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had read in his books—enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, courtships, loves, tortures, and many other absurdities. So true did all this phantasmagoria from books appear to him that he counted no history in the world more authentic.

      —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605

      Written within a few years of each other, the Western literary tradition’s most famous ghost story and its first best-seller contain variations on one of the Renaissance’s most prevalent spectatorial themes: the spectator who cannot or will not differentiate between the representational and the real. Toward the end of the “rogue and peasant slave” monologue, Hamlet recounts an oft-cited theatrical yarn, where an onstage event (usually a violent act) ignites the sleeping conscience of an audience member and drives him or her to confess a similar transgression, a scenario later played out in the play’s third act.¹ An extreme version of Aristotelian catharsis, this model imagines the theater as the affective analogue of the poison poured into Old Hamlet’s ear—an elixir that seeps into the viewer’s moral substrate, forcing that which has been kept hidden into the light. Violence subtends multiple experiential planes here: ontic, theatrical, and psychological. A murder is committed in the real world; later, the perpetrator sees the act mimicked onstage and belatedly feels remorse via traumatic recall. Less apparent is the violence inherent in the spectatorial process itself. An incisive rather than blunt force, the theatrical illusion infiltrates the spectator’s psyche, a procedure that might result in a socially efficacious purging of excess emotion or a bringing forth of monstrous secrets.

      The second version, exemplified by one of Don Quixote’s early passages, describes the more widely circulated version of this paradigm, in which the viewer or reader becomes overly invested in the fictional world presented. Despite satirizing this figure, Don Quixote cannot fully disarm its potential destructiveness: Quixote may be a charming eccentric, but he also forcibly attempts to reinscribe the world according to his own fantasies.² As in the Hamlet example, violence here permeates the imagined relationship between fictional entertainment and its consumer. In this case, however, representation pathologically overtakes the consuming subject’s phenomenological template, changing the way she or he interacts with the world. When such alterations exceed the bounds of an individual’s imagination (as they do with Quixote), they spill into the world of action, sometimes humorously and harmlessly, sometimes violently and irrevocably.

      Issues of spectatorship also connect Hamlet and Don Quixote via a representational genealogy in which both connect to one of seventeenth-century England’s most extended representations of theatrical spectatorship—Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. When Hamlet inquires of Rosencrantz why the players are traveling, he replies,

      There is, sir, an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on top of question and are most tyrannically clapp’d for it. These are now the fashion, and so berattled the common Stages—so they call them—that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither.³

      Almost universally glossed in modern editions as referring to London’s children’s companies, which were popular during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this passage is also frequently cited as referring to the so-called War of the Theaters, or Poetomachia.⁴ While this passage predates Beaumont’s ill-starred play, Knight was written for the Blackfriars children’s company—the battleground on which the Poetomachia was largely fought—and may have been one of its residual casualties.⁵ Although lasting for only a brief period at the sixteenth century’s end, some of the behaviors generated by this “war” (such as railing) persisted, particularly among the children’s companies’ audiences. Knight’s aggressively satirical tone and treatment of spectatorial “types” suggest a template forged in a combative atmosphere; indeed, as Michael Shapiro has argued, the play’s staging of resistance could be an elaborate metadramatic mechanism that attempts to disrupt the potential for audience hostility.⁶

      If Hamlet provides insight into the theatrical culture in which Knight participated, Don Quixote plays a role in its composition and legacy. Several of Knight’s scenes suggest Don Quixote’s influence, such as the mirroring of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza through the Citizen and his apprentice, and the Knight’s onstage confrontation with Barbaroso, the barber-giant.⁷ More directly, the First Quarto’s (1613) dedicatory epistle mentions Cervantes’s novel directly: “Perhaps it will be thought to be of the race of Don Quixote.”⁸ Publisher Walter Burre likely referenced Don Quixote for publicity—by 1613 the novel was an international success⁹ and Thomas Shelton’s English translation had appeared in 1612—but there are other reasons Burre might construct Knight’s genealogy to include Don Quixote. Significantly, the very identificatory template imagined in the novel (and mirrored in its commercial success) is that which Knight seemed unable to cultivate in its theater audience—a potent, unswerving absorption in the world presented to the viewer or reader. By bringing Don Quixote and Knight into the same orbit, Burre imagines a space where identification can be reforged, where a play that fails on the stage may find a new, more appreciative audience in print. Who might be included in that audience, however, is highly ambiguous—a reality highlighted by the passive locution of Burre’s sentence: “Perhaps it will be thought to be of the race of Don Quixote” (my italics). The sentence’s subject, of course, is the play, but “it” can only wait and hope to “be thought to be of” by an oddly absent entity—a presence that hovers uneasily in the statement like the vestiges of a now-absent god in the temple ruins of a long-vanished culture.

      As argued earlier, this inchoate figure can be read as symptomatic of a discourse in flux, one struggling to incorporate changing ideas about theatrical spectators as watchers, readers, and consumers. Of particular interest to me in the above examples, however, is the way these writers recalibrate violence not only as something that may occur within the viewing-reading process itself—that is, something that may occur within the spectator’s imagination when it engages with certain kinds of representation—but something that is acted out within and on the artistic product itself. Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Knight all contain scenes depicting the cessation or destruction of their respective mediums. Claudius’s act of dramatis interruptus in act 3, scene 2, may testify to his burdened soul, but it also disrupts and ends The Murder of Gonzago. Don Quixote’s housekeeper burns his library, and Knight’s entire premise swerves on the systematic dismantling of a play by audience members. And, if it is true that The Murder of Gonzago serves its purpose and does not really need an ending, that Cervantes’s novel is saved from burning by a literature-loving priest, and that Knight ultimately proves an interesting, if Frankensteinian, production, these outcomes do not fully efface the images of violence enacted on the vehicle of representation.

      While hardly ubiquitous, the destruction of books and plays (imagined or enacted) is seen with some frequency, particularly in the first decades of the seventeenth century. The senate burns Sejanus’s books, and Prospero drowns his. Although found mostly in prologues and paratextual apparatuses, the image of the wounded, even slaughtered, play abounds during this period; for example, in his commendatory epistle to Fletcher’s 1608 stage failure, The Faithful Shepherdess, Jonson refers to the play as a “murdered poem.”¹⁰ This trope (if one can call it such) becomes more pronounced if one includes its reverse—moments where artistic objects come to life or are anthropomorphized, such as Imogen’s reading of Tereus’s tale moments before Iachimo enters her bedchamber, or Middleton’s claim that “plaies in this citie are like wenches new falne to the trade, onelie desired of your neatest gallants, while they are freshe.”¹¹ Whether suggestive of a fantasy or anxiety (or some admixture thereof) on the part of these authors, a figurative trend emerges where they describe their “works” (in the Jonsonian sense) as sentient, visceral, and, most important, mortal.

      I highlight this descriptive tendency because it offers an alternative lens through which to consider the link between psychic and material violence often imagined as part and parcel of the theatrical spectator’s experience. It also offers another hermeneutic by which to explore Knight, a text that has tended to serve

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