such plays as The Spanish Gypsy (1623), The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622), and the (1623) revival of Match Me in London are more characteristic of commercial theater’s mediation of post-Reformation confessional culture. While these Spanish Match plays do reinforce anti-Catholic tropes, they also offer unexpected pleasures, as well as opportunities for identification with unlikely characters, that allow affective movement within and around the dominant paradigm in which papist Spain is the implacable enemy of Protestant England.
Cultural Pressures and Theatrical Process
My goal is to articulate the dialectic between post-Reformation English society and its dramatic fantasies; that is, to show mutually constitutive exchanges between the religious lives of early modern Londoners and the confessional worlds imagined in the commercial theaters. The methodological risk of emphasizing the broader cultural pressures that informed playhouse experience is the elision of the reciprocal impact of theatrical process (and vice versa). Some recent scholarship ascribes shared playhouse responses primarily to discursive influences, such as humoral theory or the doctrine of Eucharistic participation. Other criticism emphasizes the crucial agency of disparate audience members in creating theatrical events and their meanings, stressing the diversity of playgoers’ interpretations and uses of theater.7 This book insists that broadly collective audience responses were structured most immediately (that is, most directly during the time of performance) not by external cultural frameworks but by theatrical effects. Of course, the worlds imagined inside the playhouse are never separable from the world outside its walls.8 However, tracking their mutual entanglement depends on the recognition of the distinctive, representational aptitudes of theater.
We lose an invaluable archive of human experience if we look only at the ways plays are socially conditioned by early modern conceptions of emotion and not at how plays themselves produce feelings in the social exchange among actors and audiences. For example, Allison Hobgood’s claim that the “most determinative factor” in the interactions between early modern players and their playgoers was humoral discourse homogenizes all plays into manifestations of “the two primary resources [of theater:] … the early modern cultural script about the communicability of passions … and, second, the playgoers who materialized that cultural script.”9 Doubtless, humoral theory affected some of the ways early modern people understood emotional interactions, including those in the theater. However, the limitation of this model is that it makes the resources of actual play scripts merely instrumental to a preexisting and unchanged “cultural script.” Steven Mullaney rightly cautions against an overliteral projection of humoral discourse as an etiology of playhouse passions: “In a phenomenology of historical or theatrical emotions, it might be tempting to limit evidence to the explicitly articulated, reported, or theorized. If we do, however, are we producing a history of emotions or a history of ideas about emotions? Aren’t we confusing evidence with the explicit as well as the extant? … [Instead, we must] embrace formal literary and theatrical analysis as a useful tool for the study of early modern emotions, not merely in terms of what characters and plays say or explain or represent but also, and more crucially, in terms of what theatrical performance makes happen in and with its audience, beyond the discursive and mimetic dimensions of the stage.”10 The emotional responses of playgoers are not simply products of preexisting, historical paradigms of affect but rather are molded and mobilized by the specific and changing stimuli of performance. Plays do not just describe the passions stirring elsewhere in a culture; they make their own, often more unusual or supple, structures of feeling.
More germane to the religious concerns of this book is Anthony Dawson’s account of theatrical experience as characterized by a shared sense of “eucharistic participation.”11 While Dawson recovers a feeling of playhouse collectivity in the period that bore affinities to communion, the conceptual scale at which Dawson examines audience engagement is difficult to reconcile with the local effects of particular plays. It may well be the case that religious communion subtends the practices of theatrical reception in a diffuse but powerful manner. However, neither humoral contagion nor Eucharistic participation can be taken either as a descriptive model or as a direct cause of unified playhouse response. Dawson’s depiction of playhouse communion is largely dependent on a structural comparison between the relation of actor to role and the dual nature of Christ. Put bluntly, I doubt many people were strongly affected by theories of Christic hypostasis when Ned Alleyn was stalking the stage as Tamburlaine in red, velvet pants. The dynamic between actor and role is indeed a crucial aspect of performance (especially for a famous actor like Alleyn, who specialized in a type); and 2 Tamburlaine does have a communion scene that envelops playgoers (when their proxies, the scourge’s sons, dip their hands in his blood). The problem is that these more immediate, theatrical technes of complex personation and audience involvement are subsumed under a broader discourse of “communion.” The collective responses of mixed-faith audiences are not mystical unions but shifting convergences of feeling and thought induced by the shared apprehension of specific stage effects.
My point is not that extratheatrical, cultural frameworks do not also shape the reception of plays. Much important work, such as Dawson’s on communion, has demonstrated the influence of contiguous or analogous discourses and social practices (including, among others, spectacles of royal power, dissection, traditional festivities, fairs and markets, civic entertainments, executions, bearbaitings, medical theories of vision and the humoral body, sermons, and iconoclasm) that together overdetermined the basic conditions of behavior and perception fundamental to early modern theater. Ongoing scholarship that articulates such formative cultural pressures is vital to our understanding of the period in general, and to its drama. However, my priority here—which I understand to complement rather than to contest such work—is to stress how theater reconfigures the religious discourses it absorbs, and reshapes the ways mixed-faith audiences experience them.
Theatrical Cultivation of Imaginative Competencies
The repertory and representational practices of the commercial theaters encouraged mixed-faith audiences to approach plays with a flexible mentality. Whereas the focus of theater historians from Alfred Harbage onward has been the preexisting “mental composition” of audiences (that is, the intellectual and social experiences that playgoers took with them into the playhouse),12 my interest is in the imaginative competencies developed by theater itself. As Jeremy Lopez writes, “Companies built and maintained followings by continually increasing the demands on their audiences’ attention, thus creating audiences that could handle those demands.”13 Early modern commercial theater developed new genres and dramatized an unprecedented range of subjects. The constant influx of new plays did not just cater to audience tastes but created them. Regular theatergoers were exposed to many different kinds of drama, and people often visited the playhouse without knowing what would be performed.14 Audiences were asked to make quick emotional shifts between generic registers, “mingling Kings & Clownes [in] mungrell Tragy-comedie.”15 Early modern plays regularly contain multiple representational levels, such as inset masques and dumb shows.16 They toy with generic expectations (as in King Lear’s counterfactually tragic ending), and they disrupt basic conventions of staging (as in Edgar and Gloucester’s climb up the cliffs of Dover). The drama habitually asks its audiences to adjust their perceptions during performance, and by doing so to deepen their theatrical competencies. Early modern playhouses were places where people could acquire new ideas and accumulate vicarious experiences. The drama disseminated elite and emerging bodies of knowledge to a broad audience, thus facilitating critical habits of political thought, social skills for urban life, and “mind-travelling” to foreign lands.17 Early modern commercial theater was an experimental and world-expanding medium. It cultivated mental and emotional elasticity that carried over into audience engagements with stage treatments of confessional culture.
Theatrical representation changes its objects and the viewer’s relationship to them. The resources of stagecraft gave theatergoers special kinds of emotional and imaginative access to confessional activities and subjectivities. To use a familiar example, Hamlet’s pacing, costume, language, and use of stage space call on largely Protestant
