A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers

(and particularly non-Shakespearean) drama. More accurate, however, would be to say that insofar as Lopez is interested in audiences, he is interested in them as a construct—a projection—of early modern theater practitioners and plays and of contemporary scholars: “The audience I imagine in chapter 1 is the audience I imagine Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists to have imagined, for which the effects I describe would have been most effective.”³⁹ Such “imaginings” suggest another entity, one that Lopez tacitly acknowledges but does not explore: a category of inquiry made up of the projections addressed and created by early modern cultural institutions, including the law, education, the Church, and, of course, the theater.⁴⁰ It is precisely this entity to which Monster is devoted.

      Most recently, studies such as Tanya Pollard’s Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005), Charles Whitney’s Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (2006), Matthew Steggle’s Laughter and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (2007), Bruce Smith’s Phenomenal Shakespeare (2010), and Allison P. Hobgood’s Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (2014) have sought to augment our understanding of early modern theater audiences by bringing embodied spectatorship to the table, or, in Smith’s words, “projecting ourselves in the historically reconstructed field of perception as far as we are able.”⁴¹ Historicizing affective structures that the early modern theater helped shaped and was shaped by, these studies approach this shared aim using somewhat different archives and approaches.⁴² To a large degree, however, they share two basic claims: that while we cannot decisively “know” what audiences thought and felt while watching plays, there is more valid evidence about audience response than has been acknowledged, and that early modern audiences played an active and crucial role in shaping the period’s drama. Methodologically hybrid and argumentatively bold (particularly in their defense of phenomenological rather than material or strictly historical archives), these interventions provide a response to the often-repeated charge put forth by performance studies scholars: that historicist approaches to early modern drama tend to forget the very thing that makes theater theater—the vital presence of living bodies onstage.⁴³ This approach’s insistence on the significance of (and possibility of accessing) individual and collective processes of reception and response brings a more animate and tangible practice to the field of early modern audience studies.

      Despite the valuable insights advanced by these projects, a clear-cut problem persists, one that Hobgood addresses in Passionate Playgoing: “How can we actually know how participants felt during or after a performance of Macbeth in the early seventeenth century” (original italics)?⁴⁴ Following Bruce Smith’s charge that we take more literally the “stories” early modern subjects, especially playwrights, told about “what was happening in their bodies and brains when they looked, listened, read, and loved,”⁴⁵ Hobgood claims that “the faultlines between early modern humoral theory, philosophical and medical treatises, pro- and anti-theatrical literature, and drama of the early modern period contain a productive narrative about what it might have felt like to participate in early modern theatergoing.”⁴⁶ Such fault lines are, no doubt, productive places for excavating early modern spectatorship, but they are still the fault lines between narratives rather than experiences. More significantly, while each of the archives from which Hobgood draws (humoral theory, philosophical and medical treatises, pro- and antitheatrical literature, and drama) are cultural fields that would, certainly, have a modicum of interest in representing spectators’ experiences, reportage is by no means their primary aim. Instead, they are complex, multifaceted discursive structures, a fact that Hobgood acknowledges when she states that her study “explores [the experience of] spectatorship by examining, in great part, early modern ideas about emotion.”⁴⁷ If we imagine plugging in another ineffable, volatile, entangled human experience, such as the trauma of witnessing an accident, and study it via the same cultural structures Hobgood uses for her analysis of spectatorial experience (medical, philosophical, moral, and representational), few, I think, would claim that even a thorough canvassing of these discourses would provide an accurate understanding of traumatic experience. Such study certainly would produce some forms of comprehension—empathic identification, intellectual analysis, historical situatedness—but not actual knowledge of how it felt, something into which Hobgood claims her research can provide genuine insight: “I rethink early modern theater-going—what it felt like to be part of performances in English theater—as an intensely corporeal, highly emotive activity characterized by risky, even outright dangerous bodily transformation” (my italics).⁴⁸ However, as Cathy Caruth intuits, most corporeal, highly emotive experience “is not locatable in the … original event … but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature … returns to haunt the survivor later on.”⁴⁹

      As this study invests in those hauntings, which often take shape in the form of discursive presences, it may read as antithetical to more embodied and affective hermeneutic approaches. In other words, the discursive spectator may seem too spectral, too exsanguinated, to provide any insight into “real” audiences of the period. And, in one sense, it is. As stated earlier, A Monster with a Thousand Hands is not a study of the phenomenological audiences of early modern England but rather of the culturally constructed figure of the spectator. But despite this perspective, this study does concern real audiences: one of its central claims is that cultural discourses about entertainment spectatorship play a significant (and undertheorized) role in shaping individual and cultural interpretive practice and affective response. As Stephen Purcell has said of contemporary audiences that attend Shakespeare’s plays, “Ideas about the nature of Shakespearean spectatorship circulate widely in culture more broadly, and audiences will inevitably arrive at a Shakespearean performance with certain preconceptions about what their role is likely to involve.”⁵⁰ The sources I draw evidence from are similar to (and often the same as) those used by Whitney and Hobgood, including an admixture of more traditional historicist sources (sermons, antitheatrical treatises, legal and medical documents, and correspondence) and less material ones (such as what Whitney terms “allusions,” or references to audiences or their experiences found in various representational genres). But whereas Whitney and Hobgood seek to flesh out what Steven Mullaney has called an “emotional logic”⁵¹ of playgoing in the early modern period, I trace an alternative but intersecting history of how early modern English culture imagines, projects, represents, and circulates ideas about theater spectators and the dynamics of theatrical spectatorship.

      The Sense of an Audience: Archives, Modes of Evidence, and Ways of Reading

      Almost without exception,⁵² scholarship on early modern audiences draws heavily on antitheatricalist writings—one of the richest representational repositories of the Renaissance theatrical spectator. This relatively abundant resource, however, presents several challenges. Like English playwrights, English antitheatricalists display a tendency to “borrow” heavily at the levels of polemic and phrasing from one another and from earlier classical and medieval moralists.⁵³ Jonas Barish, for example, calls a particular section of William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix “overflow[ing] with an inky gutter of references to Tertullian, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine and ‘sundry’ other Fathers.”⁵⁴ Such redundancy mirrors a concern regarding contemporary scholarship that uses this moralist discourse: since nearly all work done on early modern audiences relies heavily on this archive, it becomes difficult to avoid retreading old ground. It is, therefore, worth taking a moment to clarify the use of antitheatricalist writings in this project. Most obviously, as this study is about spectatorial discourses (rather than spectatorial practice or affect), the parroting of classical and contemporary sources that occurs in antitheatricalist treatises becomes an important piece of evidence rather than an idiosyncracy that requires a disclaimer. That is, such repetition aptly demonstrates the presence and potency of certain discourses about theater spectators (re)circulating in early modern England. That Prynne and other antitheatricalists echo various medieval philosophers (who in turn had cited classical ones) to convey the idea of the vulnerable spectator suggests both that this discourse has a history that precedes the early modern period and that these writers, on some level, relied on these earlier discourses in order to craft their own “take” on the discursive spectator. That Prynne and