Debates about audience activity tend to propose binary alternatives: either rowdy or docile, either individuals or a group, either critical or feeling. The presumption is usually that there is a correlation among the former and latter sets of terms: that critical thought is limited to individuals, and more likely to be expressed through self-separating behavior such as interruption; whereas collective playhouse experience is understood as uncritically immersive, emotive, and passive. These are false assumptions. A quiet audience is not necessarily a passive one. Vocal playgoers are not always resistant. Immersive spectatorship can exercise critical faculties. Individual and collective playhouse experiences are not mutually exclusive.64 Theater is not a zero-sum game in which either agential, individual playgoers run roughshod over the play and players or the force of “spectacle” batters a homogeneous blob of audience into “complacent” submission.65
The cumulative evidence shows a variety of audience behavior, from rapt attention to backchat to boredom to violence. While it is important to recognize a broader difference between the polite customs of modern theatergoers and the generally more participatory range of practices available to early modern audiences, the relative frequency of attentive or disruptive behaviors in London commercial playhouses cannot be determined, given the limitations of the extant body of contemporary descriptions of playgoing. In any case, it is the wrong question. Knowing the things audiences did in playhouses does not necessarily reveal how they experienced theater. While some forms of playgoer expression are unambiguous (for example, throwing eggs at actors), it is not always possible to know what inward states are indicated by audiences’ outward behavior.
Expressions of emotion that modern playgoers might find irritating may rather for early modern theatergoers have enhanced the performance. For Preiss, audible crying disturbs the play: “The convulsive weeping of even one spectator, let alone hundreds, can be a loud and distracting business.”66 However, in Thomas Nashe’s vivid description of collective audience response to Talbot’s death in act 4, scene 4, of 1 Henry VI, mass weeping does not detract but rather contributes to the scene’s effect: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot … to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”67 Heywood records audiences responding to the scene collectively and emotionally, but not without agency, and not in a way that diminishes the play’s effects. The group response elicited by Talbot’s death transforms the scene from a representation of lost futurity to the restoration of a heroic legacy in the present.
In the play, as Alexander Leggatt points out, “the Talbots’ deaths … truly constitute an ending. After this, not only is the English cause … doomed, but Talbot and his son are forgotten.”68 The script stresses the loss of Talbot’s line. His son John Talbot appears only briefly, for the sole, dramatic purpose of dying with his father in battle. The play underscores the extinction of their family. Talbot laments, “In thee thy mother dies, our household’s name.”69 John Talbot’s bravery establishes him as a true heir: “An if I fly, I am not Talbot’s son” (4.6.2243). But the promise of patrilineal succession is confirmed only when precluded: “If son to Talbot, die at Talbot’s foot” (4.6.2245). Their deaths follow fast on each other. Together they exit to battle, Talbot urging his son to “fight by thy father’s side … let’s die in pride” (4.6.2248–49). A skirmish follows, immediately after which John Talbot’s corpse is brought onstage, and Talbot dies just fifteen lines later. Talbot’s last words—“Now my old arms are John Talbot’s grave” (4.7.2284)—register a generational collapse. The script shows the end of Talbot, both his death and the loss of his legacy.
But the weeping of playgoers changes the play. Live audiences resurrect and “new embalm” Talbot. Their responses not only affect the emotional event in the theater but touch even the dead person played on stage: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot … after he had [lain] two hundred years in his tomb.” As Rebecca Schneider describes the affective labor of historical reenactment, “The stickiness of emotion [drags] the temporal past into … [the] present.”70 The live, wet “teares of ten thousand Spectators” revivify Talbot’s historical corpse “fresh bleeding.” His affective reanimation in the present compensates for the loss of futurity scripted into the scene. Repeated performance gives Talbot the posterity the plot denies.
Here, the emotional responses of audiences revise the play not by displacing or destroying it but in collaboration with the script. Powerful as the implied, Pietà blocking is, the Talbots’ death is not simply a sad, static tableau but an interactive process of feeling. The playwrights use a technique that I call “audience priming”: the script prepares playgoers for a dramatically climactic response by placing a small-scale version of an emotional situation immediately before the big scene. This is often done through a reported speech or minor character. This device is not just a thematic doubling. What makes it effective is the temporal build. The death of a minor character, John Talbot, affectively attunes audiences for the death of the play’s hero; Talbot’s mourning for his son models audiences’ sorrow for him. In practical terms, it gets their bodies ready to cry on time. That is useful in this scene, because playgoers are asked to make a rapid, emotional transition from the adrenaline of stage combat to grief at Talbot’s death. Priming an audience, like priming a gun or a pump, is partly a physical preparation. Yet spectators are not simply having their tears jerked. Audience priming is a complex, recursive technique of deepening feeling; it is outward moving, self-replicating, an extension seeking further extension.71 Their weeping is a supplement as Jacques Derrida describes it: “The supplement adds … and makes…. Its place is assigned … by the mark of an emptiness.”72 It fills and changes an incomplete emotional structure.
Similarly, early modern theatergoers might not necessarily have found it distracting if some spectators shouted during a performance. Instead of indicating the atomization of the audience into individuals, whooping and heckling could have contributed to a group sense of investment and immediacy. To draw a modern-day comparison, for many moviegoers, yelling at the screen is a sign of absorption rather than opposition, and it especially intensifies the enjoyment of particular genres (action and horror), even for those who themselves are quiet.73 In his defense of theater, Heywood describes an action scene, in which “[soldier] and horse even from the steeds rough fetlocks to the plume of the champions helmet [were] together plunged into a purple Ocean,” that would make any playgoer “hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor.”74 Heywood’s whinnying spectator is not detached or interrupting. He is the soldier’s horse. By this, I am not saying that Heywood is describing an audience member imitating actual horse noises. However, in comparing the spectator’s cheering to neighing, Heywood conceives of playgoer vocalization as something absorbed into the fiction during performance. The same is true of somatized, emotional response: the playgoer mentally “hug[s]” the valiant soldier, just as onstage the steed and champion are tightly joined, “together plunged” from hoof to plume. These playgoer reactions participate in the martial world of the play. In short, we cannot assume that we know what playhouse noises or actions early modern Londoners would have considered truly disruptive, and what may have been incorporated into the performance event.
Furthermore, I suspect that playgoers who did behave badly (whatever that actually meant) were unlikely to bring the whole imaginative enterprise to a grinding halt. Even extreme examples of theatrical disruption could continue to interact with the fiction in performance:
Fowler you know was appointed for the Conquering parts, and it being given out he was to play the Part of a great Captain and mighty Warriour, drew much Company; the Play began, and ended with his Valour; but at the end of the Fourth Act he laid so heavily about him, that some Mutes who stood for Souldiers, fell down as they were dead e’re he had toucht their trembling Targets; so he brandisht his Sword & made his Exit; ne’re