A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers
ridiculous & scornefull sort that may be. So as it is impossible, that any beholder can be content to be such a one.”75 As late as 1612, Thomas Heywood is still defending his craft using similar logic, if more high-flown terminology: “So bewitching a thing is liuely 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.”76
It may seem as though the agential and sensory confusions particular to drama are disruptions that speak only to how the theater communicates with its audience. But both antitheatricalist and protheatricalist ideas about the spectator link the concepts of sensory and subjective fluidity through the rhetoric they use to describe these interpretive phenomena. Although each uses different formulations to describe how theatrical spectatorship “worked”—how it communicated with or to its audiences, preyed on or activated their imaginations, and authorized or damned them—they express and explain these dynamics both through metaphor and as metaphor. Sometimes, as in the case of Northbrooke’s and Gosson’s sensory metonym, metaphor is used both as the rhetorical mode of expression and as a crucial component of the thing being expressed. Others see it as a major key in which drama plays on the instrument of spectatorial imagination. Munday, Lodge, and Sidney all see metaphor as a mode intrinsic to both dramatic communication and spectatorial interpretation in that what is shown through the world onstage is then transferred by the individual to him- or herself and the world that he or she occupies. The clearest articulations of this principle, however, are found in the writings of early modern playwrights themselves. As early as 1566, George Gascoigne prefaces his Supposes by providing the law students for whom it was written with an “explanation,” not only of his play but of drama in general: “But, understand, our Suppose is nothing else but a mistaking of the imagination of one thing for another” (my italics).77 Thirty years later, Shakespeare opens his final play of the Henriad by similarly addressing the Bankside audiences:
And let us, ciphers to this great account
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies.78
This “metaphorical principle” then is one inextricably linked to the period’s ideas about how theatrical spectatorship functioned and why it was so potent, addictive, and potentially dangerous to both individuals and society itself.
As the sixteenth century moved toward a close, the theater’s cultural foothold became more secure. Correspondingly, the antitheatricalist movement diminished to the point of near silence. With two notable exceptions, post-Elizabethan treatises against the theater go out with more of a whimper than a bang. The two surviving tracts from the Stuart period (I. G.’s 1615 A Refutation of the Apology for Actors and William Prynne’s 1633 Histrio-mastix), while similar in style and form to those written in the last decades of the sixteenth century, demonstrate some shifts in the spectator’s construction within the seventeenth-century cultural imaginary. While not interested in precise demographic specimens, these later treatises describe spectators that are already becoming taxonomized through stereotypes. Whereas Northbrooke and Gosson describe the theater’s siren call ensnaring the elusive essence of men’s souls, I. G. and Prynne portray a character that sounds suspiciously like the ubiquitous groundling. I. G. claims that early modern theater audiences are made up of “in general the vulgar sort,” while Prynne delineates them more specifically as “ordinary Spectators, what are they but ridiculous, foolish, vaine, fantasticke persons, who delight in nothing more then toyes and vanities?” (original italics).79 Such typecasting was not limited to antitheatricalist discourse; playwrights took full advantage of circulating spectatorial stereotypes to create cutting-edge humor that walked a fine line between satirical in-jokes for and outright mockery of their audiences.80
As literary representations of the spectator transitioned from elusive substance to stock characters, other changes appear as well. The idea that the spectator was a site where certain experiential polarities (such as active vs. passive and collective vs. singular), as well as the full spectrum of the senses were engaged simultaneously does not disappear during the seventeenth century, but other competing, even contradictory models develop alongside them. For example, the multisensory metaphor becomes largely condensed during the seventeenth century. Instead of describing the theater as a place where the senses conjoin in cacophonous harmony, playwrights and antitheatricalists begin to articulate the spectatorial experience as one dominated by the eye and ear. I. G. condemns “the profane spectacles presented in the theaters, to the as [sic] profane sights of all that go to be spectators of them,” and Prynne separates the dangers of the playhouse into that which hurts the eyes (such as viewing lewd, impious, or tyrannous acts and effeminate and lavishly dressed actors) and that which injures the ears (blasphemy, obscenities, and love songs).81 But while the earlier synaesthetic metaphor fades, the premise behind it—that the theater has the power to construct an experience for the spectator that causes the line between imaginative and physical perception to bend, if not quite break—does not. Unlike Gurr, who sees the sensory division of sight and sound as a place of contest between poetry and spectacle, I see these later paraphrases of the multisensory metaphor as an impulse to control the evanescent spectator and the unwieldy interpretive energies this figure was thought to be capable of generating.
The following chapters focus on how a particular group that had a vested interest in the spectator imagined and attempted to shape this figure. Like the antitheatrical polemicists, early modern playwrights exhibited an anxiety that the spectator could not be known or effectively controlled. But they also demonstrated a desire to encourage and harness this energy, for it was, finally, the lifeblood of their trade. Whereas late sixteenth-century writers focused primarily on “what” and “how” questions about spectatorship (such as what made theatrical spectatorship a unique type of interaction and how the theater communicated with the spectator), by the seventeenth century, playwrights were experimenting with ways of influencing and shaping real spectators via their product. The discursive spectator, therefore, has a stronger presence in drama during the seventeenth century than it had previously, particularly in two genres: the dramatic romance and the court masque. While not new, these forms are rich sites of generic and formal experimentation during the seventeenth century’s early decades; both also reached new heights of popularity during that period. But before turning to the work of two playwrights, Shakespeare and Jonson, whose work in these respective genres were popular successes, I look at one of the period’s documented failures, Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Beaumont’s play holds a mirror up to the early modern audience by dramatizing the behaviors of two citizens attending the theater. Harmless though this might seem, Beaumont’s bitingly satirical portrayal was not met favorably: the dedicatory epistle written for the play’s publication claims that it was “utterly rejected” at its premiere. Knight offers a rare extant instance of an early modern play that both takes the spectator and spectatorial resistance as its principal subject and is met with actual resistance from its audience. As such, the play is the site of a collision between the discursive and the phenomenological spectator, one that bears traces of the subjective conflict that Knight parodies: the moment where the real viewer faces a reflection over which she or he has no immediate control and does not recognize.
CHAPTER 2
The Blood of the Muses
Violent Spectatorship and Authorial Response in The Knight of the Burning Pestle
I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been strook so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, c. 1602
In short, he so immersed himself in these romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping