Theatrical Experience of a Mixed Religious Culture
Though constrained by the social conditions of their production, fictions also shift the boundaries of a culture. Doubtless there were some ideological ne plus ultras beyond which individual playgoers could not emotionally travel. But these imaginative limits were not uniform or orthodox. Because confessional lives themselves were mixed and fluid, it is unreasonable to assume that these identities narrowly or rigidly predetermined audience reactions to theatrical fantasies about religion. This is especially true insofar as “theatrical experience is … generally far more permissive than our socially regulated experience of everyday life.”170 While theater did not happen in splendid isolation from real-world, ideological commitments, the imaginative technologies of the early modern English stage facilitated flexible engagements with a heterogeneous, religious culture. In the next chapter, I explore the capacity of dramatic technique to structure collective encounters with post-Reformation religious life. The orchestration of shared playhouse experiences that imaginatively blur, shuffle, contort, or otherwise reshape existing ideological formations was a crucial mechanism through which early modern commercial theater regenerated, and transfigured, the mixed-faith culture that fed it.
The theater’s ability to lure playgoers into other pleasures and subject positions is evident in the story of the playgoing Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini. While in London, Foscarini made frequent trips to the low-rent Curtain to stand in the yard “incognito.” On one occasion, when the actors invited the audience to name the next day’s play, “he actually named one. But the crowd wanted another and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars.’ … So loosening his cloak, he began to clap his hands just as the mob did and to shout, ‘frati, frati.’ As he was shouting this the people turned to him and, assuming he was a Spaniard, began to whistle [menacingly]. But he has not given up visiting the other theatres.”171 The animosity of the crowd at the Curtain makes Foscarini’s desire to join with them all the more important. The ambassador abandons his own choice and embraces the wishes of the playgoers around him. Although we cannot with certainty identify the play, just as presumably Foscarini could not at the time, it would have been reasonable for the ambassador to have guessed that “Friars” contained antipapist material.172 Yet he claps and shouts along. Playhouse experience could gather mixed-faith audiences into fleeting communities of thought and feeling. As Francis Bacon writes of theater, “The minds of men in company are more open to affections and impressions than when alone.”173
CHAPTER 2
Shared Feeling
The mixed-faith audiences that filled early modern London’s commercial playhouses responded to live theater in ways that were not always aligned with—or the outcome of—their individual beliefs. Sophisticated and ever-evolving theatrical techniques invited playgoers to pretend: to imagine different versions of the world, to fantasize beyond their ordinary ken, to entertain alternative perspectives of thought and feeling. Plays allowed confessionally diverse audiences to mentally and emotionally traverse the shifting ideological landscape with greater imaginative license than was afforded in many spheres of religious life. This is not utopian transcendence: London commercial theater over the seventy-five years before the English Civil War did not erode sectarian differences, or foster a general playgoing culture of Erasmian toleration. But plays in performance did temporarily focus the attention and energy of mixed-faith audiences into shared daydreams whose relations to real-world confessional politics were often productively oblique. Plays mediated religious discourses through theatrical devices that were no great respecters of doctrinal integrity but were effective in shaping audiences’ engagements with the drama.
Plays bound religious content to theatrical forms that had the power to prompt reactions that might contradict playgoers’ actual theological commitments. To say that dramatic effects shaped much of how mixed-faith audiences experienced plays does not mean that theater coerces playgoers into ideologically and emotionally uniform responses. Charles Whitney mischaracterizes critical attention to the formal orchestration of theatrical experience as a paradigm in which “the text or performance constructs audiences who perceive largely with innocent eyes from an abstract subject position.”1 My point is not that theater erases religious identities but rather that theater creates a generative misalignment of real-world confessional positions and the confessional worlds of plays. My interest is in the kinds of conceptual and affective movement—even if it is only a temporary shifting of entrenched positions—produced when people with diverse beliefs respond together to a reimagined version of their shared, mixed culture.
Theater ventures beyond the boundaries of everyday life.2 While religious differences did not disappear at the playhouse door, many plays depend, sometimes as a basic condition of their intelligibility, on the willingness of theatergoers to imaginatively embrace religious frameworks that they would reject outside the playhouse, or to dwell in stage moments that muddle confessional categories. Richard McCoy rightly emphasizes the difference between the demands of religious faith and the conditional “faith” elicited by theatrical illusions.3 The miscalibration between the ideological positions of audience members and theater’s refracted images of religious life made it possible for playgoers to experience their mixed confessional culture from other vantage points. Or, put differently, it was the semiautonomy of dramatic fantasy that made it a productive interlocutor, not merely a parrot, of confessional culture. Commercial theater permitted the “suspension of belief,” by which I mean that plays ask their mixed-faith audiences to process religious activities, objects, and subject positions differently from how they otherwise might in church, or at an execution, or during a theological debate.4 While antitheatricalists insisted on the moral and physical dangers of playgoing, there was also recognition that because theater is fictive, it operates with different interpretive protocols and consequences. As Philip Sidney puts it, “The Poet … nothing affirmes and therefore never lyeth.”5 In other words, plays allow confession-ally diverse spectators to believe in religious counterfactuals—to feel them as if real—without having to avow them as true.6 Commercial theater offered post-Reformation Londoners shared, vicarious experiences that cross confessional boundaries. These collective theatrical fantasies were not an escape from religious culture but rather a means of affective experimentation within it.
Early modern drama gave spectators the license to cognitively and emotionally invest in scenarios and subjectivities far removed from their own identity positions. In this chapter, I outline ways the representational practices of the theater business cultivated the imaginative elasticity of audiences. While many of the examples do not pertain to religious culture per se, they do demonstrate broader conditions of reception conducive to flexible engagements with religious culture. The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) offers a specific instance of theater’s capacity to reconfigure mixed-faith playgoers’ experiences of topical religious material. An eyewitness account of the play demonstrates how theatrical pleasure could displace confessional agendas. Yet the most extensive evidence of such imaginatively elastic, theatrical encounters with confessional material are the very scripts that structure these experiences. Plays orchestrate collective thought and feeling. However, responsive audiences are not passive victims of stage spectacle: reception is an active process.
The embodied, affective, and cognitive responses of audiences are the locus of theater’s ideological work. Culture is made and remade in the playhouse through gasps, tears, and snorts of laughter. Ideology is always lived; and the virtual experiences of playgoers are a particularly malleable site of reinscription and change. In closing, I show how a subgenre of Spanish Match plays from the 1620s capitalizes on the widespread fear among Protestants of a marriage alliance with Spain, yet also recasts these anxieties into more emotionally pliable fantasies. Unlike the rigid, religious binaries into which A Game at Chess interpellates its mixed-faith audiences (discussed in Chapter
