Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo
in the process of making meaning out of a performed script, that is, in the process of playmaking. Sometimes that contribution might conform to and complete the playwrights’ and players’ intentions, resulting in no significant divergence from the play’s authorial meanings. Preiss points out that often spectators applauding, laughing, or crying in the middle of a performance, though interrupting the theatrical event, nonetheless reinforce the intended generic and aesthetic goals of the scripted play.8 At other times, however, the responses and meaning-making of the playgoer challenge or even contradict those goals, resulting in a new play made by the receiver through the acts of interpretation and response, just as a playwright might rewrite another playwright’s text, or as an actor might, through performance choices, inflect or alter a playwright’s text.9 Examples of early modern playgoers’ participation changing a play demonstrate that audience members held significant potential control over the rest of the audience’s reception and understanding of the play. As noted in the Introduction, given our historical distance from the playhouse and our need to resort to written scripts of plays, scholarship has largely privileged the enduring words of the dramatist as “orchestrators” of audience experience; however, accounts of actual audience experience show that playgoers, through interpretation and intrusion, also orchestrated the play. This chapter historicizes this theoretical commonplace of performance studies within the context of the early modern stage, looking to evidence of how the idea of the participatory, playmaking audience was viewed in the period. Commentators’ complex and varied attitudes toward this concept indicate that it was deeply embedded within early modern theatrical culture and consistently under negotiation by agents of that culture.
“It is not … the Herb that makes the Honey [but] the Bee”: Reception Response in the Early Modern Audience
It is the nature of theatrical performance that every audience member has the capacity to imagine, and so understand, the play in a different way. Because reception of an encoded text requires the receiver’s interpretive response as he or she decodes the text (according to ability and inclination), every such encounter involves the creation of particularized meaning by that receiver. At times, the meaning the receiver makes will accord with what the first maker of the text intended; at other times, however, the recipient’s meaning will differ from those intentions. In both instances, however, the completion of the meaning-making process is in the hands—or, rather, interpretive faculty—of the receiver, not the first maker.10 Joel Altman refers to this as “theatrical potentiality”: the play “is potential insofar as it is incomplete in itself and must coalesce with labile thought- and feeling-structures in an auditor’s mind in order for it to produce the powerful, temporary satisfactions that we call meaning.”11 Because a play has no existence outside its interpretation by a receiver, to produce a play’s “meaning” is to make the play; therefore, every playgoer is a playmaker, creating dramatic meaning at the moment of reception—even if only that one playgoer is the consumer of the meaning produced.12 Theatrical consumption is thus creative; the spectator who “consumes” collaborates in the creation of meaning: “In the theatre every reader is involved in the making of the play.”13 Modern performance theorists repeatedly articulate this view, but it was also prevalent in early modern dramatic culture. Assumption of the significant, productive capacity of audience interpretation was a shared theoretical underpinning for both the theater’s defenders and its detractors.
In refuting William Prynne’s charge that plays are “obscene,” Sir Richard Baker describes audience reception as a form of active creation and in doing so draws upon what amounts to an early modern version of reader-response theory: “It is not so much the Player, that makes the Obscenity, as the Spectatour himself: as it is not so much the Juyce of the Herb that makes the Honey, or Poyson, as the Bee, or Spider, that sucks the Juyce. Let this man therefore bring a modest heart to a Play, and he shall never take hurt by immodest Speeches: but, if he come as a Spider to it, what marvel, if he suck Poyson, though the Herbs be never so sovereign.”14 Baker’s entomological knowledge is lacking, but he does provide an explanation of the subjective nature of audience experience as it was understood by an early modern playgoer: regardless of whether the play is meant by the author or actors to be “modest” or “immodest,” it is the “Spectatour” who finally “makes” the meaning of the play. The bee and spider metaphor, originating in Plutarch’s Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debet (“How the Young Should Study Poetry”), had long been used to describe readers as the ultimate makers of meaning in written works, particularly scripture, but it was applied to other forms of cultural consumption as well, including the audience experience in the playhouse.15 At the conclusion of his defense of the stage in the fifth book of De recta republicae administratione (translated into English by William Bavande in 1559), John Ferrarius urges playgoers to be “like as a Bee” who gathers “the swetenes of her honie” from “diuers floures.”16 In his commendatory verse for Heywood’s Apology for Actors, actor Richard Perkins uses the device to defend the stage against an imagined “Puritanicall” opponent: “Give me a play; that no distaste can breed, / Prove thou a Spider, and from flowers sucke gall, / Il’e like a Bee, take hony from a weed.”17 Theater apologists such as Baker and Perkins found the metaphor useful for responding to antitheatricalists because it redirects the critic’s complaints back upon the critic, arguing that any morally suspect meaning or detrimental effect of a play identified by its opponents was, in fact, a reflection of those opponents’ own moral shortcomings. Underlying this tactic is the metaphor’s implication that the dramatist’s intentions and actors’ interpretations of those intentions are subject to the consumers, the final arbiter of whether the play produces “honey” or “poyson.”
Like Baker and Perkins, others in the period understood that scripted fictions acted upon the stage were completed only within a playgoer’s receptive faculty. Anthony Munday formulates this idea in a negative sense by suggesting that because plays are a “representation of whoredome” therefore “al the people [watching plays] in mind plaie the whores.”18 Such a conception of the audience, of course, suggests an uncritical and uncreative—not to mention uniform—kind of response, at odds with what is seen in the work of the playwriting playgoers. Contrary to Munday’s totalizing assumption about audience absorption (“al the people”), different playgoers in the same audience see different “plays,” and thus each also responds differently. When response is internalized and interpretation purely imagined, the play is completed in the playgoer’s mind; but, as with Hoskins and both the “auditor” and Falkland at Killigrew’s premiere, response might also be expressed outwardly in an effort to impose the playgoer’s individual understanding of the play upon other playgoers (each of whom, as the Pallantus and Eudora incident demonstrates, has imaginatively created his or her own “play”). For many dramatists, reception responses within playgoers’ minds were expected, indeed, even encouraged; externalized reception responses that intruded upon others’ imaginative reception responses, however, were vigorously warned against.
Dramatists could use to their advantage this understanding of each spectator’s interpretive individuality because it allowed writers to assert their singular authority in establishing the play’s meaning. In the prologue to No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1611), Thomas Middleton itemizes the components of the play that various audience members will focus upon: wit, spectacle, costumes, mirth, passion, and more. “How is’t possible to suffice / So many Ears, so many Eyes? … How is’t possible to please / Opinions toss’d in such wild seas?” he asks rhetorically.19 Because perception of the play varies with each audience member, Middleton’s dilemma, indeed, the dilemma of every playwright, is that the play will be, in varying degrees and ways, different for each audience member. Many writers adopt the image of a banquet to explain this problem of the diversity of audience understanding and desire, and to assert the need for a single “cook” to arbitrate among them.20 In The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins adapt the metaphor by explaining that while their play is the product of “the Cookes laborious workmanship,” the materials used to make the meal have been supplied by the audience, “who gives a foule vnto [the] Cooke to dresse.”21 Meaning in this theatrical