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that playwrights developed in response to the coterie audiences’ habit of “celebrat[ing] themselves at the expense of the play.”
13 But, as Jeffrey Masten has pointed out, the play is also one of the clearest articulations of a discourse expanding to include the idea of drama as a commercial product subject to consumer desire.
14 In “The Audience as Patron:
The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” Alexander Leggatt argues that the primary anxiety to which the play responds is, “How does [the playwright] resist the tyranny of the audience and maintain the right to work on one’s own terms, when the audience is paying the bills?”
15 But whereas Leggatt understands this dynamic to signify the play’s “demystify[ication of] theatre by presenting it as a cash transaction,”
16 I see it as elucidating a variant of the early modern discursive spectator. Earlier versions of this figure (including many classical models) imagine the link between violence and spectatorship through a cause-and-effect model in which dramatic and literary fiction had the potency not only to penetrate the viewer’s imagination but also to lacerate his or her subconscious, a psychic injury that could result in violent acts committed in the material world.
17 By the seventeenth century, however, an offshoot of this discursive figuration appears: the spectator that unleashes his or her destructive energies on the object of representation.
18 This spectatorial revenant begins to haunt seventeenth-century theatrical discourse (particularly that generated by playwrights) owing to a combination of real and perceived commercial pressures, proliferation of venues, and alterations in audience behavior.
