Lacking the kinds of controls imposed upon most other fields of labor in the period (including acting), playwriting was a field wide open to amateur participation. No state, church, city, or guild restrictions regulated who could write plays for the public stage or how they could go about writing them. Privy Council edicts, City of London petitions, even antitheatricalist polemics centered almost exclusively upon the problems of play content, playing, playgoing, and the operation of playhouses, never upon the question of who could provide plays to the players. The socially marginalized position of commercial playwriting, coupled with the private nature of the act of writing, likely protected dramatists from becoming the focus of official control. The closest the state came to legislating over the work of playwrights was controlling the kind of content plays could contain by establishing rules that would create an atmosphere of anticipatory censorship. As Glynne Wickham notes, “Control of theatre means control of play, actors, and audience”;52 while what was in plays was a matter of state interest, control over who wrote them was not. Despite Jonson’s hopes, anyone could write for the commercial stage, whether he was professional or not.
“They write [for] their own delight”: Amateur Playwriting in Early Modern England
The phenomenon Jonson lamented was not new to the English stage. The history of theater in England begins with provincial and local amateurs staging plays in towns, guildhalls, and great halls.53 In London, even after the opening of the commercial playhouses, amateur drama could still on occasion be found within the city. As the commercial theater itself grew increasingly institutionalized, it diminished but did not entirely banish amateur dramatics. Most often, amateur playing, rather than playwriting, serves as the focus of commentary on these activities, probably because playing, unlike writing, was a publicly visible activity. Nonetheless, the terms used in those commentaries are useful in contextualizing early modern views of amateurism within the largely professional domain of London theatrical culture. In 1584, William Fleetwood, recorder for the City of London, described amateur players in the city: “It hath not been used nor thought meet … that players have or should make their living on the art of playing; but men for their livings using other honest and lawful arts, or retained in honest services, have by companies learned some interludes for some increase to their profit by other men’s pleasures in vacant time of recreation.”54 Fleetwood’s description is perhaps the closest we have to a period definition of “amateur”: these players make money from acting, but it is secondary to their “other honest and lawful arts”; their playing is not regular, not their principal labor, and is undertaken for “pleasures” when time allows. Receiving financial reward does not make them professional; indeed, lack of payment is not a defining component of amateurism in the period.55 The only consistent marker of amateurism in the early modern theater was this irregular engagement with the stage: an amateur occupied a position outside the industry and made no sustained efforts to change that position.
Similar valences for “amateurism” appear in the prologue to W. Smith’s The Hector of Germany, staged by amateurs for paying audiences at the Red Bull and the Curtain in 1614:
If you should aske us, being men of Trade,
Wherefore the Players facultie we invade?
Our answere is, No ambition to compare
With any, in that qualitie held rare;
Nor with a thought for any grace you give
To our weake action, by their course to live.56
The prologue acknowledges that playing is a closed profession and that the incursion of the amateurs into it is a peculiarity. Their motivation is neither to attempt comparison with the professionals nor, even if their play is well received, to make a living from the stage. Rather, the amateurs cite the precedent of others who have used theater as a means of recreation outside their proper vocations:
As in Camps, and Nurseries of Art,
Learning and valour have assum’d a part,
In a Cathurnall Sceane their wits to try,
Such is our purpose in this History.
Emperours have playd, and their Associates to,
Souldiers and Schollers; tis to speake and do.
If Citizens come short of their high fame,
Let Citizens beare with us for the name.57
Amateurism thus described is a form of heightened theatrical engagement, and one that has a long and distinguished pedigree. Robert Burton even suggests medical benefits to transforming idle spectatorship into active, amateur playing: all physicians, he notes, “will have a melancholy, sad, discontented person, make frequent use of honest sports, companies, and recreations…. Not to be an auditor only, or a spectator, but sometimes an actor himselfe.”58 Like the city apprentices who staged The Hector of Germany, instances of playgoers becoming players on the public, even commercial, stage can be found occasionally throughout the period. Later in the century, for example, Thomas Killigrew recounted to Sir John Mennis how as a boy he got involved with the theater through his engagement as a participatory playgoer: “He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, ‘Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play nothing?’ then would he go in, and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays.”59 The boys were not paid for their labor, except the in-kind payment of seeing plays for free; as with the amateurs who staged The Hector of Germany, their participation in the public theater was an exercise in pleasure and recreation. For every novice Killigrew who translated that exercise into a career in the industry, countless others—the other boys only briefly glimpsed in Killigrew’s anecdote and now lost to history—remained amateur participants, outsiders stepping only momentarily onto the stage they usually only patronized as audience members (indeed, in Killigrew’s experience, spectatorship and participation are integrated: involvement in the performance is an essential component to seeing it). Like the amateurs who staged The Hector of Germany, a troupe of apprentices staged amateur dramatist Robert Tailor’s Hog Hath Lost His Pearl at the Whitefriars and then the Red Bull in 1613, and sometime between 1623 and 1629 a company of young men of the Strand staged The Resolute Queen.60 E. K. Chambers suggests that amateur players also occasionally rented out other playhouses as well.61 Just as amateur players participated in a London theatrical culture that was increasingly professionalized, there were outsiders who did the same as writers.
If we define the professional dramatist as someone who, as a regular, internal member of the institutionalized systems for playmaking, went through some informal training as a playwright and accrued further experience by consistently plotting, writing, and revising to address pressures placed upon the play by the actors, Master of the Revels, and audience, then we can define the amateur as someone who lacked this experience and did not try to obtain it. It is important to reiterate, however, that this lack of interest in professionalizing does not equate to a lack of interest in effective playwriting. Many amateurs tried to use the same tools and processes as the professionals in making their plays viable for performance. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book look to some of the ways in which amateurs