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
