A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers
and funerals of the past have largely formed the faceless backdrop of historical inquiry. In part this lacuna is due to a scarcity of records: actual descriptions of spectators at state, religious, and entertainment productions are few and far between. To study and make claims about them, then, becomes what Dennis Kennedy calls “a problem in metaphysics, [and] writing about them may border on the impossible.”1 Exerting an equally powerful influence on the study of spectators and spectatorship, however, is the widely held prejudice that the spectator is the product of modernity and its concomitant technologies of representation: photography, film, television, and, most recently, the computer.2 In her history of spectatorship studies, Michelle Aaron places what she calls “the birth of the spectator” in the late 1960s.3 While some theorists place the origins of spectatorship as a topic of inquiry slightly earlier, there is, in general, a critical consensus that spectatorship as a discourse did not come into being before the twentieth century.4
But whereas formal theoretical approaches to and detailed statistics about spectatorship may be the domain of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discourses on the topic are not. Meditations on the dangers of looking (especially the sort associated with entertainment spectacle) exist in abundance throughout the history of Western culture. While the seven epigraphs with which I begin frame their anxieties about spectators through their unique historical and cultural contexts, certain constants emerge: the spectator is male, young, highly impressionable, and potentially dangerous. These are not, however, qualities we can assign to actual historical viewing subjects; that is, the spectator of Augustine’s gladiatorial arena is not the same as “the young men” in the New York Times article that merge the fantasy violence of video games with the incarnate act of shooting high school classmates or movie patrons. Rather, such qualities stand in for the spectator these writers imagine, project, and sometimes fear. While “real” spectators may be historically contingent and temporally circumscribed, ideas about them can (and do) cross such boundaries, accruing various resonances along the way. These ideas form a different sort of spectatorial presence, one that is discursive rather than material. Often indiscriminately conflated with the real bodies and psyches that attend the theater, sports arena, or movie multiplex, the discursive spectator is a repository of a culture’s ideas and anxiety about viewing and interpretive practices, particularly those associated with popular entertainment. And, while entertainment media, exhibition technologies, and viewing practices have changed dramatically from the era of Plato to postmodernism, anxieties about spectatorship have remained remarkably consistent. The discursive spectator, then, provides an alternative starting point for tracing a history of spectatorship—one organized by conceptual and ideological structures rather than practice-oriented ones—of which the twenty-first century is only the most recent part.
This study explores a particular moment in that history, that of early modern England. Walter Benjamin has argued that film’s development and ascendancy in the twentieth century both responded to and caused “profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus.”5 Sixteenth-century England also witnessed a surge in a particular form of mass entertainment: professional drama.6 I argue that as the commercial theater developed and prospered as a for-profit endeavor, a cultural need arose to find new ways to describe the sort of looking that playgoing both catered to and fostered. The narratives that evolved in response produce what I call the early modern discursive spectator—a figure generated largely through early modern cultural anxieties and fantasies about spectators rather than through empirical observation and thick description of actual audience behavior. Finally, I claim that the early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation.
As the opening epigraphs suggest, I am not making the case that the early modern period marks the origin of either the discursive spectator or theories of spectatorial dynamics. As Jonas Barish states, such concerns about the effects of entertainment media “go back as far in European history as the theater itself can be traced.”7 Renaissance England did, however, produce a great deal of writing on the theater and its effects on audiences. While theater had been a part of English culture since the early twelfth century,8 the sixteenth century saw massive changes in theater’s production and regulation, including the building of London’s first amphitheaters, the proliferation of professional playing companies, and the imposition of laws regulating them. The years between 1576 and 1642, therefore, are some of the earliest for which we have an abundance of materials that refer both directly and indirectly to theater spectators.9 As London’s professional theater industry took hold and flourished, those involved in the business of the stage developed a pre-occupation with shaping, even controlling, consumer tastes and habits. Simultaneously, moralists and magistrates attempted to discipline—morally, behaviorally, and geographically—London’s many theatergoers. Such mobilizations of (and resistances to) commercial, moral, and social pressures on theatergoers mark the early modern period as a particularly significant one in the development and coherence of the discursive spectator. As Jean-Christophe Agnew puts it, “Elizabethan and Jacobean theater … did not just hold the mirror up to nature; it brought forth ‘another nature’—a new world of ‘artificial persons’—the features of which audiences were just beginning to make out in the similarly new and enigmatic exchange relations then developing outside [as well as inside] the theater.”10 While Agnew’s “artificial persons” refer to the emergent early modern English professional identity of the actor, another such presence is perpetuated by the professional theater, one Agnew tacitly references: “Inside the banquet hall and guild hall of the sixteenth century, the players experimented sporadically with dramatic forms, developing new conventions that would enable them to communicate with an audience that was at once physically present and psychologically distant.”11 It is precisely this “psychological distance”—the inscrutability of any individual’s or group’s particular affective and psychological templates, desires, and limits—that gives rise to the cultural projection I call the discursive spectator.
The vast temporal expanse covered by the seven introductory epigraphs signals another of this project’s deep investments, which is to consider the discursive spectator’s transhistorical presence and potency. While focused primarily on the discursive spectator’s early modern incarnation, this study also looks backward to earlier manifestations and forward to later ones. In part, I use the early modern discursive spectator’s past and future as a framing mechanism; however, I also move between modern spectatorial theories, many of which deal with modern forms of media and entertainment, and early modern ideas about the theatrical spectator, placing them in conversation with one another throughout the book. That I do so may raise the charge of “unhistoricism,” a methodological stance recently cited by Valerie Traub as trending in both queer and early modern studies (and, most particularly, the conjunction of the two). While, as she carefully articulates, “unhistoricism” or “teloskepticism” encompasses numerous critical viewpoints and concerns, it represents, in short, a heuristic method that advocates reading against chronological sequencing as a means of averting teleological narratives of queer identity.12 While A Monster with a Thousand Hands takes as a given that “the spectator” has a discursive (as well as a material) history, it is not an archaeological or genealogical project. Rather, this study understands the discursive spectator as an entity that consists of multiple, sometimes contradictory narratives, some of which have long and relatively consistent half-lives and some of which emerge and disappear within a given era. To imagine the discursive spectator via a framework in which “one model … is superseded by another, which may again be superseded by another [and] the superseded model then drops out of the frame of analysis,”13 is to ignore the ways this figure replicates its own discursive DNA and resists historical pressures. For, even when the discursive spectator responds to historical events (such as those that occur during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in London’s theatrical exhibition, practice, and culture), how it responds defies tidy articulation along an axis of historical contingency. While cultural debates about the entertainment spectator tend to become reinvigorated by new or newly popularized entertainment media, the discourses on which they rely tend to recycle long-extant and pervasive biases. The discursive spectator’s