Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling. Musa Gurnis
watch themselves act up. It is true that early work on audience response to early modern performance, such as Jean E. Howard’s Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration, tended toward a more coercive vocabulary in which stage effects “force” or “compel” particular responses from spectators. Yet, rather than harp on thirty-year-old diction choices that have since been abandoned by Howard herself—and by most others who are interested in the effects of plays on the people who watch them—it seems more productive to me to develop the methodological insights of reader-response-derived performance criticism into the intimate relationship between theatrical technique and audience experience.43 For example, although Shakespeare’s Art prioritizes the craft of the author, Howard’s early recognition of scripts as shaped by and for a fuller field of performance practices anticipates the expanded understanding we now have of theatrical agency as distributed across the playing system as a whole.44 Performance is a river that no one steps in twice. However, reader-response-based criticism’s attention to scripts as agents and archives of the unfolding of audience experience over time makes it well equipped to examine the cultural processes enabled in live theater.
Certainly, early modern theatergoers sought forms of gratification unrelated to the performed script. Preiss, Paul Yachnin, and others offer compelling accounts of the opportunities playhouses afforded for individual social performance.45 People went to the theater for many perfectly good, nondramatic reasons: to sightsee, to sell or steal things, to cruise for sex, to flaunt their clothes and wit. Playgoers could be fractious, resistant, and sometimes more interested in themselves than the stage. But this does not preclude more receptive playhouse moods. Audience members could revel in their own activities independent of the drama, and also enjoy being moved as a group in harmony with a play. Robert Shaughnessy describes actor-audience interactivity in the reconstructed Globe as a process of “entrainment,” defined in communication studies as the phenomenon in which “two or more individuals lock into each other’s rhythms of, for example, movement, speech, and gesture.”46 In the context of theatrical reception, this does not mean marching in lockstep. Shaughnessy records divided responses among different demographics of playgoers, as well as strong feelings of playhouse-wide connectedness. Modern actors often describe Globe audiences as a “sea of faces.”47 The metaphor captures the simultaneously synchronic and multidirectional quality of theatrical response. The shared visibility among audiences and actors produces eddies, as well as waves, of emotional contagion. Actors and audiences share always-changing oscillations of feeling and attention. But while the rhythms of performance move the playhouse, actors also experience their audiences as too vast and protean to control. Entrainment is a complex and mutual process: not hypnosis.
The orchestration of collective and ideologically elastic audience experience is not an oppressive form of “mind control.”48 Some recent work seeks to “restore power … to early modern spectators” by prioritizing “uncued audience agency.”49 Hobgood objects to conceptualizing theatrical experience in terms of drama’s impact on playgoers and “rejects an incapacitating docility [implicit in the term] ‘reception.’ ”50 This is a gratuitously convoluted way of thinking about theater, predicated on a narrow definition of agency. Responsiveness is not mindless submission but a necessary contribution to performance. To say that much of an audience’s interaction with a play consists of loosely collective reactions to things happening on stage is not to treat playgoing “as if [it] were primarily a form of discipline”51 but simply to recognize that shared experience is a basic pleasure and raison d’être of theater.52
Shared responses are never identical. As Whitney rightly notes, “A collective roar, sigh, or wave of laughter in the playhouse may be generated by many diverse, individualized inflections of feeling.”53 No two people, even those who occupy similar social positions, will ever perceive, judge, and remember a play in exactly the same way.54 Rather, by collective responses I mean emotions, thoughts, and somatizations sharing a family resemblance, incited by the simultaneous perception of theatrical effects.55 Orchestrated, shared experiences may be ambiguous or conflicted. Collective responses are entangled with the process of the play’s unfolding over the time of performance. However, they do not necessarily cumulate into one shared interpretation or “takeaway” opinion of the play as a whole. Collective playhouse experiences may have different implications for spectators depending on their social circumstances. The corrupt but beautiful femmes fatales of Jacobean tragedy described by Huston Diehl may send a shiver through the whole theater, yet the shared desire and repulsion provoked by the stage embodiment of the Whore of Babylon could have different aftershocks of meaning for Calvinist, Catholic, and Laudian playgoers.56 The dramatic organization of confessionally fluid, collective experience is not totalizing. Plays do not summon into being ideologically uniform audiences. However, they do make the same virtual experiences available to everyone in the theater, even if participation asks of them different kinds of mental stretching. Orchestration draws thousands of simultaneous, individual, imaginative extensions into the experimental, social space of shared fantasy.
The active reception of theater takes many forms. While recent criticism productively attends to more conspicuous forms of audience participation, playgoer agency is not limited to its most literal, visible, and individual man-ifestations.57 It is not only through uncued behavior that theatergoers contribute to the coproduction of meaning and pleasure in the playhouse. N. R. Helms writes, “Though spectators may seem to do nothing [but] … attend to the business onstage, their minds are always busy.”58 As Keir Elam describes, plays begin and end in negotiations between performers and their audiences.59 Anticipated audience responses shape the play from its conception. Playgoers make commercial theater possible by turning up and paying. Actors adjust their delivery depending on audience reactions during performance. Most importantly, audiences imaginatively create plays as they watch them. Plays exist as the assemblage of the experiences of audience members. Matteo Pangallo dismisses “the idea of the theatrical consumer becoming a producer” as an exhausted “critical commonplace,” and he turns his attention to overt forms of audience agency instead of the “merely imaginative.”60 The direct ways in which playgoers revised plays discussed by Pangallo were indeed an important form of theatrical participation. But there is nothing “mere” about the collective imaginings of thousands of people.
Antitheatricalists as well as defenders of the stage describe theater’s capacity to transform audiences en masse, both when plays fulfilled the ameliorative moral function ascribed to them in classical dramatic theory and when they went dangerously awry.61 These accounts not only share an awareness that playgoers as a group are affected by performance (for better or worse); they also understand being moved by a play as a form of activity. Thomas Heywood praises the ability of dramatic examples of warriors to rouse like bravery in theatergoers: “What English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not … pursu[e] him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as being wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance … so bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action, that it hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”62 Here, playgoers are engrossed (“wrapt” and “bewitch[ed]”) but also exercise their imaginations energetically (“offer” and “pursu[e]”). They receive and are shaped by the pressures of the play (“new mold[ed]”), but in a way that makes them active (ready for any “notable attempt”). For Heywood, dramatizations of English heroes elicit a kind of mental support or accompaniment. Stage action and audience imagination blur together: the spectator’s wishes “pursu[e in the] enterprise.” “Prosperous performance” happens simultaneously in the fiction of the play, on the stage, and in the playgoer’s heart.
For opponents of theater, the problem was precisely this kind of collective emotional participation. Anthony Munday writes that playgoers “al by sight and assent be actors…. So that in th[e] representation of whoredome, al the people in [their] mind[s] plaie the whores.”63 Plays change spectators into inner performers. Stage representations are inseparable from playgoers’ “minds’ play.” For both Heywood and Munday, theater affects playgoers as a group: even the most virtuous spectator could be corrupted by licentious