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
