Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo

particular roles in the theatrical enterprise: “Many … have so courted the Players to re-act the same matters in the Tavernes [that they had seen in the theaters], that they came home, as able Actors themselves.”¹¹⁹ Not only is the play detached from the playhouse, ownership of the “script” transfers from performer to receiver, who becomes a self-entertaining participant. Playgoers recording, learning, and embodying play texts signal the interactive cultural system in which engaged consumers, conditioned by this transactional relationship, came to assume authority over the stage and even write their own material for it.

      Like the fictional Momus’s diary, actual commonplace books, such as Edward Pudsey’s (ca. 1600), and other written copies of plays or excerpts from plays witness how acquisitive a dedicated audience member or reader could be.¹²⁰ Consumers who commonplaced and quoted were not necessarily intending to write their own plays; their practice, however, signals the extent to which the dramatic text and its meanings were not considered to “belong” (in the sense of signification, not copyright) to the producer who first made it. The process of reception response frequently involved acquisitive consumers claiming the play for their own use and changing it as they did so. These consumers gave life to plays outside the playhouse and therefore beyond the control of their authors, something many authors lambasted as fraudulent possession. Such dismissal was an attempt to disempower consumers, relegating their texts to the status of mere plagiarism. Francis Lenton describes an Inns of Court student who “daily doth frequent” the theaters and “Treasur[es] up within his memory / The amorous toyes of every Comedy / With deepe delight.”¹²¹ The problem is not the student’s memorization of the “toyes,” however, but his later regurgitation of them as his own: “Hee writes good lines,” Lenton jokes, “but never writes his owne.” Consuming and internalizing the producer’s text is allowable, but translating that experience into an attempt by the consumer to produce renders him ridiculous; because any “good lines” the student generates cannot be his own, Lenton implies that any original lines he writes are necessarily “bad lines.” George Wither similarly mocks an amateur poet who, in order to enhance his wooing, repeats as his own poetry he has heard on stage: “His Poetry is such as he can cul / From plaies he heard at Curtaine or at Bul.”¹²² Peter Heylyn likewise teases a soldier who hopes to impress his “trul,” advising that he should “gather musty phrases from ye Bul.”¹²³ These examples all take for granted that the language and ideas of plays are transportable commodities, rendering them open to being borrowed and built upon by consumers.¹²⁴

      Like Lenton, Wither, and Heylyn, professional dramatists who mention acquisitive playgoers do so with disapproval. In the prologue to The Woman Hater (1607), Beaumont describes playgoers “lurking … in corners, with Table bookes,” “feed[ing their] malice” by recording scandalous matter in the play.¹²⁵ Dekker, implying a hierarchy between the creative wit of playwrights and derivative work of playgoers, satirically instructs gallants to “hoord up the finest play-scraps you can get, upon which your leane wit may most favourly feede for want of other stuffe.”¹²⁶ Similarly, Marston’s “Luscus” makes “a commonplace booke out of plaies”:

      Say (Curteous Sir) speakes he not movingly

      From out some new pathetique Tragedie?

      He write, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not,

      And all from out his huge long scraped stock

      Of well penn’d playes…. O ideot times,

      When gawdy Monkeyes mowe ore sprightly rimes!¹²⁷