focus away from matters of theatricality and putting it on matters of politics. The disciplinary dominance of Saunders’s class-based definition of amateurism has prevented us from fully taking advantage of the evidence provided by amateurs whose perspective on the stage was not centered upon the court or its culture. There is a distinct difference in perspective upon, and access to, the professional stage between a politically influential and potentially powerful aristocrat who might even pay the players to stage his play and a socially and economically marginalized single-time dramatist who has little to offer beyond his play. The two types of amateurs differ in their position relative to the stage, and thus their plays will reveal different types of information about their views of that stage.
In his 1986 The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, G. E. Bentley broadened the definition of “amateur” beyond Saunders’s socioeconomic classification by identifying the amateur playwright as a writer of any class who did not make a living from the writing of plays, wrote infrequently, and did not develop a sustained relationship with a commercial playing company; “though numerous and diverse,” Bentley observes, “and indicative of the strong appeal of the drama in these years, [they] were never people who looked to the commercial theatres for a living.”75 Other historians since Bentley have followed his lead in taking infrequent dramatic activity and external position to the social, economic, and artistic community of the commercial stage as the defining characteristics of the amateur.76 Counting writers of private plays for household and town performances, academic dramatists, closet dramatists, and courtier dramatists, Bentley estimates that between 1590 and 1642, more than two hundred such amateurs wrote approximately 265 surviving plays. Unfortunately, the four spaces counted by Bentley in making this tally have become tacitly accepted as the only domains of amateur playwriting in the period: the “closet,” the home or town, the academy, and the court. Because of the continued influence of Saunders’s work, scholars still typically assume that, except for the courtiers, amateurs wrote only for amateur actors (as with academic dramatists and dramatists who wrote for private performances) or readers (as with closet dramatists). This assumption has led most accounts of the early modern stage to take Bentley’s four categories as the only categories of amateur playwriting in the period, either ignoring nonaristocratic amateurs entirely or concluding—often contrary to biographical and textual evidence—that they were actually minor, essentially failed, novice professionals.
Contrary to Bentley and Saunders, Charles Whitney suggests that the example of the playwriting playgoer Richard Norwood—a young, unemployed sailor who tried to write a play while stuck in London due to a bout of seasickness in 1612—was “probably typical of several kinds of apprentices as well as of people of low degree”;77 that is, more nonaristocratic amateurs likely wrote for the public stages than we realize or for whom we have extant evidence (a caution, perhaps, to scholars looking to attribute the period’s many anonymous plays to known authors). In 1639, Lewis Sharpe—himself a nonaristocratic playwriting playgoer—noted that even “the briske Shops fore-man undertakes with’s Ell / To sound the depth of Aganippas Well.”78 Certainly the opportunity for almost anyone to write was apparent: in 1617, Henry Fitzgeoffrey complained, “Who’d not at venture Write? So many waies / A man may proue a Poet now a daies.”79 Just as an aristocrat like Lodowick Carlell might justify his foray into playwriting because, as his stationer John Rhodes put it, “his profit was his pleasure,” we should not assume on the basis of class alone that a non-aristocratic amateur like Norwood or Mountfort might not also write a play for the commercial industry for reasons of personal pleasure and engagement.80
Although Bentley neglects to consider its critical or historical value, he does briefly point out the existence of this group of nonaristocratic playwriting playgoers—“citizen amateurs” is his term—and admits that playgoers of any class could and did write for the commercial theater without looking to make playwriting their profession.81 As examples of this group, he offers Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen, Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, and Thomas Rawlins’s The Rebellion (1640), but there were several more than just these. Bentley himself disparagingly shrugs, “In a time of great dramatic activity, more plays than we now know were probably written by totally untalented amateurs.”82 And yet, but for some generalizations to distinguish these writers from professionals, Bentley offers no sustained analysis of these amateurs or their plays. The extent of his interest in playgoers’ plays consists of speculating on what he assumed to be the inevitability of their rejection: “One would guess that even in a time when the social status of the playwright was low, a fair number of amateur plays would have been boldly or surreptitiously offered to the London acting companies and rejected by them.”83 Not all amateurs’ plays were rejected by the London companies (we have evidence for only one such rejection), nor are Bentley’s qualifying adverbs—“boldly” and “surreptitiously”—accurate descriptions of the nature of the relationship between the professional industry and the amateurs whose plays survive, a relationship that was for the most part open, connected, and dynamic rather than, as Bentley implies (and as Jonson wanted), closed, divided, and static. An amateur supplying a play to the professional players would have needed to be neither bold nor surreptitious. Furthermore, by associating the value of amateurs’ plays exclusively with the question of their acceptance by professional players, Bentley overlooks their primary, indeed, unique, value as evidence, not of actual industry practices, but of how well audience members perceived those practices. To make use of playgoers’ plays for this purpose, it does not actually matter whether the plays were staged or not. Bentley recognizes that “a very small percentage of the amateur plays did get to the London theatres” but asserts that “they were very seldom intended for them.”84 In some instances, however, amateurs who did not “look to the commercial theatres for a living” did indeed intend their plays for those theaters. Martin Butler points out that from 1637 to 1640, a group of amateurs saw their plays (which he dismisses as “hardly … a thrilling output”) staged by the Queen Henrietta’s Men at Salisbury Court, probably as part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the troupe’s manager, Richard Heton, to compete with Christopher Beeston’s troupe at the Cockpit and the King’s Men at the Blackfriars.85 The amateurs’ plays that appeared in the Salisbury Court repertory included Richard Lovelace’s The Scholars, Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, William Rider’s The Twins, and possibly John Gough’s The Strange Discovery. Most of these writers explicitly indicated their disinterest in professionalizing, and, despite the fact that Heton likely paid them for their plays, none of them continued to write for the stage; they were also not courtiers or aristocrats (which raises a complication for Butler’s theory that Heton was attempting to make Salisbury Court “a venue for amateur drama of a kind more usually associated with the Blackfriars”).86 They therefore represent, along with Mountfort, Rawlins, Clavell, and others, further evidence of how nonaristocratic early modern theatrical consumers could become theatrical producers even in the context of the commercial theater—indeed, if Butler’s hypothesis about Heton’s intentions is correct, because of that commercial context.
In keeping with our definition of “amateur,” dramatists such as Lovelace, Sharpe, Rider, Gough, Mountfort, Clavell, Barnes, Rawlins, Norwood, and others like them were outsiders writing for an increasingly professionalized industry. They possessed an awareness of the industry’s needs, practices, and limitations, but, unlike that of their professional counterparts, their awareness derived largely from observation rather than previous participation; accordingly, the evidence they provide of those needs, practices, and limitations reflects the perspective and understanding of consumers, rather than regular producers. The evidence of their plays can also, in some instances, suggest specific ways in which theatrical consumers rejected what was typical for the profession, or thought differently about plays and playmaking than the professionals did, as we will see in some aspects of Robert Yarington’s use of stage directions in Two Lamentable Tragedies (Chapter 3) and Alexander Brome’s use of rhyme in The Cunning Lovers (Chapter 4). The 1642 political tragedy
