“upp on the instruccions giuen them by one Raph Savage,” a man who does not appear to have been connected to the theater industry.48 In 1601, Francis Mitchell, servant of Edward Meynell of Hawby in Yorkshire, wrote a jig based on the gossip surrounding the failed attempt of Michael Steel of Skelton to sleep with his wife’s maidservant, Frances Thornton; after being performed by amateur actors at several private homes around Yorkshire, the jig was acquired by a touring troupe of professional actors who staged it at the end of their public play performances from June through Christmas 1602.49 It did not require professional training in play-making to transport compelling events from the streets or the courtroom onto the public stage.
Flaskett, Cecil, and Savage instigated the making of new plays by providing dramatists with ready plots; more often, however, audience members “revised” plays written by professional dramatists by, like Hoskins of Oxford, intervening during a performance or altering the immediate performance context. These playgoers collaborated in the creation, not just of dramatic meaning, but of the dramatic event as well. At the broadest level, audiences might demand a change to a company’s intended repertory. Antimo Galli relates such an event in August 1613 at the Curtain, when Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini visited the playhouse; after the play, “one of the actors … asked the people to the comedy for the following day and he named one. But the people desired another one, and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars.’”50 This is a fundamental reshaping of performance context: the spectators wanted a different play from what the actors intended, they demanded it, and, presumably (Galli does not say), the actors acquiesced. While simple, even this intrusion reverses the conventional producer-consumer relationship and posits the audience as the agent setting the terms for its own theatrical experience, putting active consumers in control over responsive producers. Playgoers could also shape the performance context by calling for additional entertainment after the play was over: many performances of plays concluded with a jig, but a reference in James Shirley’s Changes suggests that the staging of the jig was not always by the actors’ choice. In the play, when Caperwit explains to a professional dancer that he himself will “write the songs” to which the dancer will perform, he notes, “Many Gentlemen / Are not, as in the dayes of understanding, / Now satisfied without a Jigge, which since / They cannot, with their honour, call for, after / The play, they looke to be serv’d up ith’ middle.”51 Caperwit suggests two ways in which the audience shapes the theatrical event: first, in the days when the amphitheaters were the only venues (“the dayes of understanding” is a joke about the groundlings who “stood under” the stage) the audience could “call for” a jig after the performance; second, though “honour” now forbids calling out for such entertainment, the players have simply subsumed audience demand by inserting dances into the bodies of plays themselves.
Likely the most famous example of consumers asserting control over the context of performance is Gayton’s—perhaps hyperbolic and invented, but nonetheless informative—description of how audience demand for specific plays could overrule players’ intentions: “I have known … where the Players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bils to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to; sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes the Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these, and at last, none of the three taking, they were forc’d to undresse and put off their Tragick habits, and conclude the day with the merry milk-maides.”52 In this incident, audience interaction compels the producers to comply with what the consumers desired. Gayton’s playgoers repeatedly interrupt the performance in order to effect changes in what they are seeing—resulting in a kind of theater-on-demand experience. What is being changed, however, is not the scheduling of plays within the repertory, as in Galli’s account, but plays in the midst of acting: plays that readers experience as whole, cohesive, and complete scripts are dismantled, their textual integrity sacrificed for the overriding concern of satisfying audience demand. What Gayton’s audience produces through its control of the playhouse is a new theatrical event, a pastiche “play” composed of bits from Tamburlaine, Jugurth, The Jew of Malta, and The Two Merry Milkmaids. Rather than a unified narrative experience, Gayton’s anecdote suggests that performances, shaped by audience demand, might be disjointed, partial, and generically incongruent miscellanies.53 Like commonplace books, theatrical performance could be a user-made conglomeration of pieces of various texts assembled in response to consumers’ inclinations. In Gayton’s example, the audience enforces its will through violence: “Unlesse this were done, and the popular humour satisfied … the Benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, Oranges, Apples, Nuts, flew about most liberally, and as there were Mechanicks of all professions, who fell every one to his owne trade, and dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruine of a stately Fabrick.”54 If the actors will not use their labor to satisfy the audience, the audience will use its labor to put the actors out of work. The commercial theater thus becomes a site of vocational contest, and consumer interaction becomes work in itself. This audience does not passively consume but instead actively takes charge of its experience, even if such participation involves physically “consuming,” that is, using up, the materials of the playhouse. Ironically, Gayton’s playgoers, in this process of “play breaking,” are “playmaking”: their desire for authority in making their own theatrical experience is so profound that to enforce it they are willing to destroy future opportunities to enjoy it.55 Gayton’s playgoers are not merely engaged in consumer interaction with the playmaking industry; they are (to Gayton’s apparent disgust) establishing the playhouse as, ultimately, their domain alone.
A less adversarial example of a playgoer contributing to the performance of a professional play may be seen in the instance of Jacobean lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke. Whitelocke had written a coranto for the 1633 court performance of James Shirley’s masque The Triumphs of Peace, but “which being cried up, was first played publiquely, by the Blackefryar’s Musicke” before a different play: “Whenever I came to that house [that is, the Blackfriars] (as I did sometimes in those dayes), though not often, to see a play, the musitians would presently play Whitelocke’s Coranto, and it was so often called for, that they would have it played twice or thrice in an afternoon.”56 Like all music in the theater, Whitelocke’s coranto contributed to the audience’s emotional and aesthetic experience and thus also to the received meaning of the play at which it was performed. The participation by Whitelocke in the theatrical event may have been peculiar, but his contribution was just as much a part of the “play” experienced by the audience as the author’s words or actors’ gestures. Furthermore, inclusion of the music at a performance, and thus its effect upon the audience, depended not upon the plans of the professional playmakers but upon the amateur musician’s role as a playgoer, since it was, Whitelocke recalls, played whenever he attended the theater, regardless of the play being staged.
Many accounts of audience behavior during a performance characterize playgoers’ activities as a kind of “other play,” made by the audience and enacted parallel to, often in competition with, the scripted performance on stage. Perhaps the most innocuous, though widespread, version of such disruptions is seen in the (often satirical) descriptions of gallants seated on or near the stage at the private theaters; repeatedly, these playgoers are described as putting themselves on show for the rest of the audience, usually in direct and deliberate competition with the show on stage. For example, John Davies mocks “Rufus the Courtier” who, “at the Theater” first finds the “most conspicuous place” in the audience but then “Doth … to the stage himselfe transferre.”57 Edward Guilpin taunts “Cornelius that braue gallant youth” who “sits o’re the stage / With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth,” dressed to the height of flashy, militaristic fashion.58 Henry Fitzgeoffrey targets a gallant for sitting on “a Stoole and Cushion” on stage dressed in clothes fancy enough to be a costume in the play (“did he not drop / Out of the Tyring-house?”).59 Francis Lenton disparages an “expensiue foole” who would “pay an angell for a paltry stoole” at the Blackfriars and even wear “spangled rare perfum’d attires” when he “so often visited the Globe.”60 Thomas May self-deprecatingly mocked his own habit of putting on a show of fashion while he “sat upon the Stage”
