Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo
anecdote might be hyperbolic ridicule of a naïve playgoer who, confronted with a vivid performance, failed to distinguish between reality and fiction. Even so, however, the comic force of the incongruity—the playgoer trying to change the play and, in effect, history—relies upon recognizing that a playgoer, stirred by an active imagination, might not sit quietly and passively as the play proceeds as scripted.
A playgoer’s interpretive understanding might not, of course, undermine or contradict the designs of the playmakers. As noted, engagement could be kept internal and thus benign. Even in these cases, however, because a text’s meaning cannot exist independent of reception, the spectator’s capacity to fill out the play imaginatively situates that consumer as part of the production process, completing what performance must leave unrepresented. When Simon Forman recorded his experience witnessing a performance of Macbeth in 1611, he remarked that when they encountered the witches, Macbeth and Banquo were “ridinge thorowe a wod”—a scenic detail not in the text of the play and unlikely to be depicted through the use of props, and so probably supplied by Forman’s own imagination.35 Shakespeare penned a script, the King’s Men translated that script into a performance, and, finally, Forman imagined that performance as a fictional event; all three of these—script, performance, reception—make up the “play” that the audience experienced. As amateur dramatist Jasper Mayne assured his royal audience in the Whitehall epilogue of The City Match (1637), “He onely wrote, your liking made the Play.”36
Early modern commentators demonstrate their understanding that the playwright provides what Altman describes as the “strands of verbal and visual material that must be woven by [the audience] into an intelligible fabric.”37 Ultimately, the audience, not the author, was recognized as possessing final, autonomous responsibility for assembling those pieces into a meaningful event, hence the recurrent trope of playwrights anxiously pleading in paratexts that the audience “take thinges as they be ment,” as Richard Edwardes puts it in the prologue to Damon and Pithias (1565–71).38 Edwardes, like other playmakers, knew that what is “ment” by the play is territory the producer must yield to the consumer. Prologues and epilogues repeatedly ask audiences to signal those parts of the play they like and those they dislike, making the promise—genuine or not—that the dramatist will draw upon such feedback to revise the text.39 Whether or not writers or players did take those responses into consideration in revising plays, audiences were frequently, and deferentially, reminded by those within the profession that consumers had, or ought to have, final control over what they saw on stage. The play was, Tiffany Stern points out, “offered to the audience as a mutable text ready for improvement,” and the audience was conditioned to think of itself as the authority guiding that improvement.40 As stationer Richard Hawkins explains in his quarto of Fletcher and Beaumont’s Philaster (1609), “the Actors [are] onely the labouring Miners, but you [that is, the consumers] the skilfull Triers and Refiners.”41 This understanding of consumers as possessing the “skilfull” authority to “try and refine,” that is, judge and revise, posits the audience as the ultimate authority in the playhouse. When the boy actor Ezekiel Fenn played his first man’s role, Henry Glapthorne wrote for him a prologue in which the player refers to himself as an “untry’d Vessell”—but it is the audience members, not the playwright, whom he describes as the “skilful Pilots” who will “stear” his course.42 Theater is a collaborative art, and the collaborating artists are not only in the tiring-house or on the stage; audience theorist Susan Bennet puts it succinctly: “In the theatre every reader is involved in the making of the play.”43 Day, Rowley, and Wilkins’s banquet metaphor can therefore be reversed: the dramatist might supply the ingredients and the playgoers make the dish, just as the spider and the bee “make” poison or honey from the raw material of the flower.
“A stage play should be made”: Playgoers Making—and Unmaking—Plays
It was not impossible, of course, for playgoers to provide playmakers with the actual “ingredients” for a play, beyond the usual commercial factor of audience demand. In 1602, George Chapman wrote a play called The Old Joiner of Aldgate and sold it to Edward Pearce, master of the Children of Paul’s. The script was Chapman’s, but the bookbinder and, apparently, playgoer John Flaskett devised the plot. According to the attorney-general’s bill for the ensuing Star Chamber proceedings, Flaskett decided “that a stage play should be made,” and, accordingly, the play “was made by one George Chapman upon a plot given unto him [by Flaskett] concerning … Agnes Howe.”44 Flaskett hoped to use the play to influence his legal efforts to marry Howe—a wealthy woman who had been betrothed by her father to (at least) three different suitors. The bookbinder did not write the script, but he was a “playmaker” in that he shaped the source material of the Howe betrothals into a plot (probably a summary or outline of the action) for the stage.45 For Old Joiner, someone outside the theater collaborated with a professional dramatist in making a play, but this was not the only instance of outsiders to the industry supplying material to those within the industry. The Duke of Feria, for example, reported to King Philip of Spain that Sir William Cecil had supplied to players the plots for many anti-Catholic interludes staged in London in 1558 and 1559.46 During a Star Chamber trial in 1596, Lord Treasurer Burghley entertained the idea of “hau[ing] those yt make the playes … make a comedie hereof, & to acte it with [the] names” of those involved in the case.47 Similar to Flaskett’s experience, Thomas Dekker reported in his deposition for the 1624 lawsuit resulting from the controversial play Keep the Widow Waking that he and his collaborators had written the script “upp on the instruccions giuen them by one Raph Savage,” a man who does not appear to have been connected to the theater industry.48 In 1601, Francis Mitchell, servant of Edward Meynell of Hawby in Yorkshire, wrote a jig based on the gossip surrounding the failed attempt of Michael Steel of Skelton to sleep with his wife’s maidservant, Frances Thornton; after being performed by amateur actors at several private homes around Yorkshire, the jig was acquired by a touring troupe of professional actors who staged it at the end of their public play performances from June through Christmas 1602.49 It did not require professional training in play-making to transport compelling events from the streets or the courtroom onto the public stage.
Flaskett, Cecil, and Savage instigated the making of new plays by providing dramatists with ready plots; more often, however, audience members “revised” plays written by professional dramatists by, like Hoskins of Oxford, intervening during a performance or altering the immediate performance context. These playgoers collaborated in the creation, not just of dramatic meaning, but of the dramatic event as well. At the broadest level, audiences might demand a change to a company’s intended repertory. Antimo Galli relates such an event in August 1613 at the Curtain, when Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini visited the playhouse; after the play, “one of the actors … asked the people to the comedy for the following day and he named one. But the people desired another one, and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars.’”50 This is a fundamental reshaping of performance context: the spectators wanted a different play from what the actors intended, they demanded it, and, presumably (Galli does not say), the actors acquiesced. While simple, even this intrusion reverses the conventional producer-consumer relationship and posits the audience as the agent setting the terms for its own theatrical experience, putting active consumers in control over responsive producers. Playgoers could also shape the performance context by calling for additional entertainment after the play was over: many performances of plays concluded with a jig, but a reference in James Shirley’s Changes suggests that the staging of the jig was not always by the actors’ choice. In the play, when Caperwit explains to a professional dancer that he himself will “write the songs” to which the dancer will perform, he notes, “Many Gentlemen / Are not, as in the dayes of understanding, / Now satisfied without a Jigge, which since / They cannot, with their honour, call for, after / The play, they looke to be serv’d up ith’ middle.”51 Caperwit suggests two ways in which the audience shapes the theatrical event: first, in the days when the amphitheaters were the only venues (“the dayes of understanding” is a joke about the groundlings who “stood under” the stage) the audience could “call for” a jig after the performance; second, though “honour” now forbids calling out for such entertainment, the players