extensions into the experimental, social space of shared fantasy.
The active reception of theater takes many forms. While recent criticism productively attends to more conspicuous forms of audience participation, playgoer agency is not limited to its most literal, visible, and individual man-ifestations.57 It is not only through uncued behavior that theatergoers contribute to the coproduction of meaning and pleasure in the playhouse. N. R. Helms writes, “Though spectators may seem to do nothing [but] … attend to the business onstage, their minds are always busy.”58 As Keir Elam describes, plays begin and end in negotiations between performers and their audiences.59 Anticipated audience responses shape the play from its conception. Playgoers make commercial theater possible by turning up and paying. Actors adjust their delivery depending on audience reactions during performance. Most importantly, audiences imaginatively create plays as they watch them. Plays exist as the assemblage of the experiences of audience members. Matteo Pangallo dismisses “the idea of the theatrical consumer becoming a producer” as an exhausted “critical commonplace,” and he turns his attention to overt forms of audience agency instead of the “merely imaginative.”60 The direct ways in which playgoers revised plays discussed by Pangallo were indeed an important form of theatrical participation. But there is nothing “mere” about the collective imaginings of thousands of people.
Antitheatricalists as well as defenders of the stage describe theater’s capacity to transform audiences en masse, both when plays fulfilled the ameliorative moral function ascribed to them in classical dramatic theory and when they went dangerously awry.61 These accounts not only share an awareness that playgoers as a group are affected by performance (for better or worse); they also understand being moved by a play as a form of activity. Thomas Heywood praises the ability of dramatic examples of warriors to rouse like bravery in theatergoers: “What English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not … pursu[e] him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance … so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”62 Here, playgoers are engrossed (“wrapt” and “bewitch[ed]”) but also exercise their imaginations energetically (“offer” and “pursu[e]”). They receive and are shaped by the pressures of the play (“new mold[ed]”), but in a way that makes them active (ready for any “notable attempt”). For Heywood, dramatizations of English heroes elicit a kind of mental support or accompaniment. Stage action and audience imagination blur together: the spectator’s wishes “pursu[e in the] enterprise.” “Prosperous performance” happens simultaneously in the fiction of the play, on the stage, and in the playgoer’s heart.
For opponents of theater, the problem was precisely this kind of collective emotional participation. Anthony Munday writes that playgoers “al by sight and assent be actors…. So that in th[e] representation of whoredome, al the people in [their] mind[s] plaie the whores.”63 Plays change spectators into inner performers. Stage representations are inseparable from playgoers’ “minds’ play.” For both Heywood and Munday, theater affects playgoers as a group: even the most virtuous spectator could be corrupted by licentious theater, just as even a coward could be emboldened by stage heroics. In other words, early modern theorists of performance observe that audience members do not maintain their individual, preexisting, inward dispositions intact for the duration of the play: “all the people” are affected by what they see. However, these mentally receptive audiences are not submissive lumps but imaginatively active partners in the creation of the play.
Debates about audience activity tend to propose binary alternatives: either rowdy or docile, either individuals or a group, either critical or feeling. The presumption is usually that there is a correlation among the former and latter sets of terms: that critical thought is limited to individuals, and more likely to be expressed through self-separating behavior such as interruption; whereas collective playhouse experience is understood as uncritically immersive, emotive, and passive. These are false assumptions. A quiet audience is not necessarily a passive one. Vocal playgoers are not always resistant. Immersive spectatorship can exercise critical faculties. Individual and collective playhouse experiences are not mutually exclusive.64 Theater is not a zero-sum game in which either agential, individual playgoers run roughshod over the play and players or the force of “spectacle” batters a homogeneous blob of audience into “complacent” submission.65
The cumulative evidence shows a variety of audience behavior, from rapt attention to backchat to boredom to violence. While it is important to recognize a broader difference between the polite customs of modern theatergoers and the generally more participatory range of practices available to early modern audiences, the relative frequency of attentive or disruptive behaviors in London commercial playhouses cannot be determined, given the limitations of the extant body of contemporary descriptions of playgoing. In any case, it is the wrong question. Knowing the things audiences did in playhouses does not necessarily reveal how they experienced theater. While some forms of playgoer expression are unambiguous (for example, throwing eggs at actors), it is not always possible to know what inward states are indicated by audiences’ outward behavior.
Expressions of emotion that modern playgoers might find irritating may rather for early modern theatergoers have enhanced the performance. For Preiss, audible crying disturbs the play: “The convulsive weeping of even one spectator, let alone hundreds, can be a loud and distracting business.”66 However, in Thomas Nashe’s vivid description of collective audience response to Talbot’s death in act 4, scene 4, of 1 Henry VI, mass weeping does not detract but rather contributes to the scene’s effect: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot … to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”67 Heywood records audiences responding to the scene collectively and emotionally, but not without agency, and not in a way that diminishes the play’s effects. The group response elicited by Talbot’s death transforms the scene from a representation of lost futurity to the restoration of a heroic legacy in the present.
In the play, as Alexander Leggatt points out, “the Talbots’ deaths … truly constitute an ending. After this, not only is the English cause … doomed, but Talbot and his son are forgotten.”68 The script stresses the loss of Talbot’s line. His son John Talbot appears only briefly, for the sole, dramatic purpose of dying with his father in battle. The play underscores the extinction of their family. Talbot laments, “In thee thy mother dies, our household’s name.”69 John Talbot’s bravery establishes him as a true heir: “An if I fly, I am not Talbot’s son” (4.6.2243). But the promise of patrilineal succession is confirmed only when precluded: “If son to Talbot, die at Talbot’s foot” (4.6.2245). Their deaths follow fast on each other. Together they exit to battle, Talbot urging his son to “fight by thy father’s side … let’s die in pride” (4.6.2248–49). A skirmish follows, immediately after which John Talbot’s corpse is brought onstage, and Talbot dies just fifteen lines later. Talbot’s last words—“Now my old arms are John Talbot’s grave” (4.7.2284)—register a generational collapse. The script shows the end of Talbot, both his death and the loss of his legacy.
But the weeping of playgoers changes the play. Live audiences resurrect and “new embalm” Talbot. Their responses not only affect the emotional event in the theater but touch even the dead person played on stage: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot … after he had [lain] two hundred years in his tomb.” As Rebecca Schneider describes the affective labor of historical reenactment, “The stickiness of emotion [drags] the temporal past into … [the] present.”70 The live, wet “teares of ten thousand Spectators” revivify Talbot’s historical corpse “fresh bleeding.” His affective reanimation in the present compensates for the loss of futurity scripted into the scene. Repeated performance
