Rather than accurate descriptions of public theater audiences and their supposed inability to understand drama, these accusations should be read as salvos in the competition between the different types of venues. Some dramatists, after all, mocked the tastes and competence of private theater playgoers as well. As early as 1609, Beaumont complained that the “illiterate” audiences of the Children of the Queen’s Revels had “scarce two of which can understand the lawes / Which they should judge by.”90 In 1631, Shirley critiqued private theater spectators who still desired jigs in their plays.91 Jonson attacked the Blackfriars audience in 1635 for being no different than amphitheater audiences (“those deepe-grounded, understanding men [who] censure Playes, yet know not when, / Or why to like”).92 Heywood mourned the rise of demand, by the 1630s, for petty sexual intrigues at the Blackfriars.93 If they could have their way, these dramatists would remake the audience in their own image, possessing their own understanding of the “lawes” of good drama—“lawes” usually according with the tastes of playgoers at a different venue. Playwrights’ damnations of audience ignorance cannot be taken at face value. Critiques of one audience offered indirect praise to another. Like many of their counterparts at private theaters, many public theater spectators understood plays as constructions of various component parts and were capable of judging how those parts worked separately as well as in combination—prerequisites to imagining changes or alternatives, or even entirely new dramatic texts.
An example of public theater audience members forming their own thoughts about how certain parts within a play ought to be revised is seen in Thomas Locke’s description of the Globe performance of Fletcher and Massinger’s The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619). In his August 19, 1619, letter to Dudley Carlton, Locke observes that though the play “hath had many spectators and receaved applause: yet some say that (according to the proverbe) the divill [that is, Olden Barnavelt] is not so bad as he is painted.”94 Locke describes specific changes that “some” have suggested would improve the portrayal of the main character: “Some say … that Barnavelt should perswade Ledenburg to make away himselfe (when he came to see him after he was prisoner) to prevent the discovrie of the plott, and to tell him that when they were both dead (as though he meant to do the like) they might sift it out of their ashes, was thought to be a point strayned.” Locke’s playgoers have not merely absorbed the theatrical event as passive recipients; they desire to participate as collaborating revisers looking to improve the play. The suggestion that a particular line is “a point strayned” signals a rejection of language as being implausible for the character, much like the “auditor” who objected during the premiere of Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora. Locke’s playgoers (assuming that this is not a description of his own experience, as may well be the case) feel that they have a right and ability not just to respond to the play but also to change it and, in so doing, improve it.
Moving from assessing the effectiveness of a play’s parts to proposing revisions to it or creating an entirely new play represents a different scale of interactive response: like interpretation, critique constructs meaning only for the critic, unless, as professional playmakers often feared, that critic disseminates that critique to others. Calling for revision of some part of the play, or writing a new play, is an act of response that always attempts to impose the individual consumer’s evaluative opinions onto the larger consumer community. John Lyly recognizes this distinction between internalized judgmental response and public play changing in the Paul’s prologue to Midas (1589), in which an actor hopes that if the play “receive an inward mislike, wee shall not be hist with an open disgrace.”95 Spectators who do not approve of the play, Lyly urges, should keep that disapproval private, limited to the individual experience of the one playgoer; if the negative response is made “open,” that is, expressed outwardly, it risks displacing the author’s authority by shaping how other members of the audience might view the play—like Hoskins of Oxford, outwardly expressing his inner dislike for Technogamia. Lyly’s Blackfriars prologue for Campaspe (1583) displays the same concern over audience members imposing their evaluation of the play upon the rest of the audience: “We here conclude: wishing that although there bee in your precise judgementes an universall mislike, yet wee maye enjoy by your wonted curtesies a generall sile[n]ce.”96 The professional dramatist does not seek to prevent judgment—he allows that some might “mislike” everything about the play—but he does warn against judgments outwardly expressed, hoping to “silence” such challenges to his authority and protect the other audience members’ autonomy to judge the play for themselves. His anxiety concedes that authority to determine how audience members might respond to the play and thus condition others’ reception of the play resides, in the end, with the audience itself.
“Jehove doth as spectator sit”: The Authority of the Playgoer
The idea of playgoers possessing authority that could supplant the dramatist was not new, nor was it without appeal to theater professionals who wanted to flatter the (paying) audience. A prominent version of the “playmaking playgoer” metaphor was found in the theatrum mundi commonplace adopted by many theater apologists. Within the theatrum mundi, God occupies the place of dramatist, scripting what is performed upon the stage of the world by the men and women who are, as Jaques observes, “merely players.”97 As Heywood explains in An Apology for Actors (1612), “The world’s a Theater, the earth a Stage, / Which God, and nature doth with Actors fill.”98 Responsibility for filling the stage with “actors” belongs to God, the playwright.99 To sustain the metaphor to its logical end, however, Heywood recognizes that a third category of participant must be included: the audience. If “the world [is] a Theater,” then
… Jehove doth as spectator sit
And chiefe determiner to’applaud the best,
And their indevours crowne with more then merit[,]
But by their evill actions doomes the rest,
To end disgrac’t whilst others praise inherit.
In Heywood’s theater of the world, playwright and audience are one and the same: the authority that observes, applauds, and condemns the action is the same authority that makes the action. Heywood’s metaphor thus relies upon a circularity of creative function: the playgoer does not merely influence what the dramatist writes; the playgoer himself or herself writes. In this idealized economy, one source satisfies both supply and demand. The theatrum mundi therefore requires that the audience wield, as Whitney puts it, “authority … in the dramatic transaction and ultimately in the process of production.”100
Others in the period employed the trope of the divine playmaking playgoer for similar ends. Indeed, Anne Barton points out that since Pythagoras, writers “have been tempted to … describe Man as an actor[,] and assign either to Fate or to God Himself the double position of dramatist