Jonson spent much of his career seeking his “ideal consumer,”63 and he understood the masque genre, both in its performed and written form, as a potential instrument for inculcating “learning and sharpness” in his audience.64 The attempt to negotiate between the “understanding”65 spectator the writer wants and the obtuse one he fears is a dynamic shared with the other plays discussed herein: all imagine the possibility of spectatorial fashioning via disciplinary conventions that promote certain behaviors and interpretive practices while holding up others to ridicule and condemnation. My argument here turns on the premise that these projections play a significant role in shaping how audiences act, think, and respond, which in turn (re)shapes the way dramatists imagine and represent their audiences. The circulatory passages through which these ideas and practices flow is where the discursive spectator lives and breathes, the place where it forms the connective tissue between ideas and anxieties about the spectator and real viewing subjects.
In his treatise on modern theater audiences, Herbert Blau notes that the audience “is always already a deceit, another fantasy of perversion (or perverse fantasy), an obligatory scene in the theater that from its very beginning theater wished it could do without.”66 Whether fantasy or phantasm, the spectator is not merely the witnessing body (or the body witnessing) performance, but an entity that determines the very conditions of theatrical production. If, as Peter Handke writes, “the audience does not yet exist”67 until it is addressed by a play, I would argue that a play does not, indeed cannot, come into being without first imagining an audience, its audience. Tellingly, the words spectator and spectre are etymological kin: both derive from the Latin root specta¯re. Embodied as the “beholder, onlooker, or observer,”68 the spectator also haunts the theater’s moral and creative landscape as an “apparition, phantom, or ghost, especially one of a terrifying nature or aspect.”69 Unstable, protean, and capricious, the spectator seems as much eidolon as entity. And yet this shadow presence—this apparition—remains long after the onlookers go home. Writing commendatory verses for colleague John Fletcher’s failed play The Faithful Shepherdess, actor Nathan Field gives this phantasm a name and shape: “[T]he monster clapt his thousand hands / And drownd the sceane with his confused cry.” Field’s refiguring of Plato’s metaphor for the crowd—the many-headed monster—offers some insight into what was at stake for those invested in the art and commerce of the early modern theater; less clear is what has been at stake in eliding or ignoring the discursive spectator over centuries of scholarly inquiry into that institution.70 In the chapters that follow, I trace the discursive spectator’s imprint on some of the cultural productions that shaped and were shaped by this figure in order to better understand its influence on those involved in producing the early modern theater, those who attended it, and those who have pursued and continue to pursue it as an object of study.
CHAPTER 1
Toward a Theory of Discursive Spectatorship
Near the turn of the twentieth century, a young Russian journalist began a short piece for the Nizhegorodski listok newspaper with the following description:
Last night I was in the Kingdom of the Shadows. If only you knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life, but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.1
His observations echo a number of modernity’s oft-cited maladies: a decresence of human experience via exposure to the industrialized workplace and landscape, an anesthetized perceptual habitus owing to urban life’s sensory overstimulation and relentless pace, and subjective erosion augmented by the inexorable force of mass labor’s and culture’s hegemonizing engines. But, although written by the young Maxim Gorky (who became one of Russia’s most outspoken voices against some of these pressures) in late imperial Russia, it is not a day-in-the-life account but a review of the newest invention from the Continent, the Lumière cinematograph.2 From Gorky’s description, this novelty does not sound as if it would have much of a draw: why would people go see a lifeless effigy of their already diluted existence? Nor does Gorky mention any compensatory gratifications here—such as those Tom Gunning describes in his theory of “the cinema of attractions”—there are no foreign lands or fantastical fictions.3 Instead, it depicts what for many would be familiar scenes: city streets bustling with people and carriages, trains rushing to various destinations, and a group of men at a bar drinking and playing cards. The only pleasure it seems to offer is the thrill of witnessing another new form of optical wizardry and the concomitant satisfaction of affirming humankind’s relentless march toward “progress” via technological advancement.
Despite his initial description of the less-than-scintillating panorama, Gorky’s narrative suggests that eventually the cinematograph’s spell takes hold of him. While the adjective “grey” predominates in the first paragraph (shown above), the second demonstrates a surprising about-face: “The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances.”4 Despite this new medium’s communicative limitations, it manages to create a surprising and novel vraisemblance:
Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight towards you—watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice….
This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague and sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim.5
Contrasts abound in Gorky’s account. Despite his claim that the medium creates only a pale facsimile of human existence (“this mute, grey life”), it also encompasses the ability to render mass and acceleration through affect rather than physics. Watching the image of a moving train, Gorky becomes pulled suddenly into incarnate sentience, as the experience renders him acutely aware of his existence as flesh-and-blood organism, “a ripped sack of lacerated flesh and splintered bones.” And, while he similarly imagines the exhibition hall “crushing into dust and broken fragments,” Gorky also becomes newly sensitized to the edifice as reliquary of some of human culture’s most vital pleasures, “women, wine, music, and vice.” This early version of “the movies,” a silent, black-and-white, two-dimensional, mobile, and highly selective narrative form, both enervates and overstimulates Gorky. Although limited to communicating primarily through the visual codes of movement in grayscale, this technology causes him to imagine pain, experience fear, and become absorbed to the