Reading a playgoer’s play as evidence of audience experience will not tell us what all—or even any other—audience members experienced in the playhouse, even audience members from the same socioeconomic class or background as the playwright. These highly invested, literate audience members were self-selecting and peculiar, and displayed a depth of interest and attention that likely set them apart from their peers. If it is true that, as Gurr speculates, the “ordinary type of playgoer [was] more absorbed in the story than the verse or characterizations [and] not at all interested in symbols or their application, inclined to moralise only in [a] conventional way,” playwriting playgoers reveal a much more heightened engagement with all of these elements.91 A loose modern analogue to plays written by playgoers may be found in “fan fiction,” in which deeply engaged cultural consumers subvert the producer-consumer hierarchy by asserting their own creative agency in ways that might reaffirm or critique texts made for them by mainstream, institutionalized commercial producers.92 Just as a script or story written by a dedicated follower of a particular television show will tell us, not about the show itself, but about that follower’s understanding of that show and its culture (in a way that a script written by a regular writer on its staff could not), a play written by a playgoer can tell us about that playgoer’s understanding of the stage.93 These playwrights’ plays merit reconsideration as primary evidence of particular audience members’ experiences because thus far the questions we have been asking of them (when we ask questions of them at all) have been, for the most part, methodologically inappropriate. When these plays have failed to live up to the expectation that they will, or should, provide the same kind of evidence as professionals’ plays, they have been pushed to the margins as unreliable and unimportant. Recognizing these plays as the work of writers whose knowledge of the theater derived almost entirely from their experience attending and reading plays, rather than making them, allows us to reposition our expectations and, at the same time, refine our own perspective on the early modern audience. If the early modern playhouse was a community of playmakers, plays by audience members afford the best access to the creative vision, as well as practical theatrical knowledge, of individuals in an otherwise largely mysterious and inscrutable part of that community.
CHAPTER 1
“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?”
The Early Modern Idea of Playgoers as Playmakers
While “standing by as a spectator” of the calamitous performance of Barton Holyday’s Technogamia before King James on August 26, 1621, a man known only as “Hoskins of Oxford” decided to share with the rest of the audience his opinion of the play. An actor delivered what must have struck Hoskins as the perfect setup: “As at a banquett some meates haue sweet some saore last—.” Before the actor could continue, Hoskins “rime[d] openly to it”: “Euen soe your dubllett is to short in the waste.”1 What was the effect of Hoskins’s addition to the play? There is no record of how the audience members—including James—responded to this intrusion, though given how bored they had become, it is not difficult to imagine that the nonsense quip was met with laughter.2 Though the play is generically an academic allegory, the audience that night saw it as a dull tribulation that was, Anthony à Wood explained, “too grave for the king, and too scholastic for the auditory.”3 After the second act, James tried to sneak out, but his advisers urged him to stay in order to avoid giving offence. He remained, “tho’ much against his will,” and took a nap. The performance lasted the entire night, and when day broke many audience members were found to have slipped out in the dark.
The question of what effect Hoskins’s addition had on the play draws a distinction between the play as its audience experienced it, that is, as a performed event shaped in the moment by audience response, and the play as we experience it today, as a written text insulated from such response. The audience on August 26, 1621, saw a different Technogamia from what we will find in the quartos of 1618 and 1630, not simply because Holyday revised the text for the event (Wood notes that Holyday made “some foolish alterations” for the royal performance) but because the audience’s experience, and hence understanding, of the play derived from the specific context of that tedious evening. Part of that context, and a part to which modern readers would be oblivious if not for the anonymous witness who recorded the event, was Hoskins. That evening, his interjection added levity by adding new text, by collaborating with Holyday (against Holyday’s will) to change the audience’s reception of the play. Hoskins’s addition to Holyday’s play was minor, but it undercut the dramatist’s generic objective by converting seriousness into humor. This generic conversion, in fact, remained part of the historical memory of that long night: one later satire on the performance—recorded in a commonplace book held by the Folger Library—recalls how what was meant “tragically” came off as “Comicall.”4 Hoskins’s nonsense contribution to Technogamia was not relevant to the play or the play’s purpose as designed by Holyday, but for one brief moment, and perhaps longer, it changed the play that the audience received. For readers of the printed script of Technogamia, the play was made entirely by Barton Holyday. For the audience of Technogamia on August 26, 1621, the play was made by many contributors, including the spontaneous, collaborating playgoer Hoskins.
Not all such audience intrusions contradict the dramatist’s intentions, but they always have the effect of appropriating to the consumer a degree of authority over the dramatic event. At the first performance of amateur dramatist Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (ca. 1635) at the Blackfriars, an audience member interrupted the play and “cried out upon the Monsterousnesse and Impossibilitie” of the “indecorum that appear’d … in the Part of Cleander, who being represented a Person of seventeen yeares of age, is made to speak words, that would better sute with the age of thirty”; Viscount Falkland was in attendance, however, and “this Noble Person, having for some time suffered the unquiet, and impertinent Dislikes of this Auditor … forbore him no longer, but (though he were one he knew not) told him, Sir, ’tis not altogether so Monsterous and Impossible, for One of Seventeen yeares to speak at such a Rate, when He that made him speak in that manner, and writ the whole Play, was Himself no Older.”5 The contest between the “auditor” and Falkland displays two different types of audience response: the first, opposing the terms of the fiction that has been written for him and proposing an alternative; the second, confirming those terms. Even Falkland’s interjection, however, stops the play in order to impose spectatorial control, and it implies that the only grounds upon which the performance can proceed is the open demonstration of spectatorial approval. As Preiss puts it, “If the play continues after this outburst, it does so on his [that is, Falkland’s] authority, not the poet’s; ‘He that … writ the whole Play’ is not the one who makes it.”6
Audience members at a play can become creative participants whose engagement with the performance might change that play, either for themselves alone, through internal interpretation, or for the rest of the audience, through