for audience participation vanished almost entirely, with the latest in Fletcher’s The Prophetess (1622). Calls to the audience to imagine what the performance could not show began as necessity, became convention, but then, particularly with the rise of the courtier amateurs in the 1630s, became irrelevant, even risky. At the same time these invitations vanished, the number of induction scenes attempting to control playgoer response rose. The more professionalized playwriting sought to become and the more amateurs supplied (or tried to supply) plays to the actors, the more it must have seemed to many professional dramatists that invitations for audience participation, even if only on the imaginative level, might encourage challenges to the profession’s desired barrier separating the lay consumer from the authorized producer.
“Hee writes good lines”: Playgoers Taking Possession of the Play
For many professionals, particularly Jonson and Shirley, the extreme—and extremely undesirable—result of spectators crossing that desired barrier was their actual incursion into the field of playwriting: playgoers who, without any training beyond their experience as playgoers, wrote plays themselves. Jonson’s complaint in his commendatory verse for The Northern Lass, discussed in the Introduction, is the most vivid example of this attitude. Though hyperbolic, Jonson’s irritation reflected reality. Playgoers not “bred” in the “craft” of playwriting translated their engagement with the stage into writing their own play texts, not only for amateur domains, but also for the professional playhouses. These playwriting playgoers learned to write for the stage as attentive consumers of theatrical texts who experienced performances in a highly personal, and peculiar, way. Their dedicated attention to the ways in which performance worked resembles the many descriptions—often satirical—of playgoers growing so engaged with the play that they effectively took possession of it, or parts of it. As we will see, many playgoers arrived at the playhouse with preconceived ideas about what, based upon genre or subject, the play should include; many also left with ownership of the text itself, carrying ideas, speeches, even parts out of the playhouse and making them their own.114 The nature of the repertory system, combined with repeat attendance, meant that one audience member could develop close familiarity with particular plays and parts. In Cynthia’s Revels (1600–1601), Jonson mocks an “Idoll”-worshipping playgoer who, waiting for the star actor to enter, “repeats … / His part of speeches, and confederate Jests / In passion to himselfe.”115 Jonson intends ridicule, but beneath the mockery lies the assumption that a committed playgoer could memorize parts he had seen performed. Over time, actors came and went, but roles stayed largely the same, making it possible, Tiffany Stern contends, for “a member of an audience [to] realistically claim to know a play as well [as] or better than the (new) actors performing it.”116 An interrupting spectator played by William Sly in Webster’s induction for The Malcontent (1602–4), for example, proudly announces that he “hath seene this play often” and knows it so well (“I have most of the jeasts heere in my table-booke”) that he “can give [the actors] intellegence for their action”—figuring the attentive playgoer as a potential authorizing agent for the performance.117 The idea of playgoers knowing players’ parts was familiar enough for John Heath to mock it in Two Centuries of Epigrams (1610), in which he jokes of a “Momus” who, wanting to “act the fooles part,” attends plays daily at the Globe, Fortune, and Curtain and in his diary “notes that action downe that likes him best” until he can, like a “Mimick,” “play the Mome.”118 Less rancorously, Gayton in the 1650s recalls a prelapsarian cultural relationship in the years before the closing of the theaters, when playgoers and playmakers came together in the communal, convivial space of a drinking establishment to blend their particular roles in the theatrical enterprise: “Many … have so courted the Players to re-act the same matters in the Tavernes [that they had seen in the theaters], that they came home, as able Actors themselves.”119 Not only is the play detached from the playhouse, ownership of the “script” transfers from performer to receiver, who becomes a self-entertaining participant. Playgoers recording, learning, and embodying play texts signal the interactive cultural system in which engaged consumers, conditioned by this transactional relationship, came to assume authority over the stage and even write their own material for it.
Like the fictional Momus’s diary, actual commonplace books, such as Edward Pudsey’s (ca. 1600), and other written copies of plays or excerpts from plays witness how acquisitive a dedicated audience member or reader could be.120 Consumers who commonplaced and quoted were not necessarily intending to write their own plays; their practice, however, signals the extent to which the dramatic text and its meanings were not considered to “belong” (in the sense of signification, not copyright) to the producer who first made it. The process of reception response frequently involved acquisitive consumers claiming the play for their own use and changing it as they did so. These consumers gave life to plays outside the playhouse and therefore beyond the control of their authors, something many authors lambasted as fraudulent possession. Such dismissal was an attempt to disempower consumers, relegating their texts to the status of mere plagiarism. Francis Lenton describes an Inns of Court student who “daily doth frequent” the theaters and “Treasur[es] up within his memory / The amorous toyes of every Comedy / With deepe delight.”121 The problem is not the student’s memorization of the “toyes,” however, but his later regurgitation of them as his own: “Hee writes good lines,” Lenton jokes, “but never writes his owne.” Consuming and internalizing the producer’s text is allowable, but translating that experience into an attempt by the consumer to produce renders him ridiculous; because any “good lines” the student generates cannot be his own, Lenton implies that any original lines he writes are necessarily “bad lines.” George Wither similarly mocks an amateur poet who, in order to enhance his wooing, repeats as his own poetry he has heard on stage: “His Poetry is such as he can cul / From plaies he heard at Curtaine or at Bul.”122 Peter Heylyn likewise teases a soldier who hopes to impress his “trul,” advising that he should “gather musty phrases from ye Bul.”123 These examples all take for granted that the language and ideas of plays are transportable commodities, rendering them open to being borrowed and built upon by consumers.124
Like Lenton, Wither, and Heylyn, professional dramatists who mention acquisitive playgoers do so with disapproval. In the prologue to The Woman Hater (1607), Beaumont describes playgoers “lurking … in corners, with Table bookes,” “feed[ing their] malice” by recording scandalous matter in the play.125 Dekker, implying a hierarchy between the creative wit of playwrights and derivative work of playgoers, satirically instructs gallants to “hoord up the finest play-scraps you can get, upon which your leane wit may most favourly feede for want of other stuffe.”126 Similarly, Marston’s “Luscus” makes “a commonplace booke out of plaies”:
Say (Curteous Sir) speakes he not movingly
From out some new pathetique Tragedie?
He write, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not,
And all from out his huge long scraped stock
Of well penn’d playes…. O ideot times,
When gawdy Monkeyes mowe ore sprightly rimes!127
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