Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo
… before doing it all over again.27 Conceptualizing playgoing as a time-wasting activity disempowers the playgoer and represents the audience experience as, though perhaps pleasurable, essentially passive and disengaged. Certainly for some the playgoing experience was, as Andrew Gurr puts it, “a distraction from the serious things of life.”28 For example, in his diary, Sir Humphrey Mildmay repeatedly characterizes his playgoing as unimportant idleness, merely a means of using up spare time: “To the Elder Brother att the bla: ffryers & was idle”; “after Noone I wente to a playe & was soe Jmployed that day”; “to a playe & loitred all the day”; “to the Newe play att Bl: fyers … where I loste the whole day”; “after Noone I Loitered att a playe.”29 Mildmay acknowledges that attending the theater wastes his time, though his continuous return implies the pleasure ensuing from that experience. While not everyone enjoyed the opportunity to spend all day at the theater, others who attended more infrequently might also have considered playgoing no more than passive escapism; as the author of Historia Histrionica recalled, “Very good People think a Play an Innocent Diversion for an idle Hour or two.”30 Even playgoers who physically or emotionally responded to a play might be considered passive consumers if that response did little more than react to the fiction of the performance. Certainly the emotional reactions of spectators contributed to the effect of the dramatic event; as Matthew Steggle explains, “The audience, too, have their role as important contributors to the symphony” that is heard in the playhouse during a performance.31 Numerous descriptions of audiences emphasize their rapt attention, as if, as Preiss puts it, they have been put under “a kind of hypnotic grip” by the play. These audiences are engaged and responsive, but they are not active in terms of paying attention to, and trying to contribute to, the making of dramatic meaning and effect. Stephen Gosson, for example, cites Xenophon’s account of an audience response to a performance of the “Tale of Bacchus, and Ariadne” at a banquet, beginning at a moment when Ariadne gestures provocatively to Bacchus: “At this the beholders beganne to shoute, when Bacchus rose up … the beholders rose up, every man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to hover …, when they sware, the company sware, when they departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire, they that were married posted home to theire wives; they that were single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded.”32 These playgoers respond in sympathy with the performance, a demonstration of their emotional engagement with the fiction, but this engagement—despite the outward markers of “activeness,” such as shouting, standing, swearing, and so forth—is still absorption stemming from an acritical acceptance that the fiction is itself real. When the spectators depart for their own sexual adventures, they confirm this absorption, as if they are incapable, or uninterested in, acknowledging the fiction of the performance.
Not every encounter between spectator and stage was one of absorption and passivity: for every Humphrey Mildmay, absorbing the play without critical engagement, there was a Walter Mountfort, assiduously attempting to analyze how that play was made into a performance. The assumption of audience complicity and assimilation characteristic of Gosson, as with most antitheatricalists, is also the fundamental lynchpin of the “orchestration” approach, which prefers—indeed, requires—a passively receptive audience. Our understanding of the audience, however, must also account for the attentive Mountfort; describing his apparent engagement with the stage as a mere “pastime” would be inaccurate. For the Mildmays in the audience, to be at a play was to be “at play,” but for the Mountforts, to be at a play was to be, in a manner, “at work.” For both, playgoing involved a trade-off against the vocational, socially sanctioned use of their time, but for attentive, participatory audience members, this resulted in no mere idleness—it was heightened activity involving labor, engagement, and even some transgressive assertiveness. The term “recreation” today refers implicitly to activities undertaken purely for pleasure, but in the period it was often used to describe nonvocational activities that involved some fulfilling labor that renewed one’s spirit; in this sense, attending plays could effectively “re-create” the playgoer himself or herself.33 In his commendation to Thomas Heywood in An Apology for Actors, Richard Perkins draws an explicit distinction between unrewarding ways to “spend [his] idle houres”—drinking, gambling, drabbing, or bowling—and the “recreation” of “seeing a play,” which will “refresh” his “tir’d spirits”: “My faculties truly to recreate / With modest mirth, and my selfe best to please / Give me a play.”34 But it is not only the playgoer who is “re-created” by the encounter; after the performance, the attentive playgoer may be able to re-create the play itself. Indeed, as explored below, to leave the playhouse with the ability to re-create the play—what we might term “re-creative playgoing” rather than merely “recreative playgoing”—was recognized in the period as a particular brand of dedicated, even productive, theatrical consumption, bordering on the avocational.
The religious term “avocation” was first used to describe a diversion from one’s proper calling around 1617 and, unlike “recreation” or “pastime,” implied a tension with professionalism similar to that evoked by the modern “amateur.”35 It is usually assumed that, while professionals develop their craft in response to the pressures of the market, avocational practitioners, lacking such pressure, simply do not worry about improving their craft, which often leads to the supposition that “success” was unimportant to them. The results of avocational labor are thus usually assumed to be only atypical—reflecting the desires of the individual producer more than the needs or wants of consumers—and, because of infrequent practice, defective. Thus the pejorative connotations of “amateur”: someone who has nothing at stake and so is uninterested in working to give others what they want, settling, instead, for what he himself or she herself desires. Richard Brome warned his audience in the prologue to The Court Beggar (1639–40), that such amateur dramatists “Write / Lesse for your pleasure than their own delight.”36 By contrast, professionals needed to please the audience, and so they had to learn to write plays that appealed to the demands and tastes of the largest group of consumers. It is fallacious, however, to attribute that same definition of “success” to plays written by playgoers who were not interested in, and thus not bound by, the professionals’ standard of commercialization. Simply because their ends differed, though (when those ends can be discerned at all), we should not think that amateurs necessarily invested a lower level of attention to their work than professionals; indeed, as the examples in this book demonstrate, amateurs often displayed heightened care and concern for their work and often closely tried to follow the working practices of the profession. As most studies of amateurism conclude, as a driver for effective practice, intrinsic motivation can equal, if not surpass, the extrinsic motivation of financial reward. The desire to find self-determined pleasure in an activity can produce an overwhelming desire to do that activity well: “Every real amateur feels responsible to some notion of doing the loving well, and that entails a kind of caring, both practice and intensity of effort, that could be called work.”37 It is in this “work” that amateurism realizes its affinity with avocation.38 The resonances associated with “avocation” are thus useful in understanding how playgoers who wrote for the stage can be distinguished from those for whom playgoing was indeed merely a form of entertainment.
Writers in the period, particularly antitheatricalists, often emphasize a moral distinction between occasional playgoing and playgoing that was too committed and crossed the line from leisure into avocation. As Richard Brathwait urged, attending plays was not a cause for concern so long as playgoing remained unimportant leisure:
I doe hold no Recreation fitter
Than Morall Enterludes; but have a care
You doe not make them too familiar;
for that were to invert a Recreation,
And by day-practice make it a Vocation.39
Brathwait puns on “a Vocation” (avocation) as the “inverse” of recreation: occasionally and uncritically sitting in the audience requires no diligence or labor and thus does not risk offending the period’s avocational taboo.40 A fine line, however, separates such attendance from playgoing that becomes “familiar” and thus avocational, between recreative playgoing and re-creative