My study shares Freedman’s belief that historical and theoretical inquiry are not mutually exclusive, that so-called “modern” theoretical concepts and lexicons can, when used with care, provide vital access points into productive investigative templates for historically antecedent phenomena. My use of history, however, diverges from Freedman’s. While Staging the Gaze tends to engage with history in order to demonstrate historicism’s inevitable imbrication with, even reliance on, theory, Freedman’s readings of Shakespeare’s plays seem far less interested in continuing the negotiation between history and theory than does her initial chapter. This methodological fade-out makes the insightful historical analysis of her first chapter seem as if it appeared only to get the monkey of historicism off her back. In addition, this bifurcated structure also places many of Freedman’s insightful readings in the service of a theoretical telos from which she initially takes some pains to distance herself: that psychoanalysis is the most accurate lexicon for expressing and understanding early modern spectatorship.
Freedman’s book emerged in a moment in Renaissance studies during which scholars tended to position psychoanalysis and historicism not only as antithetical methodologies but as ones that required defending. Much of the work from this period contains elaborate defenses about how historicism or psychoanalysis constitutes a privileged or superior way of exploring early modern subjectivity, culture, and, most particularly, Shakespeare’s plays. Current scholarship in the field tends to move more freely between these and other methodologies. As noted in Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor’s introduction to Historicism, Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture, more recent work demonstrates “less intent on upholding particular models of analysis than on rethinking and recasting their effects, [and] many contemporary critics have come to resist the labels that once accompanied certain sets of topical interests and reading strategies.”32 Mazzio and Trevor’s description of this more self-reflexively hybrid critical approach aptly depicts the one on which this study draws. Rather than a defense of historicism or psychoanalysis, Monster understands and engages with these perspectives as dialectically intertwined and mutually constitutive of one another. In addition, as noted earlier, the discursive spectator’s history often presents itself as a series of variant iterations, a temporal model in which psychoanalysis is well-versed. Freud understood such recursive phantasms as the principal dynamic that undergirds individual and cultural behaviors and representations; in psychoanalytic theory, the repression of foundational traumas—sexual, generational, ethnic, and national—forms the template from which all identity arises. While this study focuses on a discursive rather than identitarian construct, the process of recursive sedimentation Freud describes as constitutive of individual and collective identity offers an architectural paradigm for understanding the discursive spectator’s history.
In addition to privileging psychoanalysis, Freedman also adopts apparatus theory’s initial myopic focus on the visual realm of experience. Early proponents of apparatus theory treat film as if it is only visual technology, overlooking the potentially subversive or contradictory effects of sound, including film score, language, ambient noise, and sound effects. While many film scholars have since challenged this bias, there is still a pronounced tendency to talk about cinema as a primarily visual medium.33 It is a bias Freedman seems to accept, reading Elizabethan entertainment culture as one similarly focused on the visual. While Freedman’s study predates those scholars whose work has fleshed out the sensory environment of the early modern theater,34 there is ample evidence in the texts with which she works that the theater was an experience in which the ear was at least as important as the eye. Often, theatrical spectatorship was described through sensory synecdoche, as if to suggest that the theater’s communicative potency was such that the division between the senses melted away. Rather than limiting my analysis to issues of the gaze, I look at Renaissance spectatorship as an act that, up until the seventeenth century, tended to be represented as engaging the full palate of the senses.
Mentioned earlier, Jeremy Lopez’s study Theatrical Conventions and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama has played a significant role in reinvigorating early modern audience studies. In particular, Lopez’s exploration of frequently deployed dramatic conventions as a viable repository for analyzing audience experience opened up new and fertile archival terrain. Like Freedman, Lopez wants to think about the productive possibilities offered by “dehistoric[izing] audience response.” Rather than doing so in order to propose an alternative theoretical narrative, Lopez argues for creating an alternative history of spectatorship based in “the continuing vitality of a theatrical tradition.”35 Given this claim, it may seem counterintuitive that Lopez’s study focuses primarily on once-popular plays that have largely been ignored in studies of early modern drama; he does so, however, in order to move beyond the scholarly tendency to focus on Shakespeare’s audiences. His engagement with underexplored plays provides a much-needed corrective to audience studies, a field that has often been pursued in the service of understanding more about Shakespeare (the author, the “man of the theater,” the genius) than about audiences.
Lopez’s argument that the most vital and productive of repositories for understanding English Renaissance audiences are “the plays they watched” is one with which I largely agree; indeed, this book uses seventeenth-century plays and masques as its primary archival source. However, Lopez’s claim that “Elizabethan and Jacobean drama seems to be very sure of the response it wants from its audience as a whole at any given moment” often gets conflated with the implied one that what a play or playwright wants to communicate to its audience is what it or he accomplishes. For example, in a reading of the players’ scene in Hamlet, Lopez moves immediately from a claim about the scene’s (or its author’s) intentions to one about the certain achievement of these communicative goals: “Twenty-eight purple lines into his Hecuba-speech in Hamlet, the Player is interrupted by Polonius: ‘This is too long’ (2.2.456). The audience, having been taught that nothing that Polonius says can be taken seriously, laughs…. It is notable that the audience has this kind of laugh at this point because it is prepared for quite the opposite reaction.”36 Lopez might be right in his assumption that the audience would have laughed at this point in Hamlet. However, as he earlier states, we cannot and do not know what early modern spectators thought and felt or how they reacted while watching this scene.37 While such fluidity is part of Lopez’s project of proposing a history traced through theatrical traditions, ones that help create the audiences with which they communicate, the assumption that the spectator any given playwright wants is the one he gets is problematic. Unwittingly, Lopez resurrects the idea of the passive spectator, an entity that becomes imprinted with whatever message the play (or text or film) wants to send, a bias that undermines his goal of “better understanding the audiences of the English Renaissance.”38
The tendency to conflate “real” spectators with imagined or projected ones is not unique to Lopez’s work; indeed, most studies that seek to theorize the spectator rely on this fallacy to some extent. Certainly, real and theoretical spectators do align at times, and conventions that repeat in a given historical period and extend beyond it suggest a kind of communicative reliability. However, in positing the premise that early modern drama “was extremely self-conscious [and] demanded an equal self-consciousness from its audience as well,” Lopez not only avers that the relationship between play (text) and audience is one of predictable cause and effect, he also enacts his early criticism that much of the work on early modern audience ends up in the service of an author, a play, or drama more generally. In fact, one might say that Lopez is not particularly interested in audiences in Theatrical