If certain aspects of the discursive spectator can best be described and explored synchronically, a diachronic perspective better serves others. Far from challenging or rejecting historicism, I rely on many of its paradigms in order to flesh out the discursive spectator’s travels through a specific period, one that, for my purposes, is demarcated via the rise of the English professional, for-profit theater, and its subsequent cessation during the English Civil War.15 In addition to demonstrating certain historicist “hallmarks” (for example, the acceptance of periodicity and the use of a range of discursive production as a means of taking the discursive spectator’s measure), the book’s organization follows a predominantly chronological framework. While this schema runs the risk of suggesting a teleological narrative, it also allows for a more thorough examination of the ways in which the discursive spectator shifts, accrues, and pares resonances even within a relatively short period. To read chronologically does not necessarily imply reading teleologically; that is, to study a concept, discourse, institution, narrative, category, or tradition diachronically does not go hand-in-hand with accepting and propagating a narrative of destiny. Indeed, the call-and-response nature of discursive production often requires placement within a linear time frame in order to bring the smaller epiphenomena that have occurred (and continue to occur) in the discursive spectator’s history into clearer focus.16 Much like an electrocardiogram, which measures the pattern of an individual’s heartbeat over a short period in order to pick up irregularities in the heart’s sinoatrial current, a chronological approach allows for attentiveness to shifts, both major and minor, in the early modern spectator’s discursive presence during roughly a sixty-year period. While such shifts do not add up to a tidy developmental narrative, they provide a means of demonstrating this figure’s fluidity (a quality that renders it an ideal surface for registering cultural projections about theater audiences) and attaining a clearer understanding of the discursive spectator’s role in shaping spectatorial practice as it manifests in phenomenological experience and the empirical world.
My approach, then, differs from “strict” historicist methods in two primary ways. The first is that with the exception of the first chapter, the majority of my archive derives from material written for and about the theater, as opposed to reaching outside of it to other kinds of cultural institutions. The second, and more significant, is that I am less interested in what the early modern English discursive spectator tells us about something other than itself; that is, I do not investigate it in the service of another, larger construct or industry, such as early modern subjectivity, religion, sexuality, affect, cognition, or even the theater itself. Instead, this study advances two primary goals, neither of which, I have come to find, are adequately served by espousing a single methodology. The first is to demonstrate the discursive spectator’s value as a topic of study, one that has been largely overlooked and unarticulated in both early modern discussions of theater audiences and audience studies more generally. The second is that rather than privileging a historical narrative’s elucidation, I model an interpretive method—a way of reading—that takes the discursive spectator as its primary topic, and then I explore what this readjustment of focus reveals about early modern spectatorship and the scholarly biases, blind spots, and (over)investments found in much of early modern audience studies.
Those looking for a book that focuses heavily on the historical conditions of possibility and production that “produce” the early modern discursive spectator will not find it here. This is not to say that such a study would be unproductive or ineffective: certainly, I hope that others will take up and offer other perspectives on the discursive spectator. As Traub posits, “Readings … are not the same thing as history,”17 a claim with which I wholeheartedly agree. However, readings can provide effective starting points for reimagining the kinds of histories we currently tell about the spectator and (re)discovering new material in those we have previously inscribed. The subsequent section looks at some of these narratives via their enunciations in scholarly discourse, which, for the most part, have been trifurcated into the areas of demographic studies, theoretical investigations reliant on modern and postmodern theoretical axioms, and affective inquiries seeking to understand how audiences responded to early modern drama.
A View of the Field
This study participates in a methodological incentive posited by Jeremy Lopez in his 2008 book Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Pointing out that the emphasis on audience demographics has become “unnecessarily paralyzing, making it seem as though we cannot talk about the effects of a play on an ‘audience’ until we understand the exact composition of that audience,” Lopez calls for a more capacious model for studying early modern theatergoers.18 And, in point of fact, most early critical work on early modern theatrical audiences tended to fixate on “Shakespeare’s” audiences and approach the topic using a predominantly demographic approach. Among the most influential of these are Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare’s Audience (1941), E. K. Chambers’s The Elizabethan Stage (1974), Ann Jennalie Cook’s The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s England (1981), and Andrew Gurr’s Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (2004).19 Painstakingly stitching together the few scraps of extant evidence about London’s theater audiences, these scholars provide us with a relatively comprehensive picture of who might have attended one of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe or one of John Marston’s at the Children of Paul’s. While their work provides an invaluable snapshot of these audiences of the past, it does not account for the ways that the spectator is as much a cultural idea as a material presence.20 Recent studies on the early modern audiences, however, attempt to understand and re-create what audiences thought and felt when watching drama (particularly Shakespeare’s works). While the desire to unearth and interpret early modern audience response is not new, earlier approaches to this question relied on contemporary theoretical models of spectatorship. Prevalent in the 1990s,21 this set of inquiries oriented itself toward psychoanalysis and film studies, perspectives that offered alternatives to the dominant practice of demographic historicism. By applying contemporary theories of identification, particularly those derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, these studies sought to elucidate the spectatorial dynamics of the past via ideas produced in and by a more proximate historical era, that of the early and mid-twentieth century. Yet another approach (and the one with the broadest reach, in that such studies began as early as the 1970s and continue into the present moment) looks to historicize audience experiences, viewing practices, and affect.22 These studies rely on period-specific methods of exploring audience response, ones that offer alternative inroads into and archives for the “who, what, where, and how” of early modern theatergoing that are somewhat less restricted by the limits of demographic data. These include explorations of linguistic (such as puns), representational (such as allegory), and staging (such as the thrust stage) conventions; stage properties; costume; spatial orientation; cognitive structures; embodiment; and affective systems of meaning and exchange.23 Rather than canvass all of these studies here, I discuss a detailed example of the approaches that attempt to resurrect spectatorial experience with an eye toward clarifying Monster’s contribution to early modern audience studies.
Barbara Freedman’s Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (1991) remains one of the most ambitious studies of early modern spectatorial dynamics to date.24 Working primarily within Lacanian psychoanalytic paradigms and apparatus theory,25 Freedman also draws on feminism, structuralism, and cultural materialism to flesh out a theory of “Elizabethan spectator consciousness,” which she defines as “an epistemological model based upon an observer who stands outside of what she sees in a definite position of mastery over it.”26 According to Freedman, rather than participating in this model of spectatorship, Shakespearean comedy exemplifies the theater’s participation and role in the cultivation of a subversive, counterhegemonic gaze, one that works to destabilize the spectating subject’s illusion of control by staging blindness and misprision as forms of percipience.27
Freedman’s contribution to early modern audience studies has been somewhat undervalued,28