Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo
the context of performance is Gayton’s—perhaps hyperbolic and invented, but nonetheless informative—description of how audience demand for specific plays could overrule players’ intentions: “I have known … where the Players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bils to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to; sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes the Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these, and at last, none of the three taking, they were forc’d to undresse and put off their Tragick habits, and conclude the day with the merry milk-maides.”52 In this incident, audience interaction compels the producers to comply with what the consumers desired. Gayton’s playgoers repeatedly interrupt the performance in order to effect changes in what they are seeing—resulting in a kind of theater-on-demand experience. What is being changed, however, is not the scheduling of plays within the repertory, as in Galli’s account, but plays in the midst of acting: plays that readers experience as whole, cohesive, and complete scripts are dismantled, their textual integrity sacrificed for the overriding concern of satisfying audience demand. What Gayton’s audience produces through its control of the playhouse is a new theatrical event, a pastiche “play” composed of bits from Tamburlaine, Jugurth, The Jew of Malta, and The Two Merry Milkmaids. Rather than a unified narrative experience, Gayton’s anecdote suggests that performances, shaped by audience demand, might be disjointed, partial, and generically incongruent miscellanies.53 Like commonplace books, theatrical performance could be a user-made conglomeration of pieces of various texts assembled in response to consumers’ inclinations. In Gayton’s example, the audience enforces its will through violence: “Unlesse this were done, and the popular humour satisfied … the Benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, Oranges, Apples, Nuts, flew about most liberally, and as there were Mechanicks of all professions, who fell every one to his owne trade, and dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruine of a stately Fabrick.”54 If the actors will not use their labor to satisfy the audience, the audience will use its labor to put the actors out of work. The commercial theater thus becomes a site of vocational contest, and consumer interaction becomes work in itself. This audience does not passively consume but instead actively takes charge of its experience, even if such participation involves physically “consuming,” that is, using up, the materials of the playhouse. Ironically, Gayton’s playgoers, in this process of “play breaking,” are “playmaking”: their desire for authority in making their own theatrical experience is so profound that to enforce it they are willing to destroy future opportunities to enjoy it.55 Gayton’s playgoers are not merely engaged in consumer interaction with the playmaking industry; they are (to Gayton’s apparent disgust) establishing the playhouse as, ultimately, their domain alone.
A less adversarial example of a playgoer contributing to the performance of a professional play may be seen in the instance of Jacobean lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke. Whitelocke had written a coranto for the 1633 court performance of James Shirley’s masque The Triumphs of Peace, but “which being cried up, was first played publiquely, by the Blackefryar’s Musicke” before a different play: “Whenever I came to that house [that is, the Blackfriars] (as I did sometimes in those dayes), though not often, to see a play, the musitians would presently play Whitelocke’s Coranto, and it was so often called for, that they would have it played twice or thrice in an afternoon.”56 Like all music in the theater, Whitelocke’s coranto contributed to the audience’s emotional and aesthetic experience and thus also to the received meaning of the play at which it was performed. The participation by Whitelocke in the theatrical event may have been peculiar, but his contribution was just as much a part of the “play” experienced by the audience as the author’s words or actors’ gestures. Furthermore, inclusion of the music at a performance, and thus its effect upon the audience, depended not upon the plans of the professional playmakers but upon the amateur musician’s role as a playgoer, since it was, Whitelocke recalls, played whenever he attended the theater, regardless of the play being staged.
Many accounts of audience behavior during a performance characterize playgoers’ activities as a kind of “other play,” made by the audience and enacted parallel to, often in competition with, the scripted performance on stage. Perhaps the most innocuous, though widespread, version of such disruptions is seen in the (often satirical) descriptions of gallants seated on or near the stage at the private theaters; repeatedly, these playgoers are described as putting themselves on show for the rest of the audience, usually in direct and deliberate competition with the show on stage. For example, John Davies mocks “Rufus the Courtier” who, “at the Theater” first finds the “most conspicuous place” in the audience but then “Doth … to the stage himselfe transferre.”57 Edward Guilpin taunts “Cornelius that braue gallant youth” who “sits o’re the stage / With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth,” dressed to the height of flashy, militaristic fashion.58 Henry Fitzgeoffrey targets a gallant for sitting on “a Stoole and Cushion” on stage dressed in clothes fancy enough to be a costume in the play (“did he not drop / Out of the Tyring-house?”).59 Francis Lenton disparages an “expensiue foole” who would “pay an angell for a paltry stoole” at the Blackfriars and even wear “spangled rare perfum’d attires” when he “so often visited the Globe.”60 Thomas May self-deprecatingly mocked his own habit of putting on a show of fashion while he “sat upon the Stage” at the Blackfriars, one time catching “a Ladies Eie, whose Seate opposed mine [and who] look’d stedfast on me, till the Play ended; seeming to survey my Limbs with amorous curiosity: whilst I advanced them all, to encounter her approbation.”61 In the anonymous epigram “A Description of Spongus the Gallant” in the Farmer Chetham commonplace book, a brawling, lavishly dressed gentleman is mocked because, among many things, “He playes at Primero over the stage” when at the playhouse.62 Perhaps most famous of all, in The Devil Is an Ass, Jonson lambasts such behavior in Fitzdottrel, who will
goe to the Black fryers Play-house,
Sit ithe view, salute all my acquaintance,
Rise up betweene the Acts, let fall my cloake,
Publish a handsome man, and a rich suite
(As that’s a speciall end, why we goe thither,
All that pretend, to stand for’t o’the Stage)
The Ladies aske who’s that? (For, they doe come
To see us, Love, as wee doe to see them).63
The spectacle of clothing, smoking, drinking, reading, gambling, and talking staged by such playgoers meant that the “show” was in the audience as much as—sometimes more than—on the stage. The spaces of the two performances were physically conflated in the architecture of the playhouse: the gallery doubled as both a seating and an acting area, and, at the indoor theaters, the stage itself doubled as a seating area. The very nature of a three-quarters theatrical space compels audience members to become part of the performance observed by others in the same audience.
More substantial and potentially dangerous forms of audience intrusion and performance were not uncommon. For example, William Fleetwood’s June 18, 1584, report of a near brawl at the Theater describes the instigator, “one Browne,” as “having a perrelous witt of his owne.”64 The phrase “of his owne” juxtaposes Browne’s creativity in attempting to provoke a fight with the onstage show created by the playwright. In November 1634, when Robert Leake wrote to Sir Gervase Clifton to inform him of a fight between two courtiers at the Blackfriars, he explicitly described the event as “that actus secundus plaid on Tuesday last.”65 In August 1612, a dispute broke out between several playgoers at the Globe, resulting in a spectacle that must have rivaled the play itself for audience interest. Recently widowed Elizabeth Wybarn had gone to see a play, attended by several others; she was approached by Ambrose Vaux, son of William, Baron Vaux, and apparently was propositioned in an inappropriate manner. Two of her attendants responded with “great violences and blasphemous oathes,” and soon twelve other audience members intervened, “armed arraied and weaponed with Rapiars daggers Pystalls and other weapons” all “in a ryotous manner.”66 Where Wybarn and her companions were in the theater when this happened is not clear,