these writers “took” from professionals’ plays in terms of literary content but what, theatrically speaking, they learned from them. Analyzing these plays as creative, rather than derivative, works approaches them on their own terms and not through the conditioning lens of the profession. An essential goal of the book is to broaden our notion of authorship in the early modern period by placing amateur writers—rather than canonical professionals—at the center of analysis. These chapters are therefore not a “source study” shedding light on the oft-studied work of professionals but a study of the audience’s potential for deep theatrical understanding as expressed in the oft-neglected work of the amateurs.
Chapter 2 explores two playgoers’ plays in manuscript in order to show how engaged theatrical consumers drafted and revised to address the needs of specific users of those manuscripts. The first case study uses Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary to reconstruct how a playgoer tried to negotiate around the censorship of the Master of the Revels. The second case study considers how Arthur Wilson’s The Inconstant Lady (1630), a play that exists in both foul papers and an authorial presentation copy, reveals a playgoer’s process of revising in order to make his play suitable for a specific reader. Chapter 3 turns to stage directions to consider how playwriting playgoers understood and attempted to employ the materials, conventions, and practices of the commercial theaters. The chapter begins by analyzing how Robert Yarington’s position in the playhouse as a playgoer influenced one particular, pointedly theatrical stage direction that he repeatedly used in his Two Lamentable Tragedies (1594–1601). The second case study shows how a number of stage directions in Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen signal the playgoer’s understanding of performance practices and conventions and his concern also to explicate actions and materials that he knew to be unconventional. Finally, the chapter’s study of William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven (1601; revised 1606–8 and 1636–47) examines stage directions that give two or more choices to performers, depending on whether the play is staged by boys or by adults, in order to recover the playgoer’s understanding of how different performance auspices required different practices and materials. Chapter 4 interrogates the efficacy of playwriting playgoers as verse dramatists, using plays by playgoers who were also nondramatic poets to demonstrate the kinds of verse effects amateurs incorporated into their plays, thus suggesting what poetically attentive audience members might have recognized about the nature and purpose of poetry on stage. The chapter begins with transitions between prose and verse in Robert Chamberlain’s The Swaggering Damsel (1625–40) in order to demonstrate the playgoer’s understanding of how modal shifts in language on stage could serve specific performance purposes apart from the simplistic rubric of genre. A similar sophistication marks the use of rhyme in Alexander Brome’s The Cunning Lovers (ca. 1639); Brome’s frequent blending of rhymes for various purposes distinguishes the playgoer’s play from contemporaneous plays written by professionals and so presents a more complex picture of the audience than we might assume if we were to judge that audience from the professionals’ plays alone. The chapter concludes with a study of how Barnabe Barnes uses metrical variants to characterize the changing emotions of two characters in The Devil’s Charter (1607). Just as professionals shaped dramatic meter to control mood or action, Barnes recognized that deliberate deviations from ideal iambic pentameter could be used to create the illusion of dynamic characters.
Reading a playgoer’s play as evidence of audience experience will not tell us what all—or even any other—audience members experienced in the playhouse, even audience members from the same socioeconomic class or background as the playwright. These highly invested, literate audience members were self-selecting and peculiar, and displayed a depth of interest and attention that likely set them apart from their peers. If it is true that, as Gurr speculates, the “ordinary type of playgoer [was] more absorbed in the story than the verse or characterizations [and] not at all interested in symbols or their application, inclined to moralise only in [a] conventional way,” playwriting playgoers reveal a much more heightened engagement with all of these elements.91 A loose modern analogue to plays written by playgoers may be found in “fan fiction,” in which deeply engaged cultural consumers subvert the producer-consumer hierarchy by asserting their own creative agency in ways that might reaffirm or critique texts made for them by mainstream, institutionalized commercial producers.92 Just as a script or story written by a dedicated follower of a particular television show will tell us, not about the show itself, but about that follower’s understanding of that show and its culture (in a way that a script written by a regular writer on its staff could not), a play written by a playgoer can tell us about that playgoer’s understanding of the stage.93 These playwrights’ plays merit reconsideration as primary evidence of particular audience members’ experiences because thus far the questions we have been asking of them (when we ask questions of them at all) have been, for the most part, methodologically inappropriate. When these plays have failed to live up to the expectation that they will, or should, provide the same kind of evidence as professionals’ plays, they have been pushed to the margins as unreliable and unimportant. Recognizing these plays as the work of writers whose knowledge of the theater derived almost entirely from their experience attending and reading plays, rather than making them, allows us to reposition our expectations and, at the same time, refine our own perspective on the early modern audience. If the early modern playhouse was a community of playmakers, plays by audience members afford the best access to the creative vision, as well as practical theatrical knowledge, of individuals in an otherwise largely mysterious and inscrutable part of that community.
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.
