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A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers
Читать онлайн.Название A Monster with a Thousand Hands
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812295207
Автор произведения Amy J. Rodgers
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Ingram
While none of the above examples specifically references the theater (although Daniel’s uses a theatrical metaphor), each seeks to describe a sort of looking that produces similar cathartic effects that dramatic performance was imagined to produce. These writers’ use of the newfangled spectator suggests their efforts to articulate certain shifts occurring around the figure of the beholder. Whereas Sidney, Rous, and Daniel describe an interpretive site involving concurrent modes of active and passive interpretation that result in psychic trauma, others try to elucidate the convergence of individual and group consciousness that the theater could facilitate. This play between individual and communal forms of address was not unique to the theater but was related to that which took place in various other contexts, such as public executions and the Anglican Mass. Indeed, one of the most common complaints that city magistrates and clergy alike made against the theater was that it drew people from the churches and into the theaters, a charge that was taken seriously enough to result in the 1569 banning of plays on Sundays. Of equal concern, however, was the belief that the theater, like the Mass, harnessed the combined imaginative and affective energies on which it drew in ways that could animate narrative to the point where it came dangerously close to reality. This generative potency was one point on which both late sixteenth-century protheatrical and antitheatrical treatises concur; as Charles Whitney has put it, the theater’s potency was largely understood as both “a challenge to be overcome [and] a positive resource, a part of what energized a theater and extended its impact beyond the time and place of performance.”33 And, although anti- and protheatrical writers differed on whether this was a quality to celebrate or fear, both see the spectator as a catalyst that ignites the spark of life inherent in stage drama, an ability that imitates, even challenges, the prerogative of divinity itself.
Words Meet Flesh: Communities of Theatrical Looking
The stage’s ability to tap into the imaginative potency inherent in any given audience made it a cause for civic and ecclesiastical concern. However, a more immediate and acute problem was the theater’s ability to draw crowds out of the churches and into the playhouse. Complaints of this nature can be found in the Stationers’ Register from the 1590s, stating that plays withdrew “all sorts in general from their daily resort to sermons and other godly exercise.”34 Often the subject of sermons and other forms of moralist literature, this cultural anxiety pervades Anglican preacher John Northbrooke’s 1577 screed against “idle pastimes”: “And by the long suffring and permitting of these vaine plays, it hath stricken such a blinde zeale into the heartes of the people, that they shame not to say and affirme openly, that Playes are as good as Sermons, and that they learne as much or more at a Playe, than they doe at Gods worde preached. God be mercifull to this Realme of Englande, for we begynne to haue ytching eares, and lothe that heavenly Manna, as appeareth by their flowe and negligent comming unto Sermons, and running so fast, and so many, continually unto Playes.&c.”35 Northbrooke’s tendency toward hyperbole is hardly unique among antitheatrical writers; for example, William Burton’s 1595 sermon contains similar rhetoric: “As wise as they are, they can be at playes by candlelight, & heare them vntil midnight, and that without any inconvenience too, and sweare by their trothe they finde more edefying in one play, then in twenty sermons.”36 Northbrooke’s metaphorical tendencies, however, demonstrate a level of expressiveness not seen in other iterations of the theater-as-replacement-for-the-Mass discourse.37 For example, Northbrooke’s claim that the English “lothe” the heavenly manna that is the word of God parallels the intractable Elizabethans with the ungrateful Israelites, who, when God fed them with heavenly food while they wandered the desert, complained of the monotony of their divinely-provided diet: “And the mixed multitude that was among them fell to lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? / We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: / But our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.”38 Like the Israelites before them, the English risk God’s favor by pursuing the spices of life and valuing earthly pleasures (even those enjoyed under the yoke of physical or spiritual enslavement) over freedom.
In inferring this connection between the English and the Israelites, however, Northbrooke gestures toward something that exists at the core of the way early modern culture imagined theatrical spectatorship. By comparing the English, who run from the church and into the theater, to the Israelites, who eschew the food of God and long for well-fed slavery, Northbrooke delineates English theatergoers as a unique community of believers, even if their belief constitutes heresy. Such kinship manifests not only through ties of race, culture, nation, and religion, but is forged anew through a “blind zeal” for the theater. Northbrooke’s articulation of the theatergoing public as a community is reinforced through his portrayal of England’s playgoers as a people who speak and think as one: “They shame not to say and affirm openly that players are as good as sermons, and that they learn as much or more at a play than they do at God’s word preached.”39 The fact that a similar dialogic form is used in the biblical passage from which Northbrooke’s metaphor derives (the Israelites are depicted as collectively voicing their complaint) does not, I would argue, render it unimaginative or derivative. Rather, Northbrooke selects material that reflects something about the theatrical spectator that he intuits and indirectly expresses.
The theater’s popularity, however, raised a more profound metaphysical issue than the fact it resulted in poor church attendance. The communal force Northbrooke’s early treatise suggests was noted by both the theater’s proponents and detractors. Whereas the antitheatricalists saw this force as one that needed rechanneling back into the devotional sphere, those who wrote for the stage tended to imagine it as a force that could make or break the theater’s creative and financial success. Whether playwrights imagined their playgoers primarily through these mercenary terms is unclear; however, they often articulated the spectatorial energy generated between audience and performance as one that contained something ineffable and incredibly potent. Thomas Nashe’s 1592 social satire, Piers Penniless His Supplication to the Devil, suggests this generative ability: “How it would have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!”40 Nashe describes a traditionally Aristotelian catharsis here in that he describes a spectacle (the bleeding Talbot) that creates a burst of emotion in the onlookers. These spectators, however, play a large role in creating what they see, as Nashe’s rendition imagines the onlookers’ collective response as the animating force behind Talbot’s revivification. While Nashe restricts the “miracle” of Talbot’s resuscitation to the sphere of theatrical make-believe (a device Shakespeare will push to its limits in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale), his metaphor of the body “new embalmed” with the spectators’ tears smacks as much of baptism as of funerary rite, of bestowing new life as of raising specters from the past.
Although Nashe here speaks as a proponent of the theater, he follows antitheatricalist discourse in partaking of devotional imagery to craft his defense. Drawing on the iconic image of the wounded-then-resurrected body as a metaphor for the potency of the theatrical experience, Nashe may simply be throwing the antitheatricalists’ high-flown rhetoric back in their teeth via the mechanisms of satire. Entitled “The Defence of Plays,” this segment of Piers Penniless responds directly to the flurry of antitheatrical tracts generated during the last two decades of the sixteenth century. Although Nashe stops short of definitively referencing the paradigm of Christian martyrdom, his description of Talbot through terms that emphasize both corporeal ephemerality (entombment, embalmment,