Nor, I am arguing, were theatergoers’ delights welded to their religious identities. Early modern people were sometimes curious about matters that lay beyond whatever their contemporaries, or modern academics, assign as their sphere: Wright describes men who will “wrangle about matters exceeding their capacitie, as a Cobler of Chivalrie, [or] a Tailor of Divinitie.”24 Theater was a form of virtual experience that could expand playgoers’ frames of reference and foster new modes of thought and feeling. As with class and gender fantasies, confessional fictions on stage elicit similar extensions of imaginative and emotional faculties into different cultural terrain.
Though it does not record a real audience’s response to an actual play, Barnabe Riche’s pamphlet Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell—written by a playwright, in the voice of another playwright, and featuring a stage clown—nevertheless illustrates the potential of live performance to shake up fixed religious positions. In hell, the ghost of Robert Greene finds a papal legate, newly arrived to conspire with Lucifer, and “a most abominable company of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, Pryors, Abbots … for the better establishing of the Kingdom of Antechrist [in] England.”25 The pope’s representative has no sooner finished speaking:
But in comes Dick Tarlton, apparrelled like a Clowne, and singing this peece of an olde song.
If this be trewe as true it is,
Ladie Ladie:
God send her life may mend the misse,
Most deere Ladie.
This suddaine jest brought the whole company into such a vehement laughter, that not able agayne to make them keepe silence, for that present tyme they were faine to breake uppe.26
The English Protestant clown Dick Tarlton cracks up the whole popish, Antichristian convocation. The interruption of seditious, Romish scheming is temporary (“for that present tyme”), but it still ruptures confessional animosity with comic energy.
Coming out of nowhere in the narrative and breaking the prose with verse, he formally, as well as diegetically, interrupts their plotting. Tarlton’s jest also derails the narrative’s running anti-Catholic satire, shifting the tone away from confessional invective. In other words, both the audience in the story and the audience of the story are jostled out of binary, oppositional, religious positions by a singing clown.
Plays Are Not Tracts
The more entertaining aspects of a play often derail the possibility of didacticism, or doctrinal clarity. When plays answer back to early modern religious life, they do not always teach lessons but sometimes speak gibberish, or cry, or make a joke. However, modes of expression that cannot be summarized in statements are still part of the dialogue between theater and confessional culture. Peter Lake offers an invaluable account of how London commercial theater created a public engaged with the political and religious problems of their time.27 In recognizing the socially shaping work of audiences’ mental engagements with plays, Lake takes the political efficacy of theater more seriously than many literary critics. By close reading plays in their entirety (rather than in discursive snippets), he recovers sequential, theatrical experience as a social process. Yet if Lake’s correction to new historicism’s abstract understanding of power is a more fine-grained account of the immediate political and religious contexts of plays, conversely, scholars of the drama can bring to this conversation a more nuanced picture of theatrical form and the cultural work it does. Lake’s close readings largely stay on the level of plot, attend primarily to “high” politics, and limit the responses of playgoers to cognitive judgments. But theater is not simply a narrative of the actions of elites presented for analysis. It is a subtler and more complex series of interactions and pleasures, capable of indirect engagements with longue durée shifts, as well as more explicit forays into topical issues. Without question, early modern playgoers did watch plays “for use” in making sense of the dangers and possibilities of their religious and political circumstances, or for moral application in their personal lives. Nevertheless, theater offered pleasures other than instructions for living, imaginative challenges beyond the examination of court politics. As Stephen Gosson complains, “Sometime you shall see nothing but the adventures of an amorous knight, passing from countrie to countrie for the love of his lady, encountring many a terrible monster made of broun paper, [and returning unrecognizable except] by a broken ring, or a handkircher, or a piece of a cockle shell, what learn you by that?”28 The familiar binary Gosson draws here between pleasure and profit is a false one. Our shared interdisciplinary project must be to connect archival and formal specificity, high and cultural politics, as well as the cognitive and emotional work of audiences.
Nathaniel Tomkyns’s eyewitness account of an August 1634 performance of The Late Lancashire Witches at the Globe shows how even an overtly topical play could baffle attempts at application.29 The play dramatizes the alleged occult shenanigans of four women from Lancashire recently incarcerated in London on charges of witchcraft. Because the testimony that condemned them had since been recanted, it was unclear at the time of performance whether the accused would be pardoned or punished. The affair divided both popular opinion and the Privy Council between believers in the supernatural and skeptics—including the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The case was a religious and political hot potato that passed through several courts. Eventually, without any final determination made as to their guilt or innocence, the women were sent back to Lancashire, where they died in jail.
The King’s Men capitalized on the topicality of The Late Lancashire Witches;30 however, rather than offering a judgment as to whether the women were guilty, the play parodies the question.31 Opposing views as to the reality of witchcraft are continually expressed back to back, and several characters reverse their opinions to comic effect. The braggart Whetstone’s tales of witchcraft are dismissed as his usual lies. When the magic he boastingly describes is shown onstage, it is funny both because his improbable fibs turn out to be true and because, through their association with Whetstone, the supernatural tricks seem phony. One of the running jokes of the play is that witchcraft is shown primarily as the cause of everyday, embarrassing “Crosses”:32 impotency, bastardy, bad luck hunting, getting beaten in a fistfight. As the witch Meg herself points out, regarding the inversions of social hierarchies through sorcery that put unruly women above their husbands, and make children and servants overly bold with their parents and masters:
But that’s no wonder, through the wide
World ’tis common. (C4v)
The effect of coding magic as a convenient excuse is that the tricks happening almost continuously in front of the audience seem as much a shaggy-dog story as actual enchantments. Witchcraft is often a dirty joke: Mrs. Generous is turned into a “jade” with a bewitched bridle and “ridden hard” (G4r). When the women are apprehended and patriarchal order restored, all their respectable interrogator wants to know are the dirty details: “And then [the devil] lay with thee, did he not sometimes? … —and how? and how a little? was he a good Bedfellow?” (L3r). Keeping the question of the witches’ guilt or innocence open is crucial to the “game” of the play. The running gag of The Late Lancashire Witches is the simultaneity of these mutually exclusive possibilities. The play’s comedy depends on sustaining a religious question; it does not encourage spectators to take a stance in the debate. That would ruin the joke.
Because of its explicit topicality, eyewitness Tomkyns “expected … [a] judgment” in the play regarding the question of the women’s guilt, or a moral “application,” but he finds neither. Tomkyns’s correspondent, Sir Robert Phelips, would likely have been keen to hear any theatrical commentary on the issue decoded, since his father had been Speaker of the House of Commons when it passed the witchcraft law with which the women were charged. The newsletter begins with an attempt to make politic observations on the play as a social event in London, but it primarily