play (which was probably never acted), Jaques employs all of the conventional devices of Caroline courtly tragicomedy—platonic love in contest against base lust, a lost royal child found again, near incest, a blocked romantic relationship, an escape from pirates, a hunting scene in the woods, and a concluding wedding—but then upends that generic expectation by tying all of these threads together in a blood-soaked final act that includes incest realized, murder, suicide, torture, and rebellion.87 There were, of course, professional dramatists who also experimented with defying or complicating generic expectations, but the evidence of an amateur dramatist doing this points to a model of cultural consumption that was capable of imagining alternatives to the mainstream content being produced for it by the commercial theater industry. Indeed, the more established and commercialized that industry became, the more risk averse it would grow in its own experimentation with content and form (often when professionals did experiment, they were greeted with failure—as with Jonson’s Epicoene, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, and Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle); at the same time, the domain of the amateur remained free of such conservative pressures, open to explore, innovate, and contradict tradition in ways the largely convention-bound profession could not.
In keeping with our definition of “amateur,” these dramatists were also only occasional writers. Though they may have been committed playgoers, deeply engaged in writing their plays and interested in seeing them performed, they displayed no sustained commitment to the industry, no trajectory of experience gained through consistent practice, failure, and success. Many—even some, such as Thomas Rawlins, whose plays were quite successful on stage88—explicitly indicate their lack of interest in professionalizing (so common are these statements of disinterest among the amateurs that Bentley considers them “one of the hallmarks of the amateur”).89 When these amateurs approached companies with their scripts there is no positive evidence that they intended to become professional and often positive evidence to the contrary. Although they may have taken intrinsic pleasure in writing for the theater, this is not in itself reason to think that they therefore sought a career in that theater; the unevidenced belief that they must have derives from Saunders’s class-oriented definition of “amateur” and the lasting effect it has had upon our assumptions about participation in the industry. If we too readily export to the early modern theater modern (or Jonsonian) notions of playmaking as a closed field of labor, any attempt to participate by an outsider—particularly one that we assume lacked the leisure time to engage in an activity without recompense—will seem an attempt to enter the profession. The field of playwriting for the commercial stage was, however, open to dramatists of any socioeconomic group or background, regardless of their ultimate objective in writing for the stage or their position relative to the stage when they wrote. Dramatists need not have been professional, or seeking to become professional, in order to write plays for the professional players. In this respect, nonaristocratic amateurs, such as Walter Mountfort, were no different from aristocratic amateurs, such as, for example, Sir William Berkeley, author of the King’s Men’s tragicomedy The Lost Lady (1638); we should not assume that simply because Mountfort was a clerk and Berkeley an aristocrat that the former would not write a play for the same nonprofessional purposes as the latter. As the prologue to The Launching of the Mary, Clavell’s commonplace book, and other pieces of evidence attest, these amateurs could indeed be motivated by the same ends for which Brome mocked courtier amateurs: writing for “their own delight.”90 The pertinent question, then, is not about intentions, that is, why these playgoers wrote plays, but rather what their plays can tell us about how they saw or thought they saw the stage from their perspective as theatrical consumers. Playgoers writing for professional actors may have been, as Bentley puts it, “minor participants” in the theater, but they were participants nonetheless, and participants who have gone largely unexamined, despite the fact that their work provides unique evidence of how closely certain playgoers understood and interacted with the stage. Apart from passing recognition of the kind given by Bentley and Butler, most scholarship on the early modern stage and playwriting either ignores the unique position occupied by these writers or simply omits them altogether. This book seeks to undo that legacy by restoring to our narrative of early modern theater history the work of playgoers who wrote plays for the professional stage and recognizing how those plays reveal that, in early modern England, cultural consumers could be a species of cultural producers.
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The first chapter of this book revisits some of the evidence—both the familiar and the less often considered—that demonstrates that the idea of the audience as a collaborator in the making of meaning during a play’s performance was an inherent and pervasive part of theatrical culture in the period. Opinions about that perceived collaboration varied from those who took it to be mere benign, inward imaginary response that had, for other audience members, no effect upon the meaning of the play, to those who viewed externalized physical and verbal responses as a way of changing for other audience members the play’s course and meaning. Whether playgoers’ collaboration was in keeping with what professional playmakers intended or whether it deviated from that intention, authority to determine the ultimate meaning of a play in performance was recognized as residing not with the producers but with the consumers; or, more precisely, in the theater, the consumers were understood to be the play’s final producers. Though many professional playmakers contested the fact, the early modern playhouse was taken by many to be a space of shared, rather than exclusory, creation. Viewing audience experience as an encounter requiring creative interaction with the performance, in which consumers are conditioned to take on the role of producers as well, we can see how dedicated playgoers like Mountfort could look to become actual participants in the playmaking process. While others in the audience were content to limit their participation to imaginative engagement and the occasional verbal or physical responsive outburst during a performance, playwriting playgoers took their participation a substantial, creative step further. How playwrights responded to the concept of the audience as a collaborator in the playhouse reveals that many within the industry perceived the idea of audience involvement in the playmaking process as a threat to the aesthetic and dramatic integrity of the theatrical event and, implicitly, the ongoing (never fully completed) professionalization of the field of playmaking itself. Most amateurs, on the other hand, represent playgoers exercising creative authority as aesthetically and dramatically productive, even restorative, and thus a validation of their own desire to participate in the playmaking process. My interest in Chapter 1 is less in attempting to determine whether, or to what extent, audience members were in fact participants in the making of meaning in the playhouse—though establishing that function is crucial to contextualizing the work of the playwriting playgoers; rather, my focus is upon establishing how those in the period thought about and represented the relationship between theatrical consumers and the theater they consumed. For that reason, the chapter draws on both literary works (including plays by professional dramatists themselves) and documentary evidence to show that playgoers and playmakers in the period understood the audience’s relationship with the stage to be fluid, open, and dialogic, in which playgoers’ creative input could be just as authoritative as that of professional playmakers.
The remaining chapters turn from the concept of the playmaking playgoer to its reality, focusing on the working practices of several such amateur dramatists. My purpose in these chapters is to determine what plays by playgoers can tell us about a theatrical consumer’s understanding of the way plays were written and staged. The intention is not to track down specific content they may have borrowed from particular plays by professional playwrights. Though there are places where certain professional plays, playwrights, or companies influenced some amateur dramatists—and I draw attention to those debts when relevant to my analysis—there is no evidence that any of them intended a direct response to one particular professional play or playwright. Indeed, to assume that playgoers’ plays are only primarily of use or interest in how they might reflect or tell us about professionals’ plays falls back into the critical fallacy of consigning amateurs’ plays to the status of mere “plagiarisms” (the term to which Jonson often returns), only significant when they repeat or reuse material from a particular professional play. This book’s focus, rather, is upon the problem of recovering what certain early
