tended to treat it as an absurdity.18 Perhaps some Protestants did watch Hamlet’s act 1, scene 5, thinking, “This ghost is popish nonsense.” However, such a response would have very little to do with the actual scene unfolding onstage, “whose lightest word / would harrow up thy soul.”19 Plays ask audiences to “go along with” the action on stage: this could lead anywhere.
Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) illustrates the transformative potential of emotional expression and exchange. As an example of the principle that like attracts like, Wright tells this story: “Alexander asked a pyrat that was taken and brought before him, How he durst be so bold to infest the seas, and spoyle the commerceries? he answered, That he played the pyrat but with one ship, and his Majestie with a huge navie: the which saying so pleased Alexander, that he pardoned his life, and graunted him libertie: so much could the similitude of action transport the kings affection.”20 Wright’s point is that the similarity between the two men breeds sympathy between them. However, the story is memorable precisely because of the obvious difference between the imprisoned, one-ship pirate and his interrogator, the conqueror of Persia. Rather, it is the pirate’s metaphor that makes “similitude” where there was none. Just as the pirate’s figurative speech creates a new imaginative and emotional bond between himself and his observer—one that crosses the actual social divide between them—so too, early modern commercial theater possessed devices for characterization and audience engagement (for example, soliloquy, costume, and plot twists) capable of reconfiguring the imaginative status of dramatis personae or events, as well as their relationships to the audience.
While it is important to track affinities between clusters of social experience and dramatic fantasies that seem geared toward those real-world perspectives, we cannot presume to know the limits of the interests and pleasures of particular demographics of theatergoers. Roslyn Lander Knutson wisely observes, “Audience taste is difficult to verify, being not necessarily as tied to class as scholars of a former time liked to assume.”21 The same is true of gender. For example, Andrew Gurr and Karoline Szatek argue that around the early 1610s the King’s Men began adding plays featuring strong women to appeal to a sense of gender solidarity among female playgoers.22 While this is entirely plausible, it does not mean (nor do they claim) that compelling female characters did not also draw sympathy from male playgoers. Henry Jackson describes a 1610 performance of Othello that “brought forth tears,” especially at the sight of “that famous Desdemona killed before us by her husband, [who] acted her whole part extremely well, yet when she was killed was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.”23 The very specificity of Jackson’s memory of Desdemona’s dying gesture and expression registers the empathetic attention elicited by the actor’s skill. Commercial theater offered playgoers intimate engagement with characters, and imaginative investment in scenarios, far removed from their own life experiences: watching a king of England wake up in a cold sweat, or witnessing the tragic unraveling of an interracial marriage.
Nor, I am arguing, were theatergoers’ delights welded to their religious identities. Early modern people were sometimes curious about matters that lay beyond whatever their contemporaries, or modern academics, assign as their sphere: Wright describes men who will “wrangle about matters exceeding their capacitie, as a Cobler of Chivalrie, [or] a Tailor of Divinitie.”24 Theater was a form of virtual experience that could expand playgoers’ frames of reference and foster new modes of thought and feeling. As with class and gender fantasies, confessional fictions on stage elicit similar extensions of imaginative and emotional faculties into different cultural terrain.
Though it does not record a real audience’s response to an actual play, Barnabe Riche’s pamphlet Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell—written by a playwright, in the voice of another playwright, and featuring a stage clown—nevertheless illustrates the potential of live performance to shake up fixed religious positions. In hell, the ghost of Robert Greene finds a papal legate, newly arrived to conspire with Lucifer, and “a most abominable company of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Pryors, Abbots … for the better establishing of the Kingdom of Antechrist [in] England.”25 The pope’s representative has no sooner finished speaking:
But in comes Dick Tarlton, apparrelled like a Clowne, and singing this peece of an olde song.
If this be trewe as true it is,
Ladie Ladie:
God send her life may mend the misse,
Most deere Ladie.
This suddaine jest brought the whole company into such a vehement laughter, that not able agayne to make them keepe silence, for that present tyme they were faine to breake uppe.26
The English Protestant clown Dick Tarlton cracks up the whole popish, Antichristian convocation. The interruption of seditious, Romish scheming is temporary (“for that present tyme”), but it still ruptures confessional animosity with comic energy.
Coming out of nowhere in the narrative and breaking the prose with verse, he formally, as well as diegetically, interrupts their plotting. Tarlton’s jest also derails the narrative’s running anti-Catholic satire, shifting the tone away from confessional invective. In other words, both the audience in the story and the audience of the story are jostled out of binary, oppositional, religious positions by a singing clown.
Plays Are Not Tracts
The more entertaining aspects of a play often derail the possibility of didacticism, or doctrinal clarity. When plays answer back to early modern religious life, they do not always teach lessons but sometimes speak gibberish, or cry, or make a joke. However, modes of expression that cannot be summarized in statements are still part of the dialogue between theater and confessional culture. Peter Lake offers an invaluable account of how London commercial theater created a public engaged with the political and religious problems of their time.27 In recognizing the socially shaping work of audiences’ mental engagements with plays, Lake takes the political efficacy of theater more seriously than many literary critics. By close reading plays in their entirety (rather than in discursive snippets), he recovers sequential, theatrical experience as a social process. Yet if Lake’s correction to new historicism’s abstract understanding of power is a more fine-grained account of the immediate political and religious contexts of plays, conversely, scholars of the drama can bring to this conversation a more nuanced picture of theatrical form and the cultural work it does. Lake’s close readings largely stay on the level of plot, attend primarily to “high” politics, and limit the responses of playgoers to cognitive judgments. But theater is not simply a narrative of the actions of elites presented for analysis. It is a subtler and more complex series of interactions and pleasures, capable of indirect engagements with longue durée shifts, as well as more explicit forays into topical issues. Without question, early modern playgoers did watch plays “for use” in making sense of the dangers and possibilities of their religious and political circumstances, or for moral application in their personal lives. Nevertheless, theater offered pleasures other than instructions for living, imaginative challenges beyond the examination of court politics. As Stephen Gosson complains, “Sometime you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from countrie to countrie for the love of his lady, encountring many a terrible monster made of broun paper, [and returning unrecognizable except] by a broken ring, or a handkircher, or a piece of a cockle shell, what learn you by that?”28 The familiar binary Gosson draws here between pleasure and profit is a false one. Our shared interdisciplinary project must be to connect archival and formal specificity, high and cultural politics, as well as the cognitive and emotional work of audiences.
Nathaniel Tomkyns’s eyewitness account of an August 1634 performance of The Late Lancashire Witches at the Globe shows how even an overtly
