LITMIR.BIZ

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“If this episode were played out in the lords’ rooms right above the stage, the real-life events may even have eclipsed the play in the minds of the spectators as well as the participants.”⁶⁷

      In a more poetic vein, Henry Fitzgeoffrey uses a playmaking metaphor to give voice to a rake who, instead of watching a play at the Blackfriars, is busy watching the other spectators, including a “Cheapside Dame”: “Plot (Villain!) plot!” he tells his companion, so they might “devise [a way] to get her hither” into their box.⁶⁸ The rake tells his friend if “[we] lay our heads together,” the lady will “holde us doing till the Latter Act,” appropriating the theatrical term (the final act of the play) as a bawdy description of the desired outcome of his tryst (the act of intercourse). With similar sexualizing of playmaking terminology, Thomas May characterizes his elaborate scheme to win the attention of a woman in the audience at the Blackfriars as “a parlous Plot.”⁶⁹ Samuel Rowlands merges the criminal and theatrical senses of “plotting” in his description of a pickpocket attempting to cut the bottom of a purse during a performance: when both the performance and robbery are complete, “The Play is done and foorth the foole doth goe.”⁷⁰ Rowlands’s joke depends upon the ambiguous identification of the “Play” as either the fiction performed on the stage or the crime performed in the audience, casting the victim in the stock theatrical role of the “foole.” Merging the “play” in the audience with that on stage, playhouse offenders were often compelled to appear on the stage as well. Will Kemp recalled that whenever a “Cut-purse” was “at a play … taken pilfring[,] … we [would] tye [him] to a poast on our stage, for all people to wonder at.”⁷¹ The character Nobody in the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (ca. 1606) likewise notes, “Somebody once pickt a pocket in this Play-house yard, / Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it.”⁷² In these instances, the playgoer’s “performance” was drawn onto the stage, but in 1583, at the Red Lion in Norwich, the Queen’s Men took the show into the auditorium in order to chase off two audience members who refused to pay admission.⁷³ Richard Tarlton and John Bentley leapt from the stage, in costume and with property swords in hand, to defend the doorkeeper, fellow actor John Singer, from the men; eventually, another spectator, Henry Brown, joined them in the affray and was involved in fatally stabbing one of the intruders—an instance of players and playgoers collaborating in a peculiar, violent way to make a spectacle.⁷⁴ If the early modern playhouse comprised not so much a performance space and an audience space but two different kinds of performance space, Kemp’s account, Nobody’s joke, and the Queen’s Men’s storming of the auditorium all speak to a degree of both tension and exchange between the two. When the audience’s performance spills into the actors’ space and competes with professional control over what gets “played” in the commercial place of business, the actors must either comply (as in Gayton’s anecdote) or retaliate (as Kemp, Nobody, and the Queen’s Men did). In either case, the dynamic between audience and play is interactive: playgoers create drama in the playhouse just as much as watch it.

      Furthermore, when events on stage resembled what playgoers thought to be a version of their own life in the real world, that sympathy was often expressed in the language not of dramatic reflection but of dramatic self-production. For example, in referencing the oft-repeated anecdote about a woman moved to confess to the murder of her husband while watching a similar murder enacted in a play, a character in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women (1596) recalls that the murderer “cryed out, the Play was made by her.”⁷⁵ In Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), the player Paris defends the theater by claiming its innocence of its own effects, particularly noting that if the players should depict “a loose adultresse” on stage and in the audience “a Matron … Guilty of such a foule unnaturall sinne / Crie[s] out tis writ by me, we cannot helpe it.”⁷⁶ Identifying the matron as the “author” of the play on the stage subsumes the real crime into the fictional and reinforces the sense of the consumer as the one who has produced the spectacle. Paris’s logic goes even further, effectively disempowering the professional playmakers by taking from them the capacity to control the meanings made by their play (“we cannot helpe it”) and rendering them the passive instruments of the active spectator.

      Reality and performance in the playhouse are repeatedly presented as composite, even indistinguishable, in a single sociocultural continuum. Antitheatricalists were intensely aware of, and alarmed by, this capacity of the playhouse to fold reality and fiction together. Anthony Munday, for example, argued that playgoers actually participate in the sins they see enacted on stage and thus bear responsibility, with the players, for “making” the play and its meanings: “Al other evils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers.… [T]he filthiness of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladlie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors.”⁷⁷ The play’s “beholder,” its consumer, is also a “doer” or producer. Playgoers, playmakers, and even opponents of plays saw the auditorium as a performative space and the performance occurring in it as one in which audience members were both authors and actors.

      Theatrical experiences beyond the commercial playhouses also blurred the playgoer/playmaker binary. There was no line, for example, separating audiences and actors at Inns of Court entertainments.⁷⁸ Likewise, crowds observing civic pageants were themselves part of the entertainments that they watched.⁷⁹ In some pageants—such as James’s 1604 entry into London—spectators were not just performers but also authors, seeming to erupt spontaneously into orations, recitations, and songs of their own creation.⁸⁰ At the universities, audiences, actors, and writers also belonged to one and the same community; as the anonymous antitheatricalist “J. G.” complains in his rebuttal to Heywood’s An Apology for Actors, “And who [at the universities] are the spectators? but such like as both Poets and Actors are.”⁸¹ Spectators of shows of “bodily feats,” such as dancing and tumbling, were, as Erika Lin argues, “thought of as active participants even when they merely watched the show.”⁸² Even at sermons, audiences were accustomed not to silent, passive reception but to “interactive conversations … in which the congregation and preacher collaborated in the creation of the occasion.”⁸³ When individuals who learned to become consumers of performances at schools, universities, the Inns, city streets, great halls, town halls, guildhalls, or churches and open-air “crosses” brought that experience into the professional theaters, they were bringing an understanding of cultural consumption that required their collaborative participation. Amateur dramatists who wrote their own plays for professional actors merely extended that collaboration from the figurative and imaginative into the literal and active, assuming a materially interactive relationship between producers and consumers. Rather than simply responding to professionals’ scripts, imagining the fiction of what they saw represented, or applauding and hissing what they liked and disliked, amateur dramatists drew upon their experience as theatrical consumers and their own creativity and understanding to write new plays envisioned for the stage. The move from reception to creation required more than just attention and taste, of course; to write a play, would-be playwrights in the audience had to have, or at least think that they had, a critical understanding of the ways in which plays worked.

      “Scarce two … can understand the lawes”: Critical Capacity and the Playgoer as Revising Playmaker

      Playwrights in the period frequently draw attention, favorably and unfavorably, to the capacity of audience members to judge and critique specific aspects of the play, anatomizing the whole and analyzing the effectiveness of each individual part. For example, John Ford praises Blackfriars playgoers for their “Noble Judgements” that “understand” The Broken Heart (1630–33), but he acknowledges also that some in the audience might “say, ‘This was flat’; Some ‘here the Sceane / Fell from its height’; Another that the Meane / was ‘ill observ’d.’”⁸⁴ Recognizing that audience judgment involves taking his play apart into its constituent pieces, Ford concludes the epilogue by comparing such dissective critique to the play’s title, imagining that if only the “Best” in the audience approve of it, “The Broken Heart may be piec’t up againe.” Playwrights’ acknowledgments of such “judicious” playgoing became particularly prevalent in the Caroline

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