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

modern dramatic texts “must have” made an audience think, feel, or respond, or even “made” the audience itself. While such an approach, if done carefully and with evidence, might be useful if we wish to try to hypothesize about how professional playmakers thought about and tried to engage their intended audience—and, of course, the most professional of playwrights would necessarily have a fairly accurate sense of the wants, capabilities, and expectations of their audience—it presents essential complications for understanding actual audience experience. Andrew Gurr summarizes the problem with such “projections about audiences [that are] based on the expectations that [can] be identified from the writers’ texts”: “[The] process works only up to a point, and leads into arguments that become suspiciously circular.”¹⁶ Even earlier, E. K. Chambers pointed out that trying to determine “the psychological effect of a drama” must depend not just upon “what the artist puts into his work” but also upon the more elusive factor of “what the spectator brings to the contemplation of it.”¹⁷ More recently, Richard Preiss finds similar fault with the “orchestration” approach: “The playgoer has a funny way of disappearing in these accounts: what is really being studied are plays, and their techniques for structuring the experience of an audience that, to them as for us, remain hypothetical and homogenized”; to assume audience experience can be recovered from play texts is to ignore the variable of performance and the fact that in performance, “even as [playgoers] are compelled by the play, they compel it in turn.”¹⁸ Professional plays do offer clues about their audience, but only indirectly, and they provide evidence of how the audience may have experienced and understood the performance, but only as a figment of the professional dramatist’s own assumptions about that experience and understanding. Jeremy Lopez alluded to this problem at the 2011 Shakespeare Association of America conference when he argued that “theatrical texts silence the audience.” As Preiss too observes, “talking to the audience is not the same as the audience talking, which playbooks seldom give us.”¹⁹ These claims apply to theatrical texts by professional dramatists, but theatrical texts by playgoers in fact do precisely the opposite by providing audience members with a voice.

      Since the early 2000s, a number of scholars, such as Preiss, have begun to focus upon how actual individuals in the audience interacted with and responded to the plays they saw, and, in doing so, have largely overturned the old “orchestration” model.²⁰ This new audience studies approach reveals a participatory spectatorship that fed input into the theatrical process in such a way that it could potentially influence and (re)shape the performance. Central to its methodology is the understanding that theatrical performance is, and was in the period, dialogic, with audiences just as effectively active in making dramatic meaning as playwrights and players (indeed, in some cases, more efficacious). The audience, in this view, might alter or even entirely subvert the words and actions supplied by the dramatist, becoming a collaborative creator in the making or revising of dramatic meaning. For example, looking closely at “responses of those not professionally engaged in the theatre,” Charles Whitney establishes how “audience members bec[a]me agents in the shaping and realizing of meaning” in plays and of “the actual diversity and creativity of early reception.”²¹ By exercising “imaginative interpretation,” Whitney argues, early modern “audience members’ creative agency” made meaning out of the dramatic transaction that occurred in the playhouse, blurring the line between producer and consumer.²² As Alison Hobgood puts it in her study of the audience’s emotional experience in the early modern playhouse, playgoers had a “reciprocal role in enabling and cultivating dramatic affect.”²³ Though the new audience studies approach is a recent critical phenomenon, Chapter 1 of this book shows that its view of the audience as possessing a creative function in the playhouse was generally understood in the early modern period itself. While most of the new audience studies limit themselves to the question of how consumers responded directly to the plays produced for them by professional playmakers, my approach expands this territory to consider also playgoers who did not simply respond to others’ plays but produced their own. The concept of the individual audience member as an autonomous and potentially creative agent, in a figurative sense, contextualizes the motive force that led some playgoers to write their own plays, in the literal sense, not merely drawing upon professionals’ plays as sources but expressing their own imaginative visions and articulating those visions in ways that would make them accord with what the playgoers understood about the mechanisms of theatrical production. Rather than read the audience through the plays of the professional theater, my objective is to read the professional theater through the plays of the audience. Doing so recovers these plays as a new category of evidence for studies of the early modern audience, supplementing, refining, and often complicating the evidence provided by both the demographic and the orchestration approaches. Like other methods used by the new audience studies, looking to playgoers’ plays for evidence of audience experience and understanding addresses a fundamental shortcoming in both the demographic and the orchestration approaches; namely, rather than aggregating spectators into groups—real or assumed—looking at playgoers’ plays as evidence of audience experience and understanding parses that audience into its most fundamental and yet, for purposes of historicizing the Shakespearean stage, most often obscure component: the individual playgoer. A playgoer’s play cannot tell us what other playgoers thought about the playmaking process or their experiences in the playhouse, but it is this very specificity that makes that play valuable as evidence, for it provides us with a concrete, granular view of theatrical consumption largely absent from the generalized, macroscale picture drawn by the earlier models of audience studies.

      Recognizing that these plays were written not just for audiences but also by audiences opens an additional window onto the early modern playhouse, the dramatists who wrote for it, and the spectators who attended it. My interest in these plays is in what they can tell us, not about playgoers’ thoughts about individual professionals’ plays, but about those playgoers’ thoughts about theater itself—that is, how they can help us historicize certain early modern theatrical consumers’ ideas about the stage and the ways playmaking worked. In doing this, and as the remainder of this introduction will explain, it is also my objective to revisit some of the categories that have shaped the study of early modern theatrical culture, with the ideas of playgoing, professional playwriting, and amateur playwriting central to this reappraisal. As noted above, and as Chapters 2, 3, and 4 show, playwriting playgoers often closely follow, or at least approximate, professional practices and processes, which suggests an audience interested not just in the fiction of the play it was watching but also the ways that play was being made. Looking at ideas about playgoing in the period contextualizes this by showing how theatrical consumption could be more than just a mere “pastime.”

      “To invert a Recreation”: Playgoing in Early Modern England

      One reason criticism reliant upon the “orchestration” approach often unquestioningly falls back upon the idea of a passive, easily transported audience is that such passivity recurs, often cynically, as a theme in a number of descriptions of playgoing in the early modern period. In these accounts, spectatorship is often described as a “pastime,” a concept connoting the leisure of the affluent—those who had the luxury of time to pass. For example, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton complains that “the badge of gentry” is “Idlenesse,” “a life out of action, and hav[ing] no calling or ordinary imployment to busie [itself]”: “idlenesse is an appendix to nobility, they count it a disgrace to worke, and spend all their dayes in sports, recreations, and pastimes, and will therefore take no paines; be of no vocation.”²⁴ Descriptions of playgoing as something undertaken by gentlemen merely to while away the hours draw upon many of the terms Burton uses, perpetuating the notion of theater spectatorship as an activity requiring no investment of creative energy and thus producing, ultimately, nothing. Thomas Dekker, for example, imagines that “Sloth himselfe will come, and sit in the two-pennie galleries amongst the Gentlemen, and see their Knaveries and their pastimes.”²⁵ Thomas Nashe observes that during “the idlest time of the day,” those most likely