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
