several challenges. Like English playwrights, English antitheatricalists display a tendency to “borrow” heavily at the levels of polemic and phrasing from one another and from earlier classical and medieval moralists.53 Jonas Barish, for example, calls a particular section of William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix “overflow[ing] with an inky gutter of references to Tertullian, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine and ‘sundry’ other Fathers.”54 Such redundancy mirrors a concern regarding contemporary scholarship that uses this moralist discourse: since nearly all work done on early modern audiences relies heavily on this archive, it becomes difficult to avoid retreading old ground. It is, therefore, worth taking a moment to clarify the use of antitheatricalist writings in this project. Most obviously, as this study is about spectatorial discourses (rather than spectatorial practice or affect), the parroting of classical and contemporary sources that occurs in antitheatricalist treatises becomes an important piece of evidence rather than an idiosyncracy that requires a disclaimer. That is, such repetition aptly demonstrates the presence and potency of certain discourses about theater spectators (re)circulating in early modern England. That Prynne and other antitheatricalists echo various medieval philosophers (who in turn had cited classical ones) to convey the idea of the vulnerable spectator suggests both that this discourse has a history that precedes the early modern period and that these writers, on some level, relied on these earlier discourses in order to craft their own “take” on the discursive spectator. That Prynne and other antitheatricalists echo one another demonstrates one channel through which ideas about theatrical spectators were circulated and reified. These authorial and cultural redundancies provide opportunity to examine precise patterns of repetition and deviation to better understand the conceptual cynosures around which the early modern discursive spectator tends to orbit.
In addition to moralist discourse against the theater (and the counterdiscourse of protheatrical defenses), I draw upon writings produced by other cultural institutions concerned with early modern theatergoers’ behavior (such as the legal apparatus and the Anglican Church) and upon the few examples of spectatorial testimony found in correspondence and personal records. However, insofar as the discursive spectator is concerned, there is no more significant archive than the plays and entertainments written for audiences (and often for specific ones). Rather than provide a survey of early modern plays’ references to their audiences, such as is found in appendix 2 of Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, I use a selection of plays and court entertainments to explore developments in the discursive spectator that occur over a limited period of about thirty years. Just as the rise of the English professional theater is a gradual process that takes place over more than a century, English writing about the theater and those who watched it was a work in progress.55 I do not therefore claim that the early modern period had one cohesive version of the discursive spectator. Rather, I begin by identifying several pervasive discourses about theatrical spectatorship in circulation at the end of the sixteenth century and follow them through the first decades of the seventeenth. While the late sixteenth century saw massive changes to London’s theatrical landscape, the seventeenth century also saw numerous changes in early modern theatrical culture, albeit more in degree than kind. A proliferation and diversification of playing venues, innovations in staging conventions, and alterations to the theatrical patronage system during this period suggest and promote greater cultural and artistic interest in the spectator. With the reopening of the boys’ companies at Paul’s and Blackfriars at the turn of the century, the occupation of the Blackfriars by the King’s Men in 1608, and the building of the Cockpit Theater in 1616, more variety, both in genre and venue, became available to playgoers. James I’s queen, Anna, an avid patron of the arts, ran a court newly devoted to the production of entertainment spectacle. Under her supervision, the court masque developed into a multimedia event featuring dazzling visual effects that were eventually exported onto the public stage. And, while royal patronage was still a significant means of financial support for playing companies, customer revenue became increasingly important to their survival.56 In other words, the seventeenth century marks an apogee in “the artist’s push-pull relationship with his audience.”57 As competition for playgoers became more intense, schemes for attracting audiences diversified. Generic experiments accelerated as playing companies attempted to attract particular “types” of audience. The satiric, bawdy plays featured by the children’s companies, for example, targeted a more select audience, or, in more mercenary terms, one that could afford to pay three times as much for admission.58 Cultivating a more “sophisticated” audience, however, had its drawbacks; one less-desirable epiphenomenon of the satiric trend was audience backlash. Jokes made at the expense of other playing companies, public figures, and even the audience itself “localized the battlefield … by turning the device against the playwrights themselves.”59 Finally, as many playwrights began imagining their work as potentially having two lives—on stage and in print—the reader emerges as a significant asymptote to and influence on the theatrical spectator.
My goal in this study is not to canvass all of the ways in which Tudor-Stuart England thought about the large and unwieldy category of spectatorship, even theatrical spectatorship. Therefore, the book takes a suggestive rather than comprehensive approach. Focusing on the final decades of the sixteenth century, Chapter 1 explores the cultural terrain in which the early modern professional theater took root and held. It is, of course, a terrain undergoing seismic shifts, and, as I argue, the rapidity and magnitude of the English commercial theater’s rise generate new ideas (and modifications to existing ones) about and language for describing theatergoers. In particular, the word spectator enters the English language during this period, in Sir Philip Sidney’s poetic opus The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.60 Surveying a variety of texts (sermons, legal documents, treatises, essays, poetry, and drama) that reference or explicitly deliberate on the spectator, I identify three pervasive suppositions circulating during the late sixteenth century: that the interpretive exchange that occurs between the play and the spectator is often understood as a violent, even traumatic, interaction; that spectatorship, as a communal act, produces creative energy that mimics the generative force usually associated with the divine; and that spectatorship is not governed by the sensory binary of audial-visual, but is an experience that activates multiple sense perceptions.
The subsequent chapters take the discourses elucidated in the first and investigate one way in which they progress over the seventeenth century’s early decades. Focusing specifically on representations of theatrical spectators found in cultural production designed for entertainment, edification, and pleasure, I demonstrate how certain discursive shifts may be as readily explained by changes in how spectators are linguistically represented and disseminated, particularly by those writing for and about the theater, as by changes in technologies of stagecraft, spectacle, and exhibition. In particular, I focus on subgenres that become cynosures for experiments in form and staging and emerge as highly popular during the early seventeenth century: children’s company satire, dramatic romance, and court masque. Chapter 2 explores Francis Beaumont’s satire (and notable commercial flop) The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Written for the Blackfriars’ boys’ company, Knight is often cited as a play before its time—one that prefigured the radical metatheater of Brecht and Beckett. Rather than explore the play as a reliquary of audience response and tastes during the early seventeenth century (or try and pinpoint the reason for its failure), I consider the ways in which Knight engages with the figure of the violent spectator. Instead of dramatizing the widely circulated cultural narrative of the theatergoer who sees acts of violence, sedition, and lust acted out on the stage and becomes indelibly imprinted by them (a transfer demonstrated by an acting out of similar acts in the real world), Knight portrays a revelatory variant of this figure: the spectator who enacts violence on the vehicle of representation itself. I argue that this incarnation of the violent spectator appears on the early seventeenth-century stage as a response to new commercial pressures (both real and perceived), proliferation of venues, and alterations in audience behavior.
Chapter 3 explores the nascent role of the dramatic reader’s influence
