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A Monster with a Thousand Hands
A MONSTER with a THOUSAND HANDS
The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England
Amy J. Rodgers
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rodgers, Amy J., author.
Title: A monster with a thousand hands: the discursive spectator in early modern England / Amy J. Rodgers.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017059429 | ISBN 9780812250329 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Theater audiences—England—History—16th century. | Theater audiences—England—History—17th century. | English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PR658.A88 R63 2018 | DDC 792.0942/09031—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059429
For Kentston
CONTENTS
Introduction. Discursive Iterations/Fearful Symmetries
Chapter 1. Toward a Theory of Discursive Spectatorship
Chapter 3. The Book of Praises: The Spectator as Reader in Shakespeare’s Romances
Chapter 4. The Language of Looking: Making Senses Speak in Jonsonian Masque
Epilogue. The Discursive Spectator and the Question of History
INTRODUCTION
Discursive Iterations/Fearful Symmetries
For if … our youth seriously listen to such unworthy representations of the gods … hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be dishonored by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination which may arise in his mind to say and do the like.
—Plato, The Republic, c. 386 B.C.E.
As soon as he saw the [gladiator’s] blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. He found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which he had joined … He looked, he yelled, he was on fire, he took the madness home with him.
—Augustine, Confessions, c. 400
Also, sithen [miraclis pleyinge] makith to see veyne sightis of desgyse, aray of men and wymmen by yvil continaunse, eyther stiryng other to leccherie and debatis, as aftir most bodily myrthe comen moste debatis, as siche myrthe more undisposith a man to paciencie and ablith to glotonye and to othere vicis, wherefore it suffrith not a man to beholden enterly the werde of God over his heued, but makith to thenken on alle siche thingis that Crist by the dedis of his passion badde us to forgeten.
—Anonymous Wycliffite author, Miracle Plays, c. 1360
As the style and subject matter of stage-plays is scurrilous and obscene, so likewise it is bloody and tyrannical, breathing out malice, fury, anger, murder, cruelty, tyranny, treachery, frenzy, treason, and revenge … which efferate and enrage the hearts and minds of actors and spectators; yea, oft times animate and excite them to anger, malice, duels, murders, revenge, and more than barbarous cruelty, to the great disturbance of the public peace.
—William Prynne, Histrio-mastix, 1633
The spectator at the play experiences too little; he feels like a “Misero, to whom nothing worth while can happen”; he has long since had to moderate, been obliged to damp down, or better direct elsewhere, his ambition to occupy a central place in the stream of world events; he wants to feel, to act, to mold the world in the light of his own desire—in short to be a hero.
—Sigmund Freud, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” 1905
Where once the dime and nickel novels suggested ways of crime to unbalanced youth, the motion picture has come to make a more ready and more potent appeal. The printed word is never so ardent with an impressionable mind as the acted word.
—Richard Barry, Pearson’s Magazine, 1911
The young men who opened fire at Columbine High School, at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and in other massacres had this in common: they were video gamers who seemed to be acting out some dark digital fantasy. It was as if all that
