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

theater modern (or Jonsonian) notions of playmaking as a closed field of labor, any attempt to participate by an outsider—particularly one that we assume lacked the leisure time to engage in an activity without recompense—will seem an attempt to enter the profession. The field of playwriting for the commercial stage was, however, open to dramatists of any socioeconomic group or background, regardless of their ultimate objective in writing for the stage or their position relative to the stage when they wrote. Dramatists need not have been professional, or seeking to become professional, in order to write plays for the professional players. In this respect, nonaristocratic amateurs, such as Walter Mountfort, were no different from aristocratic amateurs, such as, for example, Sir William Berkeley, author of the King’s Men’s tragicomedy The Lost Lady (1638); we should not assume that simply because Mountfort was a clerk and Berkeley an aristocrat that the former would not write a play for the same nonprofessional purposes as the latter. As the prologue to The Launching of the Mary, Clavell’s commonplace book, and other pieces of evidence attest, these amateurs could indeed be motivated by the same ends for which Brome mocked courtier amateurs: writing for “their own delight.”⁹⁰ The pertinent question, then, is not about intentions, that is, why these playgoers wrote plays, but rather what their plays can tell us about how they saw or thought they saw the stage from their perspective as theatrical consumers. Playgoers writing for professional actors may have been, as Bentley puts it, “minor participants” in the theater, but they were participants nonetheless, and participants who have gone largely unexamined, despite the fact that their work provides unique evidence of how closely certain playgoers understood and interacted with the stage. Apart from passing recognition of the kind given by Bentley and Butler, most scholarship on the early modern stage and playwriting either ignores the unique position occupied by these writers or simply omits them altogether. This book seeks to undo that legacy by restoring to our narrative of early modern theater history the work of playgoers who wrote plays for the professional stage and recognizing how those plays reveal that, in early modern England, cultural consumers could be a species of cultural producers.

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      The first chapter of this book revisits some of the evidence—both the familiar and the less often considered—that demonstrates that the idea of the audience as a collaborator in the making of meaning during a play’s performance was an inherent and pervasive part of theatrical culture in the period. Opinions about that perceived collaboration varied from those who took it to be mere benign, inward imaginary response that had, for other audience members, no effect upon the meaning of the play, to those who viewed externalized physical and verbal responses as a way of changing for other audience members the play’s course and meaning. Whether playgoers’ collaboration was in keeping with what professional playmakers intended or whether it deviated from that intention, authority to determine the ultimate meaning of a play in performance was recognized as residing not with the producers but with the consumers; or, more precisely, in the theater, the consumers were understood to be the play’s final producers. Though many professional playmakers contested the fact, the early modern playhouse was taken by many to be a space of shared, rather than exclusory, creation. Viewing audience experience as an encounter requiring creative interaction with the performance, in which consumers are conditioned to take on the role of producers as well, we can see how dedicated playgoers like Mountfort could look to become actual participants in the playmaking process. While others in the audience were content to limit their participation to imaginative engagement and the occasional verbal or physical responsive outburst during a performance, playwriting playgoers took their participation a substantial, creative step further. How playwrights responded to the concept of the audience as a collaborator in the playhouse reveals that many within the industry perceived the idea of audience involvement in the playmaking process as a threat to the aesthetic and dramatic integrity of the theatrical event and, implicitly, the ongoing (never fully completed) professionalization of the field of playmaking itself. Most amateurs, on the other hand, represent playgoers exercising creative authority as aesthetically and dramatically productive, even restorative, and thus a validation of their own desire to participate in the playmaking process. My interest in Chapter 1 is less in attempting to determine whether, or to what extent, audience members were in fact participants in the making of meaning in the playhouse—though establishing that function is crucial to contextualizing the work of the playwriting playgoers; rather, my focus is upon establishing how those in the period thought about and represented the relationship between theatrical consumers and the theater they consumed. For that reason, the chapter draws on both literary works (including plays by professional dramatists themselves) and documentary evidence to show that playgoers and playmakers in the period understood the audience’s relationship with the stage to be fluid, open, and dialogic, in which playgoers’ creative input could be just as authoritative as that of professional playmakers.

      The remaining chapters turn from the concept of the playmaking playgoer to its reality, focusing on the working practices of several such amateur dramatists. My purpose in these chapters is to determine what plays by playgoers can tell us about a theatrical consumer’s understanding of the way plays were written and staged. The intention is not to track down specific content they may have borrowed from particular plays by professional playwrights. Though there are places where certain professional plays, playwrights, or companies influenced some amateur dramatists—and I draw attention to those debts when relevant to my analysis—there is no evidence that any of them intended a direct response to one particular professional play or playwright. Indeed, to assume that playgoers’ plays are only primarily of use or interest in how they might reflect or tell us about professionals’ plays falls back into the critical fallacy of consigning amateurs’ plays to the status of mere “plagiarisms” (the term to which Jonson often returns), only significant when they repeat or reuse material from a particular professional play. This book’s focus, rather, is upon the problem of recovering what certain early modern theatrical consumers thought about the stage, how it worked, and how play scripts became play performances. My interest is not in what these writers “took” from professionals’ plays in terms of literary content but what, theatrically speaking, they learned from them. Analyzing these plays as creative, rather than derivative, works approaches them on their own terms and not through the conditioning lens of the profession. An essential goal of the book is to broaden our notion of authorship in the early modern period by placing amateur writers—rather than canonical professionals—at the center of analysis. These chapters are therefore not a “source study” shedding light on the oft-studied work of professionals but a study of the audience’s potential for deep theatrical understanding as expressed in the oft-neglected work of the amateurs.

      Chapter 2 explores two playgoers’ plays in manuscript in order to show how engaged theatrical consumers drafted and revised to address the needs of specific users of those manuscripts. The first case study uses Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary to reconstruct how a playgoer tried to negotiate around the censorship of the Master of the Revels. The second case study considers how Arthur Wilson’s The Inconstant Lady (1630), a play that exists in both foul papers and an authorial presentation copy, reveals a playgoer’s process of revising in order to make his play suitable for a specific reader. Chapter 3 turns to stage directions to consider how playwriting playgoers understood and attempted to employ the materials, conventions, and practices of the commercial theaters. The chapter begins by analyzing how Robert Yarington’s position in the playhouse as a playgoer influenced one particular, pointedly theatrical stage direction that he repeatedly used in his Two Lamentable Tragedies (1594–1601). The second case study shows how a number of stage directions in Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen signal the playgoer’s understanding of performance practices and conventions and his concern also to explicate actions and materials that he knew to be unconventional. Finally, the chapter’s study of William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven (1601; revised 1606–8 and 1636–47) examines stage directions that give two or more choices to performers, depending on whether the play is staged by boys or by adults, in order to recover the playgoer’s understanding of how different performance auspices required different practices and materials. Chapter

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