the physical comedy. The Late Lancashire Witches orchestrates not a resolution but a ridiculous encounter with a religious impasse. We erase a crucial form of public engagement with confessional life if we look to plays only for the kind of “position taking” elicited by works of controversy and ignore the subtler, stranger, but equally strong processes of collective thought and feeling orchestrated by early modern commercial drama.
The Orchestration of Active Reception
Plays were considered to be working when they gathered playgoers’ imaginations. The idea that plays move their audiences as a group from one mood or mode of thought to another is implicit in early modern theater’s frequently noted connection to oratory: the art of swaying a multitude.36 Skillful players were praised for their ability to focus an audience’s attention. “Sit in a full Theater,” writes Thomas Overbury, “and you will think you see so many lines drawne from the circumference of so many eares, whiles the [Excellent] Actor is the Center.”37 As Matthew Steggle demonstrates in detail, the mark of a successful comedy was loud, theater-wide laughter, and a good tragedy was one that made the crowd weep.38 In other words, the basic, declared goal of early modern stagecraft was to guide collective audience experience.
Implicit in plays are processes of shared perception and feeling. While external evidence of playgoer behavior can seem more empirically sound than the internal evidence of plays, it is also more limited. Unattached to a specific dramatic moment, Overbury’s description of the magnetic actor only tells us that a good performer can engage a crowd. Plays offer more detailed maps of thought and feeling. Playwrights used generic cues hoping to elicit particular reactions, and, as Lopez points out, “for a device to become conventional it must be functional.”39 Scripts, and the staging practices they index, structure audience response. Even though they exclude the very things that constitute theater—live bodies, contingency, and physical staging—play scripts remain the richest and most extensive records of early modern English playhouse experiences. Nor has this archive been mined to exhaustion, especially as current scholarship attends to only a fraction of the extant corpus of early modern drama. Scripts are admittedly, as Richard Preiss objects, only a partial record of one half of a conversation, and as such omit the voices of live audiences.40 Yet these incomplete transcripts are full of speaking silences.
To value scripts in this way is not to privilege text over performance, or to reify fantasies of authorial control over the distributed agency of the playhouse. A script is not a prison house but a spine that enables movement. Play scripts are synecdochical for live performance, a suggestive piece that conjures something larger than itself. In synecdoche, the part does not “stand in for” the whole in a mimeographic fashion, like an architect’s blueprint blown up in scale on a projector. “Think when we talk of horses, that you see them,” is not a prescriptive instruction but an open invitation. The “imaginary forces” of audiences that piece out vasty fields of France within the wooden O are always bigger and wilder than the scripts that set them to work.41 Preiss imagines an oppositional relationship between scripted drama and audience interactivity: “not ‘partnership’ but competition.”42 But scripts are not the disciplinary machinery of authors intent on a territorial battle for control of the stage against a distracted multitude who come to the playhouse solely to watch themselves act up. It is true that early work on audience response to early modern performance, such as Jean E. Howard’s Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration, tended toward a more coercive vocabulary in which stage effects “force” or “compel” particular responses from spectators. Yet, rather than harp on thirty-year-old diction choices that have since been abandoned by Howard herself—and by most others who are interested in the effects of plays on the people who watch them—it seems more productive to me to develop the methodological insights of reader-response-derived performance criticism into the intimate relationship between theatrical technique and audience experience.43 For example, although Shakespeare’s Art prioritizes the craft of the author, Howard’s early recognition of scripts as shaped by and for a fuller field of performance practices anticipates the expanded understanding we now have of theatrical agency as distributed across the playing system as a whole.44 Performance is a river that no one steps in twice. However, reader-response-based criticism’s attention to scripts as agents and archives of the unfolding of audience experience over time makes it well equipped to examine the cultural processes enabled in live theater.
Certainly, early modern theatergoers sought forms of gratification unrelated to the performed script. Preiss, Paul Yachnin, and others offer compelling accounts of the opportunities playhouses afforded for individual social performance.45 People went to the theater for many perfectly good, nondramatic reasons: to sightsee, to sell or steal things, to cruise for sex, to flaunt their clothes and wit. Playgoers could be fractious, resistant, and sometimes more interested in themselves than the stage. But this does not preclude more receptive playhouse moods. Audience members could revel in their own activities independent of the drama, and also enjoy being moved as a group in harmony with a play. Robert Shaughnessy describes actor-audience interactivity in the reconstructed Globe as a process of “entrainment,” defined in communication studies as the phenomenon in which “two or more individuals lock into each other’s rhythms of, for example, movement, speech, and gesture.”46 In the context of theatrical reception, this does not mean marching in lockstep. Shaughnessy records divided responses among different demographics of playgoers, as well as strong feelings of playhouse-wide connectedness. Modern actors often describe Globe audiences as a “sea of faces.”47 The metaphor captures the simultaneously synchronic and multidirectional quality of theatrical response. The shared visibility among audiences and actors produces eddies, as well as waves, of emotional contagion. Actors and audiences share always-changing oscillations of feeling and attention. But while the rhythms of performance move the playhouse, actors also experience their audiences as too vast and protean to control. Entrainment is a complex and mutual process: not hypnosis.
The orchestration of collective and ideologically elastic audience experience is not an oppressive form of “mind control.”48 Some recent work seeks to “restore power … to early modern spectators” by prioritizing “uncued audience agency.”49 Hobgood objects to conceptualizing theatrical experience in terms of drama’s impact on playgoers and “rejects an incapacitating docility [implicit in the term] ‘reception.’ ”50 This is a gratuitously convoluted way of thinking about theater, predicated on a narrow definition of agency. Responsiveness is not mindless submission but a necessary contribution to performance. To say that much of an audience’s interaction with a play consists of loosely collective reactions to things happening on stage is not to treat playgoing “as if [it] were primarily a form of discipline”51 but simply to recognize that shared experience is a basic pleasure and raison d’être of theater.52
Shared responses are never identical. As Whitney rightly notes, “A collective roar, sigh, or wave of laughter in the playhouse may be generated by many diverse, individualized inflections of feeling.”53 No two people, even those who occupy similar social positions, will ever perceive, judge, and remember a play in exactly the same way.54 Rather, by collective responses I mean emotions, thoughts, and somatizations sharing a family resemblance, incited by the simultaneous perception of theatrical effects.55 Orchestrated, shared experiences may be ambiguous or conflicted. Collective responses are entangled with the process of the play’s unfolding over the time of performance. However, they do not necessarily cumulate into one shared interpretation or “takeaway” opinion of the play as a whole. Collective playhouse experiences may have different implications for spectators depending on their social circumstances. The corrupt but beautiful femmes fatales of Jacobean tragedy described by Huston Diehl may send a shiver through the whole theater, yet the shared desire and repulsion provoked by the stage embodiment of the Whore of Babylon could have different aftershocks of meaning for Calvinist, Catholic, and Laudian playgoers.56 The dramatic organization of confessionally fluid, collective experience is not totalizing. Plays do not summon into being ideologically uniform audiences. However, they do make the same
