More germane to the religious concerns of this book is Anthony Dawson’s account of theatrical experience as characterized by a shared sense of “eucharistic participation.”11 While Dawson recovers a feeling of playhouse collectivity in the period that bore affinities to communion, the conceptual scale at which Dawson examines audience engagement is difficult to reconcile with the local effects of particular plays. It may well be the case that religious communion subtends the practices of theatrical reception in a diffuse but powerful manner. However, neither humoral contagion nor Eucharistic participation can be taken either as a descriptive model or as a direct cause of unified playhouse response. Dawson’s depiction of playhouse communion is largely dependent on a structural comparison between the relation of actor to role and the dual nature of Christ. Put bluntly, I doubt many people were strongly affected by theories of Christic hypostasis when Ned Alleyn was stalking the stage as Tamburlaine in red, velvet pants. The dynamic between actor and role is indeed a crucial aspect of performance (especially for a famous actor like Alleyn, who specialized in a type); and 2 Tamburlaine does have a communion scene that envelops playgoers (when their proxies, the scourge’s sons, dip their hands in his blood). The problem is that these more immediate, theatrical technes of complex personation and audience involvement are subsumed under a broader discourse of “communion.” The collective responses of mixed-faith audiences are not mystical unions but shifting convergences of feeling and thought induced by the shared apprehension of specific stage effects.
My point is not that extratheatrical, cultural frameworks do not also shape the reception of plays. Much important work, such as Dawson’s on communion, has demonstrated the influence of contiguous or analogous discourses and social practices (including, among others, spectacles of royal power, dissection, traditional festivities, fairs and markets, civic entertainments, executions, bearbaitings, medical theories of vision and the humoral body, sermons, and iconoclasm) that together overdetermined the basic conditions of behavior and perception fundamental to early modern theater. Ongoing scholarship that articulates such formative cultural pressures is vital to our understanding of the period in general, and to its drama. However, my priority here—which I understand to complement rather than to contest such work—is to stress how theater reconfigures the religious discourses it absorbs, and reshapes the ways mixed-faith audiences experience them.
Theatrical Cultivation of Imaginative Competencies
The repertory and representational practices of the commercial theaters encouraged mixed-faith audiences to approach plays with a flexible mentality. Whereas the focus of theater historians from Alfred Harbage onward has been the preexisting “mental composition” of audiences (that is, the intellectual and social experiences that playgoers took with them into the playhouse),12 my interest is in the imaginative competencies developed by theater itself. As Jeremy Lopez writes, “Companies built and maintained followings by continually increasing the demands on their audiences’ attention, thus creating audiences that could handle those demands.”13 Early modern commercial theater developed new genres and dramatized an unprecedented range of subjects. The constant influx of new plays did not just cater to audience tastes but created them. Regular theatergoers were exposed to many different kinds of drama, and people often visited the playhouse without knowing what would be performed.14 Audiences were asked to make quick emotional shifts between generic registers, “mingling Kings & Clownes [in] mungrell Tragy-comedie.”15 Early modern plays regularly contain multiple representational levels, such as inset masques and dumb shows.16 They toy with generic expectations (as in King Lear’s counterfactually tragic ending), and they disrupt basic conventions of staging (as in Edgar and Gloucester’s climb up the cliffs of Dover). The drama habitually asks its audiences to adjust their perceptions during performance, and by doing so to deepen their theatrical competencies. Early modern playhouses were places where people could acquire new ideas and accumulate vicarious experiences. The drama disseminated elite and emerging bodies of knowledge to a broad audience, thus facilitating critical habits of political thought, social skills for urban life, and “mind-travelling” to foreign lands.17 Early modern commercial theater was an experimental and world-expanding medium. It cultivated mental and emotional elasticity that carried over into audience engagements with stage treatments of confessional culture.
Theatrical representation changes its objects and the viewer’s relationship to them. The resources of stagecraft gave theatergoers special kinds of emotional and imaginative access to confessional activities and subjectivities. To use a familiar example, Hamlet’s pacing, costume, language, and use of stage space call on largely Protestant audiences to imaginatively and emotionally take the possibility of purgatory seriously, even though reformers tended to treat it as an absurdity.18 Perhaps some Protestants did watch Hamlet’s act 1, scene 5, thinking, “This ghost is popish nonsense.” However, such a response would have very little to do with the actual scene unfolding onstage, “whose lightest word / would harrow up thy soul.”19 Plays ask audiences to “go along with” the action on stage: this could lead anywhere.
Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) illustrates the transformative potential of emotional expression and exchange. As an example of the principle that like attracts like, Wright tells this story: “Alexander asked a pyrat that was taken and brought before him, How he durst be so bold to infest the seas, and spoyle the commerceries? he answered, That he played the pyrat but with one ship, and his Majestie with a huge navie: the which saying so pleased Alexander, that he pardoned his life, and graunted him libertie: so much could the similitude of action transport the kings affection.”20 Wright’s point is that the similarity between the two men breeds sympathy between them. However, the story is memorable precisely because of the obvious difference between the imprisoned, one-ship pirate and his interrogator, the conqueror of Persia. Rather, it is the pirate’s metaphor that makes “similitude” where there was none. Just as the pirate’s figurative speech creates a new imaginative and emotional bond between himself and his observer—one that crosses the actual social divide between them—so too, early modern commercial theater possessed devices for characterization and audience engagement (for example, soliloquy, costume, and plot twists) capable of reconfiguring the imaginative status of dramatis personae or events, as well as their relationships to the audience.
While it is important to track affinities between clusters of social experience and dramatic fantasies that seem geared toward those real-world perspectives, we cannot presume to know the limits of the interests and pleasures of particular demographics of theatergoers. Roslyn Lander Knutson wisely observes, “Audience taste is difficult to verify, being not necessarily as tied to class as scholars of a former time liked to assume.”21 The same is true of gender. For example, Andrew Gurr and Karoline Szatek argue that around the early 1610s the King’s Men began adding plays featuring strong women to appeal to a sense of gender solidarity among female playgoers.22 While this is entirely plausible, it does not mean (nor do they claim) that compelling female characters did not also draw sympathy from male playgoers. Henry Jackson describes a 1610 performance of Othello that “brought forth tears,” especially at the sight of “that famous Desdemona killed before us by her husband, [who] acted her whole part extremely well, yet when she was killed was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.”23 The very specificity