern Audience

It is the nature of theatrical performance that every audience member has the capacity to imagine, and so understand, the play in a different way. Because reception of an encoded text requires the receiver’s interpretive response as he or she decodes the text (according to ability and inclination), every such encounter involves the creation of particularized meaning by that receiver. At times, the meaning the receiver makes will accord with what the first maker of the text intended; at other times, however, the recipient’s meaning will differ from those intentions. In both instances, however, the completion of the meaning-making process is in the hands—or, rather, interpretive faculty—of the receiver, not the first maker.¹⁰ Joel Altman refers to this as “theatrical potentiality”: the play “is potential insofar as it is incomplete in itself and must coalesce with labile thought- and feeling-structures in an auditor’s mind in order for it to produce the powerful, temporary satisfactions that we call meaning.”¹¹ Because a play has no existence outside its interpretation by a receiver, to produce a play’s “meaning” is to make the play; therefore, every playgoer is a playmaker, creating dramatic meaning at the moment of reception—even if only that one playgoer is the consumer of the meaning produced.¹² Theatrical consumption is thus creative; the spectator who “consumes” collaborates in the creation of meaning: “In the theatre every reader is involved in the making of the play.”¹³ Modern performance theorists repeatedly articulate this view, but it was also prevalent in early modern dramatic culture. Assumption of the significant, productive capacity of audience interpretation was a shared theoretical underpinning for both the theater’s defenders and its detractors.

In refuting William Prynne’s charge that plays are “obscene,” Sir Richard Baker describes audience reception as a form of active creation and in doing so draws upon what amounts to an early modern version of reader-response theory: “It is not so much the Player, that makes the Obscenity, as the Spectatour himself: as it is not so much the Juyce of the Herb that makes the Honey, or Poyson, as the Bee, or Spider, that sucks the Juyce. Let this man therefore bring a modest heart to a Play, and he shall never take hurt by immodest Speeches: but, if he come as a Spider to it, what marvel, if he suck Poyson, though the Herbs be never so sovereign.”¹⁴ Baker’s entomological knowledge is lacking, but he does provide an explanation of the subjective nature of audience experience as it was understood by an early modern playgoer: regardless of whether the play is meant by the author or actors to be “modest” or “immodest,” it is the “Spectatour” who finally “makes” the meaning of the play. The bee and spider metaphor, originating in Plutarch’s Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debet (“How the Young Should Study Poetry”), had long been used to describe readers as the ultimate makers of meaning in written works, particularly scripture, but it was applied to other forms of cultural consumption as well, including the audience experience in the playhouse.¹⁵ At the conclusion of his defense of the stage in the fifth book of De recta republicae administratione (translated into English by William Bavande in 1559), John Ferrarius urges playgoers to be “like as a Bee” who gathers “the swetenes of her honie” from “diuers floures.”¹⁶ In his commendatory verse for Heywood’s Apology for Actors, actor Richard Perkins uses the device to defend the stage against an imagined “Puritanicall” opponent: “Give me a play; that no distaste can breed, / Prove thou a Spider, and from flowers sucke gall, / Il’e like a Bee, take hony from a weed.”¹⁷ Theater apologists such as Baker and Perkins found the metaphor useful for responding to antitheatricalists because it redirects the critic’s complaints back upon the critic, arguing that any morally suspect meaning or detrimental effect of a play identified by its opponents was, in fact, a reflection of those opponents’ own moral shortcomings. Underlying this tactic is the metaphor’s implication that the dramatist’s intentions and actors’ interpretations of those intentions are subject to the consumers, the final arbiter of whether the play produces “honey” or “poyson.”

Like Baker and Perkins, others in the period understood that scripted fictions acted upon the stage were completed only within a playgoer’s receptive faculty. Anthony Munday formulates this idea in a negative sense by suggesting that because plays are a “representation of whoredome” therefore “al the people [watching plays] in mind plaie the whores.”¹⁸ Such a conception of the audience, of course, suggests an uncritical and uncreative—not to mention uniform—kind of response, at odds with what is seen in the work of the playwriting playgoers. Contrary to Munday’s totalizing assumption about audience absorption (“al the people”), different playgoers in the same audience see different “plays,” and thus each also responds differently. When response is internalized and interpretation purely imagined, the play is completed in the playgoer’s mind; but, as with Hoskins and both the “auditor” and Falkland at Killigrew’s premiere, response might also be expressed outwardly in an effort to impose the playgoer’s individual understanding of the play upon other playgoers (each of whom, as the Pallantus and Eudora incident demonstrates, has imaginatively created his or her own “play”). For many dramatists, reception responses within playgoers’ minds were expected, indeed, even encouraged; externalized reception responses that intruded upon others’ imaginative reception responses, however, were vigorously warned against.

Dramatists could use to their advantage this understanding of each spectator’s interpretive individuality because it allowed writers to assert their singular authority in establishing the play’s meaning. In the prologue to No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1611), Thomas Middleton itemizes the components of the play that various audience members will focus upon: wit, spectacle, costumes, mirth, passion, and more. “How is’t possible to suffice / So many Ears, so many Eyes? … How is’t possible to please / Opinions toss’d in such wild seas?” he asks rhetorically.¹⁹ Because perception of the play varies with each audience member, Middleton’s dilemma, indeed, the dilemma of every playwright, is that the play will be, in varying degrees and ways, different for each audience member. Many writers adopt the image of a banquet to explain this problem of the diversity of audience understanding and desire, and to assert the need for a single “cook” to arbitrate among them.²⁰ In The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins adapt the metaphor by explaining that while their play is the product of “the Cookes laborious workmanship,” the materials used to make the meal have been supplied by the audience, “who gives a foule vnto [the] Cooke to dresse.”²¹ Meaning in this theatrical event is created through a circuit from playgoers to playmakers and back, rather than a simplistic direct transaction from playmakers to playgoers. Day, Rowley, and Wilkins go beyond just an acknowledgment of the commercial playhouse’s need to please its market: in their formulation, the banqueters provide the cook with both the demand for a particular dish and the ingredients to make that dish. In other words, those who eat the banquet also help prepare it; the consumers are collaborating producers.

Using a less amicable metaphor to explain the effect of audience diversity, Middleton and Dekker, in the epilogue to The Roaring Girl (1611), point out that the audience, animated by its many different perspectives, wields potentially destructive authority if its reception is permitted to result in active response. The epilogue tells of a painter who drew a portrait and hung it out for sale. Passersby viewed the painting and “gave severall verdicts on it,” and as each opinion was offered, the painter “did mend it, / In hope to please all.”²² The resulting painting was “so vile, / So monstrous and so ugly all men did smile / At the poore Painters folly.” That folly was in allowing the impossibly diverse multitude of consumers to dictate what his “Art” should produce. Like the impossibly varied feedback given the painter, Dekker and Middleton imagine audiences urging them to change the plot, scenes, subject, and language of “this our Comedy” (emphasis added). Giving in to such consumer creativity, they explain, would result in a play as ugly as the portrait: “If we to every braine (that’s humerous) / Should fashion Sceanes, we (with the Painter) shall / In striving to please all, please none at all.” The result of allowing consumers to contribute to the production process, the professionals caution, is chaotic and ineffective: audience diversity necessitates audience passivity or else the audience will destroy the art.

Whether warning against it or embracing it, dramatists regularly demonstrate interest in the possibilities and problems stemming from audience participation in the creation of dramatic meaning. Shakespeare, for example, hinges a critical moment of Hamlet upon the individualized reception response of one of the most famous of playgoers: Claudius, attending Hamlet’s “Mousetrap.” “The crucial play is not on the ‘stage’ but in the ‘audience,’” Marjorie Garber notes, “in the reactions of the spectator, Claudius,” as he interprets Hamlet’s play—guided, lest his interpretation go astray, by the amateur dramatist’s own decoding commentary.²³ Shakespeare’s interest in this problem of individualized application of dramatic material is established even earlier in the play, when Hamlet applies to his own context the player’s “Pyrrhus” speech. Just as Claudius’s interpretation of “The Mousetrap” particularizes and risks differing from what the author intended, the “precise application [of the Pyrrhus speech] to Hamlet’s own case is private to the hearer,” as Gurr notes; “the Player is … innocent of its applicability.”²⁴ Application depends upon the applier’s context and receptive faculty, not upon what the author has written into the script or how the actor performs it.

The May 1639 performance of the lost play The Cardinal’s Conspiracy provides a historical instance of “application” producing dangerous meanings not intended by the original dramatist. According to Edmond Rossingham, “the players of the Fortune were fined 1,000£. for setting up an altar, a bason, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the church.”²⁵ Other scholars have addressed the political ramifications of this incident in relation to the perceived threat Arminianism posed to the established church.²⁶ These ramifications, however, depended upon an act of audience application: what the actors “allege” to be the play’s meaning (what the literal—probably licensed—text of the script allowed them to claim) contradicted what to the authorities “was apparent” (how the performance of that text was interpreted by the audience). Interpretation creates the ultimate meaning of a play and in this case officials “made” the play to be about Arminianism. Application rendered the play impermissible, even though the same script had been staged in the past without alarming the authorities.

“Application” was also shaped by the particular context within which any playgoer might encounter a play, ensuring that individual spectators watching the same script in the same performance might not have the experience of watching the same play. Robert Tofte provides a vivid example of this by describing a lover who sees a performance of Love’s Labor’s Lost and takes the play personally. “This Play no Play,” the speaker complains, “but Plague was unto me,” because at the performance he had “lost the Love I liked most.”²⁷ His broken-hearted alienation in the crowd of laughing playgoers is palpable, for “what to others seemde a Jest” was to him “in earnest”: “To every one (save me) twas Comicall, / Whilst Tragick like to me it did befall.” As Whitney observes, “The personated character behind the actor’s performance becomes the playgoer” through the spectator’s “sense of individualized response.”²⁸ Tofte’s narrator “applies” the play in a way that makes it both his and about him: “It is not just that everyone else is laughing and he is hurting,” Whitney explains, “but—since he experiences the actors representing not characters but his own feelings—that the audience is laughing at him.”²⁹ For this playgoer, reception leads to painful participation, resulting in the divergence of his experience from that of the rest of the audience. No other playgoer “makes” the play in the same way; the new, “Tragick” meaning, contradictory to the generic meaning given the play by Shakespeare or experienced by the rest of the audience, belongs solely to him. The contradictory generic response to a play described by Tofte was not uncommon: Edmund Gayton, with tongue in cheek, observes that “many by representation of strong passions [have] been so transported that they have gone weeping, some from Tragedies, some from Comedies.”³⁰ In The Life of a Satirical Puppy Called Nim (probably written in the 1620s), Thomas May describes observing in the Blackfriars audience the “punycall absurdity [of] a Country-Gentleman … who was so caught with the naturall action of a Youth (that represented a ravish’d Lady) [that] he swore alowd, he would not sleep until he had killed her ravisher: and how ’twas not fit such Rogues should live in a Common-wealth…. This made me laugh,” May notes, “but not merry.”³¹ The tragic, pathetic scene is broken into twice, first through the naïve playgoer’s attempt at participation and then, triggered by that intrusion, through May’s own alienated, generically inappropriate laughter. Kent Cartwright argues that “the spectator’s participation” is crucial to the realization of a play’s generic meaning;³² how are we to identify that meaning, though, if the spectator “participates” like Tofte’s brokenhearted lover, sobbing at a comedy, or May, laughing out loud during a tragedy? Reasons for such contradictory generic responses vary: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus finds the mechanicals’ tragedy humorous because the play fails to follow convention; Hamlet’s “barraine spectators” laugh during a serious scene because they lack the competence to understand what they see;³³ Tofte’s narrator, however, departs the comedy weeping because his particular, personal situation changes for him the play’s meaning. In each of these, the reception response required by the act of performance allows the playgoer to overwrite the generic identity of the play assigned by the author. Like any aspect of dramatic meaning, generic effect only occurs within the received understanding of the individual playgoer. If a playgoer does not find a play tragic, labeling it “The Tragedy of …” on a title page is irrelevant to understanding its meaning for that playgoer. If, like Hoskins, the playgoer projects outward his or her rejection of the author’s generic intentions, then, for the rest of the audience, that consumer’s idiosyncratic interpretation may take precedence over whatever objective the producer had.

In addition to a play’s generic identity, responsive playgoers could revise, or attempt to revise, its narrative. Gayton describes an incident when a butcher was “so much transported” by the play The Greeks and Trojans that, “seeing Hector over-powred by Mirmydons,” he attempted to alter the course of the Trojan War. The “passionate Butcher … got upon the Stage” and “with his good Battoone tooke the true Trojans part so stoutly, that he routed the Greeks, and rayled upon them loudly for a company of cowardly slaves to assault one man with so much odds. He strooke moreover such an especiall acquaintaince with Hector, that for a long time Hector could not obtaine leave of him to be kill’d, that the Play might go on; and the cudgelled Mirmydons durst not enter againe, till Hector, having prevailed upon his unexpected second, return’d him over the Stage againe into the yard from whence he came.”³⁴ Gayton’s (possibly fictional) anecdote might be hyperbolic ridicule of a naïve playgoer who, confronted with a vivid performance, failed to distinguish between reality and fiction. Even so, however, the comic force of the incongruity—the playgoer trying to change the play and, in effect, history—relies upon recognizing that a playgoer, stirred by an active imagination, might not sit quietly and passively as the play proceeds as scripted.

A playgoer’s interpretive understanding might not, of course, undermine or contradict the designs of the playmakers. As noted, engagement could be kept internal and thus benign. Even in these cases, however, because a text’s meaning cannot exist independent of reception, the spectator’s capacity to fill out the play imaginatively situates that consumer as part of the production process, completing what performance must leave unrepresented. When Simon Forman recorded his experience witnessing a performance of Macbeth in 1611, he remarked that when they encountered the witches, Macbeth and Banquo were “ridinge thorowe a wod”—a scenic detail not in the text of the play and unlikely to be depicted through the use of props, and so probably supplied by Forman’s own imagination.³⁵ Shakespeare penned a script, the King’s Men translated that script into a performance, and, finally, Forman imagined that performance as a fictional event; all three of these—script, performance, reception—make up the “play” that the audience experienced. As amateur dramatist Jasper Mayne assured his royal audience in the Whitehall epilogue of The City Match (1637), “He onely wrote, your liking made the Play.”³⁶

Early modern commentators demonstrate their understanding that the playwright provides what Altman describes as the “strands of verbal and visual material that must be woven by [the audience] into an intelligible fabric.”³⁷ Ultimately, the audience, not the author, was recognized as possessing final, autonomous responsibility for assembling those pieces into a meaningful event, hence the recurrent trope of playwrights anxiously pleading in paratexts that the audience “take thinges as they be ment,” as Richard Edwardes puts it in the prologue to Damon and Pithias (1565–71).³⁸ Edwardes, like other playmakers, knew that what is “ment” by the play is territory the producer must yield to the consumer. Prologues and epilogues repeatedly ask audiences to signal those parts of the play they like and those they dislike, making the promise—genuine or not—that the dramatist will draw upon such feedback to revise the text.³⁹ Whether or not writers or players did take those responses into consideration in revising plays, audiences were frequently, and deferentially, reminded by those within the profession that consumers had, or ought to have, final control over what they saw on stage. The play was, Tiffany Stern points out, “offered to the audience as a mutable text ready for improvement,” and the audience was conditioned to think of itself as the authority guiding that improvement.⁴⁰ As stationer Richard Hawkins explains in his quarto of Fletcher and Beaumont’s Philaster (1609), “the Actors [are] onely the labouring Miners, but you [that is, the consumers] the skilfull Triers and Refiners.”⁴¹ This understanding of consumers as possessing the “skilfull” authority to “try and refine,” that is, judge and revise, posits the audience as the ultimate authority in the playhouse. When the boy actor Ezekiel Fenn played his first man’s role, Henry Glapthorne wrote for him a prologue in which the player refers to himself as an “untry’d Vessell”—but it is the audience members, not the playwright, whom he describes as the “skilful Pilots” who will “stear” his course.⁴² Theater is a collaborative art, and the collaborating artists are not only in the tiring-house or on the stage; audience theorist Susan Bennet puts it succinctly: “In the theatre every reader is involved in the making of the play.”⁴³ Day, Rowley, and Wilkins’s banquet metaphor can therefore be reversed: the dramatist might supply the ingredients and the playgoers make the dish, just as the spider and the bee “make” poison or honey from the raw material of the flower.

“A stage play should be made”: Playgoers Making—and Unmaking—Plays

It was not impossible, of course, for playgoers to provide playmakers with the actual “ingredients” for a play, beyond the usual commercial factor of audience demand. In 1602, George Chapman wrote a play called The Old Joiner of Aldgate and sold it to Edward Pearce, master of the Children of Paul’s. The script was Chapman’s, but the bookbinder and, apparently, playgoer John Flaskett devised the plot. According to the attorney-general’s bill for the ensuing Star Chamber proceedings, Flaskett decided “that a stage play should be made,” and, accordingly, the play “was made by one George Chapman upon a plot given unto him [by Flaskett] concerning … Agnes Howe.”⁴⁴ Flaskett hoped to use the play to influence his legal efforts to marry Howe—a wealthy woman who had been betrothed by her father to (at least) three different suitors. The bookbinder did not write the script, but he was a “playmaker” in that he shaped the source material of the Howe betrothals into a plot (probably a summary or outline of the action) for the stage.⁴⁵ For Old Joiner, someone outside the theater collaborated with a professional dramatist in making a play, but this was not the only instance of outsiders to the industry supplying material to those within the industry. The Duke of Feria, for example, reported to King Philip of Spain that Sir William Cecil had supplied to players the plots for many anti-Catholic interludes staged in London in 1558 and 1559.⁴⁶ During a Star Chamber trial in 1596, Lord Treasurer Burghley entertained the idea of “hau[ing] those yt make the playes … make a comedie hereof, & to acte it with [the] names” of those involved in the case.⁴⁷ Similar to Flaskett’s experience, Thomas Dekker reported in his deposition for the 1624 lawsuit resulting from the controversial play Keep the Widow Waking that he and his collaborators had written the script “upp on the instruccions giuen them by one Raph Savage,” a man who does not appear to have been connected to the theater industry.⁴⁸ In 1601, Francis Mitchell, servant of Edward Meynell of Hawby in Yorkshire, wrote a jig based on the gossip surrounding the failed attempt of Michael Steel of Skelton to sleep with his wife’s maidservant, Frances Thornton; after being performed by amateur actors at several private homes around Yorkshire, the jig was acquired by a touring troupe of professional actors who staged it at the end of their public play performances from June through Christmas 1602.⁴⁹ It did not require professional training in play-making to transport compelling events from the streets or the courtroom onto the public stage.

Flaskett, Cecil, and Savage instigated the making of new plays by providing dramatists with ready plots; more often, however, audience members “revised” plays written by professional dramatists by, like Hoskins of Oxford, intervening during a performance or altering the immediate performance context. These playgoers collaborated in the creation, not just of dramatic meaning, but of the dramatic event as well. At the broadest level, audiences might demand a change to a company’s intended repertory. Antimo Galli relates such an event in August 1613 at the Curtain, when Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini visited the playhouse; after the play, “one of the actors … asked the people to the comedy for the following day and he named one. But the people desired another one, and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars.’”⁵⁰ This is a fundamental reshaping of performance context: the spectators wanted a different play from what the actors intended, they demanded it, and, presumably (Galli does not say), the actors acquiesced. While simple, even this intrusion reverses the conventional producer-consumer relationship and posits the audience as the agent setting the terms for its own theatrical experience, putting active consumers in control over responsive producers. Playgoers could also shape the performance context by calling for additional entertainment after the play was over: many performances of plays concluded with a jig, but a reference in James Shirley’s Changes suggests that the staging of the jig was not always by the actors’ choice. In the play, when Caperwit explains to a professional dancer that he himself will “write the songs” to which the dancer will perform, he notes, “Many Gentlemen / Are not, as in the dayes of understanding, / Now satisfied without a Jigge, which since / They cannot, with their honour, call for, after / The play, they looke to be serv’d up ith’ middle.”⁵¹ Caperwit suggests two ways in which the audience shapes the theatrical event: first, in the days when the amphitheaters were the only venues (“the dayes of understanding” is a joke about the groundlings who “stood under” the stage) the audience could “call for” a jig after the performance; second, though “honour” now forbids calling out for such entertainment, the players have simply subsumed audience demand by inserting dances into the bodies of plays themselves.

Likely the most famous example of consumers asserting control over the context of performance is Gayton’s—perhaps hyperbolic and invented, but nonetheless informative—description of how audience demand for specific plays could overrule players’ intentions: “I have known … where the Players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bils to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to; sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes the Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these, and at last, none of the three taking, they were forc’d to undresse and put off their Tragick habits, and conclude the day with the merry milk-maides.”⁵² In this incident, audience interaction compels the producers to comply with what the consumers desired. Gayton’s playgoers repeatedly interrupt the performance in order to effect changes in what they are seeing—resulting in a kind of theater-on-demand experience. What is being changed, however, is not the scheduling of plays within the repertory, as in Galli’s account, but plays in the midst of acting: plays that readers experience as whole, cohesive, and complete scripts are dismantled, their textual integrity sacrificed for the overriding concern of satisfying audience demand. What Gayton’s audience produces through its control of the playhouse is a new theatrical event, a pastiche “play” composed of bits from Tamburlaine, Jugurth, The Jew of Malta, and The Two Merry Milkmaids. Rather than a unified narrative experience, Gayton’s anecdote suggests that performances, shaped by audience demand, might be disjointed, partial, and generically incongruent miscellanies.⁵³ Like commonplace books, theatrical performance could be a user-made conglomeration of pieces of various texts assembled in response to consumers’ inclinations. In Gayton’s example, the audience enforces its will through violence: “Unlesse this were done, and the popular humour satisfied … the Benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, Oranges, Apples, Nuts, flew about most liberally, and as there were Mechanicks of all professions, who fell every one to his owne trade, and dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruine of a stately Fabrick.”⁵⁴ If the actors will not use their labor to satisfy the audience, the audience will use its labor to put the actors out of work. The commercial theater thus becomes a site of vocational contest, and consumer interaction becomes work in itself. This audience does not passively consume but instead actively takes charge of its experience, even if such participation involves physically “consuming,” that is, using up, the materials of the playhouse. Ironically, Gayton’s playgoers, in this process of “play breaking,” are “playmaking”: their desire for authority in making their own theatrical experience is so profound that to enforce it they are willing to destroy future opportunities to enjoy it.⁵⁵ Gayton’s playgoers are not merely engaged in consumer interaction with the playmaking industry; they are (to Gayton’s apparent disgust) establishing the playhouse as, ultimately, their domain alone.

A less adversarial example of a playgoer contributing to the performance of a professional play may be seen in the instance of Jacobean lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke. Whitelocke had written a coranto for the 1633 court performance of James Shirley’s masque The Triumphs of Peace, but “which being cried up, was first played publiquely, by the Blackefryar’s Musicke” before a different play: “Whenever I came to that house [that is, the Blackfriars] (as I did sometimes in those dayes), though not often, to see a play, the musitians would presently play Whitelocke’s Coranto, and it was so often called for, that they would have it played twice or thrice in an afternoon.”⁵⁶ Like all music in the theater, Whitelocke’s coranto contributed to the audience’s emotional and aesthetic experience and thus also to the received meaning of the play at which it was performed. The participation by Whitelocke in the theatrical event may have been peculiar, but his contribution was just as much a part of the “play” experienced by the audience as the author’s words or actors’ gestures. Furthermore, inclusion of the music at a performance, and thus its effect upon the audience, depended not upon the plans of the professional playmakers but upon the amateur musician’s role as a playgoer, since it was, Whitelocke recalls, played whenever he attended the theater, regardless of the play being staged.

Many accounts of audience behavior during a performance characterize playgoers’ activities as a kind of “other play,” made by the audience and enacted parallel to, often in competition with, the scripted performance on stage. Perhaps the most innocuous, though widespread, version of such disruptions is seen in the (often satirical) descriptions of gallants seated on or near the stage at the private theaters; repeatedly, these playgoers are described as putting themselves on show for the rest of the audience, usually in direct and deliberate competition with the show on stage. For example, John Davies mocks “Rufus the Courtier” who, “at the Theater” first finds the “most conspicuous place” in the audience but then “Doth … to the stage himselfe transferre.”⁵⁷ Edward Guilpin taunts “Cornelius that braue gallant youth” who “sits o’re the stage / With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth,” dressed to the height of flashy, militaristic fashion.⁵⁸ Henry Fitzgeoffrey targets a gallant for sitting on “a Stoole and Cushion” on stage dressed in clothes fancy enough to be a costume in the play (“did he not drop / Out of the Tyring-house?”).⁵⁹ Francis Lenton disparages an “expensiue foole” who would “pay an angell for a paltry stoole” at the Blackfriars and even wear “spangled rare perfum’d attires” when he “so often visited the Globe.”⁶⁰ Thomas May self-deprecatingly mocked his own habit of putting on a show of fashion while he “sat upon the Stage” at the Blackfriars, one time catching “a Ladies Eie, whose Seate opposed mine [and who] look’d stedfast on me, till the Play ended; seeming to survey my Limbs with amorous curiosity: whilst I advanced them all, to encounter her approbation.”⁶¹ In the anonymous epigram “A Description of Spongus the Gallant” in the Farmer Chetham commonplace book, a brawling, lavishly dressed gentleman is mocked because, among many things, “He playes at Primero over the stage” when at the playhouse.⁶² Perhaps most famous of all, in The Devil Is an Ass, Jonson lambasts such behavior in Fitzdottrel, who will

goe to the Black fryers Play-house,

Sit ithe view, salute all my acquaintance,

Rise up betweene the Acts, let fall my cloake,

Publish a handsome man, and a rich suite

(As that’s a speciall end, why we goe thither,

All that pretend, to stand for’t o’the Stage)

The Ladies aske who’s that? (For, they doe come

To see us, Love, as wee doe to see them).⁶³

The spectacle of clothing, smoking, drinking, reading, gambling, and talking staged by such playgoers meant that the “show” was in the audience as much as—sometimes more than—on the stage. The spaces of the two performances were physically conflated in the architecture of the playhouse: the gallery doubled as both a seating and an acting area, and, at the indoor theaters, the stage itself doubled as a seating area. The very nature of a three-quarters theatrical space compels audience members to become part of the performance observed by others in the same audience.

More substantial and potentially dangerous forms of audience intrusion and performance were not uncommon. For example, William Fleetwood’s June 18, 1584, report of a near brawl at the Theater describes the instigator, “one Browne,” as “having a perrelous witt of his owne.”⁶⁴ The phrase “of his owne” juxtaposes Browne’s creativity in attempting to provoke a fight with the onstage show created by the playwright. In November 1634, when Robert Leake wrote to Sir Gervase Clifton to inform him of a fight between two courtiers at the Blackfriars, he explicitly described the event as “that actus secundus plaid on Tuesday last.”⁶⁵ In August 1612, a dispute broke out between several playgoers at the Globe, resulting in a spectacle that must have rivaled the play itself for audience interest. Recently widowed Elizabeth Wybarn had gone to see a play, attended by several others; she was approached by Ambrose Vaux, son of William, Baron Vaux, and apparently was propositioned in an inappropriate manner. Two of her attendants responded with “great violences and blasphemous oathes,” and soon twelve other audience members intervened, “armed arraied and weaponed with Rapiars daggers Pystalls and other weapons” all “in a ryotous manner.”⁶⁶ Where Wybarn and her companions were in the theater when this happened is not clear, although one defendant refers to them “sitting” and to Vaux “coming in,” which might suggest either the gentlemen’s rooms to the side of the stage or the lords’ rooms above the stage; as Mary Blackstone and Cameron Louis observe, “If this episode were played out in the lords’ rooms right above the stage, the real-life events may even have eclipsed the play in the minds of the spectators as well as the participants.”⁶⁷

In a more poetic vein, Henry Fitzgeoffrey uses a playmaking metaphor to give voice to a rake who, instead of watching a play at the Blackfriars, is busy watching the other spectators, including a “Cheapside Dame”: “Plot (Villain!) plot!” he tells his companion, so they might “devise [a way] to get her hither” into their box.⁶⁸ The rake tells his friend if “[we] lay our heads together,” the lady will “holde us doing till the Latter Act,” appropriating the theatrical term (the final act of the play) as a bawdy description of the desired outcome of his tryst (the act of intercourse). With similar sexualizing of playmaking terminology, Thomas May characterizes his elaborate scheme to win the attention of a woman in the audience at the Blackfriars as “a parlous Plot.”⁶⁹ Samuel Rowlands merges the criminal and theatrical senses of “plotting” in his description of a pickpocket attempting to cut the bottom of a purse during a performance: when both the performance and robbery are complete, “The Play is done and foorth the foole doth goe.”⁷⁰ Rowlands’s joke depends upon the ambiguous identification of the “Play” as either the fiction performed on the stage or the crime performed in the audience, casting the victim in the stock theatrical role of the “foole.” Merging the “play” in the audience with that on stage, playhouse offenders were often compelled to appear on the stage as well. Will Kemp recalled that whenever a “Cut-purse” was “at a play … taken pilfring[,] … we [would] tye [him] to a poast on our stage, for all people to wonder at.”⁷¹ The character Nobody in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (ca. 1606) likewise notes, “Somebody once pickt a pocket in this Play-house yard, / Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it.”⁷² In these instances, the playgoer’s “performance” was drawn onto the stage, but in 1583, at the Red Lion in Norwich, the Queen’s Men took the show into the auditorium in order to chase off two audience members who refused to pay admission.⁷³ Richard Tarlton and John Bentley leapt from the stage, in costume and with property swords in hand, to defend the doorkeeper, fellow actor John Singer, from the men; eventually, another spectator, Henry Brown, joined them in the affray and was involved in fatally stabbing one of the intruders—an instance of players and playgoers collaborating in a peculiar, violent way to make a spectacle.⁷⁴ If the early modern playhouse comprised not so much a performance space and an audience space but two different kinds of performance space, Kemp’s account, Nobody’s joke, and the Queen’s Men’s storming of the auditorium all speak to a degree of both tension and exchange between the two. When the audience’s performance spills into the actors’ space and competes with professional control over what gets “played” in the commercial place of business, the actors must either comply (as in Gayton’s anecdote) or retaliate (as Kemp, Nobody, and the Queen’s Men did). In either case, the dynamic between audience and play is interactive: playgoers create drama in the playhouse just as much as watch it.

Furthermore, when events on stage resembled what playgoers thought to be a version of their own life in the real world, that sympathy was often expressed in the language not of dramatic reflection but of dramatic self-production. For example, in referencing the oft-repeated anecdote about a woman moved to confess to the murder of her husband while watching a similar murder enacted in a play, a character in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (1596) recalls that the murderer “cryed out, the Play was made by her.”⁷⁵ In Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), the player Paris defends the theater by claiming its innocence of its own effects, particularly noting that if the players should depict “a loose adultresse” on stage and in the audience “a Matron … Guilty of such a foule unnaturall sinne / Crie[s] out tis writ by me, we cannot helpe it.”⁷⁶ Identifying the matron as the “author” of the play on the stage subsumes the real crime into the fictional and reinforces the sense of the consumer as the one who has produced the spectacle. Paris’s logic goes even further, effectively disempowering the professional playmakers by taking from them the capacity to control the meanings made by their play (“we cannot helpe it”) and rendering them the passive instruments of the active spectator.

Reality and performance in the playhouse are repeatedly presented as composite, even indistinguishable, in a single sociocultural continuum. Antitheatricalists were intensely aware of, and alarmed by, this capacity of the playhouse to fold reality and fiction together. Anthony Munday, for example, argued that playgoers actually participate in the sins they see enacted on stage and thus bear responsibility, with the players, for “making” the play and its meanings: “Al other evils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers.… [T]he filthiness of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladlie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors.”⁷⁷ The play’s “beholder,” its consumer, is also a “doer” or producer. Playgoers, playmakers, and even opponents of plays saw the auditorium as a performative space and the performance occurring in it as one in which audience members were both authors and actors.

Theatrical experiences beyond the commercial playhouses also blurred the playgoer/playmaker binary. There was no line, for example, separating audiences and actors at Inns of Court entertainments.⁷⁸ Likewise, crowds observing civic pageants were themselves part of the entertainments that they watched.⁷⁹ In some pageants—such as James’s 1604 entry into London—spectators were not just performers but also authors, seeming to erupt spontaneously into orations, recitations, and songs of their own creation.⁸⁰ At the universities, audiences, actors, and writers also belonged to one and the same community; as the anonymous antitheatricalist “J. G.” complains in his rebuttal to Heywood’s An Apology for Actors, “And who [at the universities] are the spectators? but such like as both Poets and Actors are.”⁸¹ Spectators of shows of “bodily feats,” such as dancing and tumbling, were, as Erika Lin argues, “thought of as active participants even when they merely watched the show.”⁸² Even at sermons, audiences were accustomed not to silent, passive reception but to “interactive conversations … in which the congregation and preacher collaborated in the creation of the occasion.”⁸³ When individuals who learned to become consumers of performances at schools, universities, the Inns, city streets, great halls, town halls, guildhalls, or churches and open-air “crosses” brought that experience into the professional theaters, they were bringing an understanding of cultural consumption that required their collaborative participation. Amateur dramatists who wrote their own plays for professional actors merely extended that collaboration from the figurative and imaginative into the literal and active, assuming a materially interactive relationship between producers and consumers. Rather than simply responding to professionals’ scripts, imagining the fiction of what they saw represented, or applauding and hissing what they liked and disliked, amateur dramatists drew upon their experience as theatrical consumers and their own creativity and understanding to write new plays envisioned for the stage. The move from reception to creation required more than just attention and taste, of course; to write a play, would-be playwrights in the audience had to have, or at least think that they had, a critical understanding of the ways in which plays worked.

“Scarce two … can understand the lawes”: Critical Capacity and the Playgoer as Revising Playmaker

Playwrights in the period frequently draw attention, favorably and unfavorably, to the capacity of audience members to judge and critique specific aspects of the play, anatomizing the whole and analyzing the effectiveness of each individual part. For example, John Ford praises Blackfriars playgoers for their “Noble Judgements” that “understand” The Broken Heart (1630–33), but he acknowledges also that some in the audience might “say, ‘This was flat’; Some ‘here the Sceane / Fell from its height’; Another that the Meane / was ‘ill observ’d.’”⁸⁴ Recognizing that audience judgment involves taking his play apart into its constituent pieces, Ford concludes the epilogue by comparing such dissective critique to the play’s title, imagining that if only the “Best” in the audience approve of it, “The Broken Heart may be piec’t up againe.” Playwrights’ acknowledgments of such “judicious” playgoing became particularly prevalent in the Caroline private theaters.⁸⁵ Earlier audiences, however, and contemporaneous audiences at such theaters as the Red Bull and the Fortune also exercised analytical judgment about the effectiveness of certain qualities in the plays that they saw. Most texts that mock amphitheater audiences for their lack of these critical skills were written for audiences at the private theaters. For example, Thomas Carew’s commendatory poem for Davenant’s Blackfriars play The Just Italian (1629) decries the “weake / Spectator” of the Red Bull because if one “aske[s] him [to] reason why he did not like / … ignorance will strike”; such playgoers, Carew complains, “dare controule” but lack the prerequisite ability “to judge” or justify their opinions.⁸⁶ Gurr observes that jibes against public theater audiences tended to assume that those audiences had “debased standards of literary sophistication,”⁸⁷ but many jibes—including Carew’s—go further with the more fundamental charge of audience ignorance: it was not merely that their standards were “debased” but that they lacked standards, or knowledge of standards, at all. William Fennor, for example, denigrates the mindless responses of the “Ignoramus crew” in the pits at public theaters; with “judgements … illiterate and rude,” these “understanding grounded men” do not even know why they respond the way they do: “Let one but aske the reason why they roare / They’ll answere, cause the rest did so before.”⁸⁸ Like Fennor, Dekker derides the “Greasie-apron Audience” as unthinking, unsophisticated, and merely “Applaud[ing] what their charmd soule scarce understands.”⁸⁹

Rather than accurate descriptions of public theater audiences and their supposed inability to understand drama, these accusations should be read as salvos in the competition between the different types of venues. Some dramatists, after all, mocked the tastes and competence of private theater playgoers as well. As early as 1609, Beaumont complained that the “illiterate” audiences of the Children of the Queen’s Revels had “scarce two of which can understand the lawes / Which they should judge by.”⁹⁰ In 1631, Shirley critiqued private theater spectators who still desired jigs in their plays.⁹¹ Jonson attacked the Blackfriars audience in 1635 for being no different than amphitheater audiences (“those deepe-grounded, understanding men [who] censure Playes, yet know not when, / Or why to like”).⁹² Heywood mourned the rise of demand, by the 1630s, for petty sexual intrigues at the Blackfriars.⁹³ If they could have their way, these dramatists would remake the audience in their own image, possessing their own understanding of the “lawes” of good drama—“lawes” usually according with the tastes of playgoers at a different venue. Playwrights’ damnations of audience ignorance cannot be taken at face value. Critiques of one audience offered indirect praise to another. Like many of their counterparts at private theaters, many public theater spectators understood plays as constructions of various component parts and were capable of judging how those parts worked separately as well as in combination—prerequisites to imagining changes or alternatives, or even entirely new dramatic texts.

An example of public theater audience members forming their own thoughts about how certain parts within a play ought to be revised is seen in Thomas Locke’s description of the Globe performance of Fletcher and Massinger’s The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619). In his August 19, 1619, letter to Dudley Carlton, Locke observes that though the play “hath had many spectators and receaved applause: yet some say that (according to the proverbe) the divill [that is, Olden Barnavelt] is not so bad as he is painted.”⁹⁴ Locke describes specific changes that “some” have suggested would improve the portrayal of the main character: “Some say … that Barnavelt should perswade Ledenburg to make away himselfe (when he came to see him after he was prisoner) to prevent the discovrie of the plott, and to tell him that when they were both dead (as though he meant to do the like) they might sift it out of their ashes, was thought to be a point strayned.” Locke’s playgoers have not merely absorbed the theatrical event as passive recipients; they desire to participate as collaborating revisers looking to improve the play. The suggestion that a particular line is “a point strayned” signals a rejection of language as being implausible for the character, much like the “auditor” who objected during the premiere of Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora. Locke’s playgoers (assuming that this is not a description of his own experience, as may well be the case) feel that they have a right and ability not just to respond to the play but also to change it and, in so doing, improve it.

Moving from assessing the effectiveness of a play’s parts to proposing revisions to it or creating an entirely new play represents a different scale of interactive response: like interpretation, critique constructs meaning only for the critic, unless, as professional playmakers often feared, that critic disseminates that critique to others. Calling for revision of some part of the play, or writing a new play, is an act of response that always attempts to impose the individual consumer’s evaluative opinions onto the larger consumer community. John Lyly recognizes this distinction between internalized judgmental response and public play changing in the Paul’s prologue to Midas (1589), in which an actor hopes that if the play “receive an inward mislike, wee shall not be hist with an open disgrace.”⁹⁵ Spectators who do not approve of the play, Lyly urges, should keep that disapproval private, limited to the individual experience of the one playgoer; if the negative response is made “open,” that is, expressed outwardly, it risks displacing the author’s authority by shaping how other members of the audience might view the play—like Hoskins of Oxford, outwardly expressing his inner dislike for Technogamia. Lyly’s Blackfriars prologue for Campaspe (1583) displays the same concern over audience members imposing their evaluation of the play upon the rest of the audience: “We here conclude: wishing that although there bee in your precise judgementes an universall mislike, yet wee maye enjoy by your wonted curtesies a generall sile[n]ce.”⁹⁶ The professional dramatist does not seek to prevent judgment—he allows that some might “mislike” everything about the play—but he does warn against judgments outwardly expressed, hoping to “silence” such challenges to his authority and protect the other audience members’ autonomy to judge the play for themselves. His anxiety concedes that authority to determine how audience members might respond to the play and thus condition others’ reception of the play resides, in the end, with the audience itself.

“Jehove doth as spectator sit”: The Authority of the Playgoer

The idea of playgoers possessing authority that could supplant the dramatist was not new, nor was it without appeal to theater professionals who wanted to flatter the (paying) audience. A prominent version of the “playmaking playgoer” metaphor was found in the theatrum mundi commonplace adopted by many theater apologists. Within the theatrum mundi, God occupies the place of dramatist, scripting what is performed upon the stage of the world by the men and women who are, as Jaques observes, “merely players.”⁹⁷ As Heywood explains in An Apology for Actors (1612), “The world’s a Theater, the earth a Stage, / Which God, and nature doth with Actors fill.”⁹⁸ Responsibility for filling the stage with “actors” belongs to God, the playwright.⁹⁹ To sustain the metaphor to its logical end, however, Heywood recognizes that a third category of participant must be included: the audience. If “the world [is] a Theater,” then

… Jehove doth as spectator sit

And chiefe determiner to’applaud the best,

And their indevours crowne with more then merit[,]

But by their evill actions doomes the rest,

To end disgrac’t whilst others praise inherit.

In Heywood’s theater of the world, playwright and audience are one and the same: the authority that observes, applauds, and condemns the action is the same authority that makes the action. Heywood’s metaphor thus relies upon a circularity of creative function: the playgoer does not merely influence what the dramatist writes; the playgoer himself or herself writes. In this idealized economy, one source satisfies both supply and demand. The theatrum mundi therefore requires that the audience wield, as Whitney puts it, “authority … in the dramatic transaction and ultimately in the process of production.”¹⁰⁰

Others in the period employed the trope of the divine playmaking playgoer for similar ends. Indeed, Anne Barton points out that since Pythagoras, writers “have been tempted to … describe Man as an actor[,] and assign either to Fate or to God Himself the double position of dramatist and audience.”¹⁰¹ Playwrights found the theatrum mundi metaphor, with its idea of the play-making playgoer’s “double position,” a useful convention. In the induction to Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1587), Robert Greene enlists Venus and the Muses as both “writers” of the play and its observers. “Poets are scarce,” complains the divine amateur dramatist, “when Goddesses themselves / Are forst … to pen their Champions praise.”¹⁰² Shakerley Marmion’s A Fine Companion (1632), drawing upon Aristotelian cosmology, describes the octagonal Cockpit-in-Court as “a Spheare / Mooved by a strong Intelligence,” paralleling the audience with God as the prime mover at the center of the circles of heaven.¹⁰³ Similarly, the prologue for Shirley’s The Coronation (1634) refers to women in the audience as “the bright intelligences [that] move, / And make a harmony [of] this sphere of Love.”¹⁰⁴ Dekker craves such audiences for If This Be Not a Good Play: “I wish [for] a Theater full of very Muses themselves to be Spectators”; the ideal spectator is a divinely empowered agent whose creative authority instills in playwrights “Triumphes of Poesie” and in players, “Elaborate Industry.”¹⁰⁵ More directly, the villain Lurio in amateur dramatist William Rider’s The Twins (1630–42) wishes he were both playwright and playgoer so he could both devise and admire his plot: “Me thinks it would shew bravely on the stage, I’de have it personated to the life, and I the chief spectator on the Theatre.”¹⁰⁶

Many dramatists endorsed the authority of the creative playgoer by inviting spectators to complete the play in their imaginations. These pleas to spectators to “eke out [the] performance with [their] mind[s]” frankly acknowledge the stage’s illusionistic inadequacies, admitting the medium’s inherent representational gaps and asking the audience to “work [their] thoughts” to fill them in their minds.¹⁰⁷ The authors of these plays request that the audience assist in finishing the “making” of the play as imaginative collaborators.¹⁰⁸ Thomas Nashe, in recounting audience response to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, describes the results of this: when “the Tragedian that represents” Talbot enacts the hero’s death, “ten thousand spectators … imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”¹⁰⁹ Neither Talbot nor the “Tragedian” is actually bleeding, but within “ten thousand” imaginations “Talbot” is bleeding—and in ten thousand different ways, as each spectator “makes” the scene differently in his or her mind. Shakespeare’s invitations for such imaginative collaboration in Henry V (1599) and Pericles (1608) are well known. The Chorus in the anonymous Chamberlain’s Men play Thomas Lord Cromwell (1600), perhaps influenced by Henry V, also demands that playgoers use their creative mental capacity to compensate for insufficient artifice and lacunae in the depicted narrative: “Now gentlemen imagine,” the Chorus urges in the first act, “that young Cromwell … Is fled to Antwarpe, with his wife and children,” and later in the play, “Now let your thoughtes as swift as is the winde, / Skip some few yeares, that Cromwell spent in travell, / And now imagine him to be in England.”¹¹⁰ The prologue to the anonymous The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1602) relies upon the play’s spectators to construct the given circumstances of the first scene, pleading that they “Imagine now that [Peter Fabell] is retirde” and “Suppose the silent sable visagde night, / Casts her blacke curtaine over all the world.”¹¹¹ As these playwrights recognize, without the audience’s imaginative participation, the scaffolding of illusion upon which the theater predicates its art will be incomplete and might even collapse. The problem is not one of verisimilar representation—which was not necessarily an aesthetic goal on the early modern stage—but one of resolving the practical dramatic need for continuity, plausibility, and exposition. Unable to depict the darkness of night or Cromwell’s flight to Antwerp and the years he spent in travel, these plays demand that their audiences contribute creative energies in the making of the fiction. In some instances, the dramatist acknowledges the audience as, in fact, a progenitor of its fiction. The prologue to Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1599) implores spectators to impart “life” to the play by imagining the truth underwriting the fiction that they see: “our muse intreats, / Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, / … your gracious eye / Gives life to Fortunatus historie.”¹¹² Consumption is generative: without the audience’s engagement, without the creative act of spectatorship, the play will not live. Rather than attempt to conceal representational failures of the theatrical medium, these appeals draw attention to points where failure is inevitable and ask for playgoers’ collaboration in negotiating those moments.¹¹³ Such direct addresses are moments of surrender in which the dramatist acknowledges he must give up some control to his partners in the audience.

What makes these bids for participation particularly relevant is their timing in relation to the theater industry’s professionalization. After the 1590s, actors becoming playwrights and the nascent development of playwriting as its own self-regulating field both signaled a degree of occupational closure—and hence professionalization—of the industry; when this closure experienced its greatest threat from amateurs, invitations to the audience to participate imaginatively in the “making” of the play ceased. In the early 1620s, invitations for audience participation vanished almost entirely, with the latest in Fletcher’s The Prophetess (1622). Calls to the audience to imagine what the performance could not show began as necessity, became convention, but then, particularly with the rise of the courtier amateurs in the 1630s, became irrelevant, even risky. At the same time these invitations vanished, the number of induction scenes attempting to control playgoer response rose. The more professionalized playwriting sought to become and the more amateurs supplied (or tried to supply) plays to the actors, the more it must have seemed to many professional dramatists that invitations for audience participation, even if only on the imaginative level, might encourage challenges to the profession’s desired barrier separating the lay consumer from the authorized producer.

“Hee writes good lines”: Playgoers Taking Possession of the Play

For many professionals, particularly Jonson and Shirley, the extreme—and extremely undesirable—result of spectators crossing that desired barrier was their actual incursion into the field of playwriting: playgoers who, without any training beyond their experience as playgoers, wrote plays themselves. Jonson’s complaint in his commendatory verse for The Northern Lass, discussed in the Introduction, is the most vivid example of this attitude. Though hyperbolic, Jonson’s irritation reflected reality. Playgoers not “bred” in the “craft” of playwriting translated their engagement with the stage into writing their own play texts, not only for amateur domains, but also for the professional playhouses. These playwriting playgoers learned to write for the stage as attentive consumers of theatrical texts who experienced performances in a highly personal, and peculiar, way. Their dedicated attention to the ways in which performance worked resembles the many descriptions—often satirical—of playgoers growing so engaged with the play that they effectively took possession of it, or parts of it. As we will see, many playgoers arrived at the playhouse with preconceived ideas about what, based upon genre or subject, the play should include; many also left with ownership of the text itself, carrying ideas, speeches, even parts out of the playhouse and making them their own.¹¹⁴ The nature of the repertory system, combined with repeat attendance, meant that one audience member could develop close familiarity with particular plays and parts. In Cynthia’s Revels (1600–1601), Jonson mocks an “Idoll”-worshipping playgoer who, waiting for the star actor to enter, “repeats … / His part of speeches, and confederate Jests / In passion to himselfe.”¹¹⁵ Jonson intends ridicule, but beneath the mockery lies the assumption that a committed playgoer could memorize parts he had seen performed. Over time, actors came and went, but roles stayed largely the same, making it possible, Tiffany Stern contends, for “a member of an audience [to] realistically claim to know a play as well [as] or better than the (new) actors performing it.”¹¹⁶ An interrupting spectator played by William Sly in Webster’s induction for The Malcontent (1602–4), for example, proudly announces that he “hath seene this play often” and knows it so well (“I have most of the jeasts heere in my table-booke”) that he “can give [the actors] intellegence for their action”—figuring the attentive playgoer as a potential authorizing agent for the performance.¹¹⁷ The idea of playgoers knowing players’ parts was familiar enough for John Heath to mock it in Two Centuries of Epigrams (1610), in which he jokes of a “Momus” who, wanting to “act the fooles part,” attends plays daily at the Globe, Fortune, and Curtain and in his diary “notes that action downe that likes him best” until he can, like a “Mimick,” “play the Mome.”¹¹⁸ Less rancorously, Gayton in the 1650s recalls a prelapsarian cultural relationship in the years before the closing of the theaters, when playgoers and playmakers came together in the communal, convivial space of a drinking establishment to blend their particular roles in the theatrical enterprise: “Many … have so courted the Players to re-act the same matters in the Tavernes [that they had seen in the theaters], that they came home, as able Actors themselves.”¹¹⁹ Not only is the play detached from the playhouse, ownership of the “script” transfers from performer to receiver, who becomes a self-entertaining participant. Playgoers recording, learning, and embodying play texts signal the interactive cultural system in which engaged consumers, conditioned by this transactional relationship, came to assume authority over the stage and even write their own material for it.

Like the fictional Momus’s diary, actual commonplace books, such as Edward Pudsey’s (ca. 1600), and other written copies of plays or excerpts from plays witness how acquisitive a dedicated audience member or reader could be.¹²⁰ Consumers who commonplaced and quoted were not necessarily intending to write their own plays; their practice, however, signals the extent to which the dramatic text and its meanings were not considered to “belong” (in the sense of signification, not copyright) to the producer who first made it. The process of reception response frequently involved acquisitive consumers claiming the play for their own use and changing it as they did so. These consumers gave life to plays outside the playhouse and therefore beyond the control of their authors, something many authors lambasted as fraudulent possession. Such dismissal was an attempt to disempower consumers, relegating their texts to the status of mere plagiarism. Francis Lenton describes an Inns of Court student who “daily doth frequent” the theaters and “Treasur[es] up within his memory / The amorous toyes of every Comedy / With deepe delight.”¹²¹ The problem is not the student’s memorization of the “toyes,” however, but his later regurgitation of them as his own: “Hee writes good lines,” Lenton jokes, “but never writes his owne.” Consuming and internalizing the producer’s text is allowable, but translating that experience into an attempt by the consumer to produce renders him ridiculous; because any “good lines” the student generates cannot be his own, Lenton implies that any original lines he writes are necessarily “bad lines.” George Wither similarly mocks an amateur poet who, in order to enhance his wooing, repeats as his own poetry he has heard on stage: “His Poetry is such as he can cul / From plaies he heard at Curtaine or at Bul.”¹²² Peter Heylyn likewise teases a soldier who hopes to impress his “trul,” advising that he should “gather musty phrases from ye Bul.”¹²³ These examples all take for granted that the language and ideas of plays are transportable commodities, rendering them open to being borrowed and built upon by consumers.¹²⁴

Like Lenton, Wither, and Heylyn, professional dramatists who mention acquisitive playgoers do so with disapproval. In the prologue to The Woman Hater (1607), Beaumont describes playgoers “lurking … in corners, with Table bookes,” “feed[ing their] malice” by recording scandalous matter in the play.¹²⁵ Dekker, implying a hierarchy between the creative wit of playwrights and derivative work of playgoers, satirically instructs gallants to “hoord up the finest play-scraps you can get, upon which your leane wit may most favourly feede for want of other stuffe.”¹²⁶ Similarly, Marston’s “Luscus” makes “a commonplace booke out of plaies”:

Say (Curteous Sir) speakes he not movingly

From out some new pathetique Tragedie?

He write, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not,

And all from out his huge long scraped stock

Of well penn’d playes…. O ideot times,

When gawdy Monkeyes mowe ore sprightly rimes!¹²⁷