Many dramatists endorsed the authority of the creative playgoer by inviting spectators to complete the play in their imaginations. These pleas to spectators to “eke out [the] performance with [their] mind[s]” frankly acknowledge the stage’s illusionistic inadequacies, admitting the medium’s inherent representational gaps and asking the audience to “work [their] thoughts” to fill them in their minds.107 The authors of these plays request that the audience assist in finishing the “making” of the play as imaginative collaborators.108 Thomas Nashe, in recounting audience response to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, describes the results of this: when “the Tragedian that represents” Talbot enacts the hero’s death, “ten thousand spectators … imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”109 Neither Talbot nor the “Tragedian” is actually bleeding, but within “ten thousand” imaginations “Talbot” is bleeding—and in ten thousand different ways, as each spectator “makes” the scene differently in his or her mind. Shakespeare’s invitations for such imaginative collaboration in Henry V (1599) and Pericles (1608) are well known. The Chorus in the anonymous Chamberlain’s Men play Thomas Lord Cromwell (1600), perhaps influenced by Henry V, also demands that playgoers use their creative mental capacity to compensate for insufficient artifice and lacunae in the depicted narrative: “Now gentlemen imagine,” the Chorus urges in the first act, “that young Cromwell … Is fled to Antwarpe, with his wife and children,” and later in the play, “Now let your thoughtes as swift as is the winde, / Skip some few yeares, that Cromwell spent in travell, / And now imagine him to be in England.”110 The prologue to the anonymous The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1602) relies upon the play’s spectators to construct the given circumstances of the first scene, pleading that they “Imagine now that [Peter Fabell] is retirde” and “Suppose the silent sable visagde night, / Casts her blacke curtaine over all the world.”111 As these playwrights recognize, without the audience’s imaginative participation, the scaffolding of illusion upon which the theater predicates its art will be incomplete and might even collapse. The problem is not one of verisimilar representation—which was not necessarily an aesthetic goal on the early modern stage—but one of resolving the practical dramatic need for continuity, plausibility, and exposition. Unable to depict the darkness of night or Cromwell’s flight to Antwerp and the years he spent in travel, these plays demand that their audiences contribute creative energies in the making of the fiction. In some instances, the dramatist acknowledges the audience as, in fact, a progenitor of its fiction. The prologue to Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1599) implores spectators to impart “life” to the play by imagining the truth underwriting the fiction that they see: “our muse intreats, / Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, / … your gracious eye / Gives life to Fortunatus historie.”112 Consumption is generative: without the audience’s engagement, without the creative act of spectatorship, the play will not live. Rather than attempt to conceal representational failures of the theatrical medium, these appeals draw attention to points where failure is inevitable and ask for playgoers’ collaboration in negotiating those moments.113 Such direct addresses are moments of surrender in which the dramatist acknowledges he must give up some control to his partners in the audience.
What makes these bids for participation particularly relevant is their timing in relation to the theater industry’s professionalization. After the 1590s, actors becoming playwrights and the nascent development of playwriting as its own self-regulating field both signaled a degree of occupational closure—and hence professionalization—of the industry; when this closure experienced its greatest threat from amateurs, invitations to the audience to participate imaginatively in the “making” of the play ceased. In the early 1620s, invitations for audience participation vanished almost entirely, with the latest in Fletcher’s The Prophetess (1622). Calls to the audience to imagine what the performance could not show began as necessity, became convention, but then, particularly with the rise of the courtier amateurs in the 1630s, became irrelevant, even risky. At the same time these invitations vanished, the number of induction scenes attempting to control playgoer response rose. The more professionalized playwriting sought to become and the more amateurs supplied (or tried to supply) plays to the actors, the more it must have seemed to many professional dramatists that invitations for audience participation, even if only on the imaginative level, might encourage challenges to the profession’s desired barrier separating the lay consumer from the authorized producer.
“Hee writes good lines”: Playgoers Taking Possession of the Play
For many professionals, particularly Jonson and Shirley, the extreme—and extremely undesirable—result of spectators crossing that desired barrier was their actual incursion into the field of playwriting: playgoers who, without any training beyond their experience as playgoers, wrote plays themselves. Jonson’s complaint in his commendatory verse for The Northern Lass, discussed in the Introduction, is the most vivid example of this attitude. Though hyperbolic, Jonson’s irritation reflected reality. Playgoers not “bred” in the “craft” of playwriting translated their engagement with the stage into writing their own play texts, not only for amateur domains, but also for the professional playhouses. These playwriting playgoers learned to write for the stage as attentive consumers of theatrical texts who experienced performances in a highly personal, and peculiar, way. Their dedicated attention to the ways in which performance worked resembles the many descriptions—often satirical—of playgoers growing so engaged with the play that they effectively took possession of it, or parts of it. As we will see, many playgoers arrived at the playhouse with preconceived ideas about what, based upon genre or subject, the play should include; many also left with ownership of the text itself, carrying ideas, speeches, even parts out of the playhouse and making them their own.114 The nature of the repertory system, combined with repeat attendance, meant that one audience member could develop close familiarity with particular plays and parts. In Cynthia’s Revels (1600–1601), Jonson mocks an “Idoll”-worshipping playgoer who, waiting for the star actor to enter, “repeats … / His part of speeches, and confederate Jests / In passion to himselfe.”115 Jonson intends ridicule, but beneath the mockery lies the assumption that a committed playgoer could memorize parts he had seen performed. Over time, actors came and went, but roles stayed largely the same, making it possible, Tiffany Stern contends, for “a member of an audience [to] realistically claim to know a play as well [as] or better than the (new) actors performing it.”116 An interrupting spectator played by William Sly in Webster’s induction for The Malcontent (1602–4), for example, proudly announces that he “hath seene this play often” and knows it so well (“I have most of the jeasts heere in my table-booke”) that he “can give [the actors] intellegence for their action”—figuring the attentive playgoer as a potential authorizing agent for the performance.117 The idea of playgoers knowing players’ parts was familiar enough for John Heath to mock it in Two Centuries of Epigrams (1610), in which he jokes of a “Momus” who, wanting to “act the fooles part,” attends plays daily at the Globe, Fortune, and