Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling. Musa Gurnis
the crowd’s repeated demand for the improvised joke, but the performance itself did not. “The Play began, and ended with his valor,” in spite of the corpsing in act 4. “Recovering” the thread of action and the attention of the crowd from disturbances contingent on live performance is as basic an acting skill as memorizing lines. More to the point, it would be a mistake to think of the event described here as entirely “stopping” or “stepping outside” the play. Even though the plot is interrupted, and the conventions of theatrical representation are visibly not working, and the performance genre has changed from action to clowning—nevertheless, even here there is creative seepage between the fiction of the play and the flap in the playhouse. Even from the beginning the boundary is blurred: the crowd does not come to watch the character within the drama but to see the actor Fowler play the type of “conquering” role for which he was famous. The extras break character because Fowler’s personation of a warrior is so lifelike: their prop shields tremble with real fear. The star so terrifies his onstage observers that they pretend to die before he can pretend to kill them. This is acting: to strike viewers without touching. The personae of the “great captain” and the leading man bleed together. So do fictional place and theatrical space: he exits brandishing his sword, not minding “to bring off” (the stage) “his dead men” (the characters). Fowler’s haughty disregard for his fellow actors is continuous with a “conquering” disdain for slain enemies. He commands the “[mute] dogs” to crawl as imperiously as Tamburlaine lashes the vanquished kings that pull his chariot. It is unclear how far afield of the imaginative world of the play this interruption to the scripted action actually goes. The playgoers shouting “that again” are not impeding the performance so much as including themselves in a game among the actors, which itself echoes and elaborates (and ultimately is reintegrated into) the dramatic fiction. That is to say, plays do not usually break if dropped: they bounce.
Plays are only destroyed or undermined by vocal and physically active audiences if we think of plays as self-contained mimetic units. However, early modern scripts are not closed in this way but instead open the dramatic fiction out to a broader field of performance. Erika T. Lin aptly calls attention to the disjunction between the aesthetics of tragedies and the jigs routinely attached to them.76 Moreover, theatrical performance does not stop at the edge of the stage. As Mullaney writes, “It extended beyond the acting space or scaffold to take place in and with the audience, its necessary participant and dramaturgical collaborator.”77 William N. West describes early modern theater as “encompassing” audiences, “so that their experiences and responses become part of the play.”78 To adapt the axiom of the Prague formalists, the playhouse makes everything in it a sign. Scripts in performance do not simply create fictions on stage. They make apertures between the world of playgoers and the world of the play.
Early modern drama is full of what I call “open scenes” that depend on the collaboration of the playhouse as a whole in the creation of theatrical effects. Othello riles up the crowd with its sing-along English drinking song, making the audience itself part of the illusion of a wild party in Cyprus. Thomas Middleton’s Roaring Girl transforms the faces of playgoers into a picture gallery, incorporating audiences into the architecture of the imagined house. So easily in so many plays, real theatergoers flesh out fictional multitudes, or groups of observers, invoked by extension as a “band of brothers” or included as “pale and trembling mutes or witnesses” to the act. Audience contributions to the performance event need not be loud or literal to be powerful. Playgoers might offer a kind of attention (whether silent or not) in which Desdemona’s unexpected breath—“O”—is a coup de theatre.79 Francis Bacon compares the effect of actors on audiences to the movement of “the bow to the fiddle.”80 Although active in different ways—one striking, the other resonating—both are necessary parts of the same creative instrument.
Case Study: Playing on the Spanish Match
Any critical project that seeks to connect historical change and representational process is an attempt to leap between two moving trains. Yet this is necessary work, because it is through such jumps—back and forth, instant by instant, continually, and in every area of human activity—that cultures and subjectivities make each other. In theater, a social art in which anything can be anything else, these synapses fire with particular freedom: a puritan’s arousal at the Whore riding a prop dragon, an Arminian’s surprise at a predestinarian plot twist. A play is not a “thing” but a volatile nexus of interactions between people and the possibilities of their culture. As Mullaney writes, “The play is not embodied on the stage … such embodiment is a process rather than a presentation, and it takes place within the architectonic sociality of the playhouse.”81 Post-Reformation culture was continually re-created through the lived experiences of believers, and with particular flexibility through the virtual experiences of mixed-faith audiences.
The reiterative and adaptive nature of genre allows it to explore multiple variants of a cultural problem. A Game at Chess (see Chapter 4) was part of a larger vogue for plays set in Spain or dealing with the Spanish Match in the early 1620s. This dramatic fashion reflected, but also helped shape, how early modern Londoners thought and felt about this crucial matter of public interest. The Spanish Match subgenre flourished in part because the issue was of current concern, but it was also popularized by the repertory practices of theater companies. The King’s Men (KM) and the Lady Elizabeth’s Men (LEM) in particular offered competing Spanish plays that cultivated an appetite for drama on the subject that was likely profitable for both companies.82 These include The Spanish Curate (1622 KM), The Changeling (1622 LEM), the lost play “The Spanish Duke of Lerma” (1623 KM), The Spanish Gypsy (1623 LEM), and the lost “Spanish Viceroy” (1624 KM), among others. Whereas the stage craft of A Game at Chess produces tub-thumping ideological clarity that divides its audiences largely along denominational lines, the dramatic techniques of other Spanish Match plays generate more confessionally fluid fantasies that gather their mixed-faith audiences in shared imaginative and emotional exploration.
Theater helped condition the terms in which popular audiences conceived of Spain. I do not mean this subgenre “convinced” audiences that Spain was bad. While they do reinforce existing anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish stereotypes, these plays also involve forms of transposition and indirection that twist familiar narratives and fears into less recognizable forms. Dominant ideology reproduces itself through repetitions that are never self-identical. The reiterations on which hegemony depends are always (even if imperceptibly) changing. This constant process of re-creating the social world reinforces existing structures but also revises them. Representation changes a culture the way that waves redraw the shoreline that contains them over time.
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