displacing the author’s authority by shaping how other members of the audience might view the play—like Hoskins of Oxford, outwardly expressing his inner dislike for Technogamia. Lyly’s Blackfriars prologue for Campaspe (1583) displays the same concern over audience members imposing their evaluation of the play upon the rest of the audience: “We here conclude: wishing that although there bee in your precise judgementes an universall mislike, yet wee maye enjoy by your wonted curtesies a generall sile[n]ce.”96 The professional dramatist does not seek to prevent judgment—he allows that some might “mislike” everything about the play—but he does warn against judgments outwardly expressed, hoping to “silence” such challenges to his authority and protect the other audience members’ autonomy to judge the play for themselves. His anxiety concedes that authority to determine how audience members might respond to the play and thus condition others’ reception of the play resides, in the end, with the audience itself.
“Jehove doth as spectator sit”: The Authority of the Playgoer
The idea of playgoers possessing authority that could supplant the dramatist was not new, nor was it without appeal to theater professionals who wanted to flatter the (paying) audience. A prominent version of the “playmaking playgoer” metaphor was found in the theatrum mundi commonplace adopted by many theater apologists. Within the theatrum mundi, God occupies the place of dramatist, scripting what is performed upon the stage of the world by the men and women who are, as Jaques observes, “merely players.”97 As Heywood explains in An Apology for Actors (1612), “The world’s a Theater, the earth a Stage, / Which God, and nature doth with Actors fill.”98 Responsibility for filling the stage with “actors” belongs to God, the playwright.99 To sustain the metaphor to its logical end, however, Heywood recognizes that a third category of participant must be included: the audience. If “the world [is] a Theater,” then
… Jehove doth as spectator sit
And chiefe determiner to’applaud the best,
And their indevours crowne with more then merit[,]
But by their evill actions doomes the rest,
To end disgrac’t whilst others praise inherit.
In Heywood’s theater of the world, playwright and audience are one and the same: the authority that observes, applauds, and condemns the action is the same authority that makes the action. Heywood’s metaphor thus relies upon a circularity of creative function: the playgoer does not merely influence what the dramatist writes; the playgoer himself or herself writes. In this idealized economy, one source satisfies both supply and demand. The theatrum mundi therefore requires that the audience wield, as Whitney puts it, “authority … in the dramatic transaction and ultimately in the process of production.”100
Others in the period employed the trope of the divine playmaking playgoer for similar ends. Indeed, Anne Barton points out that since Pythagoras, writers “have been tempted to … describe Man as an actor[,] and assign either to Fate or to God Himself the double position of dramatist and audience.”101 Playwrights found the theatrum mundi metaphor, with its idea of the play-making playgoer’s “double position,” a useful convention. In the induction to Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1587), Robert Greene enlists Venus and the Muses as both “writers” of the play and its observers. “Poets are scarce,” complains the divine amateur dramatist, “when Goddesses themselves / Are forst … to pen their Champions praise.”102 Shakerley Marmion’s A Fine Companion (1632), drawing upon Aristotelian cosmology, describes the octagonal Cockpit-in-Court as “a Spheare / Mooved by a strong Intelligence,” paralleling the audience with God as the prime mover at the center of the circles of heaven.103 Similarly, the prologue for Shirley’s The Coronation (1634) refers to women in the audience as “the bright intelligences [that] move, / And make a harmony [of] this sphere of Love.”104 Dekker craves such audiences for If This Be Not a Good Play: “I wish [for] a Theater full of very Muses themselves to be Spectators”; the ideal spectator is a divinely empowered agent whose creative authority instills in playwrights “Triumphes of Poesie” and in players, “Elaborate Industry.”105 More directly, the villain Lurio in amateur dramatist William Rider’s The Twins (1630–42) wishes he were both playwright and playgoer so he could both devise and admire his plot: “Me thinks it would shew bravely on the stage, I’de have it personated to the life, and I the chief spectator on the Theatre.”106
Many dramatists endorsed the authority of the creative playgoer by inviting spectators to complete the play in their imaginations. These pleas to spectators to “eke out [the] performance with [their] mind[s]” frankly acknowledge the stage’s illusionistic inadequacies, admitting the medium’s inherent representational gaps and asking the audience to “work [their] thoughts” to fill them in their minds.107 The authors of these plays request that the audience assist in finishing the “making” of the play as imaginative collaborators.108 Thomas Nashe, in recounting audience response to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, describes the results of this: when “the Tragedian that represents” Talbot enacts the hero’s death, “ten thousand spectators … imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”109 Neither Talbot nor the “Tragedian” is actually bleeding, but within “ten thousand” imaginations “Talbot” is bleeding—and in ten thousand different ways, as each spectator “makes” the scene differently in his or her mind. Shakespeare’s invitations for such imaginative collaboration in Henry V (1599) and Pericles (1608) are well known. The Chorus in the anonymous Chamberlain’s Men play Thomas Lord Cromwell (1600), perhaps influenced by Henry V, also demands that playgoers use their creative mental capacity to compensate for insufficient artifice and lacunae in the depicted narrative: “Now gentlemen imagine,” the Chorus urges in the first act, “that young Cromwell … Is fled to Antwarpe, with his wife and children,” and later in the play, “Now let your thoughtes as swift as is the winde, / Skip some few yeares, that Cromwell spent in travell, / And now imagine him to be in England.”110 The prologue to the anonymous The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1602) relies upon the play’s spectators to construct the given circumstances of the first scene, pleading that they “Imagine now that [Peter Fabell] is retirde” and “Suppose the silent sable visagde night, / Casts her blacke curtaine over all the world.”111 As these playwrights recognize, without the audience’s imaginative participation, the scaffolding of illusion upon which the theater predicates its art will be incomplete and might even collapse. The problem is not one of verisimilar representation—which was not necessarily an aesthetic goal on the early modern stage—but one of resolving the practical dramatic need for continuity, plausibility, and exposition. Unable to depict the darkness of night or Cromwell’s flight to Antwerp and the years he spent in travel, these plays demand that their audiences contribute creative energies in the making of the fiction. In some instances, the dramatist acknowledges the audience as, in fact, a progenitor of its fiction. The prologue to Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1599) implores spectators to impart “life” to the play by imagining the truth underwriting the fiction that they see: “our muse intreats, / Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, / … your gracious eye / Gives life to Fortunatus historie.”112 Consumption is generative: without the audience’s engagement, without the creative act of spectatorship, the play will not live. Rather than attempt to conceal representational failures of the theatrical medium, these appeals draw attention to points where failure is inevitable and ask for playgoers’ collaboration in negotiating those moments.113 Such direct addresses are moments of surrender in which the dramatist acknowledges he must give up some control to his partners in the audience.
What makes these bids for participation particularly relevant is their timing in relation to the theater industry’s professionalization. After the 1590s, actors becoming playwrights and the nascent development of playwriting as its own self-regulating field both signaled a degree
