Contrary to Bentley and Saunders, Charles Whitney suggests that the example of the playwriting playgoer Richard Norwood—a young, unemployed sailor who tried to write a play while stuck in London due to a bout of seasickness in 1612—was “probably typical of several kinds of apprentices as well as of people of low degree”;77 that is, more nonaristocratic amateurs likely wrote for the public stages than we realize or for whom we have extant evidence (a caution, perhaps, to scholars looking to attribute the period’s many anonymous plays to known authors). In 1639, Lewis Sharpe—himself a nonaristocratic playwriting playgoer—noted that even “the briske Shops fore-man undertakes with’s Ell / To sound the depth of Aganippas Well.”78 Certainly the opportunity for almost anyone to write was apparent: in 1617, Henry Fitzgeoffrey complained, “Who’d not at venture Write? So many waies / A man may proue a Poet now a daies.”79 Just as an aristocrat like Lodowick Carlell might justify his foray into playwriting because, as his stationer John Rhodes put it, “his profit was his pleasure,” we should not assume on the basis of class alone that a non-aristocratic amateur like Norwood or Mountfort might not also write a play for the commercial industry for reasons of personal pleasure and engagement.80
Although Bentley neglects to consider its critical or historical value, he does briefly point out the existence of this group of nonaristocratic playwriting playgoers—“citizen amateurs” is his term—and admits that playgoers of any class could and did write for the commercial theater without looking to make playwriting their profession.81 As examples of this group, he offers Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen, Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, and Thomas Rawlins’s The Rebellion (1640), but there were several more than just these. Bentley himself disparagingly shrugs, “In a time of great dramatic activity, more plays than we now know were probably written by totally untalented amateurs.”82 And yet, but for some generalizations to distinguish these writers from professionals, Bentley offers no sustained analysis of these amateurs or their plays. The extent of his interest in playgoers’ plays consists of speculating on what he assumed to be the inevitability of their rejection: “One would guess that even in a time when the social status of the playwright was low, a fair number of amateur plays would have been boldly or surreptitiously offered to the London acting companies and rejected by them.”83 Not all amateurs’ plays were rejected by the London companies (we have evidence for only one such rejection), nor are Bentley’s qualifying adverbs—“boldly” and “surreptitiously”—accurate descriptions of the nature of the relationship between the professional industry and the amateurs whose plays survive, a relationship that was for the most part open, connected, and dynamic rather than, as Bentley implies (and as Jonson wanted), closed, divided, and static. An amateur supplying a play to the professional players would have needed to be neither bold nor surreptitious. Furthermore, by associating the value of amateurs’ plays exclusively with the question of their acceptance by professional players, Bentley overlooks their primary, indeed, unique, value as evidence, not of actual industry practices, but of how well audience members perceived those practices. To make use of playgoers’ plays for this purpose, it does not actually matter whether the plays were staged or not. Bentley recognizes that “a very small percentage of the amateur plays did get to the London theatres” but asserts that “they were very seldom intended for them.”84 In some instances, however, amateurs who did not “look to the commercial theatres for a living” did indeed intend their plays for those theaters. Martin Butler points out that from 1637 to 1640, a group of amateurs saw their plays (which he dismisses as “hardly … a thrilling output”) staged by the Queen Henrietta’s Men at Salisbury Court, probably as part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the troupe’s manager, Richard Heton, to compete with Christopher Beeston’s troupe at the Cockpit and the King’s Men at the Blackfriars.85 The amateurs’ plays that appeared in the Salisbury Court repertory included Richard Lovelace’s The Scholars, Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, William Rider’s The Twins, and possibly John Gough’s The Strange Discovery. Most of these writers explicitly indicated their disinterest in professionalizing, and, despite the fact that Heton likely paid them for their plays, none of them continued to write for the stage; they were also not courtiers or aristocrats (which raises a complication for Butler’s theory that Heton was attempting to make Salisbury Court “a venue for amateur drama of a kind more usually associated with the Blackfriars”).86 They therefore represent, along with Mountfort, Rawlins, Clavell, and others, further evidence of how nonaristocratic early modern theatrical consumers could become theatrical producers even in the context of the commercial theater—indeed, if Butler’s hypothesis about Heton’s intentions is correct, because of that commercial context.
In keeping with our definition of “amateur,” dramatists such as Lovelace, Sharpe, Rider, Gough, Mountfort, Clavell, Barnes, Rawlins, Norwood, and others like them were outsiders writing for an increasingly professionalized industry. They possessed an awareness of the industry’s needs, practices, and limitations, but, unlike that of their professional counterparts, their awareness derived largely from observation rather than previous participation; accordingly, the evidence they provide of those needs, practices, and limitations reflects the perspective and understanding of consumers, rather than regular producers. The evidence of their plays can also, in some instances, suggest specific ways in which theatrical consumers rejected what was typical for the profession, or thought differently about plays and playmaking than the professionals did, as we will see in some aspects of Robert Yarington’s use of stage directions in Two Lamentable Tragedies (Chapter 3) and Alexander Brome’s use of rhyme in The Cunning Lovers (Chapter 4). The 1642 political tragedy The Queen of Corsica, by Francis Jaques, is a good example of this: in his play (which was probably never acted), Jaques employs all of the conventional devices of Caroline courtly tragicomedy—platonic love in contest against base lust, a lost royal child found again, near incest, a blocked romantic relationship, an escape from pirates, a hunting scene in the woods, and a concluding wedding—but then upends that generic expectation by tying all of these threads together in a blood-soaked final act that includes incest realized, murder, suicide, torture, and rebellion.87 There were, of course, professional dramatists who also experimented with defying or complicating generic expectations, but the evidence of an amateur dramatist doing this points to a model of cultural consumption that was capable of imagining alternatives to the mainstream content being produced for it by the commercial theater industry. Indeed, the more established and commercialized that industry became, the more risk averse it would grow in its own experimentation with content and form (often when professionals did experiment, they were greeted with failure—as with Jonson’s Epicoene, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, and Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle); at the same time, the domain of the amateur remained free of such conservative pressures, open to explore, innovate, and contradict tradition in ways the largely convention-bound profession could not.
In keeping with our definition of “amateur,” these dramatists were also only occasional writers. Though they may have been committed playgoers, deeply engaged in writing their plays and interested in seeing them performed, they displayed no sustained commitment to the industry, no trajectory of experience gained through consistent practice, failure, and success. Many—even some, such as Thomas Rawlins, whose plays were quite successful on stage88—explicitly indicate their lack of interest in professionalizing (so common are these statements of disinterest among the amateurs that Bentley considers them “one of the hallmarks of the amateur”).89 When these amateurs approached companies with their scripts there is no positive evidence that they intended to become professional and often positive evidence to the contrary. Although they may have taken intrinsic pleasure in writing for the theater, this is not in itself reason to think that they therefore sought a career in that theater; the unevidenced belief that they must have derives from Saunders’s class-oriented definition of “amateur” and the lasting effect it has had upon our