Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater. Matteo A. Pangallo
had of the professional stage.
As with amateur players, amateur dramatists were often financially compensated for their labor. In March 1614, for example, the University of Cambridge paid Thomas Tomkis twenty pounds for writing the comedy Albumazar.62 Likewise, though the original audience for Tailor’s Hog Hath Lost His Pearl at Whitefriars in February 1613 was “invited,”63 the title page of the 1614 quarto notes that the play was subsequently “Divers times Publickely acted.” The term “Publickely” suggests that it was performed for paying audiences, and accordingly the actors likely recompensed Tailor for his labor. Playgoers such as Mountfort and Clavell, who supplied their plays to professional companies, were no doubt paid for their scripts, whether or not the play was eventually staged and even though they themselves evidently did not seek to enter the profession. Being paid for having written a play is thus an inadequate criterion for determining what makes certain dramatists “professionals,” just as not being paid fails to account for what makes others “amateurs.” Even if they were compensated for their labor, many of these amateur writers, like amateur players, participated in the playmaking process for the personal pleasure of it rather than out of concern for public reception. Many courtier dramatists, who wrote to please a very small target audience, were particularly, often proudly, unconcerned with what general audiences might think of their work. The minor aristocrat and amateur dramatist Sir Cornelius Fermedo, for example, declares to the audience of his play The Governor that even “if he wrote for gaine / He would not give a feather to obtaine / All yore approfes”: he wishes to be “vnderstood,” not “flatter’d,” and he has seen in the audience only twelve people—probably fellow courtiers—who possess sufficient “prudence and impartiallitie” to be “his Jury in this place.”64 This adversarial tone is amplified in the epilogue, where Fermedo notes, “Who writes for pleasure never taketh care / Whether he’s Where lik’t or not”; he points out that he can always
ingage
The players by filling of the stage
… to a play that’s new [because] before tis knowne
either for good or bad the people come.65
Fermedo proudly declares his freedom from the financial need to please the audience, but he also reiterates his desire to “ingage” the players, fill the auditorium, and, if need be, write more plays: “Hisse if you dare,” he challenges the audience, “if so … heele write: some thing that’s new & worse” because “hee’d rather be twice hiss’t then have one clap.”66 Brathwait adopts a similar attitude to Fermedo’s, conflating audience understanding of his (now lost) plays with socioeconomic position: because his plays were “free-borne, and not mercenarie,” they “received gracefull acceptance of all such as understood my ranke and qualitie”; that is, writing for pleasure elevates the author above the usual quality of work produced by commercial authors.67 Brathwait—again cautious about making theater an avocation—justifies his forays into playwriting upon the grounds of personal pleasure: they were simply meant “to allay and season more serious studies” rather than to serve as “any fixt imployment.”68 Again, the distinction between the amateur’s involvement with the theater and the professional’s centers upon the professional’s continuous (“fixt”) practice and hence internal familiarity with how it worked.
Glynne Wickham has argued that “by the start of the seventeenth century virtually all amateur play production (excepting that among courtiers and students) had ceased.”69 This totalizing language has led to the assumption that if someone wrote a play for the public stage after 1567, it must have been because he wanted to become professional or was an aristocrat uninterested in professionalizing. Scholars following Wickham have largely taken the evolution of public theater in London into a professional enterprise as both inevitable and absolute. As “amateur play production” in London became scarcer after the 1570s, however, the public stages became some of the last available venues in which nonprofessional playmakers could participate in dramatic culture. Amateur playwriting increased in frequency the more established the professional theater became, reaching in the Caroline era the crescendo that professionals such as Jonson and Brome found most irritating.70 For many amateurs, play-writing was indeed merely a hobby undertaken at the universities, among coteries of readers, or by courtiers seeking to impress the court. It is this last group, the courtiers, that scholars usually acknowledge as the only amateurs writing for the post-1567 professional stage, and so amateurism has come to be seen as a privilege of only the upper classes.
This class-limited definition of amateur playwriting derives in large part from the influence of J. W. Saunders’s 1964 Profession of English Letters. In a brief chapter on amateur writing in the Renaissance, Saunders describes the amateur as exclusively aristocratic and centered upon the court.71 Concomitant to Saunders’s view is the generalization that amateur writing required leisure time and freedom from economic need, both of which were unavailable to nonaristocratic writers, who must have therefore been interested only in monetizing their labor.72 Although Saunders’s assumption is contradicted by the actual socioeconomic diversity of amateur dramatists, it has shaped most scholarship on early modern playwriting because being paid to write for the stage, though potentially lucrative, was socially marginalized—ideal conditions for his hypothesis.73 It is true that throughout the period, but particularly after 1630, courtiers seeking prestige and influence at court supplied plays (usually with money) to professional actors (usually the King’s Men) for performance before the monarch and in commercial playhouses (usually the Blackfriars). Defining “amateurism” as a practice of these writers exclusively, however, overlooks nonaristocratic amateurs such as Mountfort and Clavell. While the work of the courtier dramatists is important to understanding the larger picture of amateur playwriting in the early modern period, it is not the focus of this book. Because of the influence of Saunders’s work, these writers have already received critical attention, both in individual studies and as a group more generally.74 Focusing only on aristocratic amateurs—indeed, defining the category “amateur” exclusively on socioeconomic grounds—has shaped the questions scholars ask about amateur playwrights, often taking focus away from matters of theatricality and putting it on matters of politics. The disciplinary dominance of Saunders’s class-based definition of amateurism has prevented us from fully taking advantage of the evidence provided by amateurs whose perspective on the stage was not centered upon the court or its culture. There is a distinct difference in perspective upon, and access to, the professional stage between a politically influential and potentially powerful aristocrat who might even pay the players to stage his play and a socially and economically marginalized single-time dramatist who has little to offer beyond his play. The two types of amateurs differ in their position relative to the stage, and thus their plays will reveal different types of information about their views of that stage.
In his 1986 The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, G. E. Bentley broadened the definition of “amateur” beyond Saunders’s socioeconomic classification by identifying the amateur playwright as a writer of any class who did not make a living from the writing of plays, wrote infrequently, and did not develop a sustained relationship with a commercial playing company; “though numerous and diverse,” Bentley observes, “and indicative of the strong appeal of the drama in these years, [they] were never people who looked to the commercial theatres for a living.”75 Other historians since Bentley have followed his lead in taking infrequent dramatic activity and external position to the social, economic, and artistic community of the commercial stage as the defining characteristics of the amateur.76 Counting writers of private plays for household and town performances, academic dramatists, closet dramatists, and courtier dramatists, Bentley estimates that between 1590 and 1642, more than two hundred such amateurs wrote approximately 265 surviving plays. Unfortunately, the four spaces counted by Bentley in making this tally have become tacitly accepted as the only domains of amateur playwriting in the period: the “closet,” the home or town, the academy, and the court. Because of the continued influence of Saunders’s work, scholars still typically assume that, except for the courtiers, amateurs wrote only for amateur actors (as with academic dramatists and dramatists who wrote for private performances) or readers (as with closet dramatists).