participation in the public theater was an exercise in pleasure and recreation. For every novice Killigrew who translated that exercise into a career in the industry, countless others—the other boys only briefly glimpsed in Killigrew’s anecdote and now lost to history—remained amateur participants, outsiders stepping only momentarily onto the stage they usually only patronized as audience members (indeed, in Killigrew’s experience, spectatorship and participation are integrated: involvement in the performance is an essential component to seeing it). Like the amateurs who staged The Hector of Germany, a troupe of apprentices staged amateur dramatist Robert Tailor’s Hog Hath Lost His Pearl at the Whitefriars and then the Red Bull in 1613, and sometime between 1623 and 1629 a company of young men of the Strand staged The Resolute Queen.60 E. K. Chambers suggests that amateur players also occasionally rented out other playhouses as well.61 Just as amateur players participated in a London theatrical culture that was increasingly professionalized, there were outsiders who did the same as writers.
If we define the professional dramatist as someone who, as a regular, internal member of the institutionalized systems for playmaking, went through some informal training as a playwright and accrued further experience by consistently plotting, writing, and revising to address pressures placed upon the play by the actors, Master of the Revels, and audience, then we can define the amateur as someone who lacked this experience and did not try to obtain it. It is important to reiterate, however, that this lack of interest in professionalizing does not equate to a lack of interest in effective playwriting. Many amateurs tried to use the same tools and processes as the professionals in making their plays viable for performance. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book look to some of the ways in which amateurs attempted to adopt what they assumed to be “professional” playwriting practices and consider what those efforts suggest about the perspective and understanding certain playgoers had of the professional stage.
As with amateur players, amateur dramatists were often financially compensated for their labor. In March 1614, for example, the University of Cambridge paid Thomas Tomkis twenty pounds for writing the comedy Albumazar.62 Likewise, though the original audience for Tailor’s Hog Hath Lost His Pearl at Whitefriars in February 1613 was “invited,”63 the title page of the 1614 quarto notes that the play was subsequently “Divers times Publickely acted.” The term “Publickely” suggests that it was performed for paying audiences, and accordingly the actors likely recompensed Tailor for his labor. Playgoers such as Mountfort and Clavell, who supplied their plays to professional companies, were no doubt paid for their scripts, whether or not the play was eventually staged and even though they themselves evidently did not seek to enter the profession. Being paid for having written a play is thus an inadequate criterion for determining what makes certain dramatists “professionals,” just as not being paid fails to account for what makes others “amateurs.” Even if they were compensated for their labor, many of these amateur writers, like amateur players, participated in the playmaking process for the personal pleasure of it rather than out of concern for public reception. Many courtier dramatists, who wrote to please a very small target audience, were particularly, often proudly, unconcerned with what general audiences might think of their work. The minor aristocrat and amateur dramatist Sir Cornelius Fermedo, for example, declares to the audience of his play The Governor that even “if he wrote for gaine / He would not give a feather to obtaine / All yore approfes”: he wishes to be “vnderstood,” not “flatter’d,” and he has seen in the audience only twelve people—probably fellow courtiers—who possess sufficient “prudence and impartiallitie” to be “his Jury in this place.”64 This adversarial tone is amplified in the epilogue, where Fermedo notes, “Who writes for pleasure never taketh care / Whether he’s Where lik’t or not”; he points out that he can always
ingage
The players by filling of the stage
… to a play that’s new [because] before tis knowne
either for good or bad the people come.65
Fermedo proudly declares his freedom from the financial need to please the audience, but he also reiterates his desire to “ingage” the players, fill the auditorium, and, if need be, write more plays: “Hisse if you dare,” he challenges the audience, “if so … heele write: some thing that’s new & worse” because “hee’d rather be twice hiss’t then have one clap.”66 Brathwait adopts a similar attitude to Fermedo’s, conflating audience understanding of his (now lost) plays with socioeconomic position: because his plays were “free-borne, and not mercenarie,” they “received gracefull acceptance of all such as understood my ranke and qualitie”; that is, writing for pleasure elevates the author above the usual quality of work produced by commercial authors.67 Brathwait—again cautious about making theater an avocation—justifies his forays into playwriting upon the grounds of personal pleasure: they were simply meant “to allay and season more serious studies” rather than to serve as “any fixt imployment.”68 Again, the distinction between the amateur’s involvement with the theater and the professional’s centers upon the professional’s continuous (“fixt”) practice and hence internal familiarity with how it worked.
Glynne Wickham has argued that “by the start of the seventeenth century virtually all amateur play production (excepting that among courtiers and students) had ceased.”69 This totalizing language has led to the assumption that if someone wrote a play for the public stage after 1567, it must have been because he wanted to become professional or was an aristocrat uninterested in professionalizing. Scholars following Wickham have largely taken the evolution of public theater in London into a professional enterprise as both inevitable and absolute. As “amateur play production” in London became scarcer after the 1570s, however, the public stages became some of the last available venues in which nonprofessional playmakers could participate in dramatic culture. Amateur playwriting increased in frequency the more established the professional theater became, reaching in the Caroline era the crescendo that professionals such as Jonson and Brome found most irritating.70 For many amateurs, play-writing was indeed merely a hobby undertaken at the universities, among coteries of readers, or by courtiers seeking to impress the court. It is this last group, the courtiers, that scholars usually acknowledge as the only amateurs writing for the post-1567 professional stage, and so amateurism has come to be seen as a privilege of only the upper classes.
This class-limited definition of amateur playwriting derives in large part from the influence of J. W. Saunders’s 1964 Profession of English Letters. In a brief chapter on amateur writing in the Renaissance, Saunders describes the amateur as exclusively aristocratic and centered upon the court.71 Concomitant to Saunders’s view is the generalization that amateur writing required leisure time and freedom from economic need, both of which were unavailable to nonaristocratic writers, who must have therefore been interested only in monetizing their labor.72 Although Saunders’s assumption is contradicted by the actual socioeconomic diversity of amateur dramatists, it has shaped most scholarship on early modern playwriting because being paid to write for the stage, though potentially lucrative, was socially marginalized—ideal conditions for his hypothesis.73 It is true that throughout the period, but particularly after 1630, courtiers seeking prestige and influence at court supplied plays (usually with money) to professional actors (usually the King’s Men) for performance before the monarch and in commercial playhouses (usually the Blackfriars). Defining “amateurism” as a practice of these writers exclusively, however, overlooks nonaristocratic amateurs such as Mountfort and Clavell. While the work of the courtier dramatists is important to understanding the larger picture of amateur playwriting in the early modern period, it is not the focus of this book. Because of the influence of Saunders’s work, these writers have already received critical attention, both in individual studies and as a group more generally.74 Focusing only on aristocratic
