“Into a nearer roome”: Professional Playwriting in Early Modern England
Given the potential slippage between the categories of play consumer and playmaker, we might ask what distinguishes an amateur writing just one play from a professionalizing dramatist writing a first play. Why think of a particular single-time writer for the professional stage as an “amateur” as opposed to an “aspiring (or perhaps, failed) professional”? In what ways did amateurs and novice professionals differ? It might be possible to construct an argument distinguishing these categories upon the grounds of intention, but the paucity of reliable evidence about intentions would make such an argument flimsy. Problems exist also for making a distinction along the lines of financial reward, since, as shown below, even an amateur who saw his or her one play staged would have been (or should have been) paid. The dilemma is further exacerbated by the fact that the terms “amateur” and “professional” did not exist in the period and imply a binary that does not entirely accord with the mercurial nature of theatrical creation in the period. Perhaps the best rubric to distinguish professionals from amateurs, then, is that of experience: for my purposes, a professional dramatist is one who writes with prior experience of theatrical production, and an amateur dramatist, a playwriting playgoer, is one who writes with prior experience only of theatrical consumption. It is thus possible to think of writers not as entirely professional or entirely amateur but as occupying different positions along a spectrum of professionalization demarcated by experience.
While the profession of playwriting was fluid and inchoate throughout the period, most dramatists who wrote for the London commercial theaters moved along that spectrum through specific, though informal, systems of professionalization. Some already within the industry, such as actors—like Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Nathan Field, Samuel Rowley, William Rowley, and William Shakespeare—or boys’ company managers—like Samuel Daniel and Robert Daborne—drew upon their prior experience with the public stage to write their plays.41 It would be fallacious to assume that, for example, Jonson’s first play represents the same kind of outsider’s perspective on the stage as Mountfort’s first play because, unlike Mountfort, Jonson had already been exposed to commercial playmaking from his work as an actor. Beginning even before the generation of actor-playwrights, academic dramatists—like Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, and later John Marston, George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, John Ford, and James Shirley—translated school, university, or Inns of Court dramatic experience into writing for the public stage. Though perhaps less familiar with the practices of the commercial stage than the player-playwrights, these academic dramatists came to their work with some background in making plays with a writer’s understanding of dramatic structure, genre, character, and poetry. Finally, some novice dramatists—such as Philip Massinger, Richard Brome, many of the writers for the companies financed by Philip Henslowe, and the novice playwrights of the short-lived Children of the King’s Revels at Whitefriars—served an “apprenticeship” under an established professional dramatist, learning about playwriting through collaborative writing.42 Playwriting was not a stable profession, and simply because a writer came into the industry through one of these routes does not mean that he succeeded as a playwright or that he remained involved with the commercial stage. Indeed, the very idea of playwriting as a distinct, closed profession was a contested concept in the period. Nonetheless, from a modern perspective we can see that these three systems provided novice dramatists with the means for developing dramatic concepts into theatrical scripts; through them, playwrights became professional by gaining an internal knowledge of how plays became performances on the commercial stage.
Not all dramatists writing for that stage underwent such training. In his commendatory verse for Brome’s Northern Lass (1629), Jonson makes this clear; first, he lauds his onetime apprentice for taking the “proper” route into the profession:43
I Had you for a Servant, once, Dick Brome;
And you perform’d a Servants faithfull parts:
Now, you are got into a nearer roome,
Of Fellowship, professing my old Arts.
And you doe doe them well, with good applause,
Which you have justly gained from the Stage,
By observation of those Comick Lawes
Which I, your Master, first did teach the Age.
You learn’d it well; and for it, serv’d your time
A Prentise-ship: which few doe now a dayes.44
In describing his relationship with Brome, Jonson envisions an idealistic, formal system of professionalization modeled upon both the authorized apprenticeship regimens of the guilds and the unauthorized ones of the professional actors.45 The trainee is the master’s “servant,” seeking entrance into a closed “fellowship” in which members, after a probationary period, earn the right to “profess” a specialized system of knowledge inherited from—and thus legitimized by—previous generations. A professionalized industry is a field that has experienced “occupational closure,”46 and so to be within it is to be in “a nearer roome”—an image that captures the working conditions for most dramatists in the commercial theaters.47 Jonson goes on, however, to despair at untrained outsiders who make incursions into the field of playwriting: “Now each Court-Hobby-horse will wince in rime; / Both learned, and unlearned, all write Playes.” Courtiers, academics, even the uneducated supply plays to the actors, Jonson grumbles. The defense he mounts draws upon the period’s soteriological theme of adhering to one’s calling:
It was not so of old: Men tooke up trades
That knew the Crafts they had bin bred in, right:
An honest Bilbo-Smith would make good blades,
And the Physician teach men spue, or shite;
The Cobler kept him to his nall; but now
Hee’ll be a Pilot, scarce can guide a Plough.
Jonson’s celebration of Brome’s apprenticeship and his complaint that “few doe [as Brome did] now a dayes” underscore his idea that playwriting is a vocation that, like piloting a boat, demands training and is—or ought to be—closed to aspiring practitioners who have not been properly trained. Even earlier, in the prologue to Volpone (1606), Jonson proudly declares that his play comes “From his owne hand, without a Co-adjutor, / Novice, Jorneyman, or Tutor.”48 Jonson’s vision of professionalism involves freedom from the oversight of a training collaborator—an earned autonomy that contrasts with the self-appointed amateurs he singles out for scorn in his Northern Lass verse. His complaint there gains meaning only if the dramatists he describes supplied their plays without undertaking the proper training; in other words, with no intention of professionalizing. The problem, so to speak, that Jonson identifies stems from the fact that, as Gary Taylor puts it, “because commercial playwrights were never organized into a livery company, authors could not control the free movement of labour within their profession”—including when that labor was not professional.49 Because these amateurs did not participate in the usual systems of professionalization, it would be misleading to dismiss them as failed novices. As academic dramatist Jasper Mayne explains in the preface and prologues to the 1639 edition of his 1637 The City Match, “he is not oth’ trade,” that is, not one of those professional writers “who eat by th’stage” and so must worry “Whither their sold Scenes be dislikt, or hit.”50 Rather, Mayne and others like him were outsiders who only temporarily and briefly crossed (or attempted to cross) the porous line between theatrical consumer and theatrical producer.
These outsiders were able to write for the professional theaters for the simple reason that writing was an open field