Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo
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Since the early 2000s, a number of scholars, such as Preiss, have begun to focus upon how actual individuals in the audience interacted with and responded to the plays they saw, and, in doing so, have largely overturned the old “orchestration” model.20 This new audience studies approach reveals a participatory spectatorship that fed input into the theatrical process in such a way that it could potentially influence and (re)shape the performance. Central to its methodology is the understanding that theatrical performance is, and was in the period, dialogic, with audiences just as effectively active in making dramatic meaning as playwrights and players (indeed, in some cases, more efficacious). The audience, in this view, might alter or even entirely subvert the words and actions supplied by the dramatist, becoming a collaborative creator in the making or revising of dramatic meaning. For example, looking closely at “responses of those not professionally engaged in the theatre,” Charles Whitney establishes how “audience members bec[a]me agents in the shaping and realizing of meaning” in plays and of “the actual diversity and creativity of early reception.”21 By exercising “imaginative interpretation,” Whitney argues, early modern “audience members’ creative agency” made meaning out of the dramatic transaction that occurred in the playhouse, blurring the line between producer and consumer.22 As Alison Hobgood puts it in her study of the audience’s emotional experience in the early modern playhouse, playgoers had a “reciprocal role in enabling and cultivating dramatic affect.”23 Though the new audience studies approach is a recent critical phenomenon, Chapter 1 of this book shows that its view of the audience as possessing a creative function in the playhouse was generally understood in the early modern period itself. While most of the new audience studies limit themselves to the question of how consumers responded directly to the plays produced for them by professional playmakers, my approach expands this territory to consider also playgoers who did not simply respond to others’ plays but produced their own. The concept of the individual audience member as an autonomous and potentially creative agent, in a figurative sense, contextualizes the motive force that led some playgoers to write their own plays, in the literal sense, not merely drawing upon professionals’ plays as sources but expressing their own imaginative visions and articulating those visions in ways that would make them accord with what the playgoers understood about the mechanisms of theatrical production. Rather than read the audience through the plays of the professional theater, my objective is to read the professional theater through the plays of the audience. Doing so recovers these plays as a new category of evidence for studies of the early modern audience, supplementing, refining, and often complicating the evidence provided by both the demographic and the orchestration approaches. Like other methods used by the new audience studies, looking to playgoers’ plays for evidence of audience experience and understanding addresses a fundamental shortcoming in both the demographic and the orchestration approaches; namely, rather than aggregating spectators into groups—real or assumed—looking at playgoers’ plays as evidence of audience experience and understanding parses that audience into its most fundamental and yet, for purposes of historicizing the Shakespearean stage, most often obscure component: the individual playgoer. A playgoer’s play cannot tell us what other playgoers thought about the playmaking process or their experiences in the playhouse, but it is this very specificity that makes that play valuable as evidence, for it provides us with a concrete, granular view of theatrical consumption largely absent from the generalized, macroscale picture drawn by the earlier models of audience studies.
Recognizing that these plays were written not just for audiences but also by audiences opens an additional window onto the early modern playhouse, the dramatists who wrote for it, and the spectators who attended it. My interest in these plays is in what they can tell us, not about playgoers’ thoughts about individual professionals’ plays, but about those playgoers’ thoughts about theater itself—that is, how they can help us historicize certain early modern theatrical consumers’ ideas about the stage and the ways playmaking worked. In doing this, and as the remainder of this introduction will explain, it is also my objective to revisit some of the categories that have shaped the study of early modern theatrical culture, with the ideas of playgoing, professional playwriting, and amateur playwriting central to this reappraisal. As noted above, and as Chapters 2, 3, and 4 show, playwriting playgoers often closely follow, or at least approximate, professional practices and processes, which suggests an audience interested not just in the fiction of the play it was watching but also the ways that play was being made. Looking at ideas about playgoing in the period contextualizes this by showing how theatrical consumption could be more than just a mere “pastime.”
“To invert a Recreation”: Playgoing in Early Modern England
One reason criticism reliant upon the “orchestration” approach often unquestioningly falls back upon the idea of a passive, easily transported audience is that such passivity recurs, often cynically, as a theme in a number of descriptions of playgoing in the early modern