LITMIR.BIZ

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      Although Gurr begins by comparing early modern and modern playgoers, he moves quickly to associating modern spectators with film, saying they are “eavesdroppers privileged by the camera’s hidden eye.” His elision of film and theater, or more accurately, his tacit claim that “modern” spectators are shaped by cinema, illustrates the ways that studies of spectatorship (and even the term spectator itself) has been overdetermined as a modern phenomenon. Despite the fact that he later acknowledges the use of spectator by early modern writers, Gurr makes the case here that by and large, the term is anachronistic as a referent for early modern theatergoers. Like many cultural theorists, Gurr understands twentieth-century spectatorship as image-rather than language-driven, fostering a sense of private, even voyeuristic looking and interactive only in a virtual sense.

      Gurr’s demarcation points to a question that drives much of this study: how did early modern playwrights see the difference between “an audience” and “spectators”? Did they adhere to Gurr’s neat sensory and subjective taxonomies, or were they less clear about such differences? Why did the term spectator appear in the English language during the late sixteenth century at all: what conceptual work might it signify? In order to begin addressing such questions, I explore some of the term’s earliest instances and contexts in order to trace certain discursive threads that begin to coalesce around the figure of the spectator during the final decades of Elizabeth I’s reign. Three of the most widely repeated conventions are as follows:

      • Spectatorship constitutes a dynamic exchange between the theatrical event and the individuals experiencing it. Frequently, it is portrayed as a violent, even traumatic, experience.

      • Spectatorship suggests a collective experience shared by a community of interpreters. The energies generated by this community are believed to contain a creative spark that imitates or mimics the divine.

      • Spectatorship is not an experience relegated to the sensory binary of audial-visual, but is imagined and articulated as one that activates multiple senses for the spectator.

      Although distinct, these “tenets” do not exist in isolation. Rather, they intersect at a larger early modern concern about the spectator, one still highly topical at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each of these concepts represent an initial attempt by early modern writers to articulate the theater’s unique ability to create something that could (a) seem more real to the spectator than reality itself, and (b) cause the spectator to want (or even at times attempt) to inscribe this alternative reality onto the world in which he or she lived. In other words, what was it about the particular interaction between theatrical performance and the theatrical spectator that opened up a space where the imaginary could, even if only temporarily, become confused with or mistaken for the real? To use a contemporary analogy, film and television are often seen as particularly effective mechanisms for the dissemination of ideology because of how they manipulate the viewer’s point of view. Techniques such as continuity editing, camera angle, and film speed create a uniquely “real” experience for the spectator, one designed to enhance perceptual experience and detail. But the early modern professional theater, using what we would today call “minimalist” sets and other nonrealistic conventions (such as having boys play women and the doubling and tripling of roles), would seem to provide clear signposts of the theater’s fictionality. As Philip Sidney points out in his Apologie for Poetrie, “What child is there that, coming to a play and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?”¹⁸ Clearly the potency of the theatrical experience for the early modern spectator was not based on the sort of verisimilitude created by modern viewing technologies. Was it, then, that the theater engaged the spectator’s imagination through completely different channels, or was it that verisimilitude itself meant something different to the early modern spectator?

      The three concepts of spectatorship outlined above provide a starting point for exploring these questions. Rather than attempting to excavate actual spectatorial experience, I assess how those who thought and wrote about this figure imagined and tried to articulate and control that experience. As with the case of Gorky, some of this narrative comes from “real” or perceptual experience. Many of the individuals writing about the theater (whether for or against) were themselves theatergoers; certainly Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights attended the theater, and many of the “antitheatricalists” were former playwrights and actors. Some of the narrative, however, comes from preexisting ideas about the spectator that arrives in the sixteenth century through oral (folklore, gossip, sermons) and written discourse (moralist and philosophical treatises, romance, and classical drama). Therefore, while my project seeks to articulate an early modern theory of discursive spectatorship that is my own, the ideas from which it is constructed are theirs. Found in a range of late sixteenth-century writings on and for the theater, these texts grapple with the figure of the spectator and the “new” experiences of looking that developed alongside the rise of the professional theater in early modern England. For those writing against the theater, the sorts of interpretive exchanges that occurred in the playhouse were seen as potentially subversive and ultimately detrimental to the individual and society. For those invested in and writing for the stage, this dynamic was not only celebrated but, as my later chapters explore, feared, as the energies generated when spectators and drama met in the theater were not easily predicted or controlled. Before turning to those writers who were engaged actively in this debate, I first visit the site where the term spectator emerges: a prose romance penned by one of the most spectacular figures of the Elizabethan court.

      The Active–Passive Spectator and the Rhetoric of Violence

      Gurr’s claim that the collective term audience triumphed over the solitary spectator in early modern references is only partly accurate. While audience may have been used more frequently than spectator, both are found regularly in writings about the stage and other forms of early modern spectacle.¹⁹ The term first appears in the sixteenth century: the Oxford English Dictionary cites Philip Sidney as the first Anglophone author to use spectator in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.²⁰ It appears with greater frequency as the late sixteenth century (and playgoing culture) progresses, and, by the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century, is used regularly to refer to theater audiences and other groups gathered together for the purpose of looking. For early modern writers who settled on spectator as another way of representing the “audiences,” “beholders,” and “onlookers” of their culture, this term did not evoke the same sorts of meaning we assign it from our twentieth-century critical perspective. But how did it function for them? Gurr suggests it filled a particular need in the vocabulary of playwrights concerned with the interpretive tension between looking and listening, particularly by those who used it to deride audiences that preferred the visual side of stagecraft to linguistic artistry. Citing Ben Jonson as chief among detractors of those who come primarily to look rather than listen, Gurr states, “Every time Jonson called his auditors ‘spectators,’ as he almost invariably did, he was covertly sneering at the debased preference for stage spectacle rather than the poetic ‘soul’ of the play, which he claimed they could only find by listening to his words.”²¹ Jonson, of course, is something like an early modern version of Mikey from the Life cereal commercials of the 1970s—he hates everything—and therefore is not the most objective of cultural witnesses. But Gurr claims that Jonson is by no means the only critic of the “barren spectators”; apparently, many of Jonson’s contemporaries shared the view that poetry was losing out to spectacle.²²

      In claiming, however, that even in the early modern period the term spectator was tied inextricably to the visual, Gurr contradicts his initial claim about the difference between Renaissance audiences and contemporary ones. If early modern playgoers “were audiences,” and an audience “comes to hear,” why did there emerge a need for a term that separates lookers from listeners? Neither Sidney nor Edmund Spenser, two of the earliest English writers to use the term, wrote for the stage; therefore, it is unlikely that the competition between sight and hearing that obsessed Jonson and his contemporaries would have held the same charge for them.²³ Gurr himself expresses some confusion over Sidney’s use of spectator, since he assumes the poet would naturally privilege hearing over seeing: “Curiously the first

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