Let me turn to a different account of shadows, this time, of the ilk mentioned in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“The best in this kind are but shadows” [5.1.208])7 and found in sometime actor, playwright, and moralist Anthony Munday’s account of the early modern stage:
For the strangest Comedie brings greatest delectation and pleasure. Our nature is led awaie with vanitie, which the auctor perceiving frames himself with novelties and strange trifles to content the vaine humors of his rude auditors, faining countries never heard of; monsters and prodigious creatures that are not: as of the Arimaspie, of the Grips, the Pigmeies, the Cranes, & other such notorious lies. And if they write of histories that are knowen, as the life of Pompeie; the martial affaires of Caesar, and other worthies, they give them a newe face, and turne them out like counterfeites to showe themselves on the stage. It was therefore aptlie applied of him, who likened the writers of our daies vnto Tailors, who having their sheers in their hand, can alter the facion of anie thing into another forme, & with a new face make that seeme new which is old.8
At first glance, the differences between Gorky’s and Munday’s two descriptions seem more abundant than their likenesses. Rather than depicting the familiar (city life, people leaving a factory, transportation methods), Munday describes fantastical portrayals that stretch credulity. Gorky’s account suggests a singular perspective and subjectively isolated experience, whereas Munday’s implies a collective one, both through his use of the plural pronoun—“our” natures and “our” days—and his reference to the amassed “auditors.” A closer look at these accounts, however, reveals certain symmetries. Gorky’s place of exhibition, filled with women, wine, music, and vice, resonates with Munday’s description of the theater crammed full of “rude auditors.” Additionally, Munday understands the theater as a place where vice flourishes and in which women are rendered particularly vulnerable: “The Theatre I found to be an appointed place of Bauderie; mine owne eares have heard honest women allured with abhominable speeches. Sometime I have seene two knaves at once importunate upon one light huswife, whereby much quarel hath growen to the disquieting of manie.”9 Despite the “greyness” that pervades much of Gorky’s narrative, the cinematograph provides him with a profoundly, if terrifyingly, embodied experience; Munday also represents London’s professional theaters and plays themselves as exceptionally somatic. His claim that the theater caters to its audiences’ “vaine humors” suggests the early modern period’s understanding of playgoing as an inherently embodied undertaking: “humors” invokes both “mood” or “inclination” and the body’s governing fluids. While Munday mentions plays’ sometimes fantastical plots, he also discusses another genre—the history play—in which “the life of Pompey, the martial affairs of Caesar” are given “new faces, and turn[ed] … out like counterfeits,” which sounds akin to Gorky’s “familiar” scenes made unheimlich: “You anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene, for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life.”10 Indeed, Munday’s description of playwrights as “tailors” (or “play-patchers” as Tiffany Stern calls them)11 brings to mind early filmmaking, which was far more about editing than original narrative. Finally, although the cinematograph is an almost entirely new entertainment technology in the late nineteenth century and plays in the late sixteenth century were not,12 both Gorky’s and Munday’s descriptions discuss forms of entertainment that are novel to the culture that produces them. The cinematograph is new in that it introduces the quality of movement to photographic representation; the late sixteenth-century theater is new in that it presents secular dramatic material written by professional writers and acted by professional actors for profit. Most significantly, both commentators see these communicative mediums as having the ability to mesmerize their onlookers, transporting them to something akin to an alternative reality. Gorky describes his mind being “invaded” by “strange imaginings” and his consciousness “wan[ing] and grow[ing] dim,” and Munday speaks of the auditors’ “nature” being “led away with vanity.” This potency, according to both commentators, functions like sorcery (or chicanery). Gorky calls it “Merlin’s vicious trick,”13 and Munday imagines the playwright as a kind of puppeteer who manipulates not only his art form but his audience: “Our nature is led awaie with vanitie, which the auctor perceiving frames himself with novelties and strange trifles.”
How might we read these similarities? As proleptic? As a form of transhistorical continuity in terms of audience reception? Perhaps. Alternatively, these two commentaries, much like the epigraphs with which this book begins, demonstrate another kind of connection, one that is discursive rather than affective or material. Certainly, discursive tendencies can be discerned between these writers and their historical contemporaries. The version of Gorky’s article cited above appears in a contemporary scholarly collection that collates it with other early twentieth-century articles that review the Lumière cinematograph. The editors attribute the manifold parallelisms between Gorky’s description and others’ (for example, O. Winter’s 1896 article on the cinematograph for New Review and an unattributed 1898 article for Punch articulate the machine’s effect in ways that echo Gorky with surprising precision)14 to discursive influences, or “schools of critical thought” such as “the photographic and scientific community, the entertainment sector, and … most vividly, the general press and general public.”15 As for Munday, some scholars have claimed that the “plaigiaristic” nature of the antitheatricalists’ writings makes them unworthy of serious consideration.16 My interest in these iterations, however, is not in gauging their originality as a means of determining either their earnestness or worth; rather, I take them as traces of the Western entertainment spectator’s discursive history, a history to which Gorky and Munday are subject. That is to say, many of the homologies between their claims, such as their agreement that popular mass entertainment “tricks” its audiences into confusing the fictional with the real, have had a potent and transhistorical hold on the Western cultural imaginary. Both authors, however, are not mere repositories and perpetuators of this history but contributors to it. For, while Munday and Gorky repeat certain “tenets” of mass culture, they adapt others to fit the descriptive needs engendered by their particular historical, cultural, and technological moment. Pulled between these two modes of representation (the chronic and the adaptive), these two social critics’ interpretations similarly display twinned anxieties. One prevalent concern is iterative: it centers on a culturally inculcated view that entertainment “spectacles” have a profound, perhaps irrevocable, impact on those who watch them. The other, and less immediately apparent, is adaptive: both critics endeavor to find adequate terminology to describe the experience these novel diversions create and the sort of interaction they invite or produce (a lexical challenge suggested by both writers’ excessive use of metaphor). A pattern emerges that links these two writers, immutably separated by time and space: both bear witness to cultural moments where a need arises to resurrect long-standing cultural myths about spectators while finding new ways to understand, discuss, and represent the act of spectatorship.
The link I have outlined here is a tenuous one: large, loose and, some might even say, naïvely ahistorical. I begin with this connection, however, to highlight the continuities across time in the spectator’s discursive history, ones that have been obscured by critics’ tendency to highlight the differences between modern and premodern spectatorial practices, practices they imagine as being initiated and shaped by technology and exhibition. Consider, for example, Andrew Gurr’s claims about the essential differences between early modern and contemporary audiences:
“Audience” is a collective term for a group of listeners. A “spectator” is an individual, seeing for him or herself. Modern playgoers are set up, by their physical and mental conditioning, to be solitary spectators, sitting in the dark watching a moving picture, eavesdroppers privileged by the camera’s hidden eye. In fundamental contrast, the early modern playgoers were audiences, people gathered as crowds, forming what they called assemblies, gatherings or companies. They sat or stood in a circle round the speakers who were enacting what they came to hear and see. An audience comes to hear, and therefore it clusters as closely as possible around