This narrative of the playgoer becoming a playwright characterizes the experience of a number of other dramatists who wrote for what is commonly called “Shakespeare’s theater”—that is, the professional, commercial London theaters of Shakespeare’s own time and the years following, up to the closure of 1642. These dramatists attended, read, and wrote plays, but they were not members of the industry that developed around those theaters. They were not actors, managers, sharers, or regular dramatists. They wrote their plays without the advantage of learned knowledge of the industry’s working practices enjoyed by even novice professionalizing dramatists. With a few exceptions, they did not follow up their initial attempts to write for the stage with subsequent efforts to improve and develop their playwriting skills. They were not theater professionals, and there is no evidence to suggest that they wanted to become professional. Indeed, many expressly indicated that they did not wish to professionalize. And yet they wrote for the professional stage, and some secured performance. Not outliers in a unified field of playwriting—that is, “lesser” professionals—these playwriting playgoers were, to use a modern term too often deployed in an uncritical manner, amateur dramatists. As this introduction will show, and as this book will depend upon in its study of their plays, their status as “amateurs” derives not from their intentions when they wrote, nor from whether or not they were compensated for their labor, nor from the quality of their writing, but from their position as outsiders writing for an increasingly—though always incompletely—closed industry. Although these playwrights were not regular producing participants in that industry, they were devoted consuming participants, as audience members, play readers, and, in some cases, members of peri-theatrical coteries. Their plays over and over show us just how effective the experience of theatrical consumption could be as a means for coming to understand theatrical production, and thus just how engaged early modern audience members could be with the performance, rather than only the play. The amateurs’ plays thus need to be considered within the context of an audience-stage relationship that was intensely dialogic, participatory, and creative. Situating their plays in this way allows us to use their work—both what they wrote and how they wrote—as evidence to better understand how certain members of the audience saw and understood the professional theater and its playmaking processes.
Even when their plays seem to do, or attempt to do, the same things that the professional dramatists did in their plays, because these dramatists gained their theatrical experience as consumers, their plays require us to ask questions that differ from those we usually ask of plays written by professional dramatists.5 Rather than compelling us to deduce audience experience and understanding by looking at what professional dramatists wrote, these plays reveal directly what certain audience members wanted to see, how they thought a script should communicate that, and how they thought actors might stage it. In other words, this is not a book about what the professional theater did: it is a book about what particular members of its audience thought that it did. In their use of specific materials, conventions, and techniques, these amateurs reveal how certain playgoers understood the working practices of the professional theater. As the book shows, that understanding was often alert to concerns about effective performance and followed what professional dramatists did in their playmaking practices—a conclusion at odds with the pejorative assumption that amateur writing must be, or is only of interest when it is, eccentric and unconventional, that is, different from (and, by implication, lesser than) professional writing. Most scholarship that describes the work of amateur playwrights falls back, almost reflexively, onto such dismissive terms as “naïve,” “ignorant,” and “unaware”; a close study of amateurs’ plays, however, reveals precisely the opposite: these consumers were highly aware of and attentive to the practices of playmaking. I am interested, then, not in how these plays show what playgoers did not understand or rejected about the theater but in how they show playgoers trying to understand and participate in the theater. This book is not a comprehensive reference guide to these plays or a literary criticism of their formal elements, such as plot and theme (though I draw upon these when they are relevant to my purposes). Rather, I demonstrate how, by recognizing these writers as play consumers, we can more usefully approach their plays’ theatrical evidence—for my purposes, revising practices, stage directions, and dramatic verse—to identify what particular playgoers knew (in some cases clearly, but at times imperfectly) about playmaking. This is not all we might do with these plays, nor are these three categories all of the evidence that they contain, nor are playgoers’ plays the only source of evidence about theatrical consumers’ expectations and understanding.6 My approach is merely one way that reading playgoers’ plays accounting for their authors’ status as primarily consumers of theatrical culture can help recover the plays from the usual reductive critical dismissal as merely “bad” plays.
In using these plays in this way, the book also represents a further tactic in the “new audience studies” strategy of approaching the early modern audience and theatrical consumption. Studies of consumers of theatrical culture have traditionally relied upon either demographic analyses of economic class and social rank in the auditorium7 or efforts to re-create the audience and its experience through plays written for it by the professional dramatists.8 Though it is certainly true that audiences were composed of discrete socioeconomic groups, because every audience member necessarily comprehended, interpreted, and responded to what her or she saw on stage in a way different from every other audience member, this rubric is inherently insufficient for precisely discerning audience reception.9 This is also why, incidentally, plays by individual playgoers can only reliably tell us about what that one particular playgoer—who was, almost by definition, different from most other playgoers—understood about the theater. The demographic approach can tell us what groups went to what theaters, and it can hypothesize what those groups as groups might have desired in their plays or understood about the theater (or, at least, what playwrights assumed those groups wanted and understood), but it cannot tell us what individual playgoers thought about what they saw or how they understood it. It considers playgoers in the aggregate rather than as discrete individuals. For these reasons, as Mary Blackstone and Cameron Louis urge, we need to “question further the … relative importance of the concept of social class … in understanding the success and complexity of the performance text potentially constructed by [the playwright], his players, and playgoers.”10 For example, Ben Jonson’s induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) suggests that the capacity of different segments of the audience to judge the play might be mapped onto where they were physically located in the playhouse, and thus upon their demographic (financial) group, but, as Leo Salingar points out, Jonson adds a further, essential caveat: each spectator may judge “provided, further, that he forms and stands by his own judgment, without copying his neighbor, be the latter ‘never so first, in the commission of wit.’”11 Each playgoer is to interpret the play in his or her own way and not merely try to replicate the reception experience of others, particularly his or her socioeconomic peers. Notwithstanding Jonson’s financial parsing of the auditorium, his audience, then, is an audience not of groups but of individuals.
The second category of audience studies has especially dominated scholarship on the relationships between play and audience in Shakespeare’s theater, though it is less a “reception response” approach and more a “reflection response” one: the professional’s play is assumed to reveal audience expectations, demand, and reaction. This approach sees the audience as something to be “orchestrated,” to borrow Jean Howard’s term, as something that “surrenders” to the play and its meanings12 rather than as a force that collaborates in creating those meanings. In this view, the play is “something created and set before an essentially passive audience.”13 The “spectatorial poetics” pursued by this approach belong not to the spectators but to the dramatists;14 it is poetics for the spectators, but not of the spectators. Such studies see the audience only as the fictional, idealistic creation of the author (and critic), and they operate under the assumption that the audience’s experience can be accurately presumed based upon the cues given it by the dramatist—and, very often, that its responses to those cues will accord with the critic’s own responses.15 Though nearly all theater historians have moved away from this model of the stage-audience relationship, many literary critics,