A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers
resonances from biblical renditions of Christ’s burial and resurrection. What better way to contest, even enrage, moralist critics of the theater than this skillfully veiled blasphemy used in praise of the theater and, moreover, by using an image saturated with popish resonances?
There may, however, be more at work here than Nashe’s wit. The Christian echoes found in this passage owe more to the Church’s performative traditions than its scriptural ones. Although all of the four gospels contain a scene where the Marys go to anoint Jesus’s body (only to find it missing), this moment is glossed over rather quickly in each.41 This narrative was, however, a popular one within the tradition of liturgical drama, which elaborated and expanded on it to include responses from the congregation. Consider this version from a twelfth-century Easter Mass:
To them let the deacon representing the angel answer, saying:
Whom do you seek, O trembling women, weeping at this tomb?
And they to him:
We seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.
To them let him add:
He is not here whom you seek, but going quickly tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus is risen.
After this, as they draw near, let him rise and raise up the curtain and expose the sepulchre to view, and say to them:
Come and see the place where the Lord had been laid, alleluia, alleluia …
This said, let the whole community sing together, saying:
Tell us, Mary, what did you see on the way?
And let one of the three who visited the sepulchre say in a clear voice:
I saw the sepulchre of the living Christ, and the glory of his rising.42
Of course, it is unlikely that Nashe had any familiarity with this particular text or with liturgical drama at all: it seems to have largely disappeared from the Mass even before the English Reformation.43 However, Nashe’s portrayal of Talbot’s onstage revivification shares something with the Visitatio Sepulchri other than tearful onlookers and a martyr who triumphs over death: both illustrate an innate understanding of the importance of the spectators’ role in the (re)generative process itself. In each case, of course, this process is imaginative. The spectators witness only a re-creation rather than an actual creation. This caveat, however, should not lessen the force generated by this act: as David Bevington points out, liturgical dramatization “was not intended as a mere imitation of an action, but as a demonstration of the living reality of Christ’s resurrection.”44 In order for this demonstration to work, however, the presence of the congregation was essential. Composed of both imagination and faith, their participation is “the living reality” found in the ritual. Nashe describes his theatrical spectators through similar, if more secular, terms. Like the congregants who come to witness and participate in the ritual reenactment of Christ’s death and rebirth, Nashe’s spectators come to see the dead Talbot live, speak, and, indeed, die again. And, although one instance constitutes a religious ritual and the other an afternoon’s entertainment, in both cases it is the convergence of the spectators’ shared emotion and cultural beliefs that transforms a simple mimetic act into something that contains the spark of life itself.45
That the professional theater became a site where certain cultural conflicts previously negotiated largely through Catholic ritual were revisited and reevaluated has been argued previously.46 However, the ways in which these changes played a role in shaping discourses about theatrical spectatorship has not been sufficiently explored. Part of the communicative need that the term spectator fills is the idea of an individual engaged in a secularized hermeneutic, one who could both partake in the emotion generated through the shared presence of other spectators while also engaging in a unique “individual” experience.47 Thomas Kyd’s narrative framing of his highly popular play The Spanish Tragedy suggests this dialectic. When Andrea’s ghost sits down with Revenge to watch “the miserie” of the play unfold, they become part of the interpretive community the play’s audience constitutes. Yet they also remain individual forces, ones that create meaning inside the play in that they participate in its creation both structurally and narratively. Kyd returns to this framing device periodically throughout The Spanish Tragedy. Like any bored onlooker, Revenge falls asleep during the lengthy third act, and Andrea throws a fit when he thinks things are not going quite the way he wants: “Awake, Revenge, or we are woe-begone!” (3.15.17).48 But for every moment in which these characters perform stereotypical behaviors associated with inattentive or overly invested audience members, there is another in which they actually motivate certain actions within the play. Andrea’s desire for divine justice sets the revenge plot in motion, and his call for aid is answered by none other than Revenge: “Be still Andrea; ere we go from hence, / I’ll turn their friendship to fell despite / Their love to mortal hate, their day to night” (1.5.5–7).49 How, exactly, Revenge accomplishes this is left unclear, as the play does not show him doing anything except watching and taking catnaps: it seems his very presence is sufficient to set events in motion. Through the act of spectating, Andrea and Revenge can bring to life “the mystery” and the tragedy of life, or, when metadramatically considered, the play itself.
I am not suggesting this framing device is crafted merely (or even primarily) as a meditation on the spectator. Seneca’s Thyestes, which clearly influenced the content and structure of Kyd’s play, also begins with a postmortal conversation between a ghost and a personified minor deity.50 As Megaera (one of the Furies) drags Tantalus from his insatiate existence, she calls on Thyestes to “vexe” his mortal house with “rage of furyes might.”51 Tantalus is initially a completely unwilling participant; despite Megaera’s command, he tries to flee back to his lake of eternal torment. Finally, tortured into submission, he enters his grandson’s house to continue the cycle of despair his own actions initiated long ago.52 Numerous differences exist between the Senecan narrative and Kyd’s play. Rather than remaining onstage to watch and comment on the action, Tantalus and the Fury disappear after the first scene and do not return. Tantalus is also forced to participate in a divine act of vengeance against his family rather than being granted the honor of watching his own personal vendetta acted out in the mortal realm. Kyd’s alterations to Seneca’s model cannot, of course, be traced to a single influence or cause, but I would argue that the changes he makes to the immortal characters’ roles respond to the period’s shifting ideas about the theatrical spectator. In extending the role of the framing narrative to one that remains physically and dialogically present for the entirety of the play, Kyd comments on the nature of the early modern theatrical space itself. But his commentary is not about the stage exactly; that is, it is not about what can be created on the platform at the Curtain or the Rose. Rather, Kyd dramatizes an extradiegetic space, one related to the new and relatively uncharted territory evolving for the theatrical spectator. Occupied by Andrea and Revenge, this spectatorial terrain is essentially a medial one. It is neither heaven nor hell; it calls neither for direct action nor quiescent acceptance from its participants. Shaky ground though it may seem, this emergent space is imagined as offering a certain amount of fluidity in terms of spectatorial positioning. In it, one can be (in Sidney’s terms) both actor and spectator, or, in Kyd’s implicit articulation, both a member of the community of interpreters and a unique interpretive subject.
Gluttonous Eyes and Ticklish Ears: The Spectator’s Synaesthesia
Northbrooke’s early attack on the professional theater spearheaded a deluge of similar critiques. As the sixteenth century came to a close, these focused less on the general evils committed by London’s populace and more on those committed at the theater, particularly via its detrimental influence on those in attendance. As Jeremy Lopez has pointed out, one of the most pervasive rhetorical devices for critiquing the theater was the dietary metaphor.53 For example, Northbrooke succinctly metaphorizes scripture as “manna from heaven,” and earlier in his treatise, he represents the problem of church attendance as a sort of a feast or famine binary: “The Church is alwaye emptie and voyde, the playing place is replenished