Using a less amicable metaphor to explain the effect of audience diversity, Middleton and Dekker, in the epilogue to The Roaring Girl (1611), point out that the audience, animated by its many different perspectives, wields potentially destructive authority if its reception is permitted to result in active response. The epilogue tells of a painter who drew a portrait and hung it out for sale. Passersby viewed the painting and “gave severall verdicts on it,” and as each opinion was offered, the painter “did mend it, / In hope to please all.”22 The resulting painting was “so vile, / So monstrous and so ugly all men did smile / At the poore Painters folly.” That folly was in allowing the impossibly diverse multitude of consumers to dictate what his “Art” should produce. Like the impossibly varied feedback given the painter, Dekker and Middleton imagine audiences urging them to change the plot, scenes, subject, and language of “this our Comedy” (emphasis added). Giving in to such consumer creativity, they explain, would result in a play as ugly as the portrait: “If we to every braine (that’s humerous) / Should fashion Sceanes, we (with the Painter) shall / In striving to please all, please none at all.” The result of allowing consumers to contribute to the production process, the professionals caution, is chaotic and ineffective: audience diversity necessitates audience passivity or else the audience will destroy the art.
Whether warning against it or embracing it, dramatists regularly demonstrate interest in the possibilities and problems stemming from audience participation in the creation of dramatic meaning. Shakespeare, for example, hinges a critical moment of Hamlet upon the individualized reception response of one of the most famous of playgoers: Claudius, attending Hamlet’s “Mousetrap.” “The crucial play is not on the ‘stage’ but in the ‘audience,’” Marjorie Garber notes, “in the reactions of the spectator, Claudius,” as he interprets Hamlet’s play—guided, lest his interpretation go astray, by the amateur dramatist’s own decoding commentary.23 Shakespeare’s interest in this problem of individualized application of dramatic material is established even earlier in the play, when Hamlet applies to his own context the player’s “Pyrrhus” speech. Just as Claudius’s interpretation of “The Mousetrap” particularizes and risks differing from what the author intended, the “precise application [of the Pyrrhus speech] to Hamlet’s own case is private to the hearer,” as Gurr notes; “the Player is … innocent of its applicability.”24 Application depends upon the applier’s context and receptive faculty, not upon what the author has written into the script or how the actor performs it.
The May 1639 performance of the lost play The Cardinal’s Conspiracy provides a historical instance of “application” producing dangerous meanings not intended by the original dramatist. According to Edmond Rossingham, “the players of the Fortune were fined 1,000£. for setting up an altar, a bason, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the church.”25 Other scholars have addressed the political ramifications of this incident in relation to the perceived threat Arminianism posed to the established church.26 These ramifications, however, depended upon an act of audience application: what the actors “allege” to be the play’s meaning (what the literal—probably licensed—text of the script allowed them to claim) contradicted what to the authorities “was apparent” (how the performance of that text was interpreted by the audience). Interpretation creates the ultimate meaning of a play and in this case officials “made” the play to be about Arminianism. Application rendered the play impermissible, even though the same script had been staged in the past without alarming the authorities.
“Application” was also shaped by the particular context within which any playgoer might encounter a play, ensuring that individual spectators watching the same script in the same performance might not have the experience of watching the same play. Robert Tofte provides a vivid example of this by describing a lover who sees a performance of Love’s Labor’s Lost and takes the play personally. “This Play no Play,” the speaker complains, “but Plague was unto me,” because at the performance he had “lost the Love I liked most.”27 His broken-hearted alienation in the crowd of laughing playgoers is palpable, for “what to others seemde a Jest” was to him “in earnest”: “To every one (save me) twas Comicall, / Whilst Tragick like to me it did befall.” As Whitney observes, “The personated character behind the actor’s performance becomes the playgoer” through the spectator’s “sense of individualized response.”28 Tofte’s narrator “applies” the play in a way that makes it both his and about him: “It is not just that everyone else is laughing and he is hurting,” Whitney explains, “but—since he experiences the actors representing not characters but his own feelings—that the audience is laughing at him.”29 For this playgoer, reception leads to painful participation, resulting in the divergence of his experience from that of the rest of the audience. No other playgoer “makes” the play in the same way; the new, “Tragick” meaning, contradictory to the generic meaning given the play by Shakespeare or experienced by the rest of the audience, belongs solely to him. The contradictory generic response to a play described by Tofte was not uncommon: Edmund Gayton, with tongue in cheek, observes that “many by representation of strong passions [have] been so transported that they have gone weeping, some from Tragedies, some from Comedies.”30 In The Life of a Satirical Puppy Called Nim (probably written in the 1620s), Thomas May describes observing in the Blackfriars audience the “punycall absurdity [of] a Country-Gentleman … who was so caught with the naturall action of a Youth (that represented a ravish’d Lady) [that] he swore alowd, he would not sleep until he had killed her ravisher: and how ’twas not fit such Rogues should live in a Common-wealth…. This made me laugh,” May notes, “but not merry.”31 The tragic, pathetic scene is broken into twice, first through the naïve playgoer’s attempt at participation and then, triggered by that intrusion, through May’s own alienated, generically inappropriate laughter. Kent Cartwright argues that “the spectator’s participation” is crucial to the realization of a play’s generic meaning;32 how are we to identify that meaning, though, if the spectator “participates” like Tofte’s brokenhearted lover, sobbing at a comedy, or May, laughing out loud during a tragedy? Reasons for such contradictory generic responses vary: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus finds the mechanicals’ tragedy humorous because the play fails to follow convention; Hamlet’s “barraine spectators” laugh during a serious scene because they lack the competence to understand what they see;33 Tofte’s narrator, however, departs the comedy weeping because his particular, personal situation changes for him the play’s meaning. In each of these, the reception response required by the act of performance allows the playgoer to overwrite the generic identity of the play assigned by the author. Like any aspect of dramatic meaning, generic effect only occurs within the received understanding of the individual playgoer. If a playgoer does not find a play tragic, labeling it “The Tragedy of …” on a title page is irrelevant to understanding its meaning for that playgoer. If, like Hoskins, the playgoer projects outward his or her rejection of the author’s generic intentions, then, for the rest of the audience, that consumer’s idiosyncratic interpretation may take precedence over whatever objective the producer had.
In addition to a play’s generic identity, responsive playgoers could revise, or attempt to revise, its narrative. Gayton describes an incident when a butcher was “so much transported” by the play The Greeks and Trojans that, “seeing Hector over-powred by Mirmydons,” he attempted to alter the course of the Trojan War. The “passionate Butcher … got upon the Stage” and “with his good Battoone tooke the true Trojans part so stoutly, that he routed the Greeks, and rayled upon them loudly for a company of cowardly slaves to assault one man with so much odds. He strooke moreover such an especiall acquaintaince with Hector, that for a long time Hector could not obtaine leave of him to be kill’d, that the Play might go on; and the cudgelled Mirmydons durst not