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CHAPTER 2

Shared Feeling

The mixed-faith audiences that filled early modern London’s commercial playhouses responded to live theater in ways that were not always aligned with—or the outcome of—their individual beliefs. Sophisticated and ever-evolving theatrical techniques invited playgoers to pretend: to imagine different versions of the world, to fantasize beyond their ordinary ken, to entertain alternative perspectives of thought and feeling. Plays allowed confessionally diverse audiences to mentally and emotionally traverse the shifting ideological landscape with greater imaginative license than was afforded in many spheres of religious life. This is not utopian transcendence: London commercial theater over the seventy-five years before the English Civil War did not erode sectarian differences, or foster a general playgoing culture of Erasmian toleration. But plays in performance did temporarily focus the attention and energy of mixed-faith audiences into shared daydreams whose relations to real-world confessional politics were often productively oblique. Plays mediated religious discourses through theatrical devices that were no great respecters of doctrinal integrity but were effective in shaping audiences’ engagements with the drama.

Plays bound religious content to theatrical forms that had the power to prompt reactions that might contradict playgoers’ actual theological commitments. To say that dramatic effects shaped much of how mixed-faith audiences experienced plays does not mean that theater coerces playgoers into ideologically and emotionally uniform responses. Charles Whitney mischaracterizes critical attention to the formal orchestration of theatrical experience as a paradigm in which “the text or performance constructs audiences who perceive largely with innocent eyes from an abstract subject position.”¹ My point is not that theater erases religious identities but rather that theater creates a generative misalignment of real-world confessional positions and the confessional worlds of plays. My interest is in the kinds of conceptual and affective movement—even if it is only a temporary shifting of entrenched positions—produced when people with diverse beliefs respond together to a reimagined version of their shared, mixed culture.

Theater ventures beyond the boundaries of everyday life.² While religious differences did not disappear at the playhouse door, many plays depend, sometimes as a basic condition of their intelligibility, on the willingness of theatergoers to imaginatively embrace religious frameworks that they would reject outside the playhouse, or to dwell in stage moments that muddle confessional categories. Richard McCoy rightly emphasizes the difference between the demands of religious faith and the conditional “faith” elicited by theatrical illusions.³ The miscalibration between the ideological positions of audience members and theater’s refracted images of religious life made it possible for playgoers to experience their mixed confessional culture from other vantage points. Or, put differently, it was the semiautonomy of dramatic fantasy that made it a productive interlocutor, not merely a parrot, of confessional culture. Commercial theater permitted the “suspension of belief,” by which I mean that plays ask their mixed-faith audiences to process religious activities, objects, and subject positions differently from how they otherwise might in church, or at an execution, or during a theological debate.⁴ While antitheatricalists insisted on the moral and physical dangers of playgoing, there was also recognition that because theater is fictive, it operates with different interpretive protocols and consequences. As Philip Sidney puts it, “The Poet … nothing affirmes and therefore never lyeth.”⁵ In other words, plays allow confession-ally diverse spectators to believe in religious counterfactuals—to feel them as if real—without having to avow them as true.⁶ Commercial theater offered post-Reformation Londoners shared, vicarious experiences that cross confessional boundaries. These collective theatrical fantasies were not an escape from religious culture but rather a means of affective experimentation within it.

Early modern drama gave spectators the license to cognitively and emotionally invest in scenarios and subjectivities far removed from their own identity positions. In this chapter, I outline ways the representational practices of the theater business cultivated the imaginative elasticity of audiences. While many of the examples do not pertain to religious culture per se, they do demonstrate broader conditions of reception conducive to flexible engagements with religious culture. The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) offers a specific instance of theater’s capacity to reconfigure mixed-faith playgoers’ experiences of topical religious material. An eyewitness account of the play demonstrates how theatrical pleasure could displace confessional agendas. Yet the most extensive evidence of such imaginatively elastic, theatrical encounters with confessional material are the very scripts that structure these experiences. Plays orchestrate collective thought and feeling. However, responsive audiences are not passive victims of stage spectacle: reception is an active process.

The embodied, affective, and cognitive responses of audiences are the locus of theater’s ideological work. Culture is made and remade in the playhouse through gasps, tears, and snorts of laughter. Ideology is always lived; and the virtual experiences of playgoers are a particularly malleable site of reinscription and change. In closing, I show how a subgenre of Spanish Match plays from the 1620s capitalizes on the widespread fear among Protestants of a marriage alliance with Spain, yet also recasts these anxieties into more emotionally pliable fantasies. Unlike the rigid, religious binaries into which A Game at Chess interpellates its mixed-faith audiences (discussed in Chapter 4), the confessional transpositions seen in such plays as The Spanish Gypsy (1623), The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622), and the (1623) revival of Match Me in London are more characteristic of commercial theater’s mediation of post-Reformation confessional culture. While these Spanish Match plays do reinforce anti-Catholic tropes, they also offer unexpected pleasures, as well as opportunities for identification with unlikely characters, that allow affective movement within and around the dominant paradigm in which papist Spain is the implacable enemy of Protestant England.

Cultural Pressures and Theatrical Process

My goal is to articulate the dialectic between post-Reformation English society and its dramatic fantasies; that is, to show mutually constitutive exchanges between the religious lives of early modern Londoners and the confessional worlds imagined in the commercial theaters. The methodological risk of emphasizing the broader cultural pressures that informed playhouse experience is the elision of the reciprocal impact of theatrical process (and vice versa). Some recent scholarship ascribes shared playhouse responses primarily to discursive influences, such as humoral theory or the doctrine of Eucharistic participation. Other criticism emphasizes the crucial agency of disparate audience members in creating theatrical events and their meanings, stressing the diversity of playgoers’ interpretations and uses of theater.⁷ This book insists that broadly collective audience responses were structured most immediately (that is, most directly during the time of performance) not by external cultural frameworks but by theatrical effects. Of course, the worlds imagined inside the playhouse are never separable from the world outside its walls.⁸ However, tracking their mutual entanglement depends on the recognition of the distinctive, representational aptitudes of theater.

We lose an invaluable archive of human experience if we look only at the ways plays are socially conditioned by early modern conceptions of emotion and not at how plays themselves produce feelings in the social exchange among actors and audiences. For example, Allison Hobgood’s claim that the “most determinative factor” in the interactions between early modern players and their playgoers was humoral discourse homogenizes all plays into manifestations of “the two primary resources [of theater:] … the early modern cultural script about the communicability of passions … and, second, the playgoers who materialized that cultural script.”⁹ Doubtless, humoral theory affected some of the ways early modern people understood emotional interactions, including those in the theater. However, the limitation of this model is that it makes the resources of actual play scripts merely instrumental to a preexisting and unchanged “cultural script.” Steven Mullaney rightly cautions against an overliteral projection of humoral discourse as an etiology of playhouse passions: “In a phenomenology of historical or theatrical emotions, it might be tempting to limit evidence to the explicitly articulated, reported, or theorized. If we do, however, are we producing a history of emotions or a history of ideas about emotions? Aren’t we confusing evidence with the explicit as well as the extant? … [Instead, we must] embrace formal literary and theatrical analysis as a useful tool for the study of early modern emotions, not merely in terms of what characters and plays say or explain or represent but also, and more crucially, in terms of what theatrical performance makes happen in and with its audience, beyond the discursive and mimetic dimensions of the stage.”¹⁰ The emotional responses of playgoers are not simply products of preexisting, historical paradigms of affect but rather are molded and mobilized by the specific and changing stimuli of performance. Plays do not just describe the passions stirring elsewhere in a culture; they make their own, often more unusual or supple, structures of feeling.

More germane to the religious concerns of this book is Anthony Dawson’s account of theatrical experience as characterized by a shared sense of “eucharistic participation.”¹¹ While Dawson recovers a feeling of playhouse collectivity in the period that bore affinities to communion, the conceptual scale at which Dawson examines audience engagement is difficult to reconcile with the local effects of particular plays. It may well be the case that religious communion subtends the practices of theatrical reception in a diffuse but powerful manner. However, neither humoral contagion nor Eucharistic participation can be taken either as a descriptive model or as a direct cause of unified playhouse response. Dawson’s depiction of playhouse communion is largely dependent on a structural comparison between the relation of actor to role and the dual nature of Christ. Put bluntly, I doubt many people were strongly affected by theories of Christic hypostasis when Ned Alleyn was stalking the stage as Tamburlaine in red, velvet pants. The dynamic between actor and role is indeed a crucial aspect of performance (especially for a famous actor like Alleyn, who specialized in a type); and 2 Tamburlaine does have a communion scene that envelops playgoers (when their proxies, the scourge’s sons, dip their hands in his blood). The problem is that these more immediate, theatrical technes of complex personation and audience involvement are subsumed under a broader discourse of “communion.” The collective responses of mixed-faith audiences are not mystical unions but shifting convergences of feeling and thought induced by the shared apprehension of specific stage effects.

My point is not that extratheatrical, cultural frameworks do not also shape the reception of plays. Much important work, such as Dawson’s on communion, has demonstrated the influence of contiguous or analogous discourses and social practices (including, among others, spectacles of royal power, dissection, traditional festivities, fairs and markets, civic entertainments, executions, bearbaitings, medical theories of vision and the humoral body, sermons, and iconoclasm) that together overdetermined the basic conditions of behavior and perception fundamental to early modern theater. Ongoing scholarship that articulates such formative cultural pressures is vital to our understanding of the period in general, and to its drama. However, my priority here—which I understand to complement rather than to contest such work—is to stress how theater reconfigures the religious discourses it absorbs, and reshapes the ways mixed-faith audiences experience them.

Theatrical Cultivation of Imaginative Competencies

The repertory and representational practices of the commercial theaters encouraged mixed-faith audiences to approach plays with a flexible mentality. Whereas the focus of theater historians from Alfred Harbage onward has been the preexisting “mental composition” of audiences (that is, the intellectual and social experiences that playgoers took with them into the playhouse),¹² my interest is in the imaginative competencies developed by theater itself. As Jeremy Lopez writes, “Companies built and maintained followings by continually increasing the demands on their audiences’ attention, thus creating audiences that could handle those demands.”¹³ Early modern commercial theater developed new genres and dramatized an unprecedented range of subjects. The constant influx of new plays did not just cater to audience tastes but created them. Regular theatergoers were exposed to many different kinds of drama, and people often visited the playhouse without knowing what would be performed.¹⁴ Audiences were asked to make quick emotional shifts between generic registers, “mingling Kings & Clownes [in] mungrell Tragy-comedie.”¹⁵ Early modern plays regularly contain multiple representational levels, such as inset masques and dumb shows.¹⁶ They toy with generic expectations (as in King Lear’s counterfactually tragic ending), and they disrupt basic conventions of staging (as in Edgar and Gloucester’s climb up the cliffs of Dover). The drama habitually asks its audiences to adjust their perceptions during performance, and by doing so to deepen their theatrical competencies. Early modern playhouses were places where people could acquire new ideas and accumulate vicarious experiences. The drama disseminated elite and emerging bodies of knowledge to a broad audience, thus facilitating critical habits of political thought, social skills for urban life, and “mind-travelling” to foreign lands.¹⁷ Early modern commercial theater was an experimental and world-expanding medium. It cultivated mental and emotional elasticity that carried over into audience engagements with stage treatments of confessional culture.

Theatrical representation changes its objects and the viewer’s relationship to them. The resources of stagecraft gave theatergoers special kinds of emotional and imaginative access to confessional activities and subjectivities. To use a familiar example, Hamlet’s pacing, costume, language, and use of stage space call on largely Protestant audiences to imaginatively and emotionally take the possibility of purgatory seriously, even though reformers tended to treat it as an absurdity.¹⁸ Perhaps some Protestants did watch Hamlet’s act 1, scene 5, thinking, “This ghost is popish nonsense.” However, such a response would have very little to do with the actual scene unfolding onstage, “whose lightest word / would harrow up thy soul.”¹⁹ Plays ask audiences to “go along with” the action on stage: this could lead anywhere.

Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) illustrates the transformative potential of emotional expression and exchange. As an example of the principle that like attracts like, Wright tells this story: “Alexander asked a pyrat that was taken and brought before him, How he durst be so bold to infest the seas, and spoyle the commerceries? he answered, That he played the pyrat but with one ship, and his Majestie with a huge navie: the which saying so pleased Alexander, that he pardoned his life, and graunted him libertie: so much could the similitude of action transport the kings affection.”²⁰ Wright’s point is that the similarity between the two men breeds sympathy between them. However, the story is memorable precisely because of the obvious difference between the imprisoned, one-ship pirate and his interrogator, the conqueror of Persia. Rather, it is the pirate’s metaphor that makes “similitude” where there was none. Just as the pirate’s figurative speech creates a new imaginative and emotional bond between himself and his observer—one that crosses the actual social divide between them—so too, early modern commercial theater possessed devices for characterization and audience engagement (for example, soliloquy, costume, and plot twists) capable of reconfiguring the imaginative status of dramatis personae or events, as well as their relationships to the audience.

While it is important to track affinities between clusters of social experience and dramatic fantasies that seem geared toward those real-world perspectives, we cannot presume to know the limits of the interests and pleasures of particular demographics of theatergoers. Roslyn Lander Knutson wisely observes, “Audience taste is difficult to verify, being not necessarily as tied to class as scholars of a former time liked to assume.”²¹ The same is true of gender. For example, Andrew Gurr and Karoline Szatek argue that around the early 1610s the King’s Men began adding plays featuring strong women to appeal to a sense of gender solidarity among female playgoers.²² While this is entirely plausible, it does not mean (nor do they claim) that compelling female characters did not also draw sympathy from male playgoers. Henry Jackson describes a 1610 performance of Othello that “brought forth tears,” especially at the sight of “that famous Desdemona killed before us by her husband, [who] acted her whole part extremely well, yet when she was killed was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.”²³ The very specificity of Jackson’s memory of Desdemona’s dying gesture and expression registers the empathetic attention elicited by the actor’s skill. Commercial theater offered playgoers intimate engagement with characters, and imaginative investment in scenarios, far removed from their own life experiences: watching a king of England wake up in a cold sweat, or witnessing the tragic unraveling of an interracial marriage.

Nor, I am arguing, were theatergoers’ delights welded to their religious identities. Early modern people were sometimes curious about matters that lay beyond whatever their contemporaries, or modern academics, assign as their sphere: Wright describes men who will “wrangle about matters exceeding their capacitie, as a Cobler of Chivalrie, [or] a Tailor of Divinitie.”²⁴ Theater was a form of virtual experience that could expand playgoers’ frames of reference and foster new modes of thought and feeling. As with class and gender fantasies, confessional fictions on stage elicit similar extensions of imaginative and emotional faculties into different cultural terrain.

Though it does not record a real audience’s response to an actual play, Barnabe Riche’s pamphlet Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell—written by a playwright, in the voice of another playwright, and featuring a stage clown—nevertheless illustrates the potential of live performance to shake up fixed religious positions. In hell, the ghost of Robert Greene finds a papal legate, newly arrived to conspire with Lucifer, and “a most abominable company of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Pryors, Abbots … for the better establishing of the Kingdom of Antechrist [in] England.”²⁵ The pope’s representative has no sooner finished speaking:

But in comes Dick Tarlton, apparrelled like a Clowne, and singing this peece of an olde song.

If this be trewe as true it is,

Ladie Ladie:

God send her life may mend the misse,

Most deere Ladie.

This suddaine jest brought the whole company into such a vehement laughter, that not able agayne to make them keepe silence, for that present tyme they were faine to breake uppe.²⁶

The English Protestant clown Dick Tarlton cracks up the whole popish, Antichristian convocation. The interruption of seditious, Romish scheming is temporary (“for that present tyme”), but it still ruptures confessional animosity with comic energy.

Coming out of nowhere in the narrative and breaking the prose with verse, he formally, as well as diegetically, interrupts their plotting. Tarlton’s jest also derails the narrative’s running anti-Catholic satire, shifting the tone away from confessional invective. In other words, both the audience in the story and the audience of the story are jostled out of binary, oppositional, religious positions by a singing clown.

Plays Are Not Tracts

The more entertaining aspects of a play often derail the possibility of didacticism, or doctrinal clarity. When plays answer back to early modern religious life, they do not always teach lessons but sometimes speak gibberish, or cry, or make a joke. However, modes of expression that cannot be summarized in statements are still part of the dialogue between theater and confessional culture. Peter Lake offers an invaluable account of how London commercial theater created a public engaged with the political and religious problems of their time.²⁷ In recognizing the socially shaping work of audiences’ mental engagements with plays, Lake takes the political efficacy of theater more seriously than many literary critics. By close reading plays in their entirety (rather than in discursive snippets), he recovers sequential, theatrical experience as a social process. Yet if Lake’s correction to new historicism’s abstract understanding of power is a more fine-grained account of the immediate political and religious contexts of plays, conversely, scholars of the drama can bring to this conversation a more nuanced picture of theatrical form and the cultural work it does. Lake’s close readings largely stay on the level of plot, attend primarily to “high” politics, and limit the responses of playgoers to cognitive judgments. But theater is not simply a narrative of the actions of elites presented for analysis. It is a subtler and more complex series of interactions and pleasures, capable of indirect engagements with longue durée shifts, as well as more explicit forays into topical issues. Without question, early modern playgoers did watch plays “for use” in making sense of the dangers and possibilities of their religious and political circumstances, or for moral application in their personal lives. Nevertheless, theater offered pleasures other than instructions for living, imaginative challenges beyond the examination of court politics. As Stephen Gosson complains, “Sometime you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from countrie to countrie for the love of his lady, encountring many a terrible monster made of broun paper, [and returning unrecognizable except] by a broken ring, or a handkircher, or a piece of a cockle shell, what learn you by that?”²⁸ The familiar binary Gosson draws here between pleasure and profit is a false one. Our shared interdisciplinary project must be to connect archival and formal specificity, high and cultural politics, as well as the cognitive and emotional work of audiences.

Nathaniel Tomkyns’s eyewitness account of an August 1634 performance of The Late Lancashire Witches at the Globe shows how even an overtly topical play could baffle attempts at application.²⁹ The play dramatizes the alleged occult shenanigans of four women from Lancashire recently incarcerated in London on charges of witchcraft. Because the testimony that condemned them had since been recanted, it was unclear at the time of performance whether the accused would be pardoned or punished. The affair divided both popular opinion and the Privy Council between believers in the supernatural and skeptics—including the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The case was a religious and political hot potato that passed through several courts. Eventually, without any final determination made as to their guilt or innocence, the women were sent back to Lancashire, where they died in jail.

The King’s Men capitalized on the topicality of The Late Lancashire Witches;³⁰ however, rather than offering a judgment as to whether the women were guilty, the play parodies the question.³¹ Opposing views as to the reality of witchcraft are continually expressed back to back, and several characters reverse their opinions to comic effect. The braggart Whetstone’s tales of witchcraft are dismissed as his usual lies. When the magic he boastingly describes is shown onstage, it is funny both because his improbable fibs turn out to be true and because, through their association with Whetstone, the supernatural tricks seem phony. One of the running jokes of the play is that witchcraft is shown primarily as the cause of everyday, embarrassing “Crosses”:³² impotency, bastardy, bad luck hunting, getting beaten in a fistfight. As the witch Meg herself points out, regarding the inversions of social hierarchies through sorcery that put unruly women above their husbands, and make children and servants overly bold with their parents and masters:

But that’s no wonder, through the wide

World ’tis common. (C4v)

The effect of coding magic as a convenient excuse is that the tricks happening almost continuously in front of the audience seem as much a shaggy-dog story as actual enchantments. Witchcraft is often a dirty joke: Mrs. Generous is turned into a “jade” with a bewitched bridle and “ridden hard” (G4r). When the women are apprehended and patriarchal order restored, all their respectable interrogator wants to know are the dirty details: “And then [the devil] lay with thee, did he not sometimes? … —and how? and how a little? was he a good Bedfellow?” (L3r). Keeping the question of the witches’ guilt or innocence open is crucial to the “game” of the play. The running gag of The Late Lancashire Witches is the simultaneity of these mutually exclusive possibilities. The play’s comedy depends on sustaining a religious question; it does not encourage spectators to take a stance in the debate. That would ruin the joke.

Because of its explicit topicality, eyewitness Tomkyns “expected … [a] judgment” in the play regarding the question of the women’s guilt, or a moral “application,” but he finds neither. Tomkyns’s correspondent, Sir Robert Phelips, would likely have been keen to hear any theatrical commentary on the issue decoded, since his father had been Speaker of the House of Commons when it passed the witchcraft law with which the women were charged. The newsletter begins with an attempt to make politic observations on the play as a social event in London, but it primarily records its physical comedy. Magic tricks flout Tomkyns’s best efforts to be edified. Similarly, Simon Forman’s detailed, eyewitness accounts of William Shakespeare’s plays garnish a dominant interest in striking stage moments with sprigs of application.³³ Since Tomkyns’s description of live performance is less frequently discussed than Forman’s, and because the number and vivid physicality of the special effects demonstrate my point, I quote the passage in full:

Here hath bin lately a newe comedie at the globe called The Witches of Lancasheir, acted by reason of the great concourse y[e] people 3 dayes togither: the 3[d] day I went with a friend to see it, and found a greater apparance of fine folke gent[men] and gent[weomen] then I thought had bin in town in the vacation: The subject was of the slights and passages done or supposed to be done by these witches sent from thence hither and other witches and their familiars; Of ther nightly meetings in severall places: their banqueting with all sorts of meat and drinke conveyed unto them by their familiars upon pulling of a cord: and walking of pailes of milke by themselves and (as they say of children) a highlone: the transforming of men and weomen into the shapes of severall creatures and especially of horses by putting an inchaunted bridle into ther mouths: their posting to and from places farre distant in an incredible short time: the cutting off a witch-gent^woman’s hand in the forme of a catt, by a soldier turned miller, known to her husband by a ring thereon, (the onely tragicall part of the storie:) the representing of wrong and putative fathers in the shape of meane persons to gent[men] by way of derision: the tying of a knott at a marriage (after the French manner) to cassate masculine abilitie, and y[e] conveying away of y[e] good cheere and bringing in a mock feast of bones and stones in steed thereof and y[e] filling of pies with living birds and yong catts &c: And though there be not in it (to my understanding) any poeticall Genius, or art, or language, or judgment to state o[r] tenet of witches (w[ch] I expected,) or application to vertue but full of ribaldrie and of things improbable and impossible; yet in respect of the newnesse of y[e] subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here) and in regard it consisteth from the beginning to the ende of odd passages and fopperies to provoke laughter, and is mixed with divers songs and dances, it passeth for a merrie and ex[c]ellent new play. per acta est fabula. Vale.³⁴

Tomkyns’s description captures the kind of fantasy and physicality that Gosson rejects as a gratuitous distraction to theater’s more serious, didactic purpose, even down to the recognition-by-token device in the severed hand of Mrs. Generous. However, the fact that The Late Lancashire Witches proposes no “tenet of witches” does not mean that its entertainment value makes it irrelevant to public discourse on the topic: the “newness of the subject (the witches being still visible and in prison here)” is still a large part of the appeal of the play, even though it “consisteth [of] … fopperies.”

While larger confessional conflicts over traditional festivity and the enforcement of conformity hover at the edges of the comedy,³⁵ the play maintains no clear position in these broader debates. One of the stage tricks in The Late Lancashire Witches is the supernatural flight of the servant Robin to the Miter tavern in London for wine for his master, who, “since hee was last at London and tasted the Divinitie of the Miter, scarce any liquour in Lancashire will go downe with him, sure, sure he will never be a Puritane, he holds so well with the Miter” (E2r). The joke is about boozing, but the religious associations of the pub’s name are developed enough to glance at Laud. This reference is not a coded message so much as a wink. The magical jaunt to the Miter runs irreverent, frenetic rings around a complicated set of real-world religious conflicts. The Late Lancashire Witches’ absurdist nose-thumbing at serious controversies is itself an important form of religious and political expression. The play’s “improbable and impossible” stage tricks allow its mixed-faith audiences to take pleasure in suspending the question of whether the magic was “done or supposed to be done.” The play’s comedy is too imbricated in the debate surrounding the so-called witches to be considered escapist. However, it allows audiences divided on these debates to share an alternative attitude toward the question, to approach a fraught, religious issue with greater imaginative and affective license. Rather than a release from religious politics, the play offers a giddy, double vision, in which sorcery is real and not real, the witches are socially disruptive and harmless, and confessional differences are recalibrated to pub preferences.

Tomkyns’s first-person account is a compelling piece of evidence, unusual in the specificity with which it connects cultural context, stage effects, and audience response. It shows that even plays whose commercial and artistic success depended on their explicit engagement with topical religious material did not always transmit identifiable stances on these matters to their audiences. Important as this document is, we do not need Tomkyns’s direct testimony that the play contains no “judgment … of witches” to know that this is not a didactic play making a sustained, serious case against either sorcery or superstition but is instead a comedy in which the central conceit is the inability to separate magic from hoax. That evidence is in the script. Undeniably, Tomkyns’s extensive description of props and effects not included in the stage directions points up the limitations of play texts as records of performance. Nevertheless, the premise of the script and its punch lines structure and mobilize the physical comedy. The Late Lancashire Witches orchestrates not a resolution but a ridiculous encounter with a religious impasse. We erase a crucial form of public engagement with confessional life if we look to plays only for the kind of “position taking” elicited by works of controversy and ignore the subtler, stranger, but equally strong processes of collective thought and feeling orchestrated by early modern commercial drama.

The Orchestration of Active Reception

Plays were considered to be working when they gathered playgoers’ imaginations. The idea that plays move their audiences as a group from one mood or mode of thought to another is implicit in early modern theater’s frequently noted connection to oratory: the art of swaying a multitude.³⁶ Skillful players were praised for their ability to focus an audience’s attention. “Sit in a full Theater,” writes Thomas Overbury, “and you will think you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the [Excellent] Actor is the Center.”³⁷ As Matthew Steggle demonstrates in detail, the mark of a successful comedy was loud, theater-wide laughter, and a good tragedy was one that made the crowd weep.³⁸ In other words, the basic, declared goal of early modern stagecraft was to guide collective audience experience.

Implicit in plays are processes of shared perception and feeling. While external evidence of playgoer behavior can seem more empirically sound than the internal evidence of plays, it is also more limited. Unattached to a specific dramatic moment, Overbury’s description of the magnetic actor only tells us that a good performer can engage a crowd. Plays offer more detailed maps of thought and feeling. Playwrights used generic cues hoping to elicit particular reactions, and, as Lopez points out, “for a device to become conventional it must be functional.”³⁹ Scripts, and the staging practices they index, structure audience response. Even though they exclude the very things that constitute theater—live bodies, contingency, and physical staging—play scripts remain the richest and most extensive records of early modern English playhouse experiences. Nor has this archive been mined to exhaustion, especially as current scholarship attends to only a fraction of the extant corpus of early modern drama. Scripts are admittedly, as Richard Preiss objects, only a partial record of one half of a conversation, and as such omit the voices of live audiences.⁴⁰ Yet these incomplete transcripts are full of speaking silences.

To value scripts in this way is not to privilege text over performance, or to reify fantasies of authorial control over the distributed agency of the playhouse. A script is not a prison house but a spine that enables movement. Play scripts are synecdochical for live performance, a suggestive piece that conjures something larger than itself. In synecdoche, the part does not “stand in for” the whole in a mimeographic fashion, like an architect’s blueprint blown up in scale on a projector. “Think when we talk of horses, that you see them,” is not a prescriptive instruction but an open invitation. The “imaginary forces” of audiences that piece out vasty fields of France within the wooden O are always bigger and wilder than the scripts that set them to work.⁴¹ Preiss imagines an oppositional relationship between scripted drama and audience interactivity: “not ‘partnership’ but competition.”⁴² But scripts are not the disciplinary machinery of authors intent on a territorial battle for control of the stage against a distracted multitude who come to the playhouse solely to watch themselves act up. It is true that early work on audience response to early modern performance, such as Jean E. Howard’s Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration, tended toward a more coercive vocabulary in which stage effects “force” or “compel” particular responses from spectators. Yet, rather than harp on thirty-year-old diction choices that have since been abandoned by Howard herself—and by most others who are interested in the effects of plays on the people who watch them—it seems more productive to me to develop the methodological insights of reader-response-derived performance criticism into the intimate relationship between theatrical technique and audience experience.⁴³ For example, although Shakespeare’s Art prioritizes the craft of the author, Howard’s early recognition of scripts as shaped by and for a fuller field of performance practices anticipates the expanded understanding we now have of theatrical agency as distributed across the playing system as a whole.⁴⁴ Performance is a river that no one steps in twice. However, reader-response-based criticism’s attention to scripts as agents and archives of the unfolding of audience experience over time makes it well equipped to examine the cultural processes enabled in live theater.

Certainly, early modern theatergoers sought forms of gratification unrelated to the performed script. Preiss, Paul Yachnin, and others offer compelling accounts of the opportunities playhouses afforded for individual social performance.⁴⁵ People went to the theater for many perfectly good, nondramatic reasons: to sightsee, to sell or steal things, to cruise for sex, to flaunt their clothes and wit. Playgoers could be fractious, resistant, and sometimes more interested in themselves than the stage. But this does not preclude more receptive playhouse moods. Audience members could revel in their own activities independent of the drama, and also enjoy being moved as a group in harmony with a play. Robert Shaughnessy describes actor-audience interactivity in the reconstructed Globe as a process of “entrainment,” defined in communication studies as the phenomenon in which “two or more individuals lock into each other’s rhythms of, for example, movement, speech, and gesture.”⁴⁶ In the context of theatrical reception, this does not mean marching in lockstep. Shaughnessy records divided responses among different demographics of playgoers, as well as strong feelings of playhouse-wide connectedness. Modern actors often describe Globe audiences as a “sea of faces.”⁴⁷ The metaphor captures the simultaneously synchronic and multidirectional quality of theatrical response. The shared visibility among audiences and actors produces eddies, as well as waves, of emotional contagion. Actors and audiences share always-changing oscillations of feeling and attention. But while the rhythms of performance move the playhouse, actors also experience their audiences as too vast and protean to control. Entrainment is a complex and mutual process: not hypnosis.

The orchestration of collective and ideologically elastic audience experience is not an oppressive form of “mind control.”⁴⁸ Some recent work seeks to “restore power … to early modern spectators” by prioritizing “uncued audience agency.”⁴⁹ Hobgood objects to conceptualizing theatrical experience in terms of drama’s impact on playgoers and “rejects an incapacitating docility [implicit in the term] ‘reception.’ ”⁵⁰ This is a gratuitously convoluted way of thinking about theater, predicated on a narrow definition of agency. Responsiveness is not mindless submission but a necessary contribution to performance. To say that much of an audience’s interaction with a play consists of loosely collective reactions to things happening on stage is not to treat playgoing “as if [it] were primarily a form of discipline”⁵¹ but simply to recognize that shared experience is a basic pleasure and raison d’être of theater.⁵²

Shared responses are never identical. As Whitney rightly notes, “A collective roar, sigh, or wave of laughter in the playhouse may be generated by many diverse, individualized inflections of feeling.”⁵³ No two people, even those who occupy similar social positions, will ever perceive, judge, and remember a play in exactly the same way.⁵⁴ Rather, by collective responses I mean emotions, thoughts, and somatizations sharing a family resemblance, incited by the simultaneous perception of theatrical effects.⁵⁵ Orchestrated, shared experiences may be ambiguous or conflicted. Collective responses are entangled with the process of the play’s unfolding over the time of performance. However, they do not necessarily cumulate into one shared interpretation or “takeaway” opinion of the play as a whole. Collective playhouse experiences may have different implications for spectators depending on their social circumstances. The corrupt but beautiful femmes fatales of Jacobean tragedy described by Huston Diehl may send a shiver through the whole theater, yet the shared desire and repulsion provoked by the stage embodiment of the Whore of Babylon could have different aftershocks of meaning for Calvinist, Catholic, and Laudian playgoers.⁵⁶ The dramatic organization of confessionally fluid, collective experience is not totalizing. Plays do not summon into being ideologically uniform audiences. However, they do make the same virtual experiences available to everyone in the theater, even if participation asks of them different kinds of mental stretching. Orchestration draws thousands of simultaneous, individual, imaginative extensions into the experimental, social space of shared fantasy.

The active reception of theater takes many forms. While recent criticism productively attends to more conspicuous forms of audience participation, playgoer agency is not limited to its most literal, visible, and individual man-ifestations.⁵⁷ It is not only through uncued behavior that theatergoers contribute to the coproduction of meaning and pleasure in the playhouse. N. R. Helms writes, “Though spectators may seem to do nothing [but] … attend to the business onstage, their minds are always busy.”⁵⁸ As Keir Elam describes, plays begin and end in negotiations between performers and their audiences.⁵⁹ Anticipated audience responses shape the play from its conception. Playgoers make commercial theater possible by turning up and paying. Actors adjust their delivery depending on audience reactions during performance. Most importantly, audiences imaginatively create plays as they watch them. Plays exist as the assemblage of the experiences of audience members. Matteo Pangallo dismisses “the idea of the theatrical consumer becoming a producer” as an exhausted “critical commonplace,” and he turns his attention to overt forms of audience agency instead of the “merely imaginative.”⁶⁰ The direct ways in which playgoers revised plays discussed by Pangallo were indeed an important form of theatrical participation. But there is nothing “mere” about the collective imaginings of thousands of people.

Antitheatricalists as well as defenders of the stage describe theater’s capacity to transform audiences en masse, both when plays fulfilled the ameliorative moral function ascribed to them in classical dramatic theory and when they went dangerously awry.⁶¹ These accounts not only share an awareness that playgoers as a group are affected by performance (for better or worse); they also understand being moved by a play as a form of activity. Thomas Heywood praises the ability of dramatic examples of warriors to rouse like bravery in theatergoers: “What English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not … pursu[e] him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance … so bewitching a thing is lively 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.”⁶² Here, playgoers are engrossed (“wrapt” and “bewitch[ed]”) but also exercise their imaginations energetically (“offer” and “pursu[e]”). They receive and are shaped by the pressures of the play (“new mold[ed]”), but in a way that makes them active (ready for any “notable attempt”). For Heywood, dramatizations of English heroes elicit a kind of mental support or accompaniment. Stage action and audience imagination blur together: the spectator’s wishes “pursu[e in the] enterprise.” “Prosperous performance” happens simultaneously in the fiction of the play, on the stage, and in the playgoer’s heart.

For opponents of theater, the problem was precisely this kind of collective emotional participation. Anthony Munday writes that playgoers “al by sight and assent be actors…. So that in th[e] representation of whoredome, al the people in [their] mind[s] plaie the whores.”⁶³ Plays change spectators into inner performers. Stage representations are inseparable from playgoers’ “minds’ play.” For both Heywood and Munday, theater affects playgoers as a group: even the most virtuous spectator could be corrupted by licentious theater, just as even a coward could be emboldened by stage heroics. In other words, early modern theorists of performance observe that audience members do not maintain their individual, preexisting, inward dispositions intact for the duration of the play: “all the people” are affected by what they see. However, these mentally receptive audiences are not submissive lumps but imaginatively active partners in the creation of the play.

Debates about audience activity tend to propose binary alternatives: either rowdy or docile, either individuals or a group, either critical or feeling. The presumption is usually that there is a correlation among the former and latter sets of terms: that critical thought is limited to individuals, and more likely to be expressed through self-separating behavior such as interruption; whereas collective playhouse experience is understood as uncritically immersive, emotive, and passive. These are false assumptions. A quiet audience is not necessarily a passive one. Vocal playgoers are not always resistant. Immersive spectatorship can exercise critical faculties. Individual and collective playhouse experiences are not mutually exclusive.⁶⁴ Theater is not a zero-sum game in which either agential, individual playgoers run roughshod over the play and players or the force of “spectacle” batters a homogeneous blob of audience into “complacent” submission.⁶⁵

The cumulative evidence shows a variety of audience behavior, from rapt attention to backchat to boredom to violence. While it is important to recognize a broader difference between the polite customs of modern theatergoers and the generally more participatory range of practices available to early modern audiences, the relative frequency of attentive or disruptive behaviors in London commercial playhouses cannot be determined, given the limitations of the extant body of contemporary descriptions of playgoing. In any case, it is the wrong question. Knowing the things audiences did in playhouses does not necessarily reveal how they experienced theater. While some forms of playgoer expression are unambiguous (for example, throwing eggs at actors), it is not always possible to know what inward states are indicated by audiences’ outward behavior.

Expressions of emotion that modern playgoers might find irritating may rather for early modern theatergoers have enhanced the performance. For Preiss, audible crying disturbs the play: “The convulsive weeping of even one spectator, let alone hundreds, can be a loud and distracting business.”⁶⁶ However, in Thomas Nashe’s vivid description of collective audience response to Talbot’s death in act 4, scene 4, of 1 Henry VI, mass weeping does not detract but rather contributes to the scene’s effect: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot … to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”⁶⁷ Heywood records audiences responding to the scene collectively and emotionally, but not without agency, and not in a way that diminishes the play’s effects. The group response elicited by Talbot’s death transforms the scene from a representation of lost futurity to the restoration of a heroic legacy in the present.

In the play, as Alexander Leggatt points out, “the Talbots’ deaths … truly constitute an ending. After this, not only is the English cause … doomed, but Talbot and his son are forgotten.”⁶⁸ The script stresses the loss of Talbot’s line. His son John Talbot appears only briefly, for the sole, dramatic purpose of dying with his father in battle. The play underscores the extinction of their family. Talbot laments, “In thee thy mother dies, our household’s name.”⁶⁹ John Talbot’s bravery establishes him as a true heir: “An if I fly, I am not Talbot’s son” (4.6.2243). But the promise of patrilineal succession is confirmed only when precluded: “If son to Talbot, die at Talbot’s foot” (4.6.2245). Their deaths follow fast on each other. Together they exit to battle, Talbot urging his son to “fight by thy father’s side … let’s die in pride” (4.6.2248–49). A skirmish follows, immediately after which John Talbot’s corpse is brought onstage, and Talbot dies just fifteen lines later. Talbot’s last words—“Now my old arms are John Talbot’s grave” (4.7.2284)—register a generational collapse. The script shows the end of Talbot, both his death and the loss of his legacy.

But the weeping of playgoers changes the play. Live audiences resurrect and “new embalm” Talbot. Their responses not only affect the emotional event in the theater but touch even the dead person played on stage: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot … after he had [lain] two hundred years in his tomb.” As Rebecca Schneider describes the affective labor of historical reenactment, “The stickiness of emotion [drags] the temporal past into … [the] present.”⁷⁰ The live, wet “teares of ten thousand Spectators” revivify Talbot’s historical corpse “fresh bleeding.” His affective reanimation in the present compensates for the loss of futurity scripted into the scene. Repeated performance gives Talbot the posterity the plot denies.

Here, the emotional responses of audiences revise the play not by displacing or destroying it but in collaboration with the script. Powerful as the implied, Pietà blocking is, the Talbots’ death is not simply a sad, static tableau but an interactive process of feeling. The playwrights use a technique that I call “audience priming”: the script prepares playgoers for a dramatically climactic response by placing a small-scale version of an emotional situation immediately before the big scene. This is often done through a reported speech or minor character. This device is not just a thematic doubling. What makes it effective is the temporal build. The death of a minor character, John Talbot, affectively attunes audiences for the death of the play’s hero; Talbot’s mourning for his son models audiences’ sorrow for him. In practical terms, it gets their bodies ready to cry on time. That is useful in this scene, because playgoers are asked to make a rapid, emotional transition from the adrenaline of stage combat to grief at Talbot’s death. Priming an audience, like priming a gun or a pump, is partly a physical preparation. Yet spectators are not simply having their tears jerked. Audience priming is a complex, recursive technique of deepening feeling; it is outward moving, self-replicating, an extension seeking further extension.⁷¹ Their weeping is a supplement as Jacques Derrida describes it: “The supplement adds … and makes…. Its place is assigned … by the mark of an emptiness.”⁷² It fills and changes an incomplete emotional structure.

Similarly, early modern theatergoers might not necessarily have found it distracting if some spectators shouted during a performance. Instead of indicating the atomization of the audience into individuals, whooping and heckling could have contributed to a group sense of investment and immediacy. To draw a modern-day comparison, for many moviegoers, yelling at the screen is a sign of absorption rather than opposition, and it especially intensifies the enjoyment of particular genres (action and horror), even for those who themselves are quiet.⁷³ In his defense of theater, Heywood describes an action scene, in which “[soldier] and horse even from the steeds rough fetlocks to the plume of the champions helmet [were] together plunged into a purple Ocean,” that would make any playgoer “hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor.”⁷⁴ Heywood’s whinnying spectator is not detached or interrupting. He is the soldier’s horse. By this, I am not saying that Heywood is describing an audience member imitating actual horse noises. However, in comparing the spectator’s cheering to neighing, Heywood conceives of playgoer vocalization as something absorbed into the fiction during performance. The same is true of somatized, emotional response: the playgoer mentally “hug[s]” the valiant soldier, just as onstage the steed and champion are tightly joined, “together plunged” from hoof to plume. These playgoer reactions participate in the martial world of the play. In short, we cannot assume that we know what playhouse noises or actions early modern Londoners would have considered truly disruptive, and what may have been incorporated into the performance event.

Furthermore, I suspect that playgoers who did behave badly (whatever that actually meant) were unlikely to bring the whole imaginative enterprise to a grinding halt. Even extreme examples of theatrical disruption could continue to interact with the fiction in performance:

Fowler you know was appointed for the Conquering parts, and it being given out he was to play the Part of a great Captain and mighty Warriour, drew much Company; the Play began, and ended with his Valour; but at the end of the Fourth Act he laid so heavily about him, that some Mutes who stood for Souldiers, fell down as they were dead e’re he had toucht their trembling Targets; so he brandisht his Sword & made his Exit; ne’re minding to bring off his dead men; which they perceiving, crauled into the Tyreing house, at which, Fowler grew angry, and told ’em, Dogs you should have laine there till you had been fetcht off; and so they crauled out again, which gave the People such an occasion of Laughter, they cry’d that again, that again, that again.⁷⁵

The story ends suspended in the crowd’s repeated demand for the improvised joke, but the performance itself did not. “The Play began, and ended with his valor,” in spite of the corpsing in act 4. “Recovering” the thread of action and the attention of the crowd from disturbances contingent on live performance is as basic an acting skill as memorizing lines. More to the point, it would be a mistake to think of the event described here as entirely “stopping” or “stepping outside” the play. Even though the plot is interrupted, and the conventions of theatrical representation are visibly not working, and the performance genre has changed from action to clowning—nevertheless, even here there is creative seepage between the fiction of the play and the flap in the playhouse. Even from the beginning the boundary is blurred: the crowd does not come to watch the character within the drama but to see the actor Fowler play the type of “conquering” role for which he was famous. The extras break character because Fowler’s personation of a warrior is so lifelike: their prop shields tremble with real fear. The star so terrifies his onstage observers that they pretend to die before he can pretend to kill them. This is acting: to strike viewers without touching. The personae of the “great captain” and the leading man bleed together. So do fictional place and theatrical space: he exits brandishing his sword, not minding “to bring off” (the stage) “his dead men” (the characters). Fowler’s haughty disregard for his fellow actors is continuous with a “conquering” disdain for slain enemies. He commands the “[mute] dogs” to crawl as imperiously as Tamburlaine lashes the vanquished kings that pull his chariot. It is unclear how far afield of the imaginative world of the play this interruption to the scripted action actually goes. The playgoers shouting “that again” are not impeding the performance so much as including themselves in a game among the actors, which itself echoes and elaborates (and ultimately is reintegrated into) the dramatic fiction. That is to say, plays do not usually break if dropped: they bounce.

Plays are only destroyed or undermined by vocal and physically active audiences if we think of plays as self-contained mimetic units. However, early modern scripts are not closed in this way but instead open the dramatic fiction out to a broader field of performance. Erika T. Lin aptly calls attention to the disjunction between the aesthetics of tragedies and the jigs routinely attached to them.⁷⁶ Moreover, theatrical performance does not stop at the edge of the stage. As Mullaney writes, “It extended beyond the acting space or scaffold to take place in and with the audience, its necessary participant and dramaturgical collaborator.”⁷⁷ William N. West describes early modern theater as “encompassing” audiences, “so that their experiences and responses become part of the play.”⁷⁸ To adapt the axiom of the Prague formalists, the playhouse makes everything in it a sign. Scripts in performance do not simply create fictions on stage. They make apertures between the world of playgoers and the world of the play.

Early modern drama is full of what I call “open scenes” that depend on the collaboration of the playhouse as a whole in the creation of theatrical effects. Othello riles up the crowd with its sing-along English drinking song, making the audience itself part of the illusion of a wild party in Cyprus. Thomas Middleton’s Roaring Girl transforms the faces of playgoers into a picture gallery, incorporating audiences into the architecture of the imagined house. So easily in so many plays, real theatergoers flesh out fictional multitudes, or groups of observers, invoked by extension as a “band of brothers” or included as “pale and trembling mutes or witnesses” to the act. Audience contributions to the performance event need not be loud or literal to be powerful. Playgoers might offer a kind of attention (whether silent or not) in which Desdemona’s unexpected breath—“O”—is a coup de theatre.⁷⁹ Francis Bacon compares the effect of actors on audiences to the movement of “the bow to the fiddle.”⁸⁰ Although active in different ways—one striking, the other resonating—both are necessary parts of the same creative instrument.

Case Study: Playing on the Spanish Match

Any critical project that seeks to connect historical change and representational process is an attempt to leap between two moving trains. Yet this is necessary work, because it is through such jumps—back and forth, instant by instant, continually, and in every area of human activity—that cultures and subjectivities make each other. In theater, a social art in which anything can be anything else, these synapses fire with particular freedom: a puritan’s arousal at the Whore riding a prop dragon, an Arminian’s surprise at a predestinarian plot twist. A play is not a “thing” but a volatile nexus of interactions between people and the possibilities of their culture. As Mullaney writes, “The play is not embodied on the stage … such embodiment is a process rather than a presentation, and it takes place within the architectonic sociality of the playhouse.”⁸¹ Post-Reformation culture was continually re-created through the lived experiences of believers, and with particular flexibility through the virtual experiences of mixed-faith audiences.

The reiterative and adaptive nature of genre allows it to explore multiple variants of a cultural problem. A Game at Chess (see Chapter 4) was part of a larger vogue for plays set in Spain or dealing with the Spanish Match in the early 1620s. This dramatic fashion reflected, but also helped shape, how early modern Londoners thought and felt about this crucial matter of public interest. The Spanish Match subgenre flourished in part because the issue was of current concern, but it was also popularized by the repertory practices of theater companies. The King’s Men (KM) and the Lady Elizabeth’s Men (LEM) in particular offered competing Spanish plays that cultivated an appetite for drama on the subject that was likely profitable for both companies.⁸² These include The Spanish Curate (1622 KM), The Changeling (1622 LEM), the lost play “The Spanish Duke of Lerma” (1623 KM), The Spanish Gypsy (1623 LEM), and the lost “Spanish Viceroy” (1624 KM), among others. Whereas the stage craft of A Game at Chess produces tub-thumping ideological clarity that divides its audiences largely along denominational lines, the dramatic techniques of other Spanish Match plays generate more confessionally fluid fantasies that gather their mixed-faith audiences in shared imaginative and emotional exploration.

Theater helped condition the terms in which popular audiences conceived of Spain. I do not mean this subgenre “convinced” audiences that Spain was bad. While they do reinforce existing anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish stereotypes, these plays also involve forms of transposition and indirection that twist familiar narratives and fears into less recognizable forms. Dominant ideology reproduces itself through repetitions that are never self-identical. The reiterations on which hegemony depends are always (even if imperceptibly) changing. This constant process of re-creating the social world reinforces existing structures but also revises them. Representation changes a culture the way that waves redraw the shoreline that contains them over time.