revise the play not by displacing or destroying it but in collaboration with the script. Powerful as the implied, Pietà blocking is, the Talbots’ death is not simply a sad, static tableau but an interactive process of feeling. The playwrights use a technique that I call “audience priming”: the script prepares playgoers for a dramatically climactic response by placing a small-scale version of an emotional situation immediately before the big scene. This is often done through a reported speech or minor character. This device is not just a thematic doubling. What makes it effective is the temporal build. The death of a minor character, John Talbot, affectively attunes audiences for the death of the play’s hero; Talbot’s mourning for his son models audiences’ sorrow for him. In practical terms, it gets their bodies ready to cry on time. That is useful in this scene, because playgoers are asked to make a rapid, emotional transition from the adrenaline of stage combat to grief at Talbot’s death. Priming an audience, like priming a gun or a pump, is partly a physical preparation. Yet spectators are not simply having their tears jerked. Audience priming is a complex, recursive technique of deepening feeling; it is outward moving, self-replicating, an extension seeking further extension.71 Their weeping is a supplement as Jacques Derrida describes it: “The supplement adds … and makes…. Its place is assigned … by the mark of an emptiness.”72 It fills and changes an incomplete emotional structure.
Similarly, early modern theatergoers might not necessarily have found it distracting if some spectators shouted during a performance. Instead of indicating the atomization of the audience into individuals, whooping and heckling could have contributed to a group sense of investment and immediacy. To draw a modern-day comparison, for many moviegoers, yelling at the screen is a sign of absorption rather than opposition, and it especially intensifies the enjoyment of particular genres (action and horror), even for those who themselves are quiet.73 In his defense of theater, Heywood describes an action scene, in which “[soldier] and horse even from the steeds rough fetlocks to the plume of the champions helmet [were] together plunged into a purple Ocean,” that would make any playgoer “hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor.”74 Heywood’s whinnying spectator is not detached or interrupting. He is the soldier’s horse. By this, I am not saying that Heywood is describing an audience member imitating actual horse noises. However, in comparing the spectator’s cheering to neighing, Heywood conceives of playgoer vocalization as something absorbed into the fiction during performance. The same is true of somatized, emotional response: the playgoer mentally “hug[s]” the valiant soldier, just as onstage the steed and champion are tightly joined, “together plunged” from hoof to plume. These playgoer reactions participate in the martial world of the play. In short, we cannot assume that we know what playhouse noises or actions early modern Londoners would have considered truly disruptive, and what may have been incorporated into the performance event.
Furthermore, I suspect that playgoers who did behave badly (whatever that actually meant) were unlikely to bring the whole imaginative enterprise to a grinding halt. Even extreme examples of theatrical disruption could continue to interact with the fiction in performance:
Fowler you know was appointed for the Conquering parts, and it being given out he was to play the Part of a great Captain and mighty Warriour, drew much Company; the Play began, and ended with his Valour; but at the end of the Fourth Act he laid so heavily about him, that some Mutes who stood for Souldiers, fell down as they were dead e’re he had toucht their trembling Targets; so he brandisht his Sword & made his Exit; ne’re minding to bring off his dead men; which they perceiving, crauled into the Tyreing house, at which, Fowler grew angry, and told ’em, Dogs you should have laine there till you had been fetcht off; and so they crauled out again, which gave the People such an occasion of Laughter, they cry’d that again, that again, that again.75
The story ends suspended in the crowd’s repeated demand for the improvised joke, but the performance itself did not. “The Play began, and ended with his valor,” in spite of the corpsing in act 4. “Recovering” the thread of action and the attention of the crowd from disturbances contingent on live performance is as basic an acting skill as memorizing lines. More to the point, it would be a mistake to think of the event described here as entirely “stopping” or “stepping outside” the play. Even though the plot is interrupted, and the conventions of theatrical representation are visibly not working, and the performance genre has changed from action to clowning—nevertheless, even here there is creative seepage between the fiction of the play and the flap in the playhouse. Even from the beginning the boundary is blurred: the crowd does not come to watch the character within the drama but to see the actor Fowler play the type of “conquering” role for which he was famous. The extras break character because Fowler’s personation of a warrior is so lifelike: their prop shields tremble with real fear. The star so terrifies his onstage observers that they pretend to die before he can pretend to kill them. This is acting: to strike viewers without touching. The personae of the “great captain” and the leading man bleed together. So do fictional place and theatrical space: he exits brandishing his sword, not minding “to bring off” (the stage) “his dead men” (the characters). Fowler’s haughty disregard for his fellow actors is continuous with a “conquering” disdain for slain enemies. He commands the “[mute] dogs” to crawl as imperiously as Tamburlaine lashes the vanquished kings that pull his chariot. It is unclear how far afield of the imaginative world of the play this interruption to the scripted action actually goes. The playgoers shouting “that again” are not impeding the performance so much as including themselves in a game among the actors, which itself echoes and elaborates (and ultimately is reintegrated into) the dramatic fiction. That is to say, plays do not usually break if dropped: they bounce.
Plays are only destroyed or undermined by vocal and physically active audiences if we think of plays as self-contained mimetic units. However, early modern scripts are not closed in this way but instead open the dramatic fiction out to a broader field of performance. Erika T. Lin aptly calls attention to the disjunction between the aesthetics of tragedies and the jigs routinely attached to them.76 Moreover, theatrical performance does not stop at the edge of the stage. As Mullaney writes, “It extended beyond the acting space or scaffold to take place in and with the audience, its necessary participant and dramaturgical collaborator.”77 William N. West describes early modern theater as “encompassing” audiences, “so that their experiences and responses become part of the play.”78 To adapt the axiom of the Prague formalists, the playhouse makes everything in it a sign. Scripts in performance do not simply create fictions on stage. They make apertures between the world of playgoers and the world of the play.
Early modern drama is full of what I call “open scenes” that depend on the collaboration of the playhouse as a whole in the creation of theatrical effects. Othello riles up the crowd with its sing-along English drinking song, making the audience itself part of the illusion of a wild party in Cyprus. Thomas Middleton’s Roaring Girl transforms the faces of playgoers into a picture gallery, incorporating audiences into the architecture of the imagined house. So easily in so many plays, real theatergoers flesh out fictional multitudes, or groups of observers, invoked by extension as a “band of brothers” or included as “pale and trembling mutes or witnesses” to the act. Audience contributions to the performance event need not be loud or literal to be powerful. Playgoers might offer a kind of attention (whether silent or not) in which Desdemona’s unexpected breath—“O”—is a coup de theatre.79 Francis Bacon compares the effect of actors on audiences to the movement of “the bow to the fiddle.”80 Although active in different ways—one striking, the other resonating—both are necessary parts of the same creative instrument.
Case Study: Playing on the Spanish Match
Any critical project that seeks to connect historical change and representational process is an attempt to leap between two moving trains. Yet this is necessary work, because it is through such jumps—back and forth, instant by instant, continually, and in every area of human activity—that cultures and subjectivities make each other. In theater, a social art in which anything can be anything else, these synapses fire with particular
