binary. There was no line, for example, separating audiences and actors at Inns of Court entertainments.78 Likewise, crowds observing civic pageants were themselves part of the entertainments that they watched.79 In some pageants—such as James’s 1604 entry into London—spectators were not just performers but also authors, seeming to erupt spontaneously into orations, recitations, and songs of their own creation.80 At the universities, audiences, actors, and writers also belonged to one and the same community; as the anonymous antitheatricalist “J. G.” complains in his rebuttal to Heywood’s An Apology for Actors, “And who [at the universities] are the spectators? but such like as both Poets and Actors are.”81 Spectators of shows of “bodily feats,” such as dancing and tumbling, were, as Erika Lin argues, “thought of as active participants even when they merely watched the show.”82 Even at sermons, audiences were accustomed not to silent, passive reception but to “interactive conversations … in which the congregation and preacher collaborated in the creation of the occasion.”83 When individuals who learned to become consumers of performances at schools, universities, the Inns, city streets, great halls, town halls, guildhalls, or churches and open-air “crosses” brought that experience into the professional theaters, they were bringing an understanding of cultural consumption that required their collaborative participation. Amateur dramatists who wrote their own plays for professional actors merely extended that collaboration from the figurative and imaginative into the literal and active, assuming a materially interactive relationship between producers and consumers. Rather than simply responding to professionals’ scripts, imagining the fiction of what they saw represented, or applauding and hissing what they liked and disliked, amateur dramatists drew upon their experience as theatrical consumers and their own creativity and understanding to write new plays envisioned for the stage. The move from reception to creation required more than just attention and taste, of course; to write a play, would-be playwrights in the audience had to have, or at least think that they had, a critical understanding of the ways in which plays worked.
“Scarce two … can understand the lawes”: Critical Capacity and the Playgoer as Revising Playmaker
Playwrights in the period frequently draw attention, favorably and unfavorably, to the capacity of audience members to judge and critique specific aspects of the play, anatomizing the whole and analyzing the effectiveness of each individual part. For example, John Ford praises Blackfriars playgoers for their “Noble Judgements” that “understand” The Broken Heart (1630–33), but he acknowledges also that some in the audience might “say, ‘This was flat’; Some ‘here the Sceane / Fell from its height’; Another that the Meane / was ‘ill observ’d.’”84 Recognizing that audience judgment involves taking his play apart into its constituent pieces, Ford concludes the epilogue by comparing such dissective critique to the play’s title, imagining that if only the “Best” in the audience approve of it, “The Broken Heart may be piec’t up againe.” Playwrights’ acknowledgments of such “judicious” playgoing became particularly prevalent in the Caroline private theaters.85 Earlier audiences, however, and contemporaneous audiences at such theaters as the Red Bull and the Fortune also exercised analytical judgment about the effectiveness of certain qualities in the plays that they saw. Most texts that mock amphitheater audiences for their lack of these critical skills were written for audiences at the private theaters. For example, Thomas Carew’s commendatory poem for Davenant’s Blackfriars play The Just Italian (1629) decries the “weake / Spectator” of the Red Bull because if one “aske[s] him [to] reason why he did not like / … ignorance will strike”; such playgoers, Carew complains, “dare controule” but lack the prerequisite ability “to judge” or justify their opinions.86 Gurr observes that jibes against public theater audiences tended to assume that those audiences had “debased standards of literary sophistication,”87 but many jibes—including Carew’s—go further with the more fundamental charge of audience ignorance: it was not merely that their standards were “debased” but that they lacked standards, or knowledge of standards, at all. William Fennor, for example, denigrates the mindless responses of the “Ignoramus crew” in the pits at public theaters; with “judgements … illiterate and rude,” these “understanding grounded men” do not even know why they respond the way they do: “Let one but aske the reason why they roare / They’ll answere, cause the rest did so before.”88 Like Fennor, Dekker derides the “Greasie-apron Audience” as unthinking, unsophisticated, and merely “Applaud[ing] what their charmd soule scarce understands.”89
Rather than accurate descriptions of public theater audiences and their supposed inability to understand drama, these accusations should be read as salvos in the competition between the different types of venues. Some dramatists, after all, mocked the tastes and competence of private theater playgoers as well. As early as 1609, Beaumont complained that the “illiterate” audiences of the Children of the Queen’s Revels had “scarce two of which can understand the lawes / Which they should judge by.”90 In 1631, Shirley critiqued private theater spectators who still desired jigs in their plays.91 Jonson attacked the Blackfriars audience in 1635 for being no different than amphitheater audiences (“those deepe-grounded, understanding men [who] censure Playes, yet know not when, / Or why to like”).92 Heywood mourned the rise of demand, by the 1630s, for petty sexual intrigues at the Blackfriars.93 If they could have their way, these dramatists would remake the audience in their own image, possessing their own understanding of the “lawes” of good drama—“lawes” usually according with the tastes of playgoers at a different venue. Playwrights’ damnations of audience ignorance cannot be taken at face value. Critiques of one audience offered indirect praise to another. Like many of their counterparts at private theaters, many public theater spectators understood plays as constructions of various component parts and were capable of judging how those parts worked separately as well as in combination—prerequisites to imagining changes or alternatives, or even entirely new dramatic texts.
An example of public theater audience members forming their own thoughts about how certain parts within a play ought to be revised is seen in Thomas Locke’s description of the Globe performance of Fletcher and Massinger’s The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619). In his August 19, 1619, letter to Dudley Carlton, Locke observes that though the play “hath had many spectators and receaved applause: yet some say that (according to the proverbe) the divill [that is, Olden Barnavelt] is not so bad as he is painted.”94 Locke describes specific changes that “some” have suggested would improve the portrayal of the main character: “Some say … that Barnavelt should perswade Ledenburg to make away himselfe (when he came to see him after he was prisoner) to prevent the discovrie of the plott, and to tell him that when they were both dead (as though he meant to do the like) they might sift it out of their ashes, was thought to be a point strayned.” Locke’s playgoers have not merely absorbed the theatrical event as passive recipients; they desire to participate as collaborating revisers looking to improve the play. The suggestion that a particular line is “a point strayned” signals a rejection of language as being implausible for the character, much like the “auditor” who objected during the premiere of Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora. Locke’s playgoers (assuming that this is not a description of his own experience, as may well be the case) feel that they have a right and ability not just to respond to the play but also to change it and, in so doing, improve it.
Moving from assessing the effectiveness of a play’s parts to proposing revisions to it or creating an entirely new play represents a different scale of interactive response: like interpretation, critique constructs meaning only for the critic, unless, as professional playmakers often feared, that critic disseminates that critique to others. Calling for revision of some part of the play, or writing a new play, is an act of response that always attempts to impose the individual consumer’s evaluative opinions onto the larger consumer community. John Lyly recognizes this distinction between internalized judgmental response and public play changing in the Paul’s prologue to Midas (1589), in which an actor hopes that if the play “receive an inward mislike, wee shall not be hist with an open disgrace.”95
