encounter her approbation.”61 In the anonymous epigram “A Description of Spongus the Gallant” in the Farmer Chetham commonplace book, a brawling, lavishly dressed gentleman is mocked because, among many things, “He playes at Primero over the stage” when at the playhouse.62 Perhaps most famous of all, in The Devil Is an Ass, Jonson lambasts such behavior in Fitzdottrel, who will
goe to the Black fryers Play-house,
Sit ithe view, salute all my acquaintance,
Rise up betweene the Acts, let fall my cloake,
Publish a handsome man, and a rich suite
(As that’s a speciall end, why we goe thither,
All that pretend, to stand for’t o’the Stage)
The Ladies aske who’s that? (For, they doe come
To see us, Love, as wee doe to see them).63
The spectacle of clothing, smoking, drinking, reading, gambling, and talking staged by such playgoers meant that the “show” was in the audience as much as—sometimes more than—on the stage. The spaces of the two performances were physically conflated in the architecture of the playhouse: the gallery doubled as both a seating and an acting area, and, at the indoor theaters, the stage itself doubled as a seating area. The very nature of a three-quarters theatrical space compels audience members to become part of the performance observed by others in the same audience.
More substantial and potentially dangerous forms of audience intrusion and performance were not uncommon. For example, William Fleetwood’s June 18, 1584, report of a near brawl at the Theater describes the instigator, “one Browne,” as “having a perrelous witt of his owne.”64 The phrase “of his owne” juxtaposes Browne’s creativity in attempting to provoke a fight with the onstage show created by the playwright. In November 1634, when Robert Leake wrote to Sir Gervase Clifton to inform him of a fight between two courtiers at the Blackfriars, he explicitly described the event as “that actus secundus plaid on Tuesday last.”65 In August 1612, a dispute broke out between several playgoers at the Globe, resulting in a spectacle that must have rivaled the play itself for audience interest. Recently widowed Elizabeth Wybarn had gone to see a play, attended by several others; she was approached by Ambrose Vaux, son of William, Baron Vaux, and apparently was propositioned in an inappropriate manner. Two of her attendants responded with “great violences and blasphemous oathes,” and soon twelve other audience members intervened, “armed arraied and weaponed with Rapiars daggers Pystalls and other weapons” all “in a ryotous manner.”66 Where Wybarn and her companions were in the theater when this happened is not clear, although one defendant refers to them “sitting” and to Vaux “coming in,” which might suggest either the gentlemen’s rooms to the side of the stage or the lords’ rooms above the stage; as Mary Blackstone and Cameron Louis observe, “If this episode were played out in the lords’ rooms right above the stage, the real-life events may even have eclipsed the play in the minds of the spectators as well as the participants.”67
In a more poetic vein, Henry Fitzgeoffrey uses a playmaking metaphor to give voice to a rake who, instead of watching a play at the Blackfriars, is busy watching the other spectators, including a “Cheapside Dame”: “Plot (Villain!) plot!” he tells his companion, so they might “devise [a way] to get her hither” into their box.68 The rake tells his friend if “[we] lay our heads together,” the lady will “holde us doing till the Latter Act,” appropriating the theatrical term (the final act of the play) as a bawdy description of the desired outcome of his tryst (the act of intercourse). With similar sexualizing of playmaking terminology, Thomas May characterizes his elaborate scheme to win the attention of a woman in the audience at the Blackfriars as “a parlous Plot.”69 Samuel Rowlands merges the criminal and theatrical senses of “plotting” in his description of a pickpocket attempting to cut the bottom of a purse during a performance: when both the performance and robbery are complete, “The Play is done and foorth the foole doth goe.”70 Rowlands’s joke depends upon the ambiguous identification of the “Play” as either the fiction performed on the stage or the crime performed in the audience, casting the victim in the stock theatrical role of the “foole.” Merging the “play” in the audience with that on stage, playhouse offenders were often compelled to appear on the stage as well. Will Kemp recalled that whenever a “Cut-purse” was “at a play … taken pilfring[,] … we [would] tye [him] to a poast on our stage, for all people to wonder at.”71 The character Nobody in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (ca. 1606) likewise notes, “Somebody once pickt a pocket in this Play-house yard, / Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it.”72 In these instances, the playgoer’s “performance” was drawn onto the stage, but in 1583, at the Red Lion in Norwich, the Queen’s Men took the show into the auditorium in order to chase off two audience members who refused to pay admission.73 Richard Tarlton and John Bentley leapt from the stage, in costume and with property swords in hand, to defend the doorkeeper, fellow actor John Singer, from the men; eventually, another spectator, Henry Brown, joined them in the affray and was involved in fatally stabbing one of the intruders—an instance of players and playgoers collaborating in a peculiar, violent way to make a spectacle.74 If the early modern playhouse comprised not so much a performance space and an audience space but two different kinds of performance space, Kemp’s account, Nobody’s joke, and the Queen’s Men’s storming of the auditorium all speak to a degree of both tension and exchange between the two. When the audience’s performance spills into the actors’ space and competes with professional control over what gets “played” in the commercial place of business, the actors must either comply (as in Gayton’s anecdote) or retaliate (as Kemp, Nobody, and the Queen’s Men did). In either case, the dynamic between audience and play is interactive: playgoers create drama in the playhouse just as much as watch it.
Furthermore, when events on stage resembled what playgoers thought to be a version of their own life in the real world, that sympathy was often expressed in the language not of dramatic reflection but of dramatic self-production. For example, in referencing the oft-repeated anecdote about a woman moved to confess to the murder of her husband while watching a similar murder enacted in a play, a character in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (1596) recalls that the murderer “cryed out, the Play was made by her.”75 In Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), the player Paris defends the theater by claiming its innocence of its own effects, particularly noting that if the players should depict “a loose adultresse” on stage and in the audience “a Matron … Guilty of such a foule unnaturall sinne / Crie[s] out tis writ by me, we cannot helpe it.”76 Identifying the matron as the “author” of the play on the stage subsumes the real crime into the fictional and reinforces the sense of the consumer as the one who has produced the spectacle. Paris’s logic goes even further, effectively disempowering the professional playmakers by taking from them the capacity to control the meanings made by their play (“we cannot helpe it”) and rendering them the passive instruments of the active spectator.
Reality and performance in the playhouse are repeatedly presented as composite, even indistinguishable, in a single sociocultural continuum. Antitheatricalists were intensely aware of, and alarmed by, this capacity of the playhouse to fold reality and fiction together. Anthony Munday, for example, argued that playgoers actually participate in the sins they see enacted on stage and thus bear responsibility, with the players, for “making” the play and its meanings: “Al other evils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers.… [T]he filthiness of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladlie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors.”77 The play’s “beholder,” its consumer, is also a “doer” or producer. Playgoers, playmakers, and even opponents of plays saw the auditorium as a performative space and the performance occurring
