Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater 9780812294255

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Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater

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PLAY WRITING PLAYGOERS IN SHAKESPEARE’S THEATER

MATTEO A. PANGALLO

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104​-­4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Name: Pangallo, Matteo A., author. Title: Playwriting playgoers in Shakespeare’s theater / Matteo A.  Pangallo. Description: 1st ed. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania   Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017003577 | ISBN 9780812249415  (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Dramatists, English—­Early modern,   1500–1700. | Theater audiences—­England—­History—   16th ­century. | Theater audiences—­England—­History—   17th ­century. | En­glish drama—­Early modern and   Elizabethan, 1500–1600—­History and criticism. | En­glish   drama—17th ­century—­History and criticism. | Amateurism. Classification: LCC PR646 .P36 2017 | DDC 822/.209—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017003577

For Nettie, Atticus, and Toby

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Contents

Introduction. “All write Playes” 1 Chapter 1. “Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?”: The Early Modern Idea of Playgoers as Playmakers

31

Chapter 2. “Some other may be added”: Playwriting Playgoers Revising in Their Manuscripts

74

Chapter 3. “As s­ hall be shewed before the daye of action”: Playwriting Playgoers and Per­for­mance

103

Chapter 4. “Watching ­every word”: Playwriting Playgoers as Verse Dramatists

143

Conclusion. “I began to make a play”

182

Notes 189 Bibliography 219 Index 237 Acknowl­edgments

247

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introduction

“All write Playes”

Walter Mountfort, sick and impoverished, faced ruin. Following several years in Persia as a clerk for the East India Com­pany, Mountfort had endured a perilous yearlong voyage back to London in April 1633.1 A few days a­ fter his return, workers unlading the cargo for which he was responsible had opened two containers meant to carry bales of expensive raw silk, and out spilled only rocks and dirt. Blame quickly fell upon the clerk. The Com­pany secured warrants, searched h ­ ouses, cross-­examined witnesses, threatened to involve Star Chamber, and withheld wages—­desperately needed wages. Mountfort first cast blame on corrupt fellow clerks. He then maintained that he had purchased the bales and resold them, but the court doubted him. It did not help that a shadow had long lain across Mountfort: since he began working for the Com­ pany in 1615 he frequently attracted charges of fraud, embezzlement, and, on one occasion, plotting to murder a rival clerk in a bar brawl. In June he begged for back wages to feed his ­family. He fell ill, and his wife had to appear before the court in his place. Prospects, for Mountfort, w ­ ere bleak. It was during this trial that Mountfort found the strength to stop by one of his old haunts: the Red Bull play­house. Th ­ ere he delivered to the Prince Charles’s Men a manuscript with ink fading from exposure to salty ocean air and runny from sea spray, and margins grubby from being thumbed by fin­ gers caked in oakum and tar. Scrawled on the pages in the accountant’s hand was The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife, a city comedy about the East India Com­pany and its employees, written during Mountfort’s voyage. While he was writing the play, the idea had occurred to him that actors might stage it; now, in financial straits, Mountfort desperately needed the money he could get from selling it. Despite this, though, he evidently did not wish to go into the theater business, for he continued to sue for a return to his

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employment with the East India Com­pany. The actors looked his play over and thought it warranted paying Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, for a license. When Herbert returned the play, the actors invited this playgoer, now playwright, to rewrite around the Master’s censorship. Mountfort revised his play and then left it in the hands of the com­pany’s bookkeeper. Mountfort’s specific experience was unique, but his broader narrative—­ the narrative of a playgoer who translated his love of the theater into writing a play and attempting to have a professional com­pany stage that play—­was not. In 1635, shortly a­ fter graduating from Oxford, John Jones took his tragicomedy Adrasta to a professional com­pany of players.2 Jones believed deeply that the life of drama lay in action, and he was e­ ager to share his play with the London playgoing public; it was not written (originally) for readers or staging at the university. The com­pany rejected it—­because, Jones suspected, his poetry was not quite good enough—­but Jones, still enamored of the theater, made some revisions and published Adrasta. Gentleman-­highwayman John Clavell had been out of prison for two years when he wrote a comedy for the King’s Men in 1630.3 Though he had written poetry—­most importantly, the flattering poem to King Charles that resulted in his ­pardon—­The Soddered Citizen was his first attempt at playwriting. Before his imprisonment, Clavell had often attended plays at the Blackfriars and so knew something of drama. The King’s Men staged his play, and while he never again wrote for them, he remained on good terms with the com­pany and even befriended their regular playwright, Philip Massinger. Like Clavell, Barnabe Barnes could often be found in both the audience of the theaters and the inside of a prison.4 Celebrated (and ridiculed) as the most experimental sonneteer of the age, Barnes was fascinated with all ­things Italian, from Italian history to Italian lit­er­a­ture to Italian poisons. Eight years ­after being convicted for attempted murder by means of mercury sublimate, Barnes—­who had escaped jail and remained at liberty—­penned a fantastic play of dev­ils, Machiavellian politics, Catholicism, and murder by mercury sublimate. On Candlemas night 1606, the King’s Men staged Barnes’s The Dev­il’s Charter for King James, and Barnes subsequently revised and published the play. This narrative of the playgoer becoming a playwright characterizes the experience of a number of other dramatists who wrote for what is commonly called “Shakespeare’s theater”—­that is, the professional, commercial London theaters of Shakespeare’s own time and the years following, up to the closure of 1642. Th ­ ese dramatists attended, read, and wrote plays, but they ­were not

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members of the industry that developed around t­ hose theaters. They w ­ ere not actors, man­ag­ers, sharers, or regular dramatists. They wrote their plays without the advantage of learned knowledge of the industry’s working practices enjoyed by even novice professionalizing dramatists. With a few exceptions, they did not follow up their initial attempts to write for the stage with subsequent efforts to improve and develop their playwriting skills. They ­were not theater professionals, and ­there is no evidence to suggest that they wanted to become professional. Indeed, many expressly indicated that they did not wish to professionalize. And yet they wrote for the professional stage, and some secured per­for­mance. Not outliers in a unified field of playwriting—­that is, “lesser” professionals—­these playwriting playgoers w ­ ere, to use a modern term too often deployed in an uncritical manner, amateur dramatists. As this introduction ­will show, and as this book ­will depend upon in its study of their plays, their status as “amateurs” derives not from their intentions when they wrote, nor from ­whether or not they ­were compensated for their ­labor, nor from the quality of their writing, but from their position as outsiders writing for an increasingly—­though always incompletely—­closed industry. Although ­t hese playwrights ­were not regular producing participants in that industry, they w ­ ere devoted consuming participants, as audience members, play readers, and, in some cases, members of peri-­theatrical coteries. Their plays over and over show us just how effective the experience of theatrical consumption could be as a means for coming to understand theatrical production, and thus just how engaged early modern audience members could be with the per­for­mance, rather than only the play. The amateurs’ plays thus need to be considered within the context of an audience-­stage relationship that was intensely dialogic, participatory, and creative. Situating their plays in this way allows us to use their work—­both what they wrote and how they wrote—as evidence to better understand how certain members of the audience saw and understood the professional theater and its playmaking pro­cesses. Even when their plays seem to do, or attempt to do, the same t­ hings that the professional dramatists did in their plays, ­because ­these dramatists gained their theatrical experience as consumers, their plays require us to ask questions that differ from ­those we usually ask of plays written by professional dramatists.5 Rather than compelling us to deduce audience experience and understanding by looking at what professional dramatists wrote, ­these plays reveal directly what certain audience members wanted to see, how they thought a script should communicate that, and how they thought actors might stage it. In other words, this is not a book about what the professional theater did:

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it is a book about what par­tic­u­lar members of its audience thought that it did. In their use of specific materials, conventions, and techniques, t­ hese amateurs reveal how certain playgoers understood the working practices of the professional theater. As the book shows, that understanding was often alert to concerns about effective per­for­mance and followed what professional dramatists did in their playmaking practices—­a conclusion at odds with the pejorative assumption that amateur writing must be, or is only of interest when it is, eccentric and unconventional, that is, dif­fer­ent from (and, by implication, lesser than) professional writing. Most scholarship that describes the work of amateur playwrights falls back, almost reflexively, onto such dismissive terms as “naïve,” “ignorant,” and “unaware”; a close study of amateurs’ plays, however, reveals precisely the opposite: t­ hese consumers w ­ ere highly aware of and attentive to the practices of playmaking. I am interested, then, not in how ­these plays show what playgoers did not understand or rejected about the theater but in how they show playgoers trying to understand and participate in the theater. This book is not a comprehensive reference guide to t­ hese plays or a literary criticism of their formal ele­ments, such as plot and theme (though I draw upon ­these when they are relevant to my purposes). Rather, I demonstrate how, by recognizing ­these writers as play consumers, we can more usefully approach their plays’ theatrical evidence—­for my purposes, revising practices, stage directions, and dramatic verse—to identify what par­tic­u­lar playgoers knew (in some cases clearly, but at times imperfectly) about playmaking. This is not all we might do with ­these plays, nor are ­these three categories all of the evidence that they contain, nor are playgoers’ plays the only source of evidence about theatrical consumers’ expectations and understanding.6 My approach is merely one way that reading playgoers’ plays accounting for their authors’ status as primarily consumers of theatrical culture can help recover the plays from the usual reductive critical dismissal as merely “bad” plays. In using t­ hese plays in this way, the book also represents a further tactic in the “new audience studies” strategy of approaching the early modern audience and theatrical consumption. Studies of consumers of theatrical culture have traditionally relied upon ­either demographic analyses of economic class and social rank in the auditorium7 or efforts to re-­create the audience and its experience through plays written for it by the professional dramatists.8 Though it is certainly true that audiences w ­ ere composed of discrete socioeconomic groups, ­because ­e very audience member necessarily comprehended, interpreted, and responded to what her or she saw on stage in a way dif­fer­ent from ­every other audience member, this rubric is inherently insufficient for

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precisely discerning audience reception.9 This is also why, incidentally, plays by individual playgoers can only reliably tell us about what that one par­tic­ u­lar playgoer—­who was, almost by definition, dif­fer­ent from most other playgoers—­understood about the theater. The demographic approach can tell us what groups went to what theaters, and it can hypothesize what t­ hose groups as groups might have desired in their plays or understood about the theater (or, at least, what playwrights assumed t­ hose groups wanted and understood), but it cannot tell us what individual playgoers thought about what they saw or how they understood it. It considers playgoers in the aggregate rather than as discrete individuals. For t­ hese reasons, as Mary Blackstone and Cameron Louis urge, we need to “question further the . . . ​relative importance of the concept of social class . . . ​in understanding the success and complexity of the per­for­mance text potentially constructed by [the playwright], his players, and playgoers.”10 For example, Ben Jonson’s induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) suggests that the capacity of dif­fer­ent segments of the audience to judge the play might be mapped onto where they ­were physically located in the play­ house, and thus upon their demographic (financial) group, but, as Leo Salingar points out, Jonson adds a further, essential caveat: each spectator may judge “provided, further, that he forms and stands by his own judgment, without copying his neighbor, be the latter ‘never so first, in the commission of wit.’ ”11 Each playgoer is to interpret the play in his or her own way and not merely try to replicate the reception experience of ­others, particularly his or her socioeconomic peers. Notwithstanding Jonson’s financial parsing of the auditorium, his audience, then, is an audience not of groups but of individuals. The second category of audience studies has especially dominated scholarship on the relationships between play and audience in Shakespeare’s theater, though it is less a “reception response” approach and more a “reflection response” one: the professional’s play is assumed to reveal audience expectations, demand, and reaction. This approach sees the audience as something to be “orchestrated,” to borrow Jean Howard’s term, as something that “surrenders” to the play and its meanings12 rather than as a force that collaborates in creating ­those meanings. In this view, the play is “something created and set before an essentially passive audience.”13 The “spectatorial poetics” pursued by this approach belong not to the spectators but to the dramatists;14 it is poetics for the spectators, but not of the spectators. Such studies see the audience only as the fictional, idealistic creation of the author (and critic), and they operate u ­ nder the assumption that the audience’s experience can be accurately presumed based upon the cues given it by the dramatist—­and, very often, that

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its responses to t­ hose cues ­will accord with the critic’s own responses.15 Though nearly all theater historians have moved away from this model of the stage-­ audience relationship, many literary critics, particularly t­ hose working in the school of new historicism, still find it a useful fiction to underwrite and implicitly authorize conjectures about how early modern dramatic texts “must have” made an audience think, feel, or respond, or even “made” the audience itself. While such an approach, if done carefully and with evidence, might be useful if we wish to try to hypothesize about how professional playmakers thought about and tried to engage their intended audience—­and, of course, the most professional of playwrights would necessarily have a fairly accurate sense of the wants, capabilities, and expectations of their audience—it pres­ ents essential complications for understanding a­ ctual audience experience. Andrew Gurr summarizes the prob­lem with such “projections about audiences [that are] based on the expectations that [can] be identified from the writers’ texts”: “[The] pro­cess works only up to a point, and leads into arguments that become suspiciously circular.”16 Even earlier, E. K. Chambers pointed out that trying to determine “the psychological effect of a drama” must depend not just upon “what the artist puts into his work” but also upon the more elusive f­ actor of “what the spectator brings to the contemplation of it.”17 More recently, Richard Preiss finds similar fault with the “orchestration” approach: “The playgoer has a funny way of disappearing in ­these accounts: what is ­really being studied are plays, and their techniques for structuring the experience of an audience that, to them as for us, remain hy­po­thet­i­cal and homogenized”; to assume audience experience can be recovered from play texts is to ignore the variable of per­for­mance and the fact that in per­for­mance, “even as [playgoers] are compelled by the play, they compel it in turn.”18 Professional plays do offer clues about their audience, but only indirectly, and they provide evidence of how the audience may have experienced and understood the per­ for­mance, but only as a figment of the professional dramatist’s own assumptions about that experience and understanding. Jeremy Lopez alluded to this prob­lem at the 2011 Shakespeare Association of Amer­i­ca conference when he argued that “theatrical texts silence the audience.” As Preiss too observes, “talking to the audience is not the same as the audience talking, which playbooks seldom give us.”19 ­These claims apply to theatrical texts by professional dramatists, but theatrical texts by playgoers in fact do precisely the opposite by providing audience members with a voice. Since the early 2000s, a number of scholars, such as Preiss, have begun to focus upon how ­actual individuals in the audience interacted with and re-

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sponded to the plays they saw, and, in ­doing so, have largely overturned the old “orchestration” model.20 This new audience studies approach reveals a participatory spectatorship that fed input into the theatrical pro­cess in such a way that it could potentially influence and (re)shape the per­for­mance. Central to its methodology is the understanding that theatrical per­for­mance is, and was in the period, dialogic, with audiences just as effectively active in making dramatic meaning as playwrights and players (indeed, in some cases, more efficacious). The audience, in this view, might alter or even entirely subvert the words and actions supplied by the dramatist, becoming a collaborative creator in the making or revising of dramatic meaning. For example, looking closely at “responses of t­ hose not professionally engaged in the theatre,” Charles Whitney establishes how “audience members bec[a]me agents in the shaping and realizing of meaning” in plays and of “the a­ ctual diversity and creativity of early reception.”21 By exercising “imaginative interpretation,” Whitney argues, early modern “audience members’ creative agency” made meaning out of the dramatic transaction that occurred in the play­house, blurring the line between producer and consumer.22 As Alison Hobgood puts it in her study of the audience’s emotional experience in the early modern play­house, playgoers had a “reciprocal role in enabling and cultivating dramatic affect.”23 Though the new audience studies approach is a recent critical phenomenon, Chapter 1 of this book shows that its view of the audience as possessing a creative function in the play­house was generally understood in the early modern period itself. While most of the new audience studies limit themselves to the question of how consumers responded directly to the plays produced for them by professional playmakers, my approach expands this territory to consider also playgoers who did not simply respond to o­ thers’ plays but produced their own. The concept of the individual audience member as an autonomous and potentially creative agent, in a figurative sense, contextualizes the motive force that led some playgoers to write their own plays, in the literal sense, not merely drawing upon professionals’ plays as sources but expressing their own imaginative visions and articulating t­hose visions in ways that would make them accord with what the playgoers understood about the mechanisms of theatrical production. Rather than read the audience through the plays of the professional theater, my objective is to read the professional theater through the plays of the audience. ­Doing so recovers t­ hese plays as a new category of evidence for studies of the early modern audience, supplementing, refining, and often complicating the evidence provided by both the demographic and the orchestration approaches. Like other methods used by the new audience

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studies, looking to playgoers’ plays for evidence of audience experience and understanding addresses a fundamental shortcoming in both the demographic and the orchestration approaches; namely, rather than aggregating spectators into groups—­real or assumed—­looking at playgoers’ plays as evidence of audience experience and understanding parses that audience into its most fundamental and yet, for purposes of historicizing the Shakespearean stage, most often obscure component: the individual playgoer. A playgoer’s play cannot tell us what other playgoers thought about the playmaking pro­cess or their experiences in the play­house, but it is this very specificity that makes that play valuable as evidence, for it provides us with a concrete, granular view of theatrical consumption largely absent from the generalized, macroscale picture drawn by the earlier models of audience studies. Recognizing that ­these plays ­were written not just for audiences but also by audiences opens an additional win­dow onto the early modern play­house, the dramatists who wrote for it, and the spectators who attended it. My interest in t­ hese plays is in what they can tell us, not about playgoers’ thoughts about individual professionals’ plays, but about t­ hose playgoers’ thoughts about theater itself—­that is, how they can help us historicize certain early modern theatrical consumers’ ideas about the stage and the ways playmaking worked. In ­doing this, and as the remainder of this introduction ­will explain, it is also my objective to revisit some of the categories that have s­haped the study of early modern theatrical culture, with the ideas of playgoing, professional playwriting, and amateur playwriting central to this reappraisal. As noted above, and as Chapters 2, 3, and 4 show, playwriting playgoers often closely follow, or at least approximate, professional practices and pro­cesses, which suggests an audience interested not just in the fiction of the play it was watching but also the ways that play was being made. Looking at ideas about playgoing in the period contextualizes this by showing how theatrical consumption could be more than just a mere “pastime.”

“To invert a Recreation”: Playgoing in Early Modern E ­ ngland One reason criticism reliant upon the “orchestration” approach often unquestioningly falls back upon the idea of a passive, easily transported audience is that such passivity recurs, often cynically, as a theme in a number of descriptions of playgoing in the early modern period. In t­ hese accounts, spectatorship is often described as a “pastime,” a concept connoting the leisure of

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the affluent—­those who had the luxury of time to pass. For example, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton complains that “the badge of gentry” is “Idlenesse,” “a life out of action, and hav[ing] no calling or ordinary imployment to busie [itself ]”: “idlenesse is an appendix to nobility, they count it a disgrace to worke, and spend all their dayes in sports, recreations, and pastimes, and ­will therefore take no paines; be of no vocation.”24 Descriptions of playgoing as something undertaken by gentlemen merely to while away the hours draw upon many of the terms Burton uses, perpetuating the notion of theater spectatorship as an activity requiring no investment of creative energy and thus producing, ultimately, nothing. Thomas Dekker, for example, imagines that “Sloth himselfe ­will come, and sit in the two-­pennie galleries amongst the Gentlemen, and see their Knaveries and their pastimes.”25 Thomas Nashe observes that during “the idlest time of the day,” t­ hose most likely to be found “seeing a Playe” ­were “men that are their owne masters.”26 Likewise, Edward Guilpin satirizes a lazy “Lord” who, a­ fter a day of lounging, eating, gambling, and whoring, “gets him to a play” . . . ​before d ­ oing it all over again.27 Conceptualizing playgoing as a time-­wasting activity disempowers the playgoer and represents the audience experience as, though perhaps pleas­ur­able, essentially passive and disengaged. Certainly for some the playgoing experience was, as Andrew Gurr puts it, “a distraction from the serious t­hings of life.”28 For example, in his diary, Sir Humphrey Mildmay repeatedly characterizes his playgoing as unimportant idleness, merely a means of using up spare time: “To the Elder ­Brother att the bla: ffryers & was idle”; “­after Noone I wente to a playe & was soe Jmployed that day”; “to a playe & loitred all the day”; “to the Newe play att Bl: fyers . . . ​where I loste the ­whole day”; “­after Noone I Loitered att a playe.”29 Mildmay acknowledges that attending the theater wastes his time, though his continuous return implies the plea­sure ensuing from that experience. While not every­one enjoyed the opportunity to spend all day at the theater, o­ thers who attended more infrequently might also have considered playgoing no more than passive escapism; as the author of Historia Histrionica recalled, “Very good P ­ eople think a Play an Innocent Diversion for an 30 idle Hour or two.” Even playgoers who physically or emotionally responded to a play might be considered passive consumers if that response did ­little more than react to the fiction of the per­for­mance. Certainly the emotional reactions of spectators contributed to the effect of the dramatic event; as Matthew Steggle explains, “The audience, too, have their role as impor­tant contributors to the symphony” that is heard in the play­house during a per­for­mance.31 Numerous descriptions of audiences emphasize their rapt attention, as if, as

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Preiss puts it, they have been put u ­ nder “a kind of hypnotic grip” by the play. ­These audiences are engaged and responsive, but they are not active in terms of paying attention to, and trying to contribute to, the making of dramatic meaning and effect. Stephen Gosson, for example, cites Xenophon’s account of an audience response to a per­for­mance of the “Tale of Bacchus, and Ariadne” at a banquet, beginning at a moment when Ariadne gestures provocatively to Bacchus: “At this the beholders beganne to shoute, when Bacchus ­rose up . . . ​the beholders r­ ose up, e­ very man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to hover . . . ​, when they sware, the com­pany sware, when they departed to bedde; the com­pany presently was set on fire, they that ­were married posted home to theire wives; they that w ­ ere single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded.”32 ­These playgoers respond in sympathy with the per­for­mance, a demonstration of their emotional engagement with the fiction, but this engagement—­despite the outward markers of “activeness,” such as shouting, standing, swearing, and so forth—is still absorption stemming from an acritical ac­cep­tance that the fiction is itself real. When the spectators depart for their own sexual adventures, they confirm this absorption, as if they are incapable, or uninterested in, acknowledging the fiction of the per­for­mance. Not ­every encounter between spectator and stage was one of absorption and passivity: for ­every Humphrey Mildmay, absorbing the play without critical engagement, ­there was a Walter Mountfort, assiduously attempting to analyze how that play was made into a per­for­mance. The assumption of audience complicity and assimilation characteristic of Gosson, as with most antitheatricalists, is also the fundamental lynchpin of the “orchestration” approach, which prefers—­indeed, requires—­a passively receptive audience. Our understanding of the audience, however, must also account for the attentive Mountfort; describing his apparent engagement with the stage as a mere “pastime” would be inaccurate. For the Mildmays in the audience, to be at a play was to be “at play,” but for the Mountforts, to be at a play was to be, in a manner, “at work.” For both, playgoing involved a trade-­off against the vocational, socially sanctioned use of their time, but for attentive, participatory audience members, this resulted in no mere idleness—it was heightened activity involving l­abor, engagement, and even some transgressive assertiveness. The term “recreation” ­today refers implicitly to activities undertaken purely for plea­sure, but in the period it was often used to describe nonvocational activities that involved some fulfilling ­labor that renewed one’s spirit; in this sense, attending plays could effectively “re-­create” the playgoer himself or herself.33 In his commendation to Thomas Heywood in An Apology for Actors, Richard Perkins draws an

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explicit distinction between unrewarding ways to “spend [his] idle houres”—­ drinking, gambling, drabbing, or bowling—­and the “recreation” of “seeing a play,” which ­will “refresh” his “tir’d spirits”: “My faculties truly to re­create / With modest mirth, and my selfe best to please / Give me a play.”34 But it is not only the playgoer who is “re-­created” by the encounter; ­after the per­for­mance, the attentive playgoer may be able to re-­create the play itself. Indeed, as explored below, to leave the play­house with the ability to re-­create the play—­what we might term “re-­creative playgoing” rather than merely “recreative playgoing”—­ was recognized in the period as a par­tic­u­lar brand of dedicated, even productive, theatrical consumption, bordering on the avocational. The religious term “avocation” was first used to describe a diversion from one’s proper calling around 1617 and, unlike “recreation” or “pastime,” implied a tension with professionalism similar to that evoked by the modern “amateur.”35 It is usually assumed that, while professionals develop their craft in response to the pressures of the market, avocational prac­ti­tion­ers, lacking such pressure, simply do not worry about improving their craft, which often leads to the supposition that “success” was unimportant to them. The results of avocational l­abor are thus usually assumed to be only aty­pi­cal—­reflecting the desires of the individual producer more than the needs or wants of consumers—­ and, ­because of infrequent practice, defective. Thus the pejorative connotations of “amateur”: someone who has nothing at stake and so is uninterested in working to give o­ thers what they want, s­ettling, instead, for what he himself or she herself desires. Richard Brome warned his audience in the prologue to The Court Beggar (1639–40), that such amateur dramatists “Write / Lesse for your plea­sure than their own delight.”36 By contrast, professionals needed to please the audience, and so they had to learn to write plays that appealed to the demands and tastes of the largest group of consumers. It is fallacious, however, to attribute that same definition of “success” to plays written by playgoers who w ­ ere not interested in, and thus not bound by, the professionals’ standard of commercialization. Simply b­ ecause their ends differed, though (when t­ hose ends can be discerned at all), we should not think that amateurs necessarily invested a lower level of attention to their work than professionals; indeed, as the examples in this book demonstrate, amateurs often displayed heightened care and concern for their work and often closely tried to follow the working practices of the profession. As most studies of amateurism conclude, as a driver for effective practice, intrinsic motivation can equal, if not surpass, the extrinsic motivation of financial reward. The desire to find self-­determined plea­sure in an activity can produce an overwhelming desire

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to do that activity well: “­Every real amateur feels responsible to some notion of d ­ oing the loving well, and that entails a kind of caring, both practice and intensity of effort, that could be called work.”37 It is in this “work” that amateurism realizes its affinity with avocation.38 The resonances associated with “avocation” are thus useful in understanding how playgoers who wrote for the stage can be distinguished from t­hose for whom playgoing was indeed merely a form of entertainment. Writers in the period, particularly antitheatricalists, often emphasize a moral distinction between occasional playgoing and playgoing that was too committed and crossed the line from leisure into avocation. As Richard Brathwait urged, attending plays was not a cause for concern so long as playgoing remained unimportant leisure: I doe hold no Recreation fitter Than Morall Enterludes; but have a care You doe not make them too familiar; for that w ­ ere to invert a Recreation, And by day-­practice make it a Vocation.39 Brathwait puns on “a Vocation” (avocation) as the “inverse” of recreation: occasionally and uncritically sitting in the audience requires no diligence or l­abor and thus does not risk offending the period’s avocational taboo.40 A fine line, however, separates such attendance from playgoing that becomes “familiar” and thus avocational, between recreative playgoing and re-­creative playgoing. For playwriting playgoers, plays w ­ ere far more than mere idle diversions: playgoing was of ­great importance to them b­ ecause it was how they learned about playmaking. For them, attending the theater and learning about per­for­mance through seeing plays was indeed, to use Brathwait’s worried term, a “day-­practice,” or avocation, ­because it was through such avocational playgoing that they ­were able to translate their experiences as play consumers into forays as playmakers.

“Into a nearer roome”: Professional Playwriting in Early Modern E ­ ngland Given the potential slippage between the categories of play consumer and playmaker, we might ask what distinguishes an amateur writing just one play from a professionalizing dramatist writing a first play. Why think of a par­tic­u­lar

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single-­time writer for the professional stage as an “amateur” as opposed to an “aspiring (or perhaps, failed) professional”? In what ways did amateurs and novice professionals differ? It might be pos­si­ble to construct an argument distinguishing t­hese categories upon the grounds of intention, but the paucity of reliable evidence about intentions would make such an argument flimsy. Prob­ lems exist also for making a distinction along the lines of financial reward, since, as shown below, even an amateur who saw his or her one play staged would have been (or should have been) paid. The dilemma is further exacerbated by the fact that the terms “amateur” and “professional” did not exist in the period and imply a binary that does not entirely accord with the mercurial nature of theatrical creation in the period. Perhaps the best rubric to distinguish professionals from amateurs, then, is that of experience: for my purposes, a professional dramatist is one who writes with prior experience of theatrical production, and an amateur dramatist, a playwriting playgoer, is one who writes with prior experience only of theatrical consumption. It is thus pos­si­ble to think of writers not as entirely professional or entirely amateur but as occupying dif­fer­ent positions along a spectrum of professionalization demarcated by experience. While the profession of playwriting was fluid and inchoate throughout the period, most dramatists who wrote for the London commercial theaters moved along that spectrum through specific, though informal, systems of professionalization. Some already within the industry, such as actors—­like Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Nathan Field, Samuel Rowley, William Rowley, and William Shakespeare—or boys’ com­pany man­ag­ers—­like Samuel Daniel and Robert Daborne—­drew upon their prior experience with the public stage to write their plays.41 It would be fallacious to assume that, for example, Jonson’s first play represents the same kind of outsider’s perspective on the stage as Mountfort’s first play b­ ecause, unlike Mountfort, Jonson had already been exposed to commercial playmaking from his work as an actor. Beginning even before the generation of actor-­playwrights, academic dramatists—­like Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, and ­later John Marston, George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, John Ford, and James Shirley—­translated school, university, or Inns of Court dramatic experience into writing for the public stage. Though perhaps less familiar with the practices of the commercial stage than the player-­playwrights, ­these academic dramatists came to their work with some background in making plays with a writer’s understanding of dramatic structure, genre, character, and poetry. Fi­nally, some novice dramatists—­such as Philip Massinger, Richard Brome, many of the writers for the companies financed by Philip Henslowe,

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and the novice playwrights of the short-­lived ­Children of the King’s Revels at Whitefriars—­served an “apprenticeship” u ­ nder an established professional dramatist, learning about playwriting through collaborative writing.42 Playwriting was not a stable profession, and simply ­because a writer came into the industry through one of t­hese routes does not mean that he succeeded as a playwright or that he remained involved with the commercial stage. Indeed, the very idea of playwriting as a distinct, closed profession was a contested concept in the period. Nonetheless, from a modern perspective we can see that ­these three systems provided novice dramatists with the means for developing dramatic concepts into theatrical scripts; through them, playwrights became professional by gaining an internal knowledge of how plays became per­for­mances on the commercial stage. Not all dramatists writing for that stage underwent such training. In his commendatory verse for Brome’s Northern Lass (1629), Jonson makes this clear; first, he lauds his onetime apprentice for taking the “proper” route into the profession:43 I Had you for a Servant, once, Dick Brome;     And you perform’d a Servants faithfull parts: Now, you are got into a nearer roome,    Of Fellowship, professing my old Arts. And you doe doe them well, with good applause,     Which you have justly gained from the Stage, By observation of ­those Comick Lawes    Which I, your Master, first did teach the Age. You learn’d it well; and for it, serv’d your time     A Prentise-­ship: which few doe now a dayes.44 In describing his relationship with Brome, Jonson envisions an idealistic, formal system of professionalization modeled upon both the authorized apprenticeship regimens of the guilds and the unauthorized ones of the professional actors.45 The trainee is the master’s “servant,” seeking entrance into a closed “fellowship” in which members, ­after a probationary period, earn the right to “profess” a specialized system of knowledge inherited from—­and thus legitimized by—­previous generations. A professionalized industry is a field that has experienced “occupational closure,” 46 and so to be within it is to be in “a nearer roome”—an image that captures the working conditions for most dramatists in the commercial theaters.47 Jonson goes on, however, to despair at untrained outsiders who make in-

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cursions into the field of playwriting: “Now each Court-­Hobby-­horse ­will wince in rime; / Both learned, and unlearned, all write Playes.” Courtiers, academics, even the uneducated supply plays to the actors, Jonson grumbles. The defense he mounts draws upon the period’s soteriological theme of adhering to one’s calling: It was not so of old: Men tooke up trades     That knew the Crafts they had bin bred in, right: An honest Bilbo-­Smith would make good blades,    And the Physician teach men spue, or shite; The Cobler kept him to his nall; but now    Hee’ll be a Pi­lot, scarce can guide a Plough. Jonson’s cele­bration of Brome’s apprenticeship and his complaint that “few doe [as Brome did] now a dayes” underscore his idea that playwriting is a vocation that, like pi­loting a boat, demands training and is—or o­ ught to be—­closed to aspiring prac­ti­tion­ers who have not been properly trained. Even earlier, in the prologue to Volpone (1606), Jonson proudly declares that his play comes “From his owne hand, without a Co-­adjutor, / Novice, Jorneyman, or Tutor.” 48 Jonson’s vision of professionalism involves freedom from the oversight of a training collaborator—an earned autonomy that contrasts with the self-­appointed amateurs he singles out for scorn in his Northern Lass verse. His complaint ­there gains meaning only if the dramatists he describes supplied their plays without undertaking the proper training; in other words, with no intention of professionalizing. The prob­lem, so to speak, that Jonson identifies stems from the fact that, as Gary Taylor puts it, “­because commercial playwrights ­were never or­ga­nized into a livery com­pany, authors could not control the ­free movement of ­labour within their profession”—­including when that ­labor was not professional.49 ­Because ­these amateurs did not participate in the usual systems of professionalization, it would be misleading to dismiss them as failed novices. As academic dramatist Jasper Mayne explains in the preface and prologues to the 1639 edition of his 1637 The City Match, “he is not oth’ trade,” that is, not one of t­ hose professional writers “who eat by th’stage” and so must worry “Whither their sold Scenes be dislikt, or hit.”50 Rather, Mayne and o­ thers like him w ­ ere outsiders who only temporarily and briefly crossed (or attempted to cross) the porous line between theatrical consumer and theatrical producer. ­These outsiders ­were able to write for the professional theaters for the ­simple reason that writing was an open field in comparison to nearly all other

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occupations. A ­ fter accounting for the basic ele­ments of literacy and available time, the range of potential dramatic authors was as wide—in terms of socioeconomic level, education, dramatic taste, and theatrical understanding—as the play­house audiences themselves. The assumption that playwriting for the commercial stage was fully, or even nearly, closed is an idealized modern view predicated upon the dominance that plays by professionals have enjoyed in the formation of the En­glish canon. Contradictory to the assumption that “every­one knew their place in the playgoing community,”51 in the early modern play­house ­there w ­ ere no fixed “places” into which “every­one” dutifully fell. Hence professional playmakers’ frequent complaints about and warnings against consumers attempting to get involved in playmaking: they would not so frequently and stridently warn against something that was not happening or, at least, perceived to be happening. Lacking the kinds of controls imposed upon most other fields of ­labor in the period (including acting), playwriting was a field wide open to amateur participation. No state, church, city, or guild restrictions regulated who could write plays for the public stage or how they could go about writing them. Privy Council edicts, City of London petitions, even antitheatricalist polemics centered almost exclusively upon the prob­lems of play content, playing, playgoing, and the operation of play­houses, never upon the question of who could provide plays to the players. The socially marginalized position of commercial playwriting, coupled with the private nature of the act of writing, likely protected dramatists from becoming the focus of official control. The closest the state came to legislating over the work of playwrights was controlling the kind of content plays could contain by establishing rules that would create an atmosphere of anticipatory censorship. As Glynne Wickham notes, “Control of theatre means control of play, actors, and audience”;52 while what was in plays was a ­matter of state interest, control over who wrote them was not. Despite Jonson’s hopes, anyone could write for the commercial stage, ­whether he was professional or not.

“They write [for] their own delight”: Amateur Playwriting in Early Modern E ­ ngland The phenomenon Jonson lamented was not new to the En­glish stage. The history of theater in E ­ ngland begins with provincial and local amateurs staging plays in towns, guildhalls, and g­ reat halls.53 In London, even a­ fter the open-

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ing of the commercial play­houses, amateur drama could still on occasion be found within the city. As the commercial theater itself grew increasingly institutionalized, it diminished but did not entirely banish amateur dramatics. Most often, amateur playing, rather than playwriting, serves as the focus of commentary on t­ hese activities, prob­ably ­because playing, unlike writing, was a publicly vis­i­ble activity. Nonetheless, the terms used in ­those commentaries are useful in contextualizing early modern views of amateurism within the largely professional domain of London theatrical culture. In 1584, William Fleetwood, recorder for the City of London, described amateur players in the city: “It hath not been used nor thought meet . . . ​that players have or should make their living on the art of playing; but men for their livings using other honest and lawful arts, or retained in honest ser­vices, have by companies learned some interludes for some increase to their profit by other men’s pleasures in vacant time of recreation.”54 Fleetwood’s description is perhaps the closest we have to a period definition of “amateur”: t­ hese players make money from acting, but it is secondary to their “other honest and lawful arts”; their playing is not regular, not their principal ­labor, and is undertaken for “pleasures” when time allows. Receiving financial reward does not make them professional; indeed, lack of payment is not a defining component of amateurism in the period.55 The only consistent marker of amateurism in the early modern theater was this irregular engagement with the stage: an amateur occupied a position outside the industry and made no sustained efforts to change that position. Similar valences for “amateurism” appear in the prologue to W. Smith’s The Hector of Germany, staged by amateurs for paying audiences at the Red Bull and the Curtain in 1614: If you should aske us, being men of Trade, Wherefore the Players facultie we invade? Our ans­were is, No ambition to compare With any, in that qualitie held rare; Nor with a thought for any grace you give To our weake action, by their course to live.56 The prologue acknowledges that playing is a closed profession and that the incursion of the amateurs into it is a peculiarity. Their motivation is neither to attempt comparison with the professionals nor, even if their play is well received, to make a living from the stage. Rather, the amateurs cite the pre­ce­dent

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of o­ thers who have used theater as a means of recreation outside their proper vocations: As in Camps, and Nurseries of Art, Learning and valour have assum’d a part, In a Cathurnall Sceane their wits to try, Such is our purpose in this History. Emperours have playd, and their Associates to, Souldiers and Schollers; tis to speake and do. If Citizens come short of their high fame, Let Citizens beare with us for the name.57 Amateurism thus described is a form of heightened theatrical engagement, and one that has a long and distinguished pedigree. Robert Burton even suggests medical benefits to transforming idle spectatorship into active, amateur playing: all physicians, he notes, “­will have a melancholy, sad, discontented person, make frequent use of honest sports, companies, and recreations. . . . ​Not to be an auditor only, or a spectator, but sometimes an actor himselfe.”58 Like the city apprentices who staged The Hector of Germany, instances of playgoers becoming players on the public, even commercial, stage can be found occasionally throughout the period. L ­ ater in the ­century, for example, Thomas Killigrew recounted to Sir John Mennis how as a boy he got involved with the theater through his engagement as a participatory playgoer: “He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, ‘Who w ­ ill go and be a devil, and he ­shall see the play nothing?’ then would he go in, and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays.”59 The boys ­were not paid for their ­labor, except the in-­kind payment of seeing plays for ­free; as with the amateurs who staged The Hector of Germany, their participation in the public theater was an exercise in plea­sure and recreation. For e­ very novice Killigrew who translated that exercise into a c­ areer in the industry, countless o­ thers—­t he other boys only briefly glimpsed in Killigrew’s anecdote and now lost to history—­ remained amateur participants, outsiders stepping only momentarily onto the stage they usually only patronized as audience members (indeed, in Killigrew’s experience, spectatorship and participation are integrated: involvement in the per­for­mance is an essential component to seeing it). Like the amateurs who staged The Hector of Germany, a troupe of apprentices staged amateur dramatist Robert Tailor’s Hog Hath Lost His Pearl at the Whitefriars and then the Red Bull in 1613, and sometime between 1623 and 1629 a com­pany of

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young men of the Strand staged The Resolute Queen.60 E. K. Chambers suggests that amateur players also occasionally rented out other play­houses as well.61 Just as amateur players participated in a London theatrical culture that was increasingly professionalized, ­there ­were outsiders who did the same as writers. If we define the professional dramatist as someone who, as a regular, internal member of the institutionalized systems for playmaking, went through some informal training as a playwright and accrued further experience by consistently plotting, writing, and revising to address pressures placed upon the play by the actors, Master of the Revels, and audience, then we can define the amateur as someone who lacked this experience and did not try to obtain it. It is impor­tant to reiterate, however, that this lack of interest in professionalizing does not equate to a lack of interest in effective playwriting. Many amateurs tried to use the same tools and pro­cesses as the professionals in making their plays v­ iable for per­for­mance. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book look to some of the ways in which amateurs attempted to adopt what they assumed to be “professional” playwriting practices and consider what ­those efforts suggest about the perspective and understanding certain playgoers had of the professional stage. As with amateur players, amateur dramatists ­were often financially compensated for their ­labor. In March 1614, for example, the University of Cambridge paid Thomas Tomkis twenty pounds for writing the comedy Albumazar.62 Likewise, though the original audience for Tailor’s Hog Hath Lost His Pearl at Whitefriars in February 1613 was “invited,” 63 the title page of the 1614 quarto notes that the play was subsequently “Divers times Publickely acted.” The term “Publickely” suggests that it was performed for paying audiences, and accordingly the actors likely recompensed Tailor for his l­abor. Playgoers such as Mountfort and Clavell, who supplied their plays to professional companies, ­were no doubt paid for their scripts, w ­ hether or not the play was eventually staged and even though they themselves evidently did not seek to enter the profession. Being paid for having written a play is thus an inadequate criterion for determining what makes certain dramatists “professionals,” just as not being paid fails to account for what makes ­others “amateurs.” Even if they w ­ ere compensated for their l­abor, many of t­ hese amateur writers, like amateur players, participated in the playmaking pro­cess for the personal plea­ sure of it rather than out of concern for public reception. Many courtier dramatists, who wrote to please a very small target audience, w ­ ere particularly, often proudly, unconcerned with what general audiences might think

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of their work. The minor aristocrat and amateur dramatist Sir Cornelius Fermedo, for example, declares to the audience of his play The Governor that even “if he wrote for gaine / He would not give a feather to obtaine / All yore approfes”: he wishes to be “vnderstood,” not “flatter’d,” and he has seen in the audience only twelve ­people—­prob­ably fellow courtiers—­who possess sufficient “prudence and impartiallitie” to be “his Jury in this place.” 64 This adversarial tone is amplified in the epilogue, where Fermedo notes, “Who writes for plea­sure never taketh care / ­W hether he’s Where lik’t or not”; he points out that he can always            ingage The players by filling of the stage  . . . ​to a play that’s new [­because] before tis knowne ­either for good or bad the p ­ eople come.65 Fermedo proudly declares his freedom from the financial need to please the audience, but he also reiterates his desire to “ingage” the players, fill the auditorium, and, if need be, write more plays: “Hisse if you dare,” he challenges the audience, “if so . . . ​heele write: some ­thing that’s new & worse” ­because “hee’d rather be twice hiss’t then have one clap.” 66 Brathwait adopts a similar attitude to Fermedo’s, conflating audience understanding of his (now lost) plays with socioeconomic position: ­because his plays ­were “free-­borne, and not mercenarie,” they “received gracefull ac­cep­tance of all such as understood my ranke and qualitie”; that is, writing for plea­sure elevates the author above the usual quality of work produced by commercial authors.67 Brathwait—­ again cautious about making theater an avocation—­justifies his forays into playwriting upon the grounds of personal plea­sure: they w ­ ere simply meant “to allay and season more serious studies” rather than to serve as “any fixt imployment.” 68 Again, the distinction between the amateur’s involvement with the theater and the professional’s centers upon the professional’s continuous (“fixt”) practice and hence internal familiarity with how it worked. Glynne Wickham has argued that “by the start of the seventeenth c­ entury virtually all amateur play production (excepting that among courtiers and students) had ceased.” 69 This totalizing language has led to the assumption that if someone wrote a play for the public stage ­after 1567, it must have been ­because he wanted to become professional or was an aristocrat uninterested in professionalizing. Scholars following Wickham have largely taken the evolution of public theater in London into a professional enterprise as both inevitable and

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absolute. As “amateur play production” in London became scarcer ­after the 1570s, however, the public stages became some of the last available venues in which nonprofessional playmakers could participate in dramatic culture. Amateur playwriting increased in frequency the more established the professional theater became, reaching in the Caroline era the crescendo that professionals such as Jonson and Brome found most irritating.70 For many amateurs, playwriting was indeed merely a hobby undertaken at the universities, among coteries of readers, or by courtiers seeking to impress the court. It is this last group, the courtiers, that scholars usually acknowledge as the only amateurs writing for the post-1567 professional stage, and so amateurism has come to be seen as a privilege of only the upper classes. This class-­limited definition of amateur playwriting derives in large part from the influence of J. W. Saunders’s 1964 Profession of En­glish Letters. In a brief chapter on amateur writing in the Re­nais­sance, Saunders describes the amateur as exclusively aristocratic and centered upon the court.71 Concomitant to Saunders’s view is the generalization that amateur writing required leisure time and freedom from economic need, both of which were unavailable to nonaristocratic writers, who must have therefore been interested only in monetizing their ­labor.72 Although Saunders’s assumption is contradicted by the ­actual socioeconomic diversity of amateur dramatists, it has ­shaped most scholarship on early modern playwriting ­because being paid to write for the stage, though potentially lucrative, was socially marginalized—­ideal conditions for his hypothesis.73 It is true that throughout the period, but particularly ­after 1630, courtiers seeking prestige and influence at court supplied plays (usually with money) to professional actors (usually the King’s Men) for per­ for­mance before the monarch and in commercial play­houses (usually the Blackfriars). Defining “amateurism” as a practice of ­these writers exclusively, however, overlooks nonaristocratic amateurs such as Mountfort and Clavell. While the work of the courtier dramatists is impor­tant to understanding the larger picture of amateur playwriting in the early modern period, it is not the focus of this book. ­Because of the influence of Saunders’s work, ­these writers have already received critical attention, both in individual studies and as a group more generally.74 Focusing only on aristocratic amateurs—­indeed, defining the category “amateur” exclusively on socioeconomic grounds—­has ­shaped the questions scholars ask about amateur playwrights, often taking focus away from ­matters of theatricality and putting it on ­matters of politics. The disciplinary dominance of Saunders’s class-­based definition of amateurism has prevented us from fully taking advantage of the evidence provided by

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amateurs whose perspective on the stage was not centered upon the court or its culture. Th ­ ere is a distinct difference in perspective upon, and access to, the professional stage between a po­liti­cally influential and potentially power­ ful aristocrat who might even pay the players to stage his play and a socially and eco­nom­ically marginalized single-­time dramatist who has l­ittle to offer beyond his play. The two types of amateurs differ in their position relative to the stage, and thus their plays w ­ ill reveal dif­fer­ent types of information about their views of that stage. In his 1986 The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, G. E. Bentley broadened the definition of “amateur” beyond Saunders’s socioeconomic classification by identifying the amateur playwright as a writer of any class who did not make a living from the writing of plays, wrote infrequently, and did not develop a sustained relationship with a commercial playing com­pany; “though numerous and diverse,” Bentley observes, “and indicative of the strong appeal of the drama in t­ hese years, [they] w ­ ere never p ­ eople who looked to the 75 commercial theatres for a living.” Other historians since Bentley have followed his lead in taking infrequent dramatic activity and external position to the social, economic, and artistic community of the commercial stage as the defining characteristics of the amateur.76 Counting writers of private plays for h ­ ouse­hold and town per­for­mances, academic dramatists, closet dramatists, and courtier dramatists, Bentley estimates that between 1590 and 1642, more than two hundred such amateurs wrote approximately 265 surviving plays. Unfortunately, the four spaces counted by Bentley in making this tally have become tacitly accepted as the only domains of amateur playwriting in the period: the “closet,” the home or town, the acad­emy, and the court. ­Because of the continued influence of Saunders’s work, scholars still typically assume that, except for the courtiers, amateurs wrote only for amateur actors (as with academic dramatists and dramatists who wrote for private per­for­mances) or readers (as with closet dramatists). This assumption has led most accounts of the early modern stage to take Bentley’s four categories as the only categories of amateur playwriting in the period, e­ ither ignoring nonaristocratic amateurs entirely or concluding—­often contrary to biographical and textual evidence—­ that they w ­ ere actually minor, essentially failed, novice professionals. Contrary to Bentley and Saunders, Charles Whitney suggests that the example of the playwriting playgoer Richard Norwood—­a young, unemployed sailor who tried to write a play while stuck in London due to a bout of seasickness in 1612—­was “prob­ably typical of several kinds of apprentices as well as of p ­ eople of low degree”;77 that is, more nonaristocratic amateurs likely wrote

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for the public stages than we realize or for whom we have extant evidence (a caution, perhaps, to scholars looking to attribute the period’s many anonymous plays to known authors). In 1639, Lewis Sharpe—­himself a nonaristocratic playwriting playgoer—­noted that even “the briske Shops fore-­man undertakes with’s Ell / To sound the depth of Aganippas Well.”78 Certainly the opportunity for almost anyone to write was apparent: in 1617, Henry Fitzgeoffrey complained, “Who’d not at venture Write? So many waies / A man may proue a Poet now a daies.”79 Just as an aristocrat like Lodowick Carlell might justify his foray into playwriting ­because, as his stationer John Rhodes put it, “his profit was his plea­sure,” we should not assume on the basis of class alone that a nonaristocratic amateur like Norwood or Mountfort might not also write a play for the commercial industry for reasons of personal plea­sure and engagement.80 Although Bentley neglects to consider its critical or historical value, he does briefly point out the existence of this group of nonaristocratic playwriting playgoers—­“citizen amateurs” is his term—­and admits that playgoers of any class could and did write for the commercial theater without looking to make playwriting their profession.81 As examples of this group, he offers Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen, Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, and Thomas Rawlins’s The Rebellion (1640), but ­there ­were several more than just ­these. Bentley himself disparagingly shrugs, “In a time of g­ reat dramatic activity, more plays than we now know ­were prob­ably written by totally untalented amateurs.”82 And yet, but for some generalizations to distinguish t­ hese writers from professionals, Bentley offers no sustained analy­sis of t­ hese amateurs or their plays. The extent of his interest in playgoers’ plays consists of speculating on what he assumed to be the inevitability of their rejection: “One would guess that even in a time when the social status of the playwright was low, a fair number of amateur plays would have been boldly or surreptitiously offered to the London acting companies and rejected by them.”83 Not all amateurs’ plays ­were rejected by the London companies (we have evidence for only one such rejection), nor are Bentley’s qualifying adverbs—­“ boldly” and “surreptitiously”—­accurate descriptions of the nature of the relationship between the professional industry and the amateurs whose plays survive, a relationship that was for the most part open, connected, and dynamic rather than, as Bentley implies (and as Jonson wanted), closed, divided, and static. An amateur supplying a play to the professional players would have needed to be neither bold nor surreptitious. Furthermore, by associating the value of amateurs’ plays exclusively with the question of their ac­cep­tance by professional players, Bentley overlooks their primary, indeed, unique, value as evidence,

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not of a­ ctual industry practices, but of how well audience members perceived ­those practices. To make use of playgoers’ plays for this purpose, it does not actually m ­ atter ­whether the plays ­were staged or not. Bentley recognizes that “a very small percentage of the amateur plays did get to the London theatres” but asserts that “they ­were very seldom intended for them.”84 In some instances, however, amateurs who did not “look to the commercial theatres for a living” did indeed intend their plays for t­ hose theaters. Martin Butler points out that from 1637 to 1640, a group of amateurs saw their plays (which he dismisses as “hardly . . . ​a thrilling output”) staged by the Queen Henrietta’s Men at Salisbury Court, prob­ably as part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the troupe’s man­a g­er, Richard Heton, to compete with Christopher Beeston’s troupe at the Cockpit and the King’s Men at the Blackfriars.85 The amateurs’ plays that appeared in the Salisbury Court repertory included Richard Lovelace’s The Scholars, Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, William Rider’s The Twins, and possibly John Gough’s The Strange Discovery. Most of ­t hese writers explic­itly indicated their disinterest in professionalizing, and, despite the fact that Heton likely paid them for their plays, none of them continued to write for the stage; they ­were also not courtiers or aristocrats (which raises a complication for Butler’s theory that Heton was attempting to make Salisbury Court “a venue for amateur drama of a kind more usually associated with the Blackfriars”).86 They therefore represent, along with Mountfort, Rawlins, Clavell, and o­ thers, further evidence of how nonaristocratic early modern theatrical consumers could become theatrical producers even in the context of the commercial theater—­indeed, if Butler’s hypothesis about Heton’s intentions is correct, ­because of that commercial context. In keeping with our definition of “amateur,” dramatists such as Lovelace, Sharpe, Rider, Gough, Mountfort, Clavell, Barnes, Rawlins, Norwood, and ­others like them ­were outsiders writing for an increasingly professionalized industry. They possessed an awareness of the industry’s needs, practices, and limitations, but, unlike that of their professional counter­parts, their awareness derived largely from observation rather than previous participation; accordingly, the evidence they provide of t­ hose needs, practices, and limitations reflects the perspective and understanding of consumers, rather than regular producers. The evidence of their plays can also, in some instances, suggest specific ways in which theatrical consumers rejected what was typical for the profession, or thought differently about plays and playmaking than the professionals did, as we w ­ ill see in some aspects of Robert Yarington’s use of stage directions in Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies (Chapter 3) and Alexander Brome’s

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use of rhyme in The Cunning Lovers (Chapter 4). The 1642 po­liti­cal tragedy The Queen of Corsica, by Francis Jaques, is a good example of this: in his play (which was prob­ably never acted), Jaques employs all of the conventional devices of Caroline courtly tragicomedy—­platonic love in contest against base lust, a lost royal child found again, near incest, a blocked romantic relationship, an escape from pirates, a hunting scene in the woods, and a concluding wedding—­but then upends that generic expectation by tying all of t­hese threads together in a blood-­soaked final act that includes incest realized, ­ ere, of course, professional murder, suicide, torture, and rebellion.87 ­There w dramatists who also experimented with defying or complicating generic expectations, but the evidence of an amateur dramatist d ­ oing this points to a model of cultural consumption that was capable of imagining alternatives to the mainstream content being produced for it by the commercial theater industry. Indeed, the more established and commercialized that industry became, the more risk averse it would grow in its own experimentation with content and form (often when professionals did experiment, they w ­ ere greeted with failure—as with Jonson’s Epicoene, Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, and Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle); at the same time, the domain of the amateur remained ­free of such conservative pressures, open to explore, innovate, and contradict tradition in ways the largely convention-­bound profession could not. In keeping with our definition of “amateur,” t­ hese dramatists w ­ ere also only occasional writers. Though they may have been committed playgoers, deeply engaged in writing their plays and interested in seeing them performed, they displayed no sustained commitment to the industry, no trajectory of experience gained through consistent practice, failure, and success. Many—­even some, such as Thomas Rawlins, whose plays ­were quite successful on stage88—­ explic­itly indicate their lack of interest in professionalizing (so common are ­t hese statements of disinterest among the amateurs that Bentley considers them “one of the hallmarks of the amateur”).89 When t­ hese amateurs approached companies with their scripts t­here is no positive evidence that they intended to become professional and often positive evidence to the contrary. Although they may have taken intrinsic plea­sure in writing for the theater, this is not in itself reason to think that they therefore sought a ­career in that theater; the unevidenced belief that they must have derives from Saunders’s class-­oriented definition of “amateur” and the lasting effect it has had upon our assumptions about participation in the industry. If we too readily export to the early modern theater modern (or Jonsonian) notions of playmaking as

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a closed field of l­ abor, any attempt to participate by an outsider—­particularly one that we assume lacked the leisure time to engage in an activity without recompense—­will seem an attempt to enter the profession. The field of playwriting for the commercial stage was, however, open to dramatists of any socioeconomic group or background, regardless of their ultimate objective in writing for the stage or their position relative to the stage when they wrote. Dramatists need not have been professional, or seeking to become professional, in order to write plays for the professional players. In this re­spect, nonaristocratic amateurs, such as Walter Mountfort, ­were no dif­fer­ent from aristocratic amateurs, such as, for example, Sir William Berkeley, author of the King’s Men’s tragicomedy The Lost Lady (1638); we should not assume that simply ­because Mountfort was a clerk and Berkeley an aristocrat that the former would not write a play for the same nonprofessional purposes as the latter. As the prologue to The Launching of the Mary, Clavell’s commonplace book, and other pieces of evidence attest, ­these amateurs could indeed be motivated by the same ends for which Brome mocked courtier amateurs: writing for “their own delight.”90 The pertinent question, then, is not about intentions, that is, why ­these playgoers wrote plays, but rather what their plays can tell us about how they saw or thought they saw the stage from their perspective as theatrical consumers. Playgoers writing for professional actors may have been, as Bentley puts it, “minor participants” in the theater, but they w ­ ere participants nonetheless, and participants who have gone largely unexamined, despite the fact that their work provides unique evidence of how closely certain playgoers understood and interacted with the stage. Apart from passing recognition of the kind given by Bentley and Butler, most scholarship on the early modern stage and playwriting ­either ignores the unique position occupied by ­t hese writers or simply omits them altogether. This book seeks to undo that legacy by restoring to our narrative of early modern theater history the work of playgoers who wrote plays for the professional stage and recognizing how t­hose plays reveal that, in early modern ­England, cultural consumers could be a species of cultural producers.

* * * The first chapter of this book revisits some of the evidence—­both the familiar and the less often considered—­that demonstrates that the idea of the audience as a collaborator in the making of meaning during a play’s per­for­mance was an inherent and pervasive part of theatrical culture in the period. Opin-

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ions about that perceived collaboration varied from t­hose who took it to be mere benign, inward imaginary response that had, for other audience members, no effect upon the meaning of the play, to ­those who viewed externalized physical and verbal responses as a way of changing for other audience members the play’s course and meaning. ­W hether playgoers’ collaboration was in keeping with what professional playmakers intended or ­whether it deviated from that intention, authority to determine the ultimate meaning of a play in per­for­mance was recognized as residing not with the producers but with the consumers; or, more precisely, in the theater, the consumers ­were understood to be the play’s final producers. Though many professional playmakers contested the fact, the early modern play­house was taken by many to be a space of shared, rather than exclusory, creation. Viewing audience experience as an encounter requiring creative interaction with the per­for­mance, in which consumers are conditioned to take on the role of producers as well, we can see how dedicated playgoers like Mountfort could look to become ­actual participants in the playmaking pro­cess. While ­others in the audience ­were content to limit their participation to imaginative engagement and the occasional verbal or physical responsive outburst during a per­for­mance, playwriting playgoers took their participation a substantial, creative step further. How playwrights responded to the concept of the audience as a collaborator in the play­house reveals that many within the industry perceived the idea of audience involvement in the playmaking pro­cess as a threat to the aesthetic and dramatic integrity of the theatrical event and, implicitly, the ongoing (never fully completed) professionalization of the field of playmaking itself. Most amateurs, on the other hand, represent playgoers exercising creative authority as aesthetically and dramatically productive, even restorative, and thus a validation of their own desire to participate in the playmaking pro­cess. My interest in Chapter 1 is less in attempting to determine ­whether, or to what extent, audience members ­were in fact participants in the making of meaning in the playhouse—­though establishing that function is crucial to contextualizing the work of the playwriting playgoers; rather, my focus is upon establishing how ­those in the period thought about and represented the relationship between theatrical consumers and the theater they consumed. For that reason, the chapter draws on both literary works (including plays by professional dramatists themselves) and documentary evidence to show that playgoers and playmakers in the period understood the audience’s relationship with the stage to be fluid, open, and dialogic, in which playgoers’ creative input could be just as authoritative as that of professional playmakers.

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The remaining chapters turn from the concept of the playmaking playgoer to its real­ity, focusing on the working practices of several such amateur dramatists. My purpose in ­these chapters is to determine what plays by playgoers can tell us about a theatrical consumer’s understanding of the way plays ­were written and staged. The intention is not to track down specific content they may have borrowed from par­tic­u­lar plays by professional playwrights. Though t­ here are places where certain professional plays, playwrights, or companies influenced some amateur dramatists—­and I draw attention to t­hose debts when relevant to my analy­sis—­there is no evidence that any of them intended a direct response to one par­tic­u­lar professional play or playwright. Indeed, to assume that playgoers’ plays are only primarily of use or interest in how they might reflect or tell us about professionals’ plays falls back into the critical fallacy of consigning amateurs’ plays to the status of mere “plagiarisms” (the term to which Jonson often returns), only significant when they repeat or reuse material from a par­tic­u­lar professional play. This book’s focus, rather, is upon the prob­lem of recovering what certain early modern theatrical consumers thought about the stage, how it worked, and how play scripts became play per­for­mances. My interest is not in what ­these writers “took” from professionals’ plays in terms of literary content but what, theatrically speaking, they learned from them. Analyzing ­these plays as creative, rather than derivative, works approaches them on their own terms and not through the conditioning lens of the profession. An essential goal of the book is to broaden our notion of authorship in the early modern period by placing amateur writers—­rather than canonical professionals—at the center of analy­sis. ­These chapters are therefore not a “source study” shedding light on the oft-­studied work of professionals but a study of the audience’s potential for deep theatrical understanding as expressed in the oft-­neglected work of the amateurs. Chapter 2 explores two playgoers’ plays in manuscript in order to show how engaged theatrical consumers drafted and revised to address the needs of specific users of t­hose manuscripts. The first case study uses Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary to reconstruct how a playgoer tried to negotiate around the censorship of the Master of the Revels. The second case study considers how Arthur Wilson’s The Inconstant Lady (1630), a play that exists in both foul papers and an authorial pre­sen­ta­tion copy, reveals a playgoer’s pro­ cess of revising in order to make his play suitable for a specific reader. Chapter 3 turns to stage directions to consider how playwriting playgoers understood and attempted to employ the materials, conventions, and practices of the commercial theaters. The chapter begins by analyzing how Robert Yarington’s posi-

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tion in the play­house as a playgoer influenced one par­tic­u­lar, pointedly theatrical stage direction that he repeatedly used in his Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies (1594–1601). The second case study shows how a number of stage directions in Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen signal the playgoer’s understanding of per­for­mance practices and conventions and his concern also to explicate actions and materials that he knew to be unconventional. Fi­nally, the chapter’s study of William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven (1601; revised 1606–8 and 1636–47) examines stage directions that give two or more choices to performers, depending on ­whether the play is staged by boys or by adults, in order to recover the playgoer’s understanding of how dif­fer­ent per­for­mance auspices required dif­fer­ent practices and materials. Chapter 4 interrogates the efficacy of playwriting playgoers as verse dramatists, using plays by playgoers who w ­ ere also nondramatic poets to demonstrate the kinds of verse effects amateurs incorporated into their plays, thus suggesting what poetically attentive audience members might have recognized about the nature and purpose of poetry on stage. The chapter begins with transitions between prose and verse in Robert Chamberlain’s The Swaggering Damsel (1625–40) in order to demonstrate the playgoer’s understanding of how modal shifts in language on stage could serve specific per­for­mance purposes apart from the simplistic rubric of genre. A similar sophistication marks the use of rhyme in Alexander Brome’s The Cunning Lovers (ca. 1639); Brome’s frequent blending of rhymes for vari­ous purposes distinguishes the playgoer’s play from contemporaneous plays written by professionals and so pres­ents a more complex picture of the audience than we might assume if we ­were to judge that audience from the professionals’ plays alone. The chapter concludes with a study of how Barnabe Barnes uses metrical variants to characterize the changing emotions of two characters in The Dev­il’s Charter (1607). Just as professionals s­ haped dramatic meter to control mood or action, Barnes recognized that deliberate deviations from ideal iambic pentameter could be used to create the illusion of dynamic characters. Reading a playgoer’s play as evidence of audience experience ­will not tell us what all—or even any other—­audience members experienced in the play­ house, even audience members from the same socioeconomic class or background as the playwright. ­These highly invested, literate audience members ­were self-­selecting and peculiar, and displayed a depth of interest and attention that likely set them apart from their peers. If it is true that, as Gurr speculates, the “ordinary type of playgoer [was] more absorbed in the story than the verse or characterizations [and] not at all interested in symbols or their application, inclined to moralise only in [a] conventional way,” playwriting

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playgoers reveal a much more heightened engagement with all of ­these ele­ ments.91 A loose modern analogue to plays written by playgoers may be found in “fan fiction,” in which deeply engaged cultural consumers subvert the producer-­consumer hierarchy by asserting their own creative agency in ways that might reaffirm or critique texts made for them by mainstream, institutionalized commercial producers.92 Just as a script or story written by a dedicated follower of a par­tic­u­lar tele­vi­sion show ­will tell us, not about the show itself, but about that follower’s understanding of that show and its culture (in a way that a script written by a regular writer on its staff could not), a play written by a playgoer can tell us about that playgoer’s understanding of the stage.93 ­These playwrights’ plays merit reconsideration as primary evidence of par­tic­u­lar audience members’ experiences ­because thus far the questions we have been asking of them (when we ask questions of them at all) have been, for the most part, methodologically inappropriate. When t­ hese plays have failed to live up to the expectation that they w ­ ill, or should, provide the same kind of evidence as professionals’ plays, they have been pushed to the margins as unreliable and unimportant. Recognizing t­hese plays as the work of writers whose knowledge of the theater derived almost entirely from their experience attending and reading plays, rather than making them, allows us to reposition our expectations and, at the same time, refine our own perspective on the early modern audience. If the early modern play­house was a community of playmakers, plays by audience members afford the best access to the creative vision, as well as practical theatrical knowledge, of individuals in an other­wise largely mysterious and inscrutable part of that community.

chapter 1

“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” The Early Modern Idea of Playgoers as Playmakers

While “standing by as a spectator” of the calamitous per­for­mance of Barton Holyday’s Technogamia before King James on August 26, 1621, a man known only as “Hoskins of Oxford” deci­ded to share with the rest of the audience his opinion of the play. An actor delivered what must have struck Hoskins as the perfect setup: “As at a banquett some meates haue sweet some saore last—.” Before the actor could continue, Hoskins “rime[d] openly to it”: “Euen soe your dubllett is to short in the waste.”1 What was the effect of Hoskins’s addition to the play? Th ­ ere is no rec­ord of how the audience members—­including James—­responded to this intrusion, though given how bored they had become, it is not difficult to imagine that the nonsense quip was met with laughter.2 Though the play is generically an academic allegory, the audience that night saw it as a dull tribulation that was, Anthony à Wood explained, “too grave for the king, and too scholastic for the auditory.”3 ­A fter the second act, James tried to sneak out, but his advisers urged him to stay in order to avoid giving offence. He remained, “tho’ much against his w ­ ill,” and took a nap. The per­for­mance lasted the entire night, and when day broke many audience members w ­ ere found to have slipped out in the dark. The question of what effect Hoskins’s addition had on the play draws a distinction between the play as its audience experienced it, that is, as a performed event s­ haped in the moment by audience response, and the play as we experience it ­today, as a written text insulated from such response. The audience on August 26, 1621, saw a dif­fer­ent Technogamia from what we ­will find in the quartos of 1618 and 1630, not simply b­ ecause Holyday revised the text for

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the event (Wood notes that Holyday made “some foolish alterations” for the royal per­for­mance) but ­because the audience’s experience, and hence understanding, of the play derived from the specific context of that tedious eve­ning. Part of that context, and a part to which modern readers would be oblivious if not for the anonymous witness who recorded the event, was Hoskins. That eve­ ning, his interjection added levity by adding new text, by collaborating with Holyday (against Holyday’s w ­ ill) to change the audience’s reception of the play. Hoskins’s addition to Holyday’s play was minor, but it undercut the dramatist’s generic objective by converting seriousness into humor. This generic conversion, in fact, remained part of the historical memory of that long night: one ­later satire on the performance—­recorded in a commonplace book held by the Folger Library—­recalls how what was meant “tragically” came off as “Comicall.” 4 Hoskins’s nonsense contribution to Technogamia was not relevant to the play or the play’s purpose as designed by Holyday, but for one brief moment, and perhaps longer, it changed the play that the audience received. For readers of the printed script of Technogamia, the play was made entirely by Barton Holyday. For the audience of Technogamia on August 26, 1621, the play was made by many contributors, including the spontaneous, collaborating playgoer Hoskins. Not all such audience intrusions contradict the dramatist’s intentions, but they always have the effect of appropriating to the consumer a degree of authority over the dramatic event. At the first per­for­mance of amateur dramatist Henry Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora (ca. 1635) at the Blackfriars, an audience member interrupted the play and “cried out upon the Monsterousnesse and Impossibilitie” of the “indecorum that appear’d . . . ​in the Part of Cleander, who being represented a Person of seventeen yeares of age, is made to speak words, that would better sute with the age of thirty”; Viscount Falkland was in attendance, however, and “this Noble Person, having for some time suffered the unquiet, and impertinent Dislikes of this Auditor . . . ​forbore him no longer, but (though he ­were one he knew not) told him, Sir, ’tis not altogether so Monsterous and Impossible, for One of Seventeen yeares to speak at such a Rate, when He that made him speak in that manner, and writ the w ­ hole Play, was Himself no Older.”5 The contest between the “auditor” and Falkland displays two dif­fer­ent types of audience response: the first, opposing the terms of the fiction that has been written for him and proposing an alternative; the second, confirming t­ hose terms. Even Falkland’s interjection, however, stops the play in order to impose spectatorial control, and it implies that the only grounds upon which the per­for­mance can proceed is the open demonstration of spectatorial approval. As Preiss puts it, “If the play contin-



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 33

ues ­after this outburst, it does so on his [that is, Falkland’s] authority, not the poet’s; ‘He that . . . ​writ the ­whole Play’ is not the one who makes it.” 6 Audience members at a play can become creative participants whose engagement with the per­for­mance might change that play, e­ither for themselves alone, through internal interpretation, or for the rest of the audience, through external response. Indeed, as Preiss argues, the very essence of what makes an event “theatrical” is that it “convert[s] reception into production.”7 In effect, playgoers must be collaborators in the pro­cess of making meaning out of a performed script, that is, in the pro­cess of playmaking. Sometimes that contribution might conform to and complete the playwrights’ and players’ intentions, resulting in no significant divergence from the play’s authorial meanings. Preiss points out that often spectators applauding, laughing, or crying in the ­middle of a per­for­mance, though interrupting the theatrical event, nonetheless reinforce the intended generic and aesthetic goals of the scripted play.8 At other times, however, the responses and meaning-making of the playgoer challenge or even contradict ­those goals, resulting in a new play made by the receiver through the acts of interpretation and response, just as a playwright might rewrite another playwright’s text, or as an actor might, through per­for­mance choices, inflect or alter a playwright’s text.9 Examples of early modern playgoers’ participation changing a play demonstrate that audience members held significant potential control over the rest of the audience’s reception and understanding of the play. As noted in the Introduction, given our historical distance from the play­house and our need to resort to written scripts of plays, scholarship has largely privileged the enduring words of the dramatist as “orchestrators” of audience experience; however, accounts of ­actual audience experience show that playgoers, through interpretation and intrusion, also orchestrated the play. This chapter historicizes this theoretical commonplace of per­for­mance studies within the context of the early modern stage, looking to evidence of how the idea of the participatory, playmaking audience was viewed in the period. Commentators’ complex and varied attitudes ­toward this concept indicate that it was deeply embedded within early modern theatrical culture and consistently u ­ nder negotiation by agents of that culture.

“It is not . . . ​the Herb that makes the Honey [but] the Bee”: Reception Response in the Early Modern Audience It is the nature of theatrical per­for­mance that ­every audience member has the capacity to imagine, and so understand, the play in a dif­fer­ent way. B ­ ecause

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reception of an encoded text requires the receiver’s interpretive response as he or she decodes the text (according to ability and inclination), ­every such encounter involves the creation of particularized meaning by that receiver. At times, the meaning the receiver makes w ­ ill accord with what the first maker of the text intended; at other times, however, the recipient’s meaning w ­ ill differ from ­those intentions. In both instances, however, the completion of the meaning-­making pro­cess is in the hands—or, rather, interpretive faculty—of the receiver, not the first maker.10 Joel Altman refers to this as “theatrical potentiality”: the play “is potential insofar as it is incomplete in itself and must coalesce with labile thought-­and feeling-­structures in an auditor’s mind in order for it to produce the power­ful, temporary satisfactions that we call meaning.”11 ­Because a play has no existence outside its interpretation by a receiver, to produce a play’s “meaning” is to make the play; therefore, e­ very playgoer is a playmaker, creating dramatic meaning at the moment of reception—­even if only that one playgoer is the consumer of the meaning produced.12 Theatrical consumption is thus creative; the spectator who “consumes” collaborates in the creation of meaning: “In the theatre e­ very reader is involved in the making of the play.”13 Modern per­for­mance theorists repeatedly articulate this view, but it was also prevalent in early modern dramatic culture. Assumption of the significant, productive capacity of audience interpretation was a shared theoretical underpinning for both the theater’s defenders and its detractors. In refuting William Prynne’s charge that plays are “obscene,” Sir Richard Baker describes audience reception as a form of active creation and in d ­ oing so draws upon what amounts to an early modern version of reader-­response theory: “It is not so much the Player, that makes the Obscenity, as the Spectatour himself: as it is not so much the Juyce of the Herb that makes the Honey, or Poyson, as the Bee, or Spider, that sucks the Juyce. Let this man therefore bring a modest heart to a Play, and he s­ hall never take hurt by immodest Speeches: but, if he come as a Spider to it, what marvel, if he suck Poyson, though the Herbs be never so sovereign.”14 Baker’s entomological knowledge is lacking, but he does provide an explanation of the subjective nature of audience experience as it was understood by an early modern playgoer: regardless of ­whether the play is meant by the author or actors to be “modest” or “immodest,” it is the “Spectatour” who fi­nally “makes” the meaning of the play. The bee and spider meta­phor, originating in Plutarch’s Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debet (“How the Young Should Study Poetry”), had long been used to describe readers as the ultimate makers of meaning in written



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 35

works, particularly scripture, but it was applied to other forms of cultural consumption as well, including the audience experience in the play­house.15 At the conclusion of his defense of the stage in the fifth book of De recta republicae administratione (translated into En­glish by William Bavande in 1559), John Ferrarius urges playgoers to be “like as a Bee” who gathers “the swetenes of her honie” from “diuers floures.”16 In his commendatory verse for Heywood’s Apology for Actors, actor Richard Perkins uses the device to defend the stage against an ­imagined “Puritanicall” opponent: “Give me a play; that no distaste can breed, / Prove thou a Spider, and from flowers sucke gall, / Il’e like a Bee, take hony from a weed.”17 Theater apologists such as Baker and Perkins found the meta­phor useful for responding to antitheatricalists b­ ecause it redirects the critic’s complaints back upon the critic, arguing that any morally suspect meaning or detrimental effect of a play identified by its opponents was, in fact, a reflection of t­ hose opponents’ own moral shortcomings. Under­lying this tactic is the meta­phor’s implication that the dramatist’s intentions and actors’ interpretations of t­hose intentions are subject to the consumers, the final arbiter of w ­ hether the play produces “honey” or “poyson.” Like Baker and Perkins, o­ thers in the period understood that scripted fictions acted upon the stage ­were completed only within a playgoer’s receptive faculty. Anthony Munday formulates this idea in a negative sense by suggesting that b­ ecause plays are a “repre­sen­ta­tion of whoredome” therefore “al the ­people [watching plays] in mind plaie the whores.”18 Such a conception of the audience, of course, suggests an uncritical and uncreative—­not to mention uniform—­k ind of response, at odds with what is seen in the work of the playwriting playgoers. Contrary to Munday’s totalizing assumption about audience absorption (“al the ­people”), dif­fer­ent playgoers in the same audience see dif­fer­ent “plays,” and thus each also responds differently. When response is internalized and interpretation purely ­imagined, the play is completed in the playgoer’s mind; but, as with Hoskins and both the “auditor” and Falkland at Killigrew’s premiere, response might also be expressed outwardly in an effort to impose the playgoer’s individual understanding of the play upon other playgoers (each of whom, as the Pallantus and Eudora incident demonstrates, has imaginatively created his or her own “play”). For many dramatists, reception responses within playgoers’ minds ­were expected, indeed, even encouraged; externalized reception responses that intruded upon ­others’ imaginative reception responses, however, ­were vigorously warned against. Dramatists could use to their advantage this understanding of each spectator’s interpretive individuality ­because it allowed writers to assert their singular

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authority in establishing the play’s meaning. In the prologue to No Wit, No Help Like a ­Woman’s (1611), Thomas Middleton itemizes the components of the play that vari­ous audience members ­will focus upon: wit, spectacle, costumes, mirth, passion, and more. “How is’t pos­si­ble to suffice / So many Ears, so many Eyes? . . . ​How is’t pos­si­ble to please / Opinions toss’d in such wild seas?” he asks rhetorically.19 ­Because perception of the play varies with each audience member, Middleton’s dilemma, indeed, the dilemma of e­ very playwright, is that the play w ­ ill be, in varying degrees and ways, dif­fer­ent for each audience member. Many writers adopt the image of a banquet to explain this prob­lem of the diversity of audience understanding and desire, and to assert the need for a single “cook” to arbitrate among them.20 In The Travels of the Three En­glish ­Brothers (1607), John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins adapt the meta­phor by explaining that while their play is the product of “the Cookes laborious workmanship,” the materials used to make the meal have been supplied by the audience, “who gives a foule vnto [the] Cooke to dresse.”21 Meaning in this theatrical event is created through a cir­cuit from playgoers to playmakers and back, rather than a simplistic direct transaction from playmakers to playgoers. Day, Rowley, and Wilkins go beyond just an acknowl­edgment of the commercial play­house’s need to please its market: in their formulation, the banqueters provide the cook with both the demand for a par­tic­u­lar dish and the ingredients to make that dish. In other words, ­those who eat the banquet also help prepare it; the consumers are collaborating producers. Using a less amicable meta­phor to explain the effect of audience diversity, Middleton and Dekker, in the epilogue to The Roaring Girl (1611), point out that the audience, animated by its many dif­fer­ent perspectives, wields potentially destructive authority if its reception is permitted to result in active response. The epilogue tells of a painter who drew a portrait and hung it out for sale. Passersby viewed the painting and “gave severall verdicts on it,” and as each opinion was offered, the painter “did mend it, / In hope to please all.”22 The resulting painting was “so vile, / So monstrous and so ugly all men did smile / At the poore Paint­ers folly.” That folly was in allowing the impossibly diverse multitude of consumers to dictate what his “Art” should produce. Like the impossibly varied feedback given the painter, Dekker and Middleton imagine audiences urging them to change the plot, scenes, subject, and language of “this our Comedy” (emphasis added). Giving in to such consumer creativity, they explain, would result in a play as ugly as the portrait: “If we to e­ very braine (that’s humerous) / Should fashion Sceanes, we (with the Painter) s­ hall / In



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 37

striving to please all, please none at all.” The result of allowing consumers to contribute to the production pro­cess, the professionals caution, is chaotic and in­effec­tive: audience diversity necessitates audience passivity or ­else the audience w ­ ill destroy the art. ­W hether warning against it or embracing it, dramatists regularly demonstrate interest in the possibilities and prob­lems stemming from audience participation in the creation of dramatic meaning. Shakespeare, for example, hinges a critical moment of Hamlet upon the individualized reception response of one of the most famous of playgoers: Claudius, attending Hamlet’s “Mousetrap.” “The crucial play is not on the ‘stage’ but in the ‘audience,’ ” Marjorie Garber notes, “in the reactions of the spectator, Claudius,” as he interprets Hamlet’s play—­guided, lest his interpretation go astray, by the amateur dramatist’s own decoding commentary.23 Shakespeare’s interest in this prob­lem of individualized application of dramatic material is established even earlier in the play, when Hamlet applies to his own context the player’s “Pyrrhus” speech. Just as Claudius’s interpretation of “The Mousetrap” particularizes and risks differing from what the author intended, the “precise application [of the Pyrrhus speech] to Hamlet’s own case is private to the hearer,” as Gurr notes; “the Player is . . . ​innocent of its applicability.”24 Application depends upon the applier’s context and receptive faculty, not upon what the author has written into the script or how the actor performs it. The May 1639 per­for­mance of the lost play The Cardinal’s Conspiracy provides a historical instance of “application” producing dangerous meanings not intended by the original dramatist. According to Edmond Rossingham, “the players of the Fortune w ­ ere fined 1,000£. for setting up an altar, a bason, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the church.”25 Other scholars have addressed the po­liti­cal ramifications of this incident in relation to the perceived threat Arminianism posed to the established church.26 ­These ramifications, however, depended upon an act of audience application: what the actors “allege” to be the play’s meaning (what the literal—­prob­ably licensed—­text of the script allowed them to claim) contradicted what to the authorities “was apparent” (how the per­for­mance of that text was interpreted by the audience). Interpretation creates the ultimate meaning of a play and in this case officials “made” the play to be about Arminianism. Application rendered the play impermissible, even though the same script had been staged in the past without alarming the authorities.

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“Application” was also ­shaped by the par­tic­u­lar context within which any playgoer might encounter a play, ensuring that individual spectators watching the same script in the same per­for­mance might not have the experience of watching the same play. Robert Tofte provides a vivid example of this by describing a lover who sees a per­for­mance of Love’s L ­ abor’s Lost and takes the play personally. “This Play no Play,” the speaker complains, “but Plague was unto me,” b­ ecause at the per­for­mance he had “lost the Love I liked most.”27 His broken-­hearted alienation in the crowd of laughing playgoers is palpable, for “what to o­ thers seemde a Jest” was to him “in earnest”: “To e­ very one (save me) twas Comicall, / Whilst Tragick like to me it did befall.” As Whitney observes, “The personated character ­behind the actor’s per­for­mance becomes the playgoer” through the spectator’s “sense of individualized response.”28 Tofte’s narrator “applies” the play in a way that makes it both his and about him: “It is not just that every­one e­ lse is laughing and he is hurting,” Whitney explains, “but—­since he experiences the actors representing not characters but his own feelings—­that the audience is laughing at him.”29 For this playgoer, reception leads to painful participation, resulting in the divergence of his experience from that of the rest of the audience. No other playgoer “makes” the play in the same way; the new, “Tragick” meaning, contradictory to the generic meaning given the play by Shakespeare or experienced by the rest of the audience, belongs solely to him. The contradictory generic response to a play described by Tofte was not uncommon: Edmund Gayton, with tongue in cheek, observes that “many by repre­sen­ta­tion of strong passions [have] been so transported that they have gone weeping, some from Tragedies, some from Comedies.”30 In The Life of a Satirical Puppy Called Nim (prob­ably written in the 1620s), Thomas May describes observing in the Blackfriars audience the “punycall absurdity [of] a Country-­Gentleman . . . ​who was so caught with the naturall action of a Youth (that represented a ravish’d Lady) [that] he swore alowd, he would not sleep u ­ ntil he had killed her ravisher: and how ’twas not fit such Rogues should live in a Common-­wealth. . . . ​This made me laugh,” May notes, “but not merry.”31 The tragic, pathetic scene is broken into twice, first through the naïve playgoer’s attempt at participation and then, triggered by that intrusion, through May’s own alienated, generically inappropriate laughter. Kent Cartwright argues that “the spectator’s participation” is crucial to the realization of a play’s generic meaning;32 how are we to identify that meaning, though, if the spectator “participates” like Tofte’s broken-­ hearted lover, sobbing at a comedy, or May, laughing out loud during a tragedy? Reasons for such contradictory generic responses vary: in A Midsummer



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 39

Night’s Dream, Egeus finds the mechanicals’ tragedy humorous ­because the play fails to follow convention; Hamlet’s “barraine spectators” laugh during a serious scene b­ ecause they lack the competence to understand what they see;33 Tofte’s narrator, however, departs the comedy weeping ­because his par­tic­u­lar, personal situation changes for him the play’s meaning. In each of ­these, the reception response required by the act of per­for­mance allows the playgoer to overwrite the generic identity of the play assigned by the author. Like any aspect of dramatic meaning, generic effect only occurs within the received understanding of the individual playgoer. If a playgoer does not find a play tragic, labeling it “The Tragedy of . . .” on a title page is irrelevant to understanding its meaning for that playgoer. If, like Hoskins, the playgoer proj­ects outward his or her rejection of the author’s generic intentions, then, for the rest of the audience, that consumer’s idiosyncratic interpretation may take pre­ce­dence over what­ever objective the producer had. In addition to a play’s generic identity, responsive playgoers could revise, or attempt to revise, its narrative. Gayton describes an incident when a butcher was “so much transported” by the play The Greeks and Trojans that, “seeing Hector over-­powred by Mirmydons,” he attempted to alter the course of the Trojan War. The “passionate Butcher . . . ​got upon the Stage” and “with his good Battoone tooke the true Trojans part so stoutly, that he routed the Greeks, and rayled upon them loudly for a com­pany of cowardly slaves to assault one man with so much odds. He strooke moreover such an especiall acquaintaince with Hector, that for a long time Hector could not obtaine leave of him to be kill’d, that the Play might go on; and the cudgelled Mirmydons durst not enter againe, till Hector, having prevailed upon his unexpected second, return’d him over the Stage againe into the yard from whence he came.”34 Gayton’s (possibly fictional) anecdote might be hyperbolic ridicule of a naïve playgoer who, confronted with a vivid per­for­mance, failed to distinguish between real­ity and fiction. Even so, however, the comic force of the incongruity—­the playgoer trying to change the play and, in effect, history—­ relies upon recognizing that a playgoer, stirred by an active imagination, might not sit quietly and passively as the play proceeds as scripted. A playgoer’s interpretive understanding might not, of course, undermine or contradict the designs of the playmakers. As noted, engagement could be kept internal and thus benign. Even in t­ hese cases, however, ­because a text’s meaning cannot exist in­de­pen­dent of reception, the spectator’s capacity to fill out the play imaginatively situates that consumer as part of the production pro­ cess, completing what per­for­mance must leave unrepresented. When Simon

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Forman recorded his experience witnessing a per­for­mance of Macbeth in 1611, he remarked that when they encountered the witches, Macbeth and Banquo ­were “ridinge thorowe a wod”—­a scenic detail not in the text of the play and unlikely to be depicted through the use of props, and so prob­ably supplied by Forman’s own imagination.35 Shakespeare penned a script, the King’s Men translated that script into a per­for­mance, and, fi­nally, Forman i­magined that per­for­mance as a fictional event; all three of ­these—­script, per­for­mance, reception—­make up the “play” that the audience experienced. As amateur dramatist Jasper Mayne assured his royal audience in the Whitehall epilogue of The City Match (1637), “He onely wrote, your liking made the Play.”36 Early modern commentators demonstrate their understanding that the playwright provides what Altman describes as the “strands of verbal and visual material that must be woven by [the audience] into an intelligible fabric.”37 Ultimately, the audience, not the author, was recognized as possessing final, autonomous responsibility for assembling t­ hose pieces into a meaningful event, hence the recurrent trope of playwrights anxiously pleading in paratexts that the audience “take thinges as they be ment,” as Richard Edwardes puts it in the prologue to Damon and Pithias (1565–71).38 Edwardes, like other playmakers, knew that what is “ment” by the play is territory the producer must yield to the consumer. Prologues and epilogues repeatedly ask audiences to signal ­those parts of the play they like and ­those they dislike, making the promise—­genuine or not—­that the dramatist w ­ ill draw upon such feedback to revise the text.39 ­W hether or not writers or players did take ­those responses into consideration in revising plays, audiences ­were frequently, and deferentially, reminded by ­those within the profession that consumers had, or o­ ught to have, final control over what they saw on stage. The play was, Tiffany Stern points out, “offered to the audience as a mutable text ready for improvement,” and the audience was conditioned to think of itself as the authority guiding that improvement.40 As stationer Richard Hawkins explains in his quarto of Fletcher and Beaumont’s Philaster (1609), “the Actors [are] onely the labouring Miners, but you [that is, the consumers] the skilfull Triers and Refiners.” 41 This understanding of consumers as possessing the “skilfull” authority to “try and refine,” that is, judge and revise, posits the audience as the ultimate authority in the play­house. When the boy actor Ezekiel Fenn played his first man’s role, Henry Glapthorne wrote for him a prologue in which the player refers to himself as an “untry’d Vessell”—­but it is the audience members, not the playwright, whom he describes as the “skilful Pi­lots” who ­will “stear” his course.42 Theater is a collaborative art, and the collaborating art-



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 41

ists are not only in the tiring-­house or on the stage; audience theorist Susan Bennet puts it succinctly: “In the theatre e­ very reader is involved in the making of the play.” 43 Day, Rowley, and Wilkins’s banquet meta­phor can therefore be reversed: the dramatist might supply the ingredients and the playgoers make the dish, just as the spider and the bee “make” poison or honey from the raw material of the flower.

“A stage play should be made”: Playgoers Making—­and Unmaking—­Plays It was not impossible, of course, for playgoers to provide playmakers with the ­actual “ingredients” for a play, beyond the usual commercial f­actor of audience demand. In 1602, George Chapman wrote a play called The Old Joiner of Aldgate and sold it to Edward Pearce, master of the ­Children of Paul’s. The script was Chapman’s, but the bookbinder and, apparently, playgoer John Flaskett devised the plot. According to the attorney-­general’s bill for the ensuing Star Chamber proceedings, Flaskett deci­ded “that a stage play should be made,” and, accordingly, the play “was made by one George Chapman upon a plot given unto him [by Flaskett] concerning . . . ​A gnes Howe.” 44 Flaskett hoped to use the play to influence his l­egal efforts to marry Howe—­a wealthy ­woman who had been betrothed by her ­father to (at least) three dif­fer­ent suitors. The bookbinder did not write the script, but he was a “playmaker” in that he s­ haped the source material of the Howe betrothals into a plot (prob­ably a summary or outline of the action) for the stage.45 For Old Joiner, someone outside the theater collaborated with a professional dramatist in making a play, but this was not the only instance of outsiders to the industry supplying material to ­those within the industry. The Duke of Feria, for example, reported to King Philip of Spain that Sir William Cecil had supplied to players the plots for many anti-­Catholic interludes staged in London in 1558 and 1559.46 During a Star Chamber trial in 1596, Lord Trea­surer Burghley entertained the idea of “hau[ing] ­those yt make the playes . . . ​make a comedie hereof, & to acte it with [the] names” of ­those involved in the case.47 Similar to Flaskett’s experience, Thomas Dekker reported in his deposition for the 1624 lawsuit resulting from the controversial play Keep the W ­ idow Waking that he and his collaborators had written the script “upp on the instruccions giuen them by one Raph Savage,” a man who does not appear to have been connected to the theater industry.48 In 1601, Francis Mitchell, servant of Edward Meynell of

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Hawby in Yorkshire, wrote a jig based on the gossip surrounding the failed attempt of Michael Steel of Skelton to sleep with his wife’s maidservant, Frances Thornton; a­ fter being performed by amateur actors at several private homes around Yorkshire, the jig was acquired by a touring troupe of professional actors who staged it at the end of their public play per­for­mances from June through Christmas 1602.49 It did not require professional training in playmaking to transport compelling events from the streets or the courtroom onto the public stage. Flaskett, Cecil, and Savage instigated the making of new plays by providing dramatists with ready plots; more often, however, audience members “revised” plays written by professional dramatists by, like Hoskins of Oxford, intervening during a per­for­mance or altering the immediate per­for­mance context. ­These playgoers collaborated in the creation, not just of dramatic meaning, but of the dramatic event as well. At the broadest level, audiences might demand a change to a com­pany’s intended repertory. Antimo Galli relates such an event in August  1613 at the Curtain, when Venetian ambassador Antonio Foscarini visited the play­house; ­after the play, “one of the actors . . . ​ asked the ­people to the comedy for the following day and he named one. But the ­people desired another one, and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars.’ ”50 This is a fundamental reshaping of per­for­mance context: the spectators wanted a dif­fer­ent play from what the actors intended, they demanded it, and, presumably (Galli does not say), the actors acquiesced. While s­imple, even this intrusion reverses the conventional producer-­consumer relationship and posits the audience as the agent setting the terms for its own theatrical experience, putting active consumers in control over responsive producers. Playgoers could also shape the per­for­mance context by calling for additional entertainment ­after the play was over: many per­for­mances of plays concluded with a jig, but a reference in James Shirley’s Changes suggests that the staging of the jig was not always by the actors’ choice. In the play, when Caperwit explains to a professional dancer that he himself ­will “write the songs” to which the dancer ­will perform, he notes, “Many Gentlemen / Are not, as in the dayes of understanding, / Now satisfied without a Jigge, which since / They cannot, with their honour, call for, ­after / The play, they looke to be serv’d up ith’ ­middle.”51 Caperwit suggests two ways in which the audience shapes the theatrical event: first, in the days when the amphitheaters w ­ ere the only venues (“the dayes of understanding” is a joke about the groundlings who “stood ­under” the stage) the audience could “call for” a jig a­ fter the per­for­mance; second, though “honour” now forbids calling out for such entertainment, the players have



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 43

simply subsumed audience demand by inserting dances into the bodies of plays themselves. Likely the most famous example of consumers asserting control over the context of per­for­mance is Gayton’s—­perhaps hyperbolic and in­ven­ted, but nonetheless informative—­description of how audience demand for specific plays could overrule players’ intentions: “I have known . . . ​where the Players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bils to the contrary, to act what the major part of the com­pany had a mind to; sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes the Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all ­these, and at last, none of the three taking, they w ­ ere forc’d to undresse and put off their Tragick habits, and conclude the day with the merry milk-­maides.”52 In this incident, audience interaction compels the producers to comply with what the consumers desired. Gayton’s playgoers repeatedly interrupt the per­ for­ mance in order to effect changes in what they are seeing—­resulting in a kind of theater-­on-­demand experience. What is being changed, however, is not the scheduling of plays within the repertory, as in Galli’s account, but plays in the midst of acting: plays that readers experience as w ­ hole, cohesive, and complete scripts are dismantled, their textual integrity sacrificed for the overriding concern of satisfying audience demand. What Gayton’s audience produces through its control of the play­house is a new theatrical event, a pastiche “play” composed of bits from Tamburlaine, Jugurth, The Jew of Malta, and The Two Merry Milkmaids. Rather than a unified narrative experience, Gayton’s anecdote suggests that per­for­mances, s­ haped by audience demand, might be disjointed, partial, and generically incongruent miscellanies.53 Like commonplace books, theatrical per­for­mance could be a user-­made conglomeration of pieces of vari­ous texts assembled in response to consumers’ inclinations. In Gayton’s example, the audience enforces its w ­ ill through vio­lence: “Unlesse this w ­ ere done, and the popu­lar humour satisfied . . . ​the Benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, Oranges, Apples, Nuts, flew about most liberally, and as t­ here w ­ ere Mechanicks of all professions, who fell ­every one to his owne trade, and dissolved a ­house in an instant, and made a ruine of a stately Fabrick.”54 If the actors w ­ ill not use their ­labor to satisfy the audience, the audience ­will use its ­labor to put the actors out of work. The commercial theater thus becomes a site of vocational contest, and consumer interaction becomes work in itself. This audience does not passively consume but instead actively takes charge of its experience, even if such participation involves physically “consuming,” that is, using up, the materials of the play­house. Ironically, Gayton’s playgoers, in this pro­cess of “play breaking,” are “playmaking”: their desire for authority in

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making their own theatrical experience is so profound that to enforce it they are willing to destroy ­future opportunities to enjoy it.55 Gayton’s playgoers are not merely engaged in consumer interaction with the playmaking industry; they are (to Gayton’s apparent disgust) establishing the play­house as, ultimately, their domain alone. A less adversarial example of a playgoer contributing to the per­for­ mance of a professional play may be seen in the instance of Jacobean l­awyer Bulstrode Whitelocke. Whitelocke had written a coranto for the 1633 court per­for­mance of James Shirley’s masque The Triumphs of Peace, but “which being cried up, was first played publiquely, by the Blackefryar’s Musicke” before a dif­fer­ent play: “Whenever I came to that ­house [that is, the Blackfriars] (as I did sometimes in ­those dayes), though not often, to see a play, the musitians would presently play Whitelocke’s Coranto, and it was so often called for, that they would have it played twice or thrice in an after­noon.”56 Like all ­music in the theater, Whitelocke’s coranto contributed to the audience’s emotional and aesthetic experience and thus also to the received meaning of the play at which it was performed. The participation by Whitelocke in the theatrical event may have been peculiar, but his contribution was just as much a part of the “play” experienced by the audience as the author’s words or actors’ gestures. Furthermore, inclusion of the ­music at a per­for­mance, and thus its effect upon the audience, depended not upon the plans of the professional playmakers but upon the amateur musician’s role as a playgoer, since it was, Whitelocke recalls, played whenever he attended the theater, regardless of the play being staged. Many accounts of audience be­hav­ior during a per­for­mance characterize playgoers’ activities as a kind of “other play,” made by the audience and enacted parallel to, often in competition with, the scripted per­for­mance on stage. Perhaps the most innocuous, though widespread, version of such disruptions is seen in the (often satirical) descriptions of gallants seated on or near the stage at the private theaters; repeatedly, ­these playgoers are described as putting themselves on show for the rest of the audience, usually in direct and deliberate competition with the show on stage. For example, John Davies mocks “Rufus the Courtier” who, “at the Theater” first finds the “most con­ spic­u­ous place” in the audience but then “Doth . . . ​to the stage himselfe transferre.”57 Edward Guilpin taunts “Cornelius that braue gallant youth” who “sits ­o’re the stage / With the Tobacco-­pipe now at his mouth,” dressed to the height of flashy, militaristic fashion.58 Henry Fitzgeoffrey targets a gallant for sitting on “a Stoole and Cushion” on stage dressed in clothes fancy enough to



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 45

be a costume in the play (“did he not drop / Out of the Tyring-­house?”).59 Francis Lenton disparages an “expensiue foole” who would “pay an angell for a paltry stoole” at the Blackfriars and even wear “spangled rare perfum’d attires” when he “so often visited the Globe.” 60 Thomas May self-­deprecatingly mocked his own habit of putting on a show of fashion while he “sat upon the Stage” at the Blackfriars, one time catching “a Ladies Eie, whose Seate opposed mine [and who] look’d stedfast on me, till the Play ended; seeming to survey my Limbs with amorous curiosity: whilst I advanced them all, to encounter her approbation.” 61 In the anonymous epigram “A Description of Spongus the Gallant” in the Farmer Chetham commonplace book, a brawling, lavishly dressed gentleman is mocked ­because, among many ­things, “He playes at Primero over the stage” when at the play­house.62 Perhaps most famous of all, in The Devil Is an Ass, Jonson lambasts such be­hav­ior in Fitzdottrel, who ­will goe to the Black fryers Play-­house, Sit ithe view, salute all my acquaintance, Rise up betweene the Acts, let fall my cloake, Publish a handsome man, and a rich suite (As that’s a speciall end, why we goe thither, All that pretend, to stand for’t o­ ’the Stage) The Ladies aske who’s that? (For, they doe come To see us, Love, as wee doe to see them).63 The spectacle of clothing, smoking, drinking, reading, gambling, and talking staged by such playgoers meant that the “show” was in the audience as much as—­sometimes more than—on the stage. The spaces of the two per­for­mances ­were physically conflated in the architecture of the play­house: the gallery doubled as both a seating and an acting area, and, at the indoor theaters, the stage itself doubled as a seating area. The very nature of a three-­quarters theatrical space compels audience members to become part of the per­for­mance observed by o­ thers in the same audience. More substantial and potentially dangerous forms of audience intrusion and per­for­mance ­were not uncommon. For example, William Fleetwood’s June 18, 1584, report of a near brawl at the Theater describes the instigator, “one Browne,” as “having a perrelous witt of his owne.” 64 The phrase “of his owne” juxtaposes Browne’s creativity in attempting to provoke a fight with the onstage show created by the playwright. In November 1634, when Robert Leake wrote to Sir Gervase Clifton to inform him of a fight between two courtiers

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at the Blackfriars, he explic­itly described the event as “that actus secundus plaid on Tuesday last.” 65 In August 1612, a dispute broke out between several playgoers at the Globe, resulting in a spectacle that must have rivaled the play itself for audience interest. Recently widowed Elizabeth Wybarn had gone to see a play, attended by several o­ thers; she was approached by Ambrose Vaux, son of William, Baron Vaux, and apparently was propositioned in an inappropriate manner. Two of her attendants responded with “­great vio­lences and blasphemous oathes,” and soon twelve other audience members intervened, “armed arraied and weaponed with Rapiars daggers Pystalls and other weapons” all “in a ryotous manner.” 66 Where Wybarn and her companions ­were in the theater when this happened is not clear, although one defendant refers to them “sitting” and to Vaux “coming in,” which might suggest ­either the gentlemen’s rooms to the side of the stage or the lords’ rooms above the stage; as Mary Blackstone and Cameron Louis observe, “If this episode w ­ ere played out in the lords’ rooms right above the stage, the real-­life events may even have eclipsed the play in the minds of the spectators as well as the participants.” 67 In a more poetic vein, Henry Fitzgeoffrey uses a playmaking meta­phor to give voice to a rake who, instead of watching a play at the Blackfriars, is busy watching the other spectators, including a “Cheapside Dame”: “Plot (Villain!) plot!” he tells his companion, so they might “devise [a way] to get her hither” into their box.68 The rake tells his friend if “[we] lay our heads together,” the lady ­will “holde us ­doing till the Latter Act,” appropriating the theatrical term (the final act of the play) as a bawdy description of the desired outcome of his tryst (the act of intercourse). With similar sexualizing of playmaking terminology, Thomas May characterizes his elaborate scheme to win the attention of a w ­ oman in the audience at the Blackfriars as “a parlous Plot.” 69 Samuel Rowlands merges the criminal and theatrical senses of “plotting” in his description of a pickpocket attempting to cut the bottom of a purse during a per­for­mance: when both the per­for­mance and robbery are complete, “The Play is done and foorth the foole doth goe.”70 Rowlands’s joke depends upon the ambiguous identification of the “Play” as e­ ither the fiction performed on the stage or the crime performed in the audience, casting the victim in the stock theatrical role of the “foole.” Merging the “play” in the audience with that on stage, play­house offenders w ­ ere often compelled to appear on the stage as well. W ­ ill Kemp recalled that whenever a “Cut-­purse” was “at a play . . . ​ taken pilfring[,] . . . ​we [would] tye [him] to a poast on our stage, for all p ­ eople to won­der at.”71 The character Nobody in the anonymous Nobody and Some-



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body (ca. 1606) likewise notes, “Somebody once pickt a pocket in this Play-­house yard, / Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it.”72 In t­ hese instances, the playgoer’s “per­for­mance” was drawn onto the stage, but in 1583, at the Red Lion in Norwich, the Queen’s Men took the show into the auditorium in order to chase off two audience members who refused to pay admission.73 Richard Tarlton and John Bentley leapt from the stage, in costume and with property swords in hand, to defend the doorkeeper, fellow actor John Singer, from the men; eventually, another spectator, Henry Brown, joined them in the affray and was involved in fatally stabbing one of the intruders—an instance of players and playgoers collaborating in a peculiar, violent way to make a spectacle.74 If the early modern play­house comprised not so much a per­for­ mance space and an audience space but two dif­fer­ent kinds of per­for­mance space, Kemp’s account, Nobody’s joke, and the Queen’s Men’s storming of the auditorium all speak to a degree of both tension and exchange between the two. When the audience’s per­for­mance spills into the actors’ space and competes with professional control over what gets “played” in the commercial place of business, the actors must ­either comply (as in Gayton’s anecdote) or retaliate (as Kemp, Nobody, and the Queen’s Men did). In e­ ither case, the dynamic between audience and play is interactive: playgoers create drama in the play­ house just as much as watch it. Furthermore, when events on stage resembled what playgoers thought to be a version of their own life in the real world, that sympathy was often expressed in the language not of dramatic reflection but of dramatic self-­ production. For example, in referencing the oft-­repeated anecdote about a ­woman moved to confess to the murder of her husband while watching a similar murder enacted in a play, a character in the anonymous A Warning for Fair ­Women (1596) recalls that the murderer “cryed out, the Play was made by her.”75 In Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), the player Paris defends the theater by claiming its innocence of its own effects, particularly noting that if the players should depict “a loose adultresse” on stage and in the audience “a Matron . . . ​Guilty of such a foule unnaturall sinne / Crie[s] out tis writ by me, we cannot helpe it.”76 Identifying the matron as the “author” of the play on the stage subsumes the real crime into the fictional and reinforces the sense of the consumer as the one who has produced the spectacle. Paris’s logic goes even further, effectively disempowering the professional playmakers by taking from them the capacity to control the meanings made by their play (“we cannot helpe it”) and rendering them the passive instruments of the active spectator.

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Real­ity and per­for­mance in the play­house are repeatedly presented as composite, even indistinguishable, in a single sociocultural continuum. Antitheatricalists ­were intensely aware of, and alarmed by, this capacity of the play­house to fold real­ity and fiction together. Anthony Munday, for example, argued that playgoers actually participate in the sins they see enacted on stage and thus bear responsibility, with the players, for “making” the play and its meanings: “Al other evils pollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers. . . . ​ [T]he filthiness of plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actors & beholders giltie alike. For while they saie nought, but gladlie looke on, they al by sight and assent be actors.”77 The play’s “beholder,” its consumer, is also a “doer” or producer. Playgoers, playmakers, and even opponents of plays saw the auditorium as a performative space and the per­for­mance occurring in it as one in which audience members ­were both authors and actors. Theatrical experiences beyond the commercial play­houses also blurred the playgoer/playmaker binary. ­There was no line, for example, separating audiences and actors at Inns of Court entertainments.78 Likewise, crowds observing civic pageants w ­ ere themselves part of the entertainments that they watched.79 In some pageants—­such as James’s 1604 entry into London—­ spectators w ­ ere not just performers but also authors, seeming to erupt spontaneously into orations, recitations, and songs of their own creation.80 At the universities, audiences, actors, and writers also belonged to one and the same community; as the anonymous antitheatricalist “J. G.” complains in his rebuttal to Heywood’s An Apology for Actors, “And who [at the universities] are the spectators? but such like as both Poets and Actors are.”81 Spectators of shows of “bodily feats,” such as dancing and tumbling, ­were, as Erika Lin argues, “thought of as active participants even when they merely watched the show.”82 Even at sermons, audiences ­were accustomed not to ­silent, passive reception but to “interactive conversations . . . ​in which the congregation and preacher collaborated in the creation of the occasion.”83 When individuals who learned to become consumers of per­for­mances at schools, universities, the Inns, city streets, g­reat halls, town halls, guildhalls, or churches and open-­air “crosses” brought that experience into the professional theaters, they ­were bringing an understanding of cultural consumption that required their collaborative participation. Amateur dramatists who wrote their own plays for professional actors merely extended that collaboration from the figurative and imaginative into the literal and active, assuming a materially interactive relationship between producers and consumers. Rather than simply responding to professionals’ scripts, imagining the fiction of what they saw represented,



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or applauding and hissing what they liked and disliked, amateur dramatists drew upon their experience as theatrical consumers and their own creativity and understanding to write new plays envisioned for the stage. The move from reception to creation required more than just attention and taste, of course; to write a play, would-be playwrights in the audience had to have, or at least think that they had, a critical understanding of the ways in which plays worked.

“Scarce two . . . ​can understand the lawes”: Critical Capacity and the Playgoer as Revising Playmaker Playwrights in the period frequently draw attention, favorably and unfavorably, to the capacity of audience members to judge and critique specific aspects of the play, anatomizing the ­whole and analyzing the effectiveness of each individual part. For example, John Ford praises Blackfriars playgoers for their “Noble Judgements” that “understand” The Broken Heart (1630–33), but he acknowledges also that some in the audience might “say, ‘This was flat’; Some ‘­here the Sceane / Fell from its height’; Another that the Meane / was ‘ill observ’d.’ ”84 Recognizing that audience judgment involves taking his play apart into its constituent pieces, Ford concludes the epilogue by comparing such dissective critique to the play’s title, imagining that if only the “Best” in the audience approve of it, “The Broken Heart may be piec’t up againe.” Playwrights’ acknowl­edgments of such “judicious” playgoing became particularly prevalent in the Caroline private theaters.85 Earlier audiences, however, and contemporaneous audiences at such theaters as the Red Bull and the Fortune also exercised analytical judgment about the effectiveness of certain qualities in the plays that they saw. Most texts that mock amphitheater audiences for their lack of ­these critical skills ­were written for audiences at the private theaters. For example, Thomas Carew’s commendatory poem for Davenant’s Blackfriars play The Just Italian (1629) decries the “weake / Spectator” of the Red Bull ­because if one “aske[s] him [to] reason why he did not like / . . . ​ignorance ­will strike”; such playgoers, Carew complains, “dare controule” but lack the prerequisite ability “to judge” or justify their opinions.86 Gurr observes that jibes against public theater audiences tended to assume that ­those audiences had “debased standards of literary sophistication,”87 but many jibes—­including Carew’s—go further with the more fundamental charge of audience ignorance: it was not merely that their standards w ­ ere “debased” but that they lacked standards, or knowledge of standards, at all. William Fennor, for e­ xample,

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denigrates the mindless responses of the “Ignoramus crew” in the pits at public theaters; with “judgements . . . ​illiterate and rude,” t­hese “understanding grounded men” do not even know why they respond the way they do: “Let one but aske the reason why they roare / ­They’ll ans­were, cause the rest did so before.”88 Like Fennor, Dekker derides the “Greasie-­apron Audience” as unthinking, unsophisticated, and merely “Applaud[ing] what their charmd soule scarce understands.”89 Rather than accurate descriptions of public theater audiences and their supposed inability to understand drama, ­these accusations should be read as salvos in the competition between the dif­fer­ent types of venues. Some dramatists, a­ fter all, mocked the tastes and competence of private theater playgoers as well. As early as 1609, Beaumont complained that the “illiterate” audiences of the ­Children of the Queen’s Revels had “scarce two of which can understand the lawes / Which they should judge by.”90 In 1631, Shirley critiqued private theater spectators who still desired jigs in their plays.91 Jonson attacked the Blackfriars audience in 1635 for being no dif­fer­ent than amphitheater audiences (“­those deepe-­grounded, understanding men [who] censure Playes, yet know not when, / Or why to like”).92 Heywood mourned the rise of demand, by the 1630s, for petty sexual intrigues at the Blackfriars.93 If they could have their way, t­ hese dramatists would remake the audience in their own image, possessing their own understanding of the “lawes” of good drama—­“ lawes” usually according with the tastes of playgoers at a dif­fer­ent venue. Playwrights’ damnations of audience ignorance cannot be taken at face value. Critiques of one audience offered indirect praise to another. Like many of their counter­parts at private theaters, many public theater spectators understood plays as constructions of vari­ous component parts and w ­ ere capable of judging how ­those parts worked separately as well as in combination—­ prerequisites to imagining changes or alternatives, or even entirely new dramatic texts. An example of public theater audience members forming their own thoughts about how certain parts within a play o­ ught to be revised is seen in Thomas Locke’s description of the Globe per­for­mance of Fletcher and Mas­ singer’s The Tragedy of Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619). In his August 19, 1619, letter to Dudley Carlton, Locke observes that though the play “hath had many spectators and receaved applause: yet some say that (according to the proverbe) the divill [that is, Olden Barnavelt] is not so bad as he is painted.”94 Locke describes specific changes that “some” have suggested would improve



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the portrayal of the main character: “Some say . . . ​that Barnavelt should perswade Ledenburg to make away himselfe (when he came to see him a­ fter he was prisoner) to prevent the discovrie of the plott, and to tell him that when they w ­ ere both dead (as though he meant to do the like) they might sift it out of their ashes, was thought to be a point strayned.” Locke’s playgoers have not merely absorbed the theatrical event as passive recipients; they desire to participate as collaborating revisers looking to improve the play. The suggestion that a par­tic­u­lar line is “a point strayned” signals a rejection of language as being implausible for the character, much like the “auditor” who objected during the premiere of Killigrew’s Pallantus and Eudora. Locke’s playgoers (assuming that this is not a description of his own experience, as may well be the case) feel that they have a right and ability not just to respond to the play but also to change it and, in so ­doing, improve it. Moving from assessing the effectiveness of a play’s parts to proposing revisions to it or creating an entirely new play represents a dif­fer­ent scale of interactive response: like interpretation, critique constructs meaning only for the critic, u ­ nless, as professional playmakers often feared, that critic disseminates that critique to o­ thers. Calling for revision of some part of the play, or writing a new play, is an act of response that always attempts to impose the individual consumer’s evaluative opinions onto the larger consumer community. John Lyly recognizes this distinction between internalized judgmental response and public play changing in the Paul’s prologue to Midas (1589), in which an actor hopes that if the play “receive an inward mislike, wee s­hall not be hist with an open disgrace.”95 Spectators who do not approve of the play, Lyly urges, should keep that disapproval private, limited to the individual experience of the one playgoer; if the negative response is made “open,” that is, expressed outwardly, it risks displacing the author’s authority by shaping how other members of the audience might view the play—­like Hoskins of Oxford, outwardly expressing his inner dislike for Technogamia. Lyly’s Blackfriars prologue for Campaspe (1583) displays the same concern over audience members imposing their evaluation of the play upon the rest of the audience: “We ­here conclude: wishing that although t­ here bee in your precise judgementes an universall mislike, yet wee maye enjoy by your wonted curtesies a generall sile[n]ce.”96 The professional dramatist does not seek to prevent judgment—he allows that some might “mislike” every­thing about the play—­but he does warn against judgments outwardly expressed, hoping to “silence” such challenges to his authority and protect the other audience members’ autonomy to judge the play

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for themselves. His anxiety concedes that authority to determine how audience members might respond to the play and thus condition ­others’ reception of the play resides, in the end, with the audience itself.

“Jehove doth as spectator sit”: The Authority of the Playgoer The idea of playgoers possessing authority that could supplant the dramatist was not new, nor was it without appeal to theater professionals who wanted to flatter the (paying) audience. A prominent version of the “playmaking playgoer” meta­phor was found in the theatrum mundi commonplace a­ dopted by many theater apologists. Within the theatrum mundi, God occupies the place of dramatist, scripting what is performed upon the stage of the world by the men and w ­ omen who are, as Jaques observes, “merely players.”97 As Heywood explains in An Apology for Actors (1612), “The world’s a Theater, the earth a Stage, / Which God, and nature doth with Actors fill.”98 Responsibility for filling the stage with “actors” belongs to God, the playwright.99 To sustain the meta­phor to its logical end, however, Heywood recognizes that a third category of participant must be included: the audience. If “the world [is] a Theater,” then  . . . ​Jehove doth as spectator sit And chiefe determiner to’applaud the best, And their indevours crowne with more then merit[,] But by their evill actions doomes the rest, To end disgrac’t whilst o­ thers praise inherit. In Heywood’s theater of the world, playwright and audience are one and the same: the authority that observes, applauds, and condemns the action is the same authority that makes the action. Heywood’s meta­phor thus relies upon a circularity of creative function: the playgoer does not merely influence what the dramatist writes; the playgoer himself or herself writes. In this idealized economy, one source satisfies both supply and demand. The theatrum mundi therefore requires that the audience wield, as Whitney puts it, “authority . . . ​ in the dramatic transaction and ultimately in the pro­cess of production.”100 ­Others in the period employed the trope of the divine playmaking playgoer for similar ends. Indeed, Anne Barton points out that since Pythagoras, writers “have been tempted to . . . ​describe Man as an actor[,] and assign ­either



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to Fate or to God Himself the double position of dramatist and audience.”101 Playwrights found the theatrum mundi meta­phor, with its idea of the playmaking playgoer’s “double position,” a useful convention. In the induction to Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1587), Robert Greene enlists Venus and the Muses as both “writers” of the play and its observers. “Poets are scarce,” complains the divine amateur dramatist, “when Goddesses themselves / Are forst . . . ​to pen their Champions praise.”102 Shakerley Marmion’s A Fine Companion (1632), drawing upon Aristotelian cosmology, describes the octagonal Cockpit-­in-­ Court as “a Spheare / Mooved by a strong Intelligence,” paralleling the audience with God as the prime mover at the center of the circles of heaven.103 Similarly, the prologue for Shirley’s The Coronation (1634) refers to w ­ omen in the audience as “the bright intelligences [that] move, / And make a harmony [of] this sphere of Love.”104 Dekker craves such audiences for If This Be Not a Good Play: “I wish [for] a Theater full of very Muses themselves to be Spectators”; the ideal spectator is a divinely empowered agent whose creative authority instills in playwrights “Triumphes of Poesie” and in players, “Elaborate Industry.”105 More directly, the villain Lurio in amateur dramatist William Rider’s The Twins (1630–42) wishes he w ­ ere both playwright and playgoer so he could both devise and admire his plot: “Me thinks it would shew bravely on the stage, I’de have it personated to the life, and I the chief spectator on the Theatre.”106 Many dramatists endorsed the authority of the creative playgoer by inviting spectators to complete the play in their imaginations. ­These pleas to spectators to “eke out [the] per­for­mance with [their] mind[s]” frankly acknowledge the stage’s illusionistic inadequacies, admitting the medium’s inherent repre­sen­ta­tional gaps and asking the audience to “work [their] thoughts” to fill them in their minds.107 The authors of ­these plays request that the audience assist in finishing the “making” of the play as imaginative collaborators.108 Thomas Nashe, in recounting audience response to Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI, describes the results of this: when “the Tragedian that represents” Talbot enacts the hero’s death, “ten thousand spectators . . . ​imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.”109 Neither Talbot nor the “Tragedian” is actually bleeding, but within “ten thousand” imaginations “Talbot” is bleeding—­and in ten thousand dif­fer­ent ways, as each spectator “makes” the scene differently in his or her mind. Shakespeare’s invitations for such imaginative collaboration in Henry V (1599) and Pericles (1608) are well known. The Chorus in the anonymous Chamberlain’s Men play Thomas Lord ­Cromwell (1600), perhaps influenced by Henry V, also demands that playgoers use their creative ­mental

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capacity to compensate for insufficient artifice and lacunae in the depicted narrative: “Now gentlemen imagine,” the Chorus urges in the first act, “that young ­Cromwell . . . ​Is fled to Antwarpe, with his wife and ­children,” and ­later in the play, “Now let your thoughtes as swift as is the winde, / Skip some few yeares, that ­Cromwell spent in travell, / And now imagine him to be in ­England.”110 The prologue to the anonymous The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1602) relies upon the play’s spectators to construct the given circumstances of the first scene, pleading that they “Imagine now that [Peter Fabell] is retirde” and “Suppose the s­ ilent sable visagde night, / Casts her blacke curtaine over all the world.”111 As t­hese playwrights recognize, without the audience’s imaginative participation, the scaffolding of illusion upon which the theater predicates its art ­will be incomplete and might even collapse. The prob­lem is not one of verisimilar representation—­which was not necessarily an aesthetic goal on the early modern stage—­but one of resolving the practical dramatic need for continuity, plausibility, and exposition. Unable to depict the darkness of night or ­Cromwell’s flight to Antwerp and the years he spent in travel, ­t hese plays demand that their audiences contribute creative energies in the making of the fiction. In some instances, the dramatist acknowledges the audience as, in fact, a progenitor of its fiction. The prologue to Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (1599) implores spectators to impart “life” to the play by imagining the truth underwriting the fiction that they see: “our muse intreats, / Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, / . . . ​your gracious eye / Gives life to Fortunatus historie.”112 Consumption is generative: without the audience’s engagement, without the creative act of spectatorship, the play ­will not live. Rather than attempt to conceal repre­sen­ta­tional failures of the theatrical medium, t­hese appeals draw attention to points where failure is inevitable and ask for playgoers’ collaboration in negotiating t­ hose moments.113 Such direct addresses are moments of surrender in which the dramatist acknowledges he must give up some control to his partners in the audience. What makes ­these bids for participation particularly relevant is their timing in relation to the theater industry’s professionalization. ­A fter the 1590s, actors becoming playwrights and the nascent development of playwriting as its own self-­regulating field both signaled a degree of occupational closure—­ and hence professionalization—of the industry; when this closure experienced its greatest threat from amateurs, invitations to the audience to participate imaginatively in the “making” of the play ceased. In the early 1620s, invitations for audience participation vanished almost entirely, with the latest in Fletcher’s The Prophetess (1622). Calls to the audience to imagine what the per­



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for­mance could not show began as necessity, became convention, but then, particularly with the rise of the courtier amateurs in the 1630s, became irrelevant, even risky. At the same time t­ hese invitations vanished, the number of induction scenes attempting to control playgoer response r­ ose. The more professionalized playwriting sought to become and the more amateurs supplied (or tried to supply) plays to the actors, the more it must have seemed to many professional dramatists that invitations for audience participation, even if only on the imaginative level, might encourage challenges to the profession’s desired barrier separating the lay consumer from the authorized producer.

“Hee writes good lines”: Playgoers Taking Possession of the Play For many professionals, particularly Jonson and Shirley, the extreme—­and extremely undesirable—­result of spectators crossing that desired barrier was their a­ ctual incursion into the field of playwriting: playgoers who, without any training beyond their experience as playgoers, wrote plays themselves. Jonson’s complaint in his commendatory verse for The Northern Lass, discussed in the Introduction, is the most vivid example of this attitude. Though hyperbolic, Jonson’s irritation reflected real­ity. Playgoers not “bred” in the “craft” of playwriting translated their engagement with the stage into writing their own play texts, not only for amateur domains, but also for the professional play­ houses. ­These playwriting playgoers learned to write for the stage as attentive consumers of theatrical texts who experienced per­for­mances in a highly personal, and peculiar, way. Their dedicated attention to the ways in which per­for­mance worked resembles the many descriptions—­often satirical—of playgoers growing so engaged with the play that they effectively took possession of it, or parts of it. As we ­will see, many playgoers arrived at the play­ house with preconceived ideas about what, based upon genre or subject, the play should include; many also left with owner­ship of the text itself, carry­ing ideas, speeches, even parts out of the play­house and making them their own.114 The nature of the repertory system, combined with repeat attendance, meant that one audience member could develop close familiarity with par­tic­u­lar plays and parts. In Cynthia’s Revels (1600–1601), Jonson mocks an “Idoll”-­worshipping playgoer who, waiting for the star actor to enter, “repeats . . . ​/ His part of speeches, and confederate Jests / In passion to himselfe.”115 Jonson intends ridicule, but beneath the mockery lies the assumption that a committed playgoer could memorize parts he had seen performed. Over time, actors came

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and went, but roles stayed largely the same, making it pos­si­ble, Tiffany Stern contends, for “a member of an audience [to] realistically claim to know a play as well [as] or better than the (new) actors performing it.”116 An interrupting spectator played by William Sly in Webster’s induction for The Malcontent (1602–4), for example, proudly announces that he “hath seene this play often” and knows it so well (“I have most of the jeasts heere in my table-­booke”) that he “can give [the actors] intellegence for their action”—­figuring the attentive playgoer as a potential authorizing agent for the per­for­mance.117 The idea of playgoers knowing players’ parts was familiar enough for John Heath to mock it in Two Centuries of Epigrams (1610), in which he jokes of a “Momus” who, wanting to “act the fooles part,” attends plays daily at the Globe, Fortune, and Curtain and in his diary “notes that action downe that likes him best” ­until he can, like a “Mimick,” “play the Mome.”118 Less rancorously, Gayton in the 1650s recalls a prelapsarian cultural relationship in the years before the closing of the theaters, when playgoers and playmakers came together in the communal, convivial space of a drinking establishment to blend their par­tic­ u­lar roles in the theatrical enterprise: “Many . . . ​have so courted the Players to re-­act the same ­matters in the Tavernes [that they had seen in the theaters], that they came home, as able Actors themselves.”119 Not only is the play detached from the play­house, owner­ship of the “script” transfers from performer to receiver, who becomes a self-­entertaining participant. Playgoers recording, learning, and embodying play texts signal the interactive cultural system in which engaged consumers, conditioned by this transactional relationship, came to assume authority over the stage and even write their own material for it. Like the fictional Momus’s diary, a­ ctual commonplace books, such as Edward Pudsey’s (ca. 1600), and other written copies of plays or excerpts from plays witness how acquisitive a dedicated audience member or reader could ­ ere not necessarily intendbe.120 Consumers who commonplaced and quoted w ing to write their own plays; their practice, however, signals the extent to which the dramatic text and its meanings ­were not considered to “belong” (in the sense of signification, not copyright) to the producer who first made it. The pro­cess of reception response frequently involved acquisitive consumers claiming the play for their own use and changing it as they did so. Th ­ ese consumers gave life to plays outside the play­house and therefore beyond the control of their authors, something many authors lambasted as fraudulent possession. Such dismissal was an attempt to disempower consumers, relegating their texts to the status of mere plagiarism. Francis Lenton describes an Inns of Court student who “daily doth frequent” the theaters and “Trea­sur[es] up



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within his memory / The amorous toyes of e­ very Comedy / With deepe delight.”121 The prob­lem is not the student’s memorization of the “toyes,” however, but his ­later regurgitation of them as his own: “Hee writes good lines,” Lenton jokes, “but never writes his owne.” Consuming and internalizing the producer’s text is allowable, but translating that experience into an attempt by the consumer to produce renders him ridicu­lous; b­ ecause any “good lines” the student generates cannot be his own, Lenton implies that any original lines he writes are necessarily “bad lines.” George Wither similarly mocks an amateur poet who, in order to enhance his wooing, repeats as his own poetry he has heard on stage: “His Poetry is such as he can cul / From plaies he heard at Curtaine or at Bul.”122 Peter Heylyn likewise teases a soldier who hopes to impress his “trul,” advising that he should “gather musty phrases from ye Bul.”123 ­These examples all take for granted that the language and ideas of plays are transportable commodities, rendering them open to being borrowed and built upon by consumers.124 Like Lenton, Wither, and Heylyn, professional dramatists who mention acquisitive playgoers do so with disapproval. In the prologue to The ­Woman Hater (1607), Beaumont describes playgoers “lurking . . . ​in corners, with ­Table bookes,” “feed[ing their] malice” by recording scandalous m ­ atter in the play.125 Dekker, implying a hierarchy between the creative wit of playwrights and derivative work of playgoers, satirically instructs gallants to “hoord up the finest play-­scraps you can get, upon which your leane wit may most favourly feede for want of other stuffe.”126 Similarly, Marston’s “Luscus” makes “a common-­ place booke out of plaies”: Say (Curteous Sir) speakes he not movingly From out some new pathetique Tragedie? He write, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not, And all from out his huge long scraped stock Of well penn’d playes. . . . ​O ideot times, When gawdy Monkeyes mowe ore sprightly rimes!127 Luscus, Marston taunts, is an “Ape” condemned to “servile imitation,” who can only with “sweat patch an Oration” from stolen material. Jonson, even early in his ­career, equated such playgoer plagiarism with the kind of misinterpretation that he saw as a challenge to his authority over his plays’ meanings: in the induction to E ­ very Man out of His Humor, Cordatus complains of playgoers who “apply [the play] as the foile to their owne vertues,” but especially

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the “narrow-­ey’d Decipherers” who misread and “extort straunge and abstruse meanings” into “their writing-­Tables.”128 To Dekker, such plagiarism might even become a form of meta­phorical resale, with consumers realizing an unearned (social) gain from the legitimate ­labor of the professional: “Your Groundling and Gallery Commoner buyes his sport by the penny, and, like a Hagler, is glad to utter it againe by retailing.”129 Dekker satirizes the work of nonprofessional—­and explic­itly nonaristocratic—­writers as derivative, but by ­doing so he attests to the understanding that many playgoers had more than a passing, ephemeral acquaintance with what they heard on stage: they absorbed it, owned it, and used it. Not surprisingly, dedicated playgoers learning, or mislearning, lines, words, and even ­whole parts appear in plays in the form of characters who are parodies of line-­memorizing, play-­obsessed fans: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Pistol are the most famous; other examples—­almost always comic—­include Gullio in 1 The Return from Parnassus (1598–1602), Luce in Club Law (1599), Albius in Poetaster (1601), Quicksilver in Eastward Ho (1605), Rafe in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), and Trincalo in Albumazar (1615). Satirizing playgoers who repeat professionals’ words as their own only works if the practice is recognizable to audiences. By mocking the practice, ­these playwrights warn playgoers that if they behave like ­these characters they too w ­ ill be ridiculed. Professional playwrights’ negative depictions of such be­hav­ior ­were no doubt a means for attempting to preserve—as far as pos­si­ble within the context of live theater—­control over dramatic meaning and production. To some extent, they had good reason for this concern: in manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books, passages from plays are almost always revised in ways that make them par­tic­u­lar to the needs of the recorder, with no regard for fidelity to the intentions of the original author.130 For ­these acquisitive theatrical consumers, the theater was not only a place of entertainment and recreation; it was a place of re-­creation and even creation. ­A fter the theaters had closed, Richard Flecknoe could still recall how play­ house attendance had equaled ­either travel or formal education as a means for learning be­hav­iors and forms of speech: “The Gentry of our Nation ­were as much civiliz’d by the Stage, as e­ ither by Travail, or the University, in beholding the abridgment ­there of the best Fashions, Language, and Behaviour of the Time.”131 Some playgoers attended plays for the express purpose of emulating what they saw and heard t­ here; they took owner­ship of the plays and particularized them for their own needs. Gayton suggests a model of audience engagement dif­fer­ent from Flecknoe’s, though one still involving discovery and transformation: “Men come



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not to study at a Play-­house,” he reflects, “but love such expressions and passages, which with care insinuate them into their capacities.”132 In Gayton’s version, the playgoer does not so much learn new material from the play as—­like the spider and the bee—­bring preformed inclinations and abilities that lead him to adopt certain pieces of discrete, detachable content. Gayton’s model of the acquisitive playgoer reinforces the idea that what the play meant, and what the experience of attending the play ultimately was, depended not upon what the playmakers expected but upon what individual playgoers chose to, or ­were able to, make of the play. Puritan cleric Henry Crosse—­complaining not of plays but of books—­suggested that t­ hose lacking education should avoid reading “­because they see in them [that is, books] as in a glasse, their owne conditions: now such vaine fragments as fit their humors, they sucke in, and squeeze out againe in ­every assembly.”133 Like Gayton, Crosse argues that reception is conditioned upon preexisting inclinations within the receiver—­inclinations that lead the receiver to interpret the text in such a way as to reinforce the receiver’s moral flaws in what t­ oday we would describe as “confirmation bias.” Crosse’s interest in reception response is driven by his fear of (mis)interpretation of cultural content that consumers encounter; for him, this is more than a mere Jonsonian clash of authority, it is a cause for soteriological concern: as Whitney explains, “For Crosse, the printing press and the theatre ­were dangerous partly ­because . . . ​they license or accommodate the audience’s authority of interpretation, license responses that seem to wrest ­matter from due authority [and] turn it to opportunistic use.”134 Crosse’s concept of reception, however, still depends upon the same assumption of the consumer’s ultimate authority that Baker, Perkins, and other theater apologists embraced. W ­ hether the theater instills new ideas in its audience, as Flecknoe suggests, or ­whether it “licenses” and “accommodates” t­ hose that already exist, as Gayton suggests, the spectator leaves the play­house or puts down the quarto possessing content that he or she considers personal, affective, relevant, and requiring interpretation and application. Assuming the existence of a basic level of literacy, it would be a relatively small transition to go from loyal playgoer, practiced in dramatic judgment and individualized interpretation and experiencing a sense of owner­ship of both the theatrical event and existing dramatic texts, to amateur participant, who uses that training in the creative act of reception in order to develop entirely new dramatic texts. Indeed, it was a step that the inherent need for a collaborative audience programmed into early modern dramatic culture—­even within the commercial play­houses that professional playmakers so frequently

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hoped to keep immune to such individualized engagement. Playgoing required consumers think of themselves as part of the playmaking pro­cess, imaginatively contributing to, even actively participating in, the plays they saw and heard on stage. For some playgoers, “the purpose of a play,” Preiss contends, “was to actuate that sense of self-­possession through their possession of the stage itself.”135 Attempting to pen a new play was simply another means through which to express that desire for possession, that is, the next reasonable form of participatory engagement with the drama that they loved.

“Malignantly witty in anothers Worke”: Responses to the Idea of the Playmaking Playgoer For a moment in The Noble Stranger (1639), playwriting playgoer Lewis Sharpe seems to mock professional dramatists who complain about the impossibility of pleasing the pluralistic audience. A gang of tricksters takes in the dullard Pupillus, who wishes to learn how to be “witty.” ­Going through the motions of an in­ven­ted ritual, they feed him slips of paper bearing excerpts by vari­ous authors. As Pupillus consumes each, he believes that the writer’s spirit possesses him. One paper bears a speech by “a confident Poeticall wit”: “This from our Author I was bid to say, / By Jove ’tis good; and if you lik’t you may.”136 The lines are from the self-­congratulatory epilogue to Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels: “Ile onely speake, what I have heard him [the author] say; / By God ’tis good, and if you lik’t, you may.”137 Upon eating the paper, Pupillus transforms into a ridicu­lous, hyperbolic version of Ben Jonson. Jonson’s plays deeply influenced Sharpe: the paper-­eating trick, for example, seems a version of the word-­purging sequence in Poetaster (1601); indeed, before he eats Jonson’s lines, Pupillus asks the tricksters to “pick out the hard words.”138 ­A fter swallowing the slip, Pupillus erupts into a diatribe on the vagaries and diversities of audience taste: “Oh that I ­were in a Play-­house—­I would tell the ­whole Audience of their pittifull, Hereticall, Criticall humours.” Much of his screed involves the typical condescending charge that audiences do not even know why they like what they like: “Let a man, striving to enrich his l­abours, make himselfe as poore as a broken Citizen . . . ​yet w ­ ill t­ hese ­people crye it downe, they know not why.” He then itemizes the dif­fer­ent ignorant desires the dramatist must satisfy: “One loves high language, though he understands it not; another whats obscaene, to move the blood, not spleene: a third, whose wit lyes all in his gall, must have a Satyre: a fourth man all



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ridicu­lous.” Particularly irksome, though, is the playgoer who merely apes his affluent neighbor—­exactly what Jonson warned against in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614): “The fift man not knowing what to have, grounds his opinion on the next man ith’ formall Ruffe.” The speech voices the view of professional writing as sacrificial l­abor—­“so many heads, so many severall humours; and yet the poor Poet must find waies to please ’hem all”—­that underwrites Jonson’s mockery of his audience: when Pupillus wishes he “­were in a Play-­house” he is, of course, in a play­house; when he fantasizes about telling “the ­whole Audience of their pittifull, Hereticall, Criticall humours” he is ­doing precisely that. Most impor­tant of all, however, the passage hyperbolizes the professional’s anxious refusal to allow any one playgoer the right to contribute to, or shape, the dramatic event. Sharpe was a dedicated playgoer, but he was not interested in becoming a regular, professional member of that theater. In the dedication, he disavows any intention of professionalizing: “As for the name of Poet, it is a stile I never aimed at, (though afarre off I have admired their sacred Raptures) and therefore ­will not be injurious to your Expectation, to bribe your Ac­cep­tance with promising Workes of a higher strain hereafter.”139 In other words, Sharpe himself was the kind of “critical” audience member that Pupillus/Jonson loathes. We can read in Pupillus’s speech, then, a playwriting playgoer mocking Jonson’s and other professionals’ defensive rhe­toric and attempts to deactivate, or at least control, the audience’s natu­ral impulse to engage with, respond to, and even contribute to the play. Like Sharpe, a number of dramatists portrayed playgoers who attempted to put themselves into Barton’s “double position of dramatist and audience”140—­that is, spectators who amplified imaginative participation into attempts at ­actual participation, becoming, like Sharpe, playmaking playgoers. As we ­will see, playwrights ­were cognizant of, and often concerned by, spectators trying to cross the border to become collaborating “authorities” in the construction or alteration of the play. Like Pupillus’s version of Jonson, they often charge playgoers with being incapable of exercising appropriate, effective dramatic judgment. Amateur playwrights, on the other hand, repeatedly show the audience as the ultimate constructive, creative authority, with its vision of the play necessarily taking pre­ce­dence over that of the dramatist who wrote it. Jonson, of course, saw audience participation of any kind as a challenge to his own authority, as he makes clear in his epistle prefacing the 1607 quarto of Volpone: “Application, is now, growne a Trade with many; and t­here are, that professe, to have a Key for the deciphering of e­ very ­thing, but let wise

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and noble Persons take heed how they bee to credulous, or give leave to ­these ­ ere focuses upon audience interinvading Interpreters.”141 Jonson’s vexation h pretation that attempted to discern the identity of “real p ­ eople” b­ ehind his characters. The “invading Interpreters” who “decipher” his characters exercise autonomy from the playwright in determining the signification of what they see. To Jonson—in addition to the po­liti­cal danger of state “interpreters” of his plays142—­audience interaction of this sort dispossesses the playwright of sovereignty to determine the identity (or nonidentity) of his characters, and hence the meaning(s) of the play. Importantly, he adopts the language of professionalization to characterize this dispossession: interpreters make their intrusions a “trade” that they “profess,” supplanting the vocational authority of the professional poet. Jonson was the playwright most concerned with policing (indeed, creating) the boundary in the play­house between the lay consumer and the professional producer. In Poetaster (1601), for example, Virgil amplifies interpretive reading into a dangerous po­liti­cal act: ’Tis not the wholsome sharpe Morality, Or modest anger of a Satyricke Spirit, That hurts, or wounds the body of a State; But the sinister Application Of the malitious, ignorant, and base Interpreter; who w ­ ill distort, and straine The generall Scope and purpose of an Author To his par­tic­u­lar, and private spleene.143 “We knowe it, our deare Virgill,” Caesar agrees, “and esteeme it / A most dishonest practise, in that man, / W ­ ill seeme too wittie in anothers worke.”144 Jonson strikes the same note, in the same language, at the end of his ­career, in The Magnetic Lady (1632): “It is the solemne vice of interpretation, that deformes the figure of many a faire Scene, by drawing it awry; and indeed is the civill murder of most good Playes. . . . ​[It is] most unbecomming a Gentleman to appeare malignantly witty in anothers Worke.”145 When playgoers “distort and strain” the author’s meaning by displacing his authority with their own (being “wittie in anothers worke”) it is theft, even “murder.” Such interpretive intrusions ruin the play by “deforming the scene” to accord with the individual consumer’s determined meaning of it. For this reason, according to Jonson, the “work”—­both the text and the l­abor that produces it—­must be-



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long to the author, not the interpreter. In defending himself to Robert Cecil ­after the Eastward Ho fiasco in 1605, Jonson used the same phrase to complain of spectators “Who are too witty in another man[’s] Workes” and excavate “malicious meaninges” from his “own Wordes.”146 Jonson asserted his authority over his audience even in per­for­mance before the monarch: the induction for Bartholomew Fair was performed before King James on November 1, 1614, and, as Grace Ioppolo remarks, it establishes that, “as audience members, [the courtly spectators] w ­ ere all subservient to the author.”147 Critical inductions such as that in Bartholomew Fair ­were, in fact, prime territory in which dramatists, both professional and amateur, could articulate responses to the idea of the playmaking playgoer.148 Inductions reveal what writers thought, or at least wanted their audiences to think, about consumers crossing the border and becoming or attempting to become participants in the production of dramatic meaning. More broadly, they demonstrate the influence that the idea of the collaborative consumer, and the practice of ­actual playwriting playgoers, had upon play­house culture. Most professionals’ repre­sen­ta­tions of playmaking playgoers emphasize the aesthetic and social disorder precipitated by their intrusions—in effect, attempting to protect the “profession” from encroachments by “unqualified” laypeople. For example, in Webster’s induction for Marston’s The Malcontent (1602–4), the actor Sly plays a foppish playgoer who, upon learning that the play lacks a prologue, offers to “make one extempore”—­resulting in a comic, but completely dramatically irrelevant, prose quip.149 Jonson displays a similarly ignorant playgoer attempting to control and change the course of dramatic events in the “intermean” scenes in The Magnetic Lady; when Damplay demands that the players take his advice and omit the fifth act entirely, one of them admonishes him: “Nor is it in your office to be troubled or perplexed with [the structure of the plot], but to sit still, and expect. The more your imagination busies it selfe, the more it is intangled”; Damplay’s companion, Master Probee, concurs, reminding his fellow spectator that “our parts . . . ​are to await the pro­cesse, and events of ­things as the Poet pres­ents them, not as wee would corruptly fashion them.”150 John Day’s ­Children of the Queen’s Revels comedy The Isle of Gulls (1606) begins with an induction featuring three “gentlemen” who sit upon the stage “as to see a Play” and press an actor for information about the writer.151 When they learn that the playwright is a “stranger” relatively new to the venue, they take this to mean that he may be vulnerable to challenges from the audience; the gentlemen seize the opportunity to offer their own creative input,

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each demanding that a dif­fer­ent genre be played. The effect is to ridicule the concept of allowing the audience, with its myriad opinions about what the play “should” be, to control the dramatic event. In the case of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the playmaking playgoers George and Nell pres­ent an entertaining but even more anarchic vision of consumers who reject the play that has been prepared for them and impose, instead, their own dramatic desires onto the stage. As Lee Bliss points out, George and Nell’s entrance onto the stage platform “violat[es] the play’s privileged space”152 just as it violates the social space of the gallants’ seating area. George does not belong in this venue, let alone on its stage: though familiar with the satires typical of the Blackfriars repertory, he is mocked as “an understanding man,”153 a common pun referring to the groundlings at the public play­houses where he belongs. George’s dramatic expectations demonstrate his love of the nationalistic pseudo-­histories in vogue at the Fortune, Globe, and Red Bull but reveal him to be markedly out of place at the Blackfriars, particularly when he ends up rejecting such basic dramatic ele­ments as plot consistency and character plausibility. Like her husband, Nell too does not belong in this venue, as she herself acknowledges: “By your leave Gentlemen all, Im’e [sic] somthing troublesome, Im’e a strãger ­here, I was nere at one of ­these playes as they say, before.”154 In the period, “stranger” carried associations of foreignness, displacement, and unfamiliarity with native ways.155 John Cowell, in The Interpreter (1607), explained that “straunger . . . ​ signifieth in our Language generally a man borne out of the land or unknowne,” a definition followed by most other early modern lexicographers.156 Use of “stranger” by a member of the working class in 1607 might have more specifically recalled for the Blackfriars audience the word’s connotation as a term for Eu­ro­pean immigrants to London who competed with native laborers. Their willingness to be paid below guild rates was widely feared to drive down the value of native-­made goods and undercut the rate of pay for En­ glish workers.157 The threat ­these “strangers” represented to efforts by the guilds to close and control their fields mirrors the threat posed by “strangers,” like Nell, emigrating from audience to stage in order to ­labor in the making of the play. Beaumont was not the only person whose ­career relied upon the professionalization of the stage to use “stranger” to describe an outsider making a play within a professional theatrical space: Master of the Revels Sir Henry Herbert noted that “a com­pany of strangers” staged Come See a Won­der at the Red Bull in September 1623, and “a strange com­pany” performed The Fair Foul



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One at the same venue in November that year.158 What made ­these companies “strange” for Herbert was that they ­were not professional troupes or, as Herbert put it, not “of the foure companies” allowed by law (the King’s Men, Lady Elizabeth’s Men, Palsgrave’s Men, and first Prince Charles’s Men). In addition to Herbert, playmakers within the industry used the term “strangers” to describe intruding outsiders. In 1615, the players financed by Henslowe brought vari­ous “Articles of [gri]evance against” him, one of which was his selling of parts of the com­pany’s “stock” of costumes “to strangers for £400.”159 During the 1635 dispute over the disposition of shares in the King’s Men, Cuthbert and William Burbage noted that the portions owned by the original members had, through deaths, remarriages, and inheritances, become “dissolved to strangers” over time.160 Not only are “strangers,” in this instance, outsiders, their entrance into the industry is assumed to be antithetical to the integrity of the profession. Less threatening is Heywood’s reference to the “stranger that lately acted Valerius his part” in the 1638 revival of his 1603–8 The Rape of Lucrece; w ­ hether this person was an a­ ctual foreigner or, as seems more likely, simply not a regular member of the industry, the outsider not only took a role but also contributed by adding two songs.161 The idea of the playmaking playgoer as a “stranger” was thus grounded in an understanding of that word as a marker of exteriority from the regular industry—­though not necessarily one of qualitatively inferior abilities. Theater necessarily creates an authorial gap, an opening for creative collaboration that first the actors fill through per­for­mance and then the audience fills through interpretation, and in that pro­cess of interpreting, Jonson feared, nothing prevents the audience from getting it “wrong.” He recognized the uncontrollable diversity of responses to the authorial gap opened by per­ for­mance; inevitably, some in the audience ­will respond with “malicious meanings”—­that is, meanings contrary to ­those intended by the author, or, as per­for­mance theorist Keir Elam puts it more objectively, “However judicious or aberrant the spectator’s decodification, the final responsibility for the meaning and coherence of what he constructs is his.”162 Dramatists like Jonson saw themselves, according to George Rowe, as working in “a world where author and audience face[d] one another with suspicion and strug­gle for the domination both of the stage and the meaning of what occurs on it.”163 Jonson’s own adversarial view of audience authority may have derived from his experiences grudgingly revising plays in order to satisfy audience demand. In the quarto of ­Every Man out of His Humor, Jonson notes that the play “had another Catastrophe or Conclusion, at the first Playing: which . . . ​many seem’d

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not to rellish . . . ​and therefore ’twas since alter’d.”164 The alteration struck Jonson as neither necessary nor an improvement. To defend his original and assert his professional authority, he included in the quarto his first version of the scene, along with reasons why it was better than the alteration: “A right-­ei’d and solide Reader,” he insists, “may perceive it was not so ­great a part of the Heaven awry, as they would make it.”165 For Jonson, the audience might know what it wants, but that does not mean it knows how to make professionals’ plays “better”: “To judge of Poets,” he declares in Timber, “is only the facultie of Poets; and not of all Poets, but the best.”166 “Judgment” and “interpretation” challenge the poet’s prerogative to define his or her own meaning and, hence, challenge the autonomy, prestige, and very identity of writing as a profession. As the inductions cited above show, other professionals echoed Jonson in his concerns about untrained—­that is, amateur—­playmakers. Shirley, in his commendatory verse for Massinger’s Renegado (1624), critiques t­hose “Dabblers in Poetry” who use their verses “onely [to] Court” ­women and make a show of their “loose witt in rime,” “fright[ing] the time / . . . ​with mighty words, that teare / a Passage through the eare.”167 Such poetic “dabblers” are to Shirley akin to unduly critical audience members: let them “Conspire one Comedy,” he challenges, “and they ­will say / Tis easier to Commend, then make a Play.” If ­these critics ­were to try to write plays themselves, they would realize that ­there must be a division between producer and consumer and that their respective roles—to “make” on the one hand and to judge on the other—­ must remain distinct. Similarly, Dekker and Middleton’s prologue to The Roaring Girl adopts an adversarial view of playgoers who blur the boundary between their roles and that of the authors:  . . . ​each [spectator] comes And brings a play in’s head with him: up he summes, What he would of a Roaring Girle have writ; If that he findes not h ­ ere, he mewes at it.168 In this model, all playgoers are, in effect, playmakers in their minds, using the play’s title (known in advance of coming to the theater) as a jumping-­off point for their own dramatic narratives. Dekker and Middleton see themselves as confronting an audience full of not merely spectators but amateur dramatists as well.169 Each consumer comes with a personalized expectation of what the play should be; if that version of The Roaring Girl remains in his imagina-



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tion only, t­ here is no conflict with the dramatists’ professional agenda (which is to supply a play that w ­ ill satisfy the most playgoers). The dramatists’ alarm comes when playgoers compare their ­imagined version with the ­actual version and comment outwardly on deviations between the two. Their concern stems from the possibility that spectators who collaborate imaginatively might, like Hoskins of Oxford, participate outwardly. They return to this concern in the epilogue’s anecdote of the disastrous results stemming from a crowd-­ sourced work of art; at both the start and the end of the per­for­mance, Dekker and Middleton remind their audience that the professionals’ authority as cultural producers must supersede the consumers’ diverse, and thus inherently contradictory, ideas of what the play should be. Fletcher’s prefatory note to The Faithful Shepherdess (1609) provides additional evidence of a professional’s worried view of audience members who anticipated what a play would, or should, include: “It is a pastorall Tragic-­ comedie, which the p ­ eople seeing when it was plaid, having ever had a singular gift in defining, concluded to be a play of cou[n]try hired Shepheards, in gray cloakes, with curtailed dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another: And missing whitsun ales, creame, wassel & morris-­dances, began to be angry.”170 Fletcher’s sarcastic praise of the audience’s “singular gift in defining” suggests that he was displeased with spectators arriving at his play with certain, to his mind erroneous, generic expectations. Jonson, too, complained that readers might unfairly judge his Catiline (1603) against “some pieces” of Cicero that they knew from their schooldays.171 Like Fletcher, he attributed his play’s poor reception to the audience’s preemptive assumptions about dramatic content, though in this case t­ hose stemmed from the consumers’ familiarity with source material rather than their generic expectations. As Fletcher, Jonson, Dekker, and Middleton suggest, audience members might arrive at the play­house with an expectation of what they ­will be seeing—­expectations that did not always accord with the a­ ctual plays they saw. Such anticipation amounts to internalized playmaking: each playgoer has a “play” in mind and might actively respond to the per­for­mance in an effort to make the performed play conform to that ­imagined version. Each playgoer could thus practice spontaneous collaboration, interpreting, judging, and “in’s head” revising plays at the moment of performance—in effect, playmaking in the act of playgoing. For ­these dramatists, however, such collaboration is unwelcome and inherently destructive. This is not to say that professionals might not represent playmaking playgoers as constructive forces, if d ­ oing so served their purposes. Marston’s

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induction for What You W ­ ill (1601) includes the spectator Phylomuse (“lover of the muse”), who identifies himself as a friend of the dramatist and who has himself written “a kind of inductive speech to this Commedy”; Phylomuse’s participation, however, is much the same as Master Probee’s from The Magnetic Lady, for his purpose is to bring into line three other gentlemen spectators who have nearly disrupted the play with their conflicting demands about what it should include. In 1638, the professional players at Salisbury Court staged an induction for amateur dramatist Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess.172 At the induction’s end, a Prologue attempts—or, rather, three Prologues attempt—to start the play. The first actor trying to deliver the prologue remembers only his first line: “Must alwayes I a Hearer only be?”173 He looks to the prompter for help remembering the next line, but the prompter is missing, so he exits in humiliation. The second actor gets a bit further: “Must alwayes I a Hearer only be? / Mayn’t a Spectator write a Comedy?” At a loss for the next line, he looks inside his hat for his part, to which “an Actor plac’t in the Pit, laughs.” The “playgoer” in the pit takes his leave from t­ hose around him and climbs onstage: “Faith Gentlemen, I’le leave your com­pany, / Since none ­will do the Author Justice, I / ­Will something vent, though’t be ex tempore.”174 The “Spectator” assures the audience of the originality of his text, and hence of his own authority: “If I too should be out, this answer take, / I do not now so much repeat, as make.”175 This producing consumer asserts his creative authority as one not of repetition or plagiarism but of in­de­pen­dently “making” an entirely new text. The two Prologues had relied upon a prepared speech in which they claimed to be both playgoers and playwrights: obviously, they ­were neither. The “Spectator” who intervenes to save the play points out the scripted nature of the fiction invoked by the Prologues and declares his autonomy from that script. H ­ ere, it seems, is a real “Hearer” who ­will indeed “write a Comedy.” Readers know that this is all scripted and that the intervening spectator is also just “an Actor” delivering lines written by a playwright. For an audience, however, the line between illusion and real­ity is less clear: who is the spectator, who the actor, and who the playwright? Indeed, why must t­hose categories be mutually exclusive? For a moment, the induction grants its audience a generous form of imaginative participation: anyone sufficiently capable could be the intervening spectator who saves the play from impending failure. Martin Butler argues that the Careless Shepherdess induction is “symptomatic commentary on the emergence of the amateur playwright at the end of the period” and displays a prominent “admiration for amateur dramatists.”176 And yet, even in the context of such an endorse-



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ment of amateur participation, the profession cannot resign full authority to the audience: the intervening spectator exercises creative agency in devising a prologue, but in that prologue he mocks the audience’s creative and critical faculties and defends the need for the professional dramatist. He has overheard the vari­ous demands of ­those standing about him in the pit and resolves that the pluralistic audience is inherently incapable of agreeing upon what makes a play effective. As Dekker and Middleton assert in the epilogue to The Roaring Girl, it must be left to “the Author” alone to craft the work of “Art.”177 As he explic­itly noted while taking the stage, this “playgoer” w ­ ill “do the Author Justice,” even at the expense of his fellow playgoers’ authority. While professionals often warn against the intrusion of “strangers” into the play­house’s systems of meaning making, repre­sen­ta­tions of playmaking playgoers by amateur dramatists emphasize their stabilizing, even curative power.178 As we have seen, professionals’ inductions frequently show playmaking to be not just something playgoers should not do but something they cannot do; amateurs’ inductions, however, uniformly show playmaking as something playgoers must do. A good example of this is in the induction to John Jones’s Adrasta (1635).179 In the play, Lucilio’s love for Althea drives his jealous m ­ other, Adrasta, to orchestrate her arrest for treason and to attempt to kill her with witchcraft; in a comic subplot, a lecherous husband is frightened into faithfulness when his wife’s friends disguise a barber as a demon who kidnaps the man and threatens to castrate him (the barber ends up, instead, simply giving him a shave). Some aspects of the play derive from the Jacobean revenge tradition (the Italian setting, disguises, assassinations, poison, black magic), but it is, in the end, a Caroline tragicomedy in which near incest is avoided, aristocrats disguise themselves as shepherds, and lovers are united through the unraveling of mistaken identities and the absolute power of forgiveness. Jones intended his play for public per­for­mance, but when he presented the script to a troupe, “the Players, upon a slight and halfe view of it, refus’d to doe it.”180 Stung by the rejection but still enamored with the theater, Jones revised and published his play. Jones’s play begins with a stage direction in which, as is typical for critical inductions, “real­ity” seems to interrupt the show: “A ­little before the Prologue comes forth, enters one of the Actors and sits downe on the Stage as a stranger, awhile ­after enters the Prologue and stumbles at his legs.”181 While speech prefixes identify this playgoer as a gentleman, this stage direction and the actor delivering the prologue refer to him as a “stranger.” As noted, Day adopts this title in The Isle of Gulls in order to close a win­dow of opportunity for

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several would-be controlling playgoers; Beaumont calls Nell a “stranger” in order to emphasize her naïveté about plays and incursion both onto the stage and into the practice of playmaking. Jones, however, portrays the informed spectator’s presence on the stage as a productive immigration of the spectator into the playwright’s domain, allowing the playgoer to adjust the play ­until it accords with audience demand. A ­ fter blaming one another for the tripping, the actor and stranger debate the suitability of certain genres for the public stage. The actors intend to perform a satire; the stranger, however, ­will have none of it: “Doe you heare Prologue! your Author is a foole: is he desirous to buy Fame at such a rate, that he ­will smart for’t?” The stranger then provides detailed instructions on what kind of play would please the audience. Overwhelmed by the specificity of his demands, the actor invites him to confer with the author in the tiring-­house, and the stranger concurs: “I w ­ ill presently, and disswade his intention, and yet I doubt not but to give sufficient contentation to his Auditors, whose patience I feare I have wrong’d by interrupting their Prologue.” In voicing the common refrain of the dramatist’s need to please the audience, the intervening playgoer fashions himself as a kind of dramatist who w ­ ill supply the play that can best satisfy the audience of which he himself is a member. Crucially, this playmaking playgoer exits into the tiring-house at the invitation of the professional playmakers: the spectator’s creative participation is not incidental to the play’s success; it is, in fact, required. The stranger’s intrusion onto the stage and subsequent departure into the tiring-­house (from which he never reemerges) reflect the fantasy of participation that, judging from the play’s preface, catalyzed the a­ ctual playwriting playgoer, John Jones. In other words, the stranger may represent Jones himself. By calling himself a “stranger,” Jones acknowledges his peculiar status as he attempts to cross the stage, a space that he sees not as a barrier between playgoer and playwright—as Jonson hoped—­but as a threshold inviting movement between audience and tiring-­house, between externality to the industry and internality, and between textual reception and textual creation. In transitioning between ­those spaces, the stranger fulfills the amateur’s objective of collapsing t­hose binaries, demonstrating the possibility and benefit of the playgoer as playmaker. Jones was not alone in using the induction of a play to articulate a vision of the theatrical consumer as theatrical producer: for example, in Robert Wild’s school play The Benefice (1641), the amateur dramatist Pedanto reads “all the Play Books in the Country” in order to help him in his task of writing a school play;182 in William Hawkins’s school play Apollo Shroving (1627), the garrulous Mistress Lala descends from the audience to



“Mayn’t a spectator write a comedy?” 71

make sure that the students performing the play speak in “plaine dealing En­ glish” and even decides to go “into the tyreing ­house” to take “a mans part” in the play.183 Unlike their professional counter­parts, amateur dramatists like Jones, Wild, and Hawkins, who represent playgoers taking an active role in the construction of dramatic meaning, repeatedly portray that pro­cess as one of usefully creative playmaking. ­W hether endorsing, damning, or taking advantage of the idea of playmaking playgoers, dramatists recognized that the concept exerted influence in the early modern play­house and, in portraying their differing views of that concept, they relied upon the audience’s own understanding that making meaning out of a script—­that is, making the play—­involved participation by that audience. The question for ­these dif­fer­ ent authors, then, was not w ­ hether the audience was to participate in making the play but how and to what ends.

* * * Summoned before the Senate charged with performing plays comprising “Actions not to be toucht,” the actor Paris in Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626) declares that he ­will “prove / That they [that is, his accusers] make that a libell which the Poet / Writ for a Comedie, so acted too.”184 Paris’s refutation resembles professional dramatists’ frequent worry that figures in authority might, in the pro­cess of interpretation, misconstrue po­liti­cally offensive meanings in their plays. Beyond expressing fear about official misinterpretation, however, Paris’s statement reveals a fundamental assumption b­ ehind Massinger’s understanding of the audience’s role in the play­house. Paris’s choice of verb to describe the activity of audience interpretation recalls the productive work undertaken by playgoers in Baker’s bee and spider meta­phor: like them, Paris’s audience “makes” the play. The participation of t­hese consumers involves more than merely decoding what “the Poet / Writ” or what was “acted too,” and extends to replacing what was “writ” with meaning that is (Paris contends) entirely new. Even though the author and actors did not set out to pres­ent their audience with the experience of “a libel,” the audience “made” the play into that. Massinger thus recognizes that the audience is the final authority determining a play’s meaning: Paris’s self-­defense is premised upon the ability of playgoers to engage with, respond to, and, in ­doing so, change the plays that they saw in ways that at times directly contradicted what authors or actors expected. Even as the theater professionalized, final authority over making dramatic meaning remained vested in its consumers rather than its

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producer—or, more precisely, theatrical consumers w ­ ere (and are) also theatrical producers. As noted earlier, situating this commonplace of per­for­mance studies within the context of the early modern theater raises essential prob­lems for the “orchestration” approach to studying early modern audiences, since that approach assumes an idealistically static, rigidly divided relationship between active playmakers and compliantly responsive playgoers; this chapter has argued that their relationship was in fact more often a dynamic dialogue between active consumers and responsive producers. We deny the audience its authoritative position in the play­house when we ignore the impor­tant role of audience participation in making dramatic meaning simply b­ ecause that participation results in an unrecoverable multiplicity of meanings—­something anathema to the critical move of imposing a singular meaning onto a dramatic text, or the even more frequent critical move of assuming a singular audience response to, or effect upon the audience by, a par­tic­u­lar dramatic text. Setting aside the unrecoverable infinite number of potential imaginative responses to a play, the real and occasionally recoverable phenomenon of outward audience response shows that the playgoing experience could be in­de­pen­dent from what­ever the professional playmakers might express about it or attempt to impose upon it. Many in the audience refused to allow their understanding of ­either the dramatic event or dramatic meaning be scripted for them, rendering inherently inadequate any attempt to “read” the historical audience through scripts by t­ hose dramatists. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa speculate that the experience of attending the theater must have been collective and “harmonious,” with “every­one . . . ​­t here for the same purpose, anticipating the same ­things.”185 This image of the “harmonious” auditorium, however, is at odds with the diversity of dramatic understanding playgoers brought to the play­house and the potential for a wide range of radically dif­fer­ent interpretive and interactive experiences in the audience. In some ways, this is a familiar story: the idea of the audience as an imaginative or figurative participant in the theater is a critical commonplace of both per­for­mance studies and theater history. Less familiar, however, is the idea that ­these repre­sen­ta­tions of creative, participating playgoers in Shakespeare’s theater took form in ­actual playwriting playgoers. My interest in revisiting and explicating the evidence for participatory playgoers has been to situate the work of ­actual playwriting playgoers as a literalization of the well-­ known practice of imaginative participation. The dynamic relationship between play producers and consumers assumed by the model of the participatory



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audience helps explain how audience members might be prompted to write their own plays: if the consumer was not satisfied collaborating with the professional stage merely through responsive expression in reaction to what he or she saw ­there, the next possibility was creative expression by penning an entirely new play. Being a regular, internal member of the industry was not required, ­because playgoers ­were taught to think of themselves as inherent partners in the pro­cess of meaning-making within the play­house. My intention in this chapter has been to show that playwriting playgoers w ­ ere thus, like all audience members, “trained” to collaborate in the shaping of dramatic meaning and events and, more impor­tant, that they ­were aware of that training; they ­were cultural consumers in a theater that openly recognized playgoers as simply another species of playmakers. Prepared for the creative pro­cess through both inward imaginative participation and outward active response, t­hese playgoers saw (at times perhaps too optimistically) a theater industry designed to receive and react to consumers’ input, dramatic visions, and desires. Particularized, creative audience response meant that, contrary to the banquet meta­phor a­ dopted by so many professional dramatists, playgoing did not involve consuming a ready-­made meal so much as contributing to a collaborative potluck: each spectator enjoys what has been prepared but also brings a dish to add to the buffet. ­Actual playwriting playgoers, however, did more than just bring a dish: they attempted to set an entirely new banquet.

chapter 2

“Some other may be added” Playwriting Playgoers Revising in Their Manuscripts

On the verso of the final leaf of his tragedy The Queen of Corsica—in which a queen’s lust for her b­ rother results in a rebellion—­playwriting playgoer Francis Jaques falls s­ilent: the promise of an “Epilogue” heads the page, but the remainder is blank—­with the exception of the author’s signature and a few cryptic, smudged words at the bottom.1 Throughout the holograph fair copy, Jaques revisited ideas and words, revised passages, pinned on addition slips, and elaborated on stage directions. Like the fictional Pedanto, this real amateur labored at his writing, taking pains to correct and improve his play to make it as complete as pos­si­ble—­and yet he still left out the epilogue, which suggests that the decision may have been deliberate. The absent epilogue may thus reflect Jaques’s hopes of securing per­for­mance by a professional com­pany: writing inductions, prologues, and epilogues was often the job of a com­pany’s regular dramatist, and if Jaques knew that, he may have left the page blank so that a professional could supply the speech (the play also lacks a prologue, though no blank is provided for it). At the same time, Jaques added a marginal note reading “more” next to a passage of dialogue, suggesting that he expected to have the chance to make even further changes.2 He never made ­those changes, nor was he likely to have seen his play staged: despite its theatricality, the extant manuscript bears no evidence of play­house use. No external evidence of a per­for­mance survives, and the title-­page date of “1642” suggests that none was likely to occur. Jaques’s attention to detail in correcting and adding as he copied his work attests to his desire to “get it right”—­though for what ends, if not per­for­mance, remains a mystery. Grace Ioppolo com-



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pares Jaques’s improving his play as he copied it to Munday’s fair copying of his John a Kent and John a Cumber: Munday’s care with his copy reveals that he was “proud” of his work; so too, we must infer, was the amateur.3 Like professionals, playwriting playgoers would often change text as they wrote, seeking just the right word or expression. The courtier amateur Sir William Berkeley took his dedication to that pursuit beyond even the bounds of print: ­after correcting the manuscript of his The Lost Lady for its first print edition he corrected it again for the second edition, and even a­ fter that he sought out and marked up as many copies of the second edition as he could find.4 Scholars usually assume that such revision signals amateurish indecision—­the fallacious generalization that playgoers did not know what they w ­ ere d ­ oing when they wrote their plays—­rather than creative experimentation. This position is taken, for example, by the editor of the anonymous The Emperor’s Favorite, who claims that the heavy currente calamo revisions in that manuscript indicate “that the play’s author was prob­ably an amateur rather than a professional,” despite the fact that such revisions are found in professionals’ manuscripts as well.5 Revisions that “suggest that [a dramatist] began writing the play ­either without mapping it out entirely or with a readiness to make changes as he saw fit once he was writing” are not valid criteria for amateurism, since professionals also did this.6 Rather, such revisions show that playwriting playgoers exercised the same kind and depth of care and pride as many professionals. Care and pride, however, do not necessarily equate with effectiveness: some playgoers’ manuscripts reveal telling unfamiliarity with certain industry practices, a mea­sure of the distance between the workings of the profession and what even an informed, dedicated layperson might understand about t­ hose workings. For example, most professional dramatists did not include dramatis personae lists in their foul papers or playbook manuscripts ­because such lists ­were customarily part of a separate species of industry document—­the author’s plot; amateur dramatists, however, including t­hose who wrote for the professional stage, almost always included such lists in their manuscripts ­because, as play readers, they w ­ ere familiar with them as normal components 7 of printed plays. Despite such formal differences, playgoers’ plays in manuscript more often than not show striking similarities with manuscripts of professionals’ plays. Like their professional counter­parts, amateurs used deli­ berate revisionary strategies to try to ensure that their plays appealed to their users—­whether the public, a single reader, a troupe of actors, or the Master of the Revels. Unlike professionals, however, amateurs employed ­these strategies without the advantages conveyed by regularly revising dramatic texts to

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satisfy other users. While this lack of regular practice may at times have undermined amateurs’ attempts to negotiate the pro­cess of revising, it does not mean that amateurs ­were ignorant of the need for such negotiation or unconcerned about satisfying t­ hose users. Playwriting playgoers w ­ ere often deeply concerned that their plays should meet the needs of o­ thers, and they w ­ ere often willing to attempt significant, compromising changes in order to meet ­t hose needs. This chapter examines two cases of revision in playgoers’ manuscript plays in order to see how ­t hese writers understood their role as participants in a collaborative enterprise that required the necessary activity of rewriting. Th ­ ese examples show amateur dramatists modifying their authorial vision in order to bring their plays into accord with the demands of nonauthorial agents. Reading ­those revisions as part of a deliberate effort to satisfy other users, rather than as mere “amateurish” naïveté, opens up a new category of evidence for what audience members knew, and how they knew, about the ways in which a dramatic text could be changed. Evidence of amateurs willing to revise their plays is significant also b­ ecause, lacking professionals’ financial need to see their plays succeed, they could elect simply to abandon their scripts. The fragment of The Amazon, by Edward Herbert, first Baron Herbert of Cherbury, demonstrates this contradictory tendency, showing both heavy revision and, like the final page of Jaques’s play, inexplicable silence. Herbert evidently expected his play to be performed, for next to the dramatis personae list he added a note making a casting suggestion for the part of Myops: “yf that you me ­will like .for I thinke myselfe to bee lovely.”8 All of the revisions and deletions in the fragment are currente calamo by the author; nothing was changed specifically to make the play suitable for the stage, and he gave up a­ fter writing only just more than three scenes. Given the numerous deletions and revisions, it is pos­si­ble that Herbert deci­ded to start over again with a clean copy, but this seems highly unlikely. The final page is a fair copy of the extremely messy preceding leaf, which suggests that Herbert was willing to copy into the same booklet in which he drafted; it seems unlikely then that he would give up and move to a new booklet with so many blank pages left at the end of the extant booklet. Furthermore, in a few places his revisions are in a dif­fer­ent ink, which suggests that they ­were made ­later than the initial draft. In other words, rather than rewrite in a new booklet, Herbert was content to work on top of his old draft, writing changes directly into his existing text. The most plausible explanation, therefore, is that he simply gave up on writing the play. Herbert’s currente calamo revisions reveal his creative pro­cess before giving up, though,



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as he deleted words and interlined alternatives, and often altered ­those as well. For example, it mattered to him ­whether an old royal councilor “can feele in mee the flame of Love” (deleted) or \ “can feele, and though I do not burne / Yet I can know how to warme mee by the fier of love” (ultimately, “Yet I can” was also struck out).9 The penultimate leaf vividly details the amateur’s frustrated attempts to get his words just right: it contains a song so heavi­ly altered that Herbert ended up rewriting it on the next page.10 The Amazon illustrates how an amateur went about drafting and revising, but it also illustrates how, ­after investing a considerable amount of creative energy and ­labor into his script, he could simply put it down. Unlike Herbert’s Amazon, the two plays examined in this chapter ­were completed, and they w ­ ere revised, not just during drafting, but at ­later stages in their circulation as well. The holograph playbook of Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary (1632–33) demonstrates how a playwriting playgoer revised around the demands of one of the principal authorities of the industry—­the Master of the Revels—­and even, unlike most professionals, attempted to negate the effect of the Master’s censorship. In Mountfort’s negotiation with the Master we see a playgoer preparing his play for the stage and, in d ­ oing so, vacillating between willing compliance and frustrated defiance in the face of challenges to his authorial expectations and control. The two holographs of Arthur Wilson’s The Inconstant Lady (1627–30)—­a play prob­ ably first written for private h ­ouse­ hold per­ for­ mance but eventually staged in the commercial play­house by the King’s Men11—­reveal how a playwriting playgoer made major and minor changes in revising his script into a pre­sen­ta­tion copy for a reader whose inclinations stood at odds with content that the dramatist had originally included for the stage. In ­these examples, and ­others like them, playwriting playgoers employ many of the same revisionary tactics, for many of the same purposes, as many professionals. Their position as consumers renders their use of t­ hese tactics telling points of intersection between the awareness of the audience and the practices of the playmakers. How fully did playgoers understand the pro­cess of revising a play to make it suitable for a reader or audience? What kinds of information did they think to, or w ­ ere they willing to, remove or add? What ­were their expectations for their script in the transmission pro­cess, and what might that tell us about audience members’ understanding of theatrical manuscript practices? The first case study shows that playwriting playgoers, like professionals such as Jonson, might see the dilemma presented by censorship as a challenge to their personal voice in their plays. Importantly, Mountfort’s The

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Launching of the Mary reveals also that a playwriting playgoer could collaborate with the actors in revising his play for the commercial stage. The Launching of the Mary demonstrates that a playwriting playgoer could reasonably, despite his status as a “stranger” to the industry, expect to see his play staged by a professional com­pany. In this, The Launching of the Mary and the information it provides about Mountfort’s engagement with the producing pro­cess testify to the porous boundary between playmaking and playgoing in the professional theaters of early modern London.

“Yt may be punishment to speake / somethynges that are in print”: Revising Around the Censor in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary In April 1632, ­after two years in Persia, the East India Com­pany (EIC) clerk Walter Mountfort returned home to London.12 He spent the year-­long voyage writing The Launching of the Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife, a city comedy about EIC employees and sailors’ wives in the London dockyards where he had lived. Mountfort wrote the play to pass time onboard the ship; as he explains in his prologue: This was done at sea on land tis facile. wthout further plea: He did yt, wch did doe yt to reviue his stupid sences: not thereby to thriue by settinge yt to sale. [10–13]13 While he may have been bored during the voyage, his modesty is rhetorical convention: as the next chapter shows, Mountfort intended to see his play’s “action on a stage,” as he puts it in the prologue (3). Seeking to participate in the theatrical industry without becoming a member of it by “settinge” his play “to sale”—­meaning both to let it set sail (that is, be put into action) and to sell it—­ Mountfort expressly did not intend “to thriue,” or make a living, writing plays, even if he did make some money from writing just the one. In the epilogue, he acknowledges his inexperience as a dramatist, confessing that “tyll now, he neuer tracte the Theater” (2967). He also again affirms his status as an amateur, noting that if the audience does not like his play, he is not concerned: “what needes he feare / that neuer lookes a laurell wreath to weare?” (2960–61).



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When Mountfort at last arrived in London he provided his manuscript to a professional troupe of actors, most likely the second Prince Charles’s Men.14 Some scholars guess that the EIC had commissioned the play for private per­ for­mance.15 Given the Master’s license, Mountfort’s troubled relationship with his employers, the subplot’s critique of the EIC and its policies, and the lack of evidence in the Com­pany’s scrupulous rec­ords for payment of such a commission, it seems more likely that the play was prepared for public per­for­ mance.16 Although he licensed the play, the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, required a number of changes. The actors brought Mountfort back to revise around the censorship, and their bookkeeper then went about making further changes (mostly cuts). All of t­ hese layers—­Mountfort’s draft with its currente calamo revisions, the Master’s censorship, Mountfort’s responses to that censorship, and the bookkeeper’s cuts—­are recorded in the extant holograph of the play. The play itself comprises three plots: a main plot, in which officers of the EIC attempt to justify the Com­pany—­and global trade in general—to a skeptical Lord Admiral; a second plot, in which two sailors’ wives, left b­ ehind in London while their husbands are overseas on EIC expeditions, frequent taverns, seduce apprentices, and engage in petty assault and thievery, whereas a third wife chastely defends her honor from a series of would-be suitors (including a courtier, a captain, a soldier, and a vicar) and supports herself by taking up needlework; and a third plot, in which a group of Blackwall shipyard laborers (resembling in character and names the mechanicals of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) divide their time between finishing work on the EIC’s new ship, the Mary, gathering for drinks and fisticuffs, casting aspersions upon the Dutch, and fi­nally staging an amateur dance to celebrate the eventual launching of the Mary, which concludes the play. While the main plot—­a dry series of lengthy speeches and recitations of economic statistics largely without real conflict—is taken almost verbatim from EIC officer Thomas Mun’s treatise, Discourse of Trade from E ­ ngland unto the East-­Indies (1621), the more engaging subplots are largely Mountfort’s own inventions, though they contain ele­ments from a variety of sources, including passages from Cervantes’s Don Quixote and, more tellingly, generic and narrative devices recalling the working-­class city comedies of Dekker and Heywood. What it was about this content that would have interested a professional troupe of players is difficult to ascertain. If the play was bought by the second Prince Charles’s Men, it was licensed for them at a particularly troubled moment in the troupe’s operations: formed in 1631, by 1633 the troupe was on the verge of

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ending its stay at the Salisbury Court play­house and was facing low audience numbers, lawsuits, po­liti­cal trou­ble, debt, and the loss through death and desertion of almost half of its playing sharers.17 In 1631–33, the com­pany was staging Shakerley Marmion’s city comedies Holland’s Leaguer and A Fine Companion and so may have thought Mountfort’s play a good fit with its existing repertory, but l­ittle e­ lse is known about the plays specifically written for the troupe. It is notable that Holland’s Leaguer was given a peculiar six-­day run and yet even so brought in l­ittle profit, which might suggest a degree of desperation on the part of the com­pany stemming from a lack of enough playbooks to stage, which in turn might have made Mountfort’s script an appealing, and presumably (given Mountfort’s own financial predicaments at the time) cheap to purchase, possibility.18 Although Mountfort was in the Indian Ocean when he wrote his play, he expected it to be staged when he returned to London and anticipated being involved with preparing it for the stage (see Chapter 3). In this expectation he was correct: the manuscript shows that he worked closely with the bookkeeper and purposefully revised around changes required by the actors and the Master. The manuscript of Launching thus demonstrates that a playgoer could not only see his play licensed and prepared for per­for­mance by a professional troupe but even participate in that preparation, despite the fact that when he wrote the play he was not in proximity (professionally or physically) to the industry. The revisions Mountfort made in this pro­cess demonstrate the kinds of changes a playgoer thought might be sufficient in making a censored play appropriate for the public stage. The material that Herbert marked for deletion, however, demonstrates the playgoer’s unfamiliarity with the professional theater’s established systems and (often unspoken) expectations of censorship. For example, Mountfort frequently uses impermissible casual oaths such as “fayth,” “troth,” and “s’life.” So prevalent are ­t hese that Herbert singled them out in his license.19 He marked most for deletion (though he missed fifteen),20 and Mountfort made no effort to replace them, indicating his willingness to comply with the censor on this point. The fact that he included such language to begin with, however, suggests that Mountfort was unaware that this manner of colloquial language—­which perhaps to him seemed fitting in the mouths of shipyard workers and sailors’ wives—­was not allowed on stage. Herbert’s note to the bookkeeper, however,21 indicates that the Master was primarily concerned not with t­ hese casual oaths but with the copious blasphemy and impermissible topical allusions in the play (he did nothing to remove the subplot’s explicit sexual humor).22 Most substantive censorship was



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applied to ­t hose passages that struck Herbert as religiously, po­liti­c ally, or diplomatically sensitive.23 ­A fter the manuscript came back from Herbert, Mountfort let some of ­these deletions stand. For example, when Dorotea—­the “honest wife” of the subtitle—­receives a seducing letter from “a vicious vicar,” Herbert deleted the passage (2131–53), and it was not replaced; in fact, e­ ither Mountfort or the bookkeeper struck out the entire scene.24 When Mountfort did replace deleted passages, he did so by adding new material directly into the manuscript Herbert had licensed: new text was written onto slips that ­were pinned over excised passages (ff. 320r and 333r), was added in the margin (f. 334r), inserted in the body of the text (f. 330r), and included on new pages (ff. 342–45). Scholars still often repeat W. W. Greg’s assumption that the players always prepared a fair copy for the Master,25 but Launching as well as some professionals’ manuscripts, such as Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) and Sir Thomas More (1595–1600), show that revisions could be incorporated into the same copy that was submitted to the Master, and that copy might indeed be foul papers. In other words, the author’s copy underwent a circular pro­ gress as the play was prepared for the stage.26 Furthermore, rather than prepare a new fair copy following Herbert’s mark-up, Mountfort continued to use his foul papers as he changed his play and prepared it for the stage. Many passages that attracted Herbert’s attention bear upon foreign affairs, particularly ­England’s commercial relations with the Dutch. By 1620 the Dutch East India Com­pany (VOC) had seized Batavia (now Jakarta), dismantled the En­glish factories ­there, and armed its own forts. In retaliation, the EIC drove the Dutch from Ormuz and impressed the natives into its ser­vice by inducing them to swear fealty to the En­glish monarch.27 The Deputy Governor refers to this conflict in a speech entirely deleted by Herbert: the vnkinde, & vnexspeced quarrells of our a fo-­freind the neighbouringe Hollander who gaynst the lawe of nations, more or of freinds In sundry places, & at several tymes, surprysde & tooke twelue of our proper shipps, to our no l­ittle hinderance & losse[.] [1624–29] Rather than just accepting the excision, Mountfort made the alterations in the second line in order to try to retain a sense of the passage, perhaps hoping that his audience would be able to unpack the cryptic allusion to the “fo-­ friend.” ­W hether such a piecemeal solution would have satisfied Herbert is

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doubtful, but it speaks to Mountfort’s occasional practice of addressing the literal substance of the Master’s censorship while retaining or adding ambiguous hints at the deleted content. This practice is most evident in the play’s references to the 1624 Amboyna massacre.28 In the Deputy’s “fo-­freind” speech (and also deleted by Herbert) Mountfort describes the most grievous charge against the VOC:  . . . ​the death, the barbarous death (an act of won­der to a modest earthe) of many of our worthy maryners, & other men of eminence; some slaine, some tortured, some prisoners, massacred, and sufferinge death vnder theyr bloodie hands[.] [1630–35] In the summer of 1624, news reached London that Dutch soldiers had executed eleven En­glish merchants on the island of Amboyna; the En­glish public was outraged, and its anger only grew when, for diplomatic reasons, King James and then Charles chose not to retaliate. Mountfort knew that even a de­cade l­ater Amboyna was not an acceptable topic for public debate—in the play, Sheathing Nail reminds his fellow workers that, if the subject comes up, “vnder the r­ ose be yt spoken” (1111)—­but that did not prevent him from trying to share with his audience his views on the event. Unlike his unawareness of the code governing oaths on stage, his sensitivity to this par­tic­u­lar category of censorship was evidently sophisticated: just before bringing up the topic (and not deleted by Herbert), Sheathing Nail warns that “yt may be punishment to speake / somethynges that are in print” (1131–32). Published accounts of the massacre w ­ ere widely available, the most popu­lar being Mountfort’s source, Sir John Skinner’s True Relation of the Unjust, Cruel, and Barbarous Proceedings Against the En­glish at Amboyna (1624), but Mountfort understood that this did not mean the topic would necessarily be permitted on stage. The amateur recognized that, in terms of what was allowable for public discourse, a distinction existed between dif­fer­ent forms of media, even if ­those media delivered the same content. Despite this, he included the risky content and attempted to ensure that, even ­after Herbert’s deletions, his audience might be able to glean the topic to which his characters repeatedly refer. While Mountfort let many excisions in the play stand, he attempted to work around most of the Amboyna deletions. For example, at one point he added text in response to the deletion of an explicit complaint about the mas-



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sacre: Herbert struck out Sheathing Nail’s lament that the Dutch “haue Chopt of a good many / of our nation at Amboyna” (97–98). In its place, Mountfort interlined the vague observation that “­there haue beene some that haue suffered.” On the same page, a­ fter the workers exit, Lord Admiral Hobab himself sympathizes with them: my selfe haue heard, the miserable torture of the vnmatcht vile, miserable, torture, ­Those dutch inflicted on some En­glish men t, at that Amboyna, [116–20] Herbert emphatically struck out this speech with brackets and underlining. Again, rather than omit the offending text—­text irrelevant to the narrative—­ Mountfort attempted to salvage the passage by deleting only “at that Amboyna” (120), though he then realized (or the bookkeeper told him) that he had to scrap the w ­ hole. He wrote a replacement speech on a slip, which he pinned over the offending passage. Hobab’s new speech, like nearly all of the replacement passages, begins by announcing that an imposing authority has interfered with the author’s text: Somethinge ­these fellowes would, but dare not, saye. theyr teethe Canne hardly keepe theyr slippery tongues wthin theyr mouthes: like fire in Embers hid they smother vp theyr wordes, wch fayne would burst into an open flame: but ys supprest by an o­ ’re ponderous waight[.] [115.1–6] Hobab’s imagery reflects the amateur’s sense of having his words, like ­those of his characters, “smothered”: the Master’s suppression of Mountfort’s po­ liti­cal opinions is “an o­ ’re ponderous waight” stifling open discussion of what every­one already knows and can read about in print. As with Mountfort’s other efforts to work around the censor, the replacement passage draws oblique attention to the topic that Herbert has removed: I Cannot diue into theyr thoughtes: but by the language spoke I may suppose hard mea­sures to be vsde

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in places farre remote gaynst some of note & othersome of meaner qualitie what ys allready done past Cannot be helpt, but I doe hartely wish that Circumspect may futurely be had: that no such errour hereafter be Committed: may the guilt light on his head by whom mans blood is spilt[.] [115.6–15] ­ hether Herbert would have found this satisfactory is unknown; it reads very W much like the “demeaning public scrutiny” of the government against which he was expressly to guard.29 Judging from the absence of Herbert’s pen from any of the added passages, the players evidently did not resubmit the manuscript for his further review.30 Mountfort’s revisions around Herbert’s deletions demonstrate his desire to retain as much as pos­si­ble his expression of outrage about the massacre, which may reflect his own connections to the event. When Amboyna occurred, Mountfort was a rising clerk involved in EIC interactions with the VOC. He very likely knew details of the massacre before most in E ­ ngland heard of the event, and perhaps he even knew personally some of the victims. That Mountfort could write so passionately and per­sis­tently about events that happened a de­cade earlier should thus be no surprise, just as it is no surprise that Herbert would be so sensitive to the po­liti­cal repercussions of that passion. Public outrage over both the massacre and the lack of reciprocation—­a long with efforts by the government to curb public displays of that outrage—­ lasted into the Restoration.31 Mountfort anticipated that discussion of the massacre might not be allowed on the public stage, but other dramatists had been able to get away with glancing references to it. Manuscript plays being prepared for the stage at times include the censorship of certain subjects that nonetheless appeared in contemporaneous printed plays, meaning, as Sheathing Nail observes, ­things allowed in print might not be allowed on stage.32 Even a­ fter a few years had passed, professional dramatists w ­ ere making b­ itter, jesting allusions to the massacre, as in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Fair Maid of the Inn (1626), Shirley’s The Contention for Honor and Riches (1625–32), Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626), and Davenant’s News from Plymouth (1635). If Mountfort read ­those plays, the Amboyna references may have convinced him that commentary on the event might be permissible in his own play. Mountfort’s treatment of it, however, as we might expect from an EIC clerk, goes far beyond the passing references made by professionals. Perhaps the inclusion of



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Amboyna in Launching was simply an “innocent” m ­ istake, as Bentley suggests, committed by someone unfamiliar with the delicate diplomatic negotiations between ­England and the Netherlands in 1632–33.33 Given his efforts to salvage the offensive passages, it seems likely that Mountfort did not suspect that the references would be, or ­ought to be, so strictly censored. His assiduous efforts to contradict the Master hint at the dif­fer­ent perspectives on censorship held by a professional dramatist—­who would, for his c­ areer’s sake, comply without negotiation—­a nd an amateur—­for whom personal voice might m ­ atter more than unquestioning compliance with authority. W ­ hether the professional actors concurred with Mountfort’s decision to equivocate around Herbert’s requirements is, of course, a separate ­matter. In other places where Herbert cut for po­liti­cal reasons, Mountfort often shows the same urge to provide veiled references to the excised material. For example, in the main plot, Lord Admiral Hobab pres­ents several EIC officers with a series of typical, though po­liti­cally sensitive, objections to the Com­ pany’s overseas trade, and they offer lengthy responses to the charges. His final objection relates to the EIC’s frequent use of foreign specie, resulting in what Hobab describes as “the small or no imployment / the [En­glish] mint hath had” (206–7). The subject evidently touched a vein with Herbert, for the pages with the officers’ reply w ­ ere removed entirely and new ones inserted in their place. The Com­pany’s governor begins the replacement scene by summarizing the objection: our aduersaries saye, and dare affirme that since the birth of our East Indian trade the mints imployment hath beene wondrous small and oft tymes none. [2281–84] The Lord Admiral, however, cuts him off with a paralipsis that draws attention to the topic while si­mul­ta­neously—in language recalling Hamlet’s meditation on the Player’s bond with Hecuba—­claiming disinterest in it: The mint’s an edge toole, meddle not wth that, for what’s the mint to you, or you to yt, or yt to your obiectors: a response to that obiection weare as friuolous as the obiection is wthin yt selfe: for as your importation doth small good

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so doth your exportation ­little harme for o­ ught I euer heard[.] [2285–92] Hobab’s terse reply prob­ably summarizes what the removed pages expressed at length. Mountfort’s source for the disputations of the main plot—­Mun’s Discourse of Trade—­offers an elaboration to Hobab’s vague generalization. Mun absolves the EIC of hindering the mint by arguing that in the past “the Mint had l­ittle or no imployment for coinage of Siluer,” thus, to use Hobab’s phrase, the com­pany’s “exportation [of silver has done] l­ittle harme” to the mint.34 Likewise, Mun maintains that silver “is not imported into the Realme as in former times”; the drop-­off in the rate of importation of silver is b­ ecause ­England no longer “send[s] out hundreds of Ships laden with Corne, as in times past which was returned home in Siluer.”35 Mun, in print, makes explicit what Mountfort, on stage, must veil in ambiguity: the Com­pany’s “importation [of silver] doth small [that is, some] good” in the face of ­England’s overall trade deficit.36 ­A fter his vague defense of the EIC on the subject of the mint, Hobab adds, “­matter of state / Canne brooke no dalliance” (2292–93). The Lord Admiral’s summary observation suggests the playwriting playgoer’s attitude ­toward the Master’s treatment of his play was a combination of surprise and offense. Mountfort could have resigned himself to Herbert’s demands and deleted all references to the mint. Instead, he retained the Admiral’s objection and pointed obliquely ­toward the original response while alerting his audience to the intervening hand of authority. Further signaling the importance of ­these partial changes is the fact that not all of Mountfort’s revisions around Herbert’s censorship of po­liti­cal content follow this pattern. In places, he was willing to allow the deletion of sensitive material. For example, one of the other charges against the EIC is that it consumes maritime supplies that should be conserved in case the state needs them. In response, one of the commissioners explains that the king can count upon the EIC if he does need such resources:  . . . ​his maiestie Cannott wth more authoritie Commaund then wee wth willinge minds, ­will see performde to be at his dispose, & royall vse. [1449–52] Herbert marked ­t hese lines for removal, though his reason for ­doing so is unclear. Launching was licensed at a time when Herbert’s professional con-



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duct was ­under question by Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, so he may simply have erred on the side of caution by excising anything potentially problematic.37 On the same page he deleted a reference to the king’s “buildinge of braue shipps” (1425–31) and ­later he deleted a description of the Com­pany’s philanthropic “repayre of Churches, mayntenance of schollers, / reliefe of needie preachers, of the sacred word” (1739–45). Direct reference to both the past and the current king was clearly unwelcome, and Herbert perhaps thought that Mountfort was endorsing the practice of merchant companies subsidizing radical puritan preachers.38 More simply, however, all three passages, like the mint section, draw attention to the extent to which the monarch had become reliant upon the EIC and the merchant class. As N. W. Bawcutt notes, for Mountfort “to make detailed proposals of what the com­pany was prepared to do to help national defence might have seemed an attempt to dictate to the government.”39 ­Unlike the Amboyna revisions or the mint deletion, ­here Mountfort deferred and allowed the excisions to stand. The 1425–31 deletion was replaced by a single bland line; that at 1739–45 was not replaced at all. In response to the deletion at 1438–52, Mountfort did supply a replacement, but it does not gesture t­oward the deleted material; evidently he thought the excised text unimportant in a way that neither the Amboyna nor the mint material was. Herbert’s deletion of the rather dull passage itemizing ­those EIC resources available to the king should he need them (1438–52) was actually to the play’s benefit, for Mountfort supplied in its place some of the finest writing in the play: Take a materiall from his proper vse and yt w ­ ill serue to ­little or no purpose: leaue scarlett folded in a Cyprus Chest the mothes ­will eate yt: and what luster makes a diamond wthin a painted boxe? so ys yt wth a shippe yf still endockt yt giues Content to nothinge but the eye nor much to that: for doth the eyes Content Content the totall man:? sure nothinge lesse: a shippe is but a pile of plancke & timber yf not imployde in trade: sett her to sea and sinke or swimme shee’s in her Ele­ment[.] [1441.1–12]

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Written in the summer of 1633, a year ­after the rest of the play, this is the last piece of extant writing by Walter Mountfort. The speech marks an improvement over the flat and lifeless verse he wrote during his voyage and reveals how much Mountfort had learned about shaping his ideas and language to blank verse, employing rhetorical devices for dramatic purposes, and using puns to layer meanings. Added to the play at a time Mountfort himself was idle, removed from employment during an investigation into potential embezzlement, the passage hints at the playwright’s feelings in ­those months: taken “from his proper vse,” a resource gone to waste, like a ship rotting at dock. In this instance, rather than obscuring the author’s views, Herbert’s censorship afforded Mountfort an opportunity to write more of himself into his play. Mountfort’s unapologetically direct treatment of con­temporary po­liti­cal prob­lems suggests his lack of what Richard Dutton assumes was the usual early modern audience habit of “analogical reading”—­that is, the practice of interpreting fictional characters and narratives as indirect repre­sen­ta­tions of con­ temporary ­people and events.40 Mountfort’s revisions in response to Herbert’s deletions demonstrate how an amateur hoped to ensure, as much as he could, that his audience would experience and understand the play as he had intended it. ­These changes and the passages for which they ­were substituted complicate what Annabel Patterson suggests was authors’ “widely understood . . . ​system of [using] ambiguity [as] a creative and necessary instrument . . . ​in order to be able to say what they had to publicly without directly provoking or confronting the authorities.” 41 Mountfort deploys such ambiguity only ­after having provoked authority, and even then his revised references are almost as offensive as the passages they replace. Paradoxically, Mountfort’s practice of replacing censored material resembles that used by the period’s most self-­ consciously professional dramatist: like Mountfort, Ben Jonson eagerly sought “to express . . . ​censored material” in his plays.42 Jonson not only took advantage of print publication to replace material that the Master had removed for per­for­mance, but, like Mountfort, he often explic­itly, almost proudly, drew attention to the fact that material had been censored at all.43 Mountfort’s inability to incorporate subtly or analogically his offensive material may reflect his theatrical experience as a playgoer rather than a regular playmaker: as Janet Clare argues, for most audience members “not privy to court affairs or to ideological debate”—­audience members such as Mountfort—­“oblique po­liti­ cal analogies” and other sophisticated forms of ambiguity ­were in­effec­tive in comparison to “thinly veiled satire and topical association.” 44 As a playgoer, Mountfort lacked practiced familiarity with both the censor’s limits and the



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most effective strategies to work around ­those limits.45 Given the inconsistent and often contradictory regulation of plays, it must have been particularly challenging for an outsider to navigate the labyrinth of at times idiosyncratic censorship policies.46 The extant manuscript of Mountfort’s play documents a playgoer’s experience of frustratedly learning ­those policies first-­hand. The playwriting playgoer thus stands as an exception to the complicity that historians argue united playwrights and censors in the goal of getting plays before audiences through the use of analogy and apology.47 Patterson, for example, sees “the prevailing codes of communication, the implicit social contract between authors and authorities, as being intelligible to all parties at the time, as being a fully deliberate and conscious arrangement.” 48 For professionals, such intelligibility must have, ­under normal circumstances, informed decisions about what to write: an awareness of t­ hose “codes” was a requirement of the profession, a skill that had to be learned in order for the writer to remain ­viable in the industry.49 But it is fallacious to totalize, as Bentley and o­ thers do, that “­every dramatist” knew about the Master’s role in censoring plays.50 Playgoers like Mountfort, who “neuer tracte the Theater” before writing their plays, might have known of the Master’s censorship, but only indirectly, as consumers of the post-­censored text, never through the experience of writing and revising ­under its pressure. For such writers, initial assumptions about what could or could not be said on stage could only have derived from their experience as playgoers and play readers. In the latter case, printed plays provided l­ittle reliable mea­sure for judging what had been allowed on stage, ­because authors frequently modified the text for print, often reinserting material that had been cut for per­for­mance or omitting material thought unsuitable for readers.51 In the former case, modern readers must conjecture, often with ­little evidence, about how the performed text may have deviated from the written text that survives. It is in forming this conjecture that Mountfort’s play and its pattern of censorship and post-­censorship revision can prove particularly useful. His inclusion of material so clearly unallowable and his lack of “functional ambiguity”52 in replacing that material suggests that Mountfort did not think such content would, or should, pres­ent a prob­lem to the Master; we might then conclude that he had heard such kinds of content in plays in per­for­mance and did not know that what he was hearing was not written into the script allowed by the censor.53 In other words, to use Herbert’s own terminology from the license for Launching, simply b­ ecause something was “crost In ye booke” did not always mean that it was “left out In ye action.” To the audience, the presence of censorship is typically undetectable b­ ecause the censor’s pen works silently; thus,

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when his play was subjected to censorship that he did not anticipate, the playwriting playgoer responded with irritation and the desire to announce the existence of such interference. The pre-­ censor version of Launching therefore suggests the potentially controversial language and ideas an audience member expected to encounter at a professional per­for­mance, confirming that more might be performed than was written in the script. Despite the Master’s instructions, and the substantial penalties for ignoring them, not only might performed plays contain oaths, they might offer pointed po­liti­cal commentary. Launching reveals what one playgoer thought to be conventional, or at least allowable, on the public stage. Furthermore, as a play revised by that playgoer to accommodate the Master’s censorship, Launching demonstrates that an amateur could participate in the pro­cess of making his play suitable for that stage. Being outsiders to the industry did not necessarily prevent amateur dramatists from getting involved when their plays w ­ ere readied for per­for­mance. Most critics of Launching deride Mountfort’s abilities as a writer, and yet when the players had the chance to replace him they still opted to choose the amateur to revise around Herbert’s censorship. Indeed, nearly all of Herbert’s excisions had no real effect upon the play’s dramatic narrative; simply deleting the offending material would have been the easiest solution, but the actors invited Mountfort back to the play­house to supply additional material. The playgoer’s participation extended beyond the casual activity of writing a play in his leisure time and abandoning it into the hands of the actors; instead, the playwriting playgoer was an active collaborator in translating his play into a per­for­mance. Mountfort’s manuscript of Launching reveals what a playgoer might know (and not know) about allowable content on the public stage and how an amateur dramatist might attempt to negotiate the Master of the Revels’ censorship while preserving some of his own dramatic voice. In Arthur Wilson’s The Inconstant Lady, however, the playwriting playgoer revised his play for an entirely dif­fer­ ent objective: to satisfy the needs of an individual reader.

“I was a contriver both of words & m ­ atter”: Arthur Wilson’s The Inconstant Lady and the Playwriting Playgoer Revising for a Reader In the winters of the late 1620s, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, would retire to his ­family estates, including Drayton, where his grand­mother,



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Countess of Leicester, entertained him with hunting, chess, and—­her favorite pastime—­amateur dramatics. In his manuscript autobiography years ­later, Essex’s secretary, Arthur Wilson, describes the “masks [and] playes” as “sports” funded at “­great charge & expence.”54 Essex had hired Wilson b­ ecause of his training in calligraphy ­under John Davies, but Wilson also possessed talent as a dramatist. Whenever the countess desired new plays, Wilson was called upon to write them: “I was a contriver both of words & ­matter,” he admitted. “For as long as the good old Countesse of Leicester lived . . . ​her hospitable entertainment was garnisht with such, then harmeles, recreations.”55 Though never a member of the theater industry, Wilson was a playgoer and play reader, particularly fond of Shakespeare and Shirley.56 He was also a skilled poet: Anthony à Wood ranked him among “the Wits and Virtuosi of [the] time,”57 and Edward Bathurst judged him a “commendable poet.”58 ­A fter finishing his studies ­under Davies, Wilson found a post as a clerk in the Exchequer ­under Sir Henry Spiller, where, he recalls, “my genius carried me to some poetical fancies” and he ended up “writt[ing] some verses” about one of Spiller’s maids.59 When Lady Spiller (“a g­ reat papist, & one who did not love me”) discovered the poem, she thought it “to be a libell” aimed at her, and Wilson’s employment was terminated.60 He lived briefly in Holborn, “addicting my selfe much to reading & poetrie. Which [last] . . . ​­were rawe & indigested stuff,” u ­ ntil he ran out of money.61 His subsequent employment with Essex gave him time and means to continue his poetic writing and, at the countess’s invitation, to try playwriting as well. By the early 1630s, several of his plays ended up in the hands of the King’s Men, the troupe with which Wilson was evidently most familiar.62 R. C. Bald’s conjecture that between leaving Essex’s ser­vice and moving to Oxford Wilson spent a year in London where “he attempted to make his way as a dramatic writer” assumes that a writer for the professional stage must have been interested in entering the profession, though, as we have seen, this was not necessarily true.63 Wilson himself says he went to Oxford “presently” ­after leaving Essex’s ser­vice in July 1630, arriving in Oxford that same month, and in his detailed diary he makes no mention of visiting London or intending to enter the playmaking industry.64 Christopher Gordon-­Craig offers a more reasonable conjecture: Thomas Crosfield claimed that it was “customary for [the King’s Men] to play annually at the University,” and so Wilson likely “had the opportunity to come in contact with the King’s Men” while still at Oxford.65 On September 30, 1630—­t wo months ­a fter Wilson had left Essex’s employ—­his The Inconstant Lady was performed at court by the King’s Men.

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Edward Bathurst notes also that Wilson’s “Comedies . . . ​­were acted at Black-­ Friers in London, by the King’s players, and in the Act time at Oxon, with good applause, himself being pres­ent.” 66 Crosfield indicates that the troupe was at Oxford in the summers of 1631, 1634, and 1635—­years when Wilson’s plays ­were in its repertoire.67 According to the title page of one of the manuscripts of The Inconstant Lady, it appeared at the Blackfriars, which is where John Green prob­ably saw it in March 1635.68 Wilson’s play was thus staged for at least five years, if not longer, and was a regular part of the com­pany’s repertory for both London and touring. The King’s Men still thought highly enough of The Inconstant Lady to include it in their 1641 list of plays protected for them by the Lord Chamberlain.69 It is not difficult to see why The Inconstant Lady found f­avor with the troupe and its audiences: Wilson’s play follows the form of a typical Caroline tragicomedy of romance and includes the usual devices of young lovers frustrated, a son’s attempt to secure his inheritance, an almost inadvertently incestuous coupling, mistaken identity and disguise, lost c­ hildren found again, and the use of the woods as an uncontrolled space beyond the court. When Millecert’s f­ ather violates the tradition of primogeniture and leaves the ­family estate to him rather than his older ­brother, Aramant, Aramant’s betrothed, Emilia, leaves him for Millecert, and Aramant—­realizing his error in judging Emilia’s character—­ends up falling in love with Emilia’s ­sister, Cloris. Unfortunately, the Duke of Burgundy also falls in love with Cloris, prompting the jealous Emilia to try to have her ­sister killed in order to win the duke for herself. Millecert, in disguise, sets all right when he saves Cloris’s life and reveals that she is actually the duke’s d ­ aughter and so cannot marry him. Emilia repents and marries Millecert, and Cloris marries Aramant. Through this plot, Wilson explores concepts that ­were popu­lar in many other Caroline tragicomedies, such as the difference between love and lust, the importance of honorable be­hav­ior rather than birth in establishing the value of a man as “noble” or “gentle,” the social uses of rhe­toric and elocution, and the proper forms of feminine conduct, especially with regard to vanity and chastity. While it is thus highly conventional from both a generic and a thematic perspective, the play’s style and poetry represents a considerable degree of refined craftsmanship and artistry that would likely have appealed to the King’s Men in their attempt to satisfy, or perhaps flatter, what they evidently saw as the changing tastes of the Caroline private theater and court audiences. The Inconstant Lady survives in three manuscript copies. One (Bodleian Rawlinson Poet.128) is an eighteenth-­century copy that introduces numerous



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nonauthorial revisions, some of which might derive from a lost authorial copy, but one that is nonetheless unreliable as a witness.70 The other two (Folger J.b.1., the “Lambarde” copy, and Bodleian Rawlinson Poet.9) are holographs with dif­fer­ent authorial revisions and, apparently, dif­fer­ent intentions. The Lambarde was evidently Wilson’s “working copy,” containing currente calamo corrections but also further revisions evidently aimed to prepare the play for per­for­mance.71 The changes Wilson made as he wrote the Lambarde illustrate his creative pro­cess as well as his desire to make the play ready for per­for­ mance.72 Variants between the Lambarde and the Rawlinson, on the other hand, suggest that Wilson intended the Rawlinson for an individual reader. If the Lambarde reveals how a playwriting playgoer “sought to fashion a play suited to the taste and style of his Caroline audience,” as Linda Itzoe puts it, the Rawlinson reveals how he sought to fashion—or, rather, refashion—­his play for the tastes of a specific reader.73 ­There is l­ittle doubt that the Rawlinson was a pre­sen­ta­tion copy derived from the Lambarde.74 Trained as a calligrapher, Wilson had professional skills in drawing up precise, legible, and elegant documents, and he brought ­t hese to the task of copying his play.75 Several of his formatting alterations replicate conventions of printed plays, such as the addition of per­for­mance provenance on the title page and the inclusion of r­ unning titles in the upper margin. Ornate scene designations divide the play in the Rawlinson, whereas the Lambarde contains only act divisions. In the Rawlinson’s dramatis personae list, brackets help the reader understand how characters are related, and the list is headed with the fictional “Persons” rather than the Lambarde’s theatrical “Actors.” On the verso of the final leaf, Wilson wrote the title page for one of his other plays (The Corporal), which suggests that he was assembling his works into a collection for his reader. Besides ­these formal alterations, Wilson also carefully changed certain theatrical features to make the text suitable for a reader.76 Most prominent of ­these was the addition of stage directions to clarify action that had occurred on the stage. For example, Lavia’s departure to fetch Cloris at 1.2.4 goes unmarked in the Lambarde, but Wilson added it in the Rawlinson, thus avoiding any ambiguity of timing, just as he added an entrance for Busiro’s brief appearance to receive an order from the Duke (3.2.202).77 To avoid confusion about who can overhear whom (confusion that actors could easily clear up in per­for­mance), Wilson inserted an explicit direction for Aramant to “talke . . . ​ to La[via]” (1.2.79) while Millecert and Emilia have a private conference. Besides adding new directions, Wilson expanded some existing directions with details that would help a reader better visualize the action. Some of ­these supply

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the name of a character carry­ing out an action, such as the inclusion of Emilia’s name with the exit direction at 4.3.95 or identification of the character entering at 5.3.150 as a “Guard.” Other expansions seem to glimpse at the business and materials the King’s Men used when they staged the play. For example, Pantarbo’s entrance “in an old night gowne and capp,” in the Lambarde, acquires further costuming in the Rawlinson: “With a foule napkin about his necke” (3.4.1). More costuming is also specified at the start of the final scene: Emilia is discovered “lying on a bed” in both versions, but in the Rawlinson she also has a “vaile on her face” (5.3.1). Revision for the reader necessitated other changes in the interest of specificity: for example, in per­for­mance Wilson could rely on the actor playing Aramant to gesture with the line, “Are the spangles / That do imbroder yon rich canopie / Dropt from their spheres?” (1.2.199–201). In the Rawlinson, “yon” is changed to “heauen’s,” even though this is a word that Wilson almost always excised elsewhere in the copy (see below). Movement from stage script to literary text may also explain why Wilson altered several directions calling for sounds “within” (that is, inside the tiring-­house) to sounds “without” (outside the fictional room) (4.2.4, 15, 18, and 21).78 The “within”/“without” change, in fact, provides a cautionary example of the confusion caused by examining plays by playgoers without fully recognizing the writer’s status as an amateur. Paul Werstine reads the “within”/“without” revision as evidence that the Rawlinson was not, as R. C. Bald had argued, based upon a playbook; if it had been, Werstine concludes, “we would . . . ​expect [it] to be written from the perspective of the stage, not from that of the audience.”79 As we have seen, however, when Wilson copied his play he also revised it to make it more appropriate for a reader, and so could have considered changing “within” to “without” as part of that transformation. More fundamentally, The Inconstant Lady was written by a dramatist whose perspective was “from . . . ​the audience” and not from “the stage.” Werstine correctly observes that “the Rawlinson manuscript is written from the point of view of a spectator, not that of a playing com­pany,”80 but this in itself cannot be used as evidence that the manuscript does not derive from play­ house copy, b­ ecause the play was written by a spectator, someone for whom “within” the tiring-­house would have been perceived as “without” the playing space. The changes considered thus far are t­ hose Wilson evidently thought necessary to make his script into a reading text: format was modified to fit conventions of printed and pre­sen­ta­tion manuscript plays, and details of stage actions ­were made more explicit in order to fill in gestural and material lacu-



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nae, thus helping the reader “see” what was happening (or perhaps what had happened in the play’s per­for­mance). Many variants between the Rawlinson and its precursor, however, cannot be justified on such grounds. A number of ­these are Wilson’s fastidious grammatical corrections and verbal polishing.81 ­Others, however, had more substantive ends. While the revisions thus far described could be meant to satisfy any reader, ­these revisions demonstrate Wilson’s goal of satisfying the unique inclinations of a specific reader. In some instances, it is unclear w ­ hether Wilson was changing the text to satisfy the reader or to improve the quality of writing. For example, Aramant’s ­father gives the young man a choice: if he abandons Emilia, upon his f­ ather’s death he w ­ ill inherit the ­family fortune, but if he remains with her, the fortune w ­ ill go to his younger ­brother. In love (and defiance), Aramant chooses Emilia—an unfortunate choice, as it turns out, ­because she is the titular “inconstant lady.” When she discovers that he is now penniless, she leaves him for his ­brother. In the Lambarde, Emilia’s speech declaring her contempt for Aramant is functional but prosaic: Yes! I am angry, and haue cause; for can I be pleased With Pouertie? Or with the Man Wo’d bring me to distruction? No! I hate it as I doe thee, worse then a f­ athers hate. For the pre­sen­ta­tion copy, Wilson rewrote the speech, investing it with richer imagery. “Thou canst not be angrie,” frets Aramant. Emilia replies: No more then southerne ayre chaft into heat By the sunn’s scorching beames. Can I loue barrennes, Weake, sordid man? All creatures naturally Suck vp their preseruation; if they want it, They pine and die. Can I subsist with nothing? (1.2.163–67) The Rawlinson generalizes the ideas that the Lambarde limits to the specific context of the play, making it suitable for a reader perhaps seeking discrete passages to extract and memorize or copy into a commonplace book. W ­ hether Wilson was trying to improve the passage or was deliberately making it useful for his reader is impossible to say. Other revisions, however, do not, in terms of subjective quality, improve the play; in fact, many often result in weaker writing. For example, Wilson removed almost all of the play’s many figurative

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images of ­water—­a move which may have (for some reason) satisfied his reader but which also led him to substitute staid, clichéd language for lines that ­were originally fresh and precise. Antonio’s offer to share in his friend’s “­great Shipwrack” becomes an offer to share in his “­great ruine,” even though this mixes the meta­phor in his next line: “You ­shall not sinke alone” (5.1.19–20). Emilia’s blood, “like a swelling streame, ris[ing] high,” ­will, in the Lambarde, “tosse the dancing Barke” of her emotions; in the Rawlinson, the image is replaced with the vague explanation that “time is dull that bounds” her feelings (5.2.8–9). A similar dulling of language results from diminishing Millecert’s warning about fickle ­women—­“The tide ­will turne agen”—to the less awe-­ inspiring “The streame w ­ ill turne agen” (5.3.186). Given Wilson’s experience as a poet, he was likely aware that such revisions produced less vivid writing. The most plausible explanation, then, is that Wilson, knowing something about the tastes of the person for whom the copy was meant, assumed that such language would be more appealing. Wilson also apparently knew that his reader would be offended by anything even remotely inappropriate, and so he made many “delicacy” revisions, even if at times t­ hose revisions changed other nuances about the play and its characters. Such tactful rewriting is the most frequent type of revision in the Rawlinson, accounting for nearly half of its substantive differences from the Lambarde. ­These delicacy revisions include the omission of many oaths and offensive phrases, such as “faith” (1.1.55 and 4.1.5), “Godamercy” (2.4.134), “heauen’s sake” (2.4.162), and “Pox” (3.4.1 and 136). R. C. Bald argues that the omission of t­ hese from the Rawlinson reflected the Master of the Revels’ censorship of the (no longer extant) playbook from which it may have been copied.82 Censorship for the stage, however, does not adequately explain all of the sensitive material omitted or revised in the Rawlinson. Indeed, much that was taken out consists of material that Herbert let stand in other plays.83 For example, Wilson repeatedly changed references to divine powers into expressions of mortal power: a prayer to “yee powers aboue” becomes a prayer to “Some Earthen Power” (1.2.215) and “You Gods, you Gods, is this the best reward / for honestie?” becomes “Reason, thou queene of frailty, where is vertue?” (1.2.233). Such changes go beyond the kinds of revisions Herbert customarily required; religious language was permitted in plays, and many dramatists used such pagan and polytheistic allusions specifically to work around restrictions on Christian or mono­the­istic references. In addition to oaths, Wilson excised all references to men of rank: gone are jokes about lords (1.1.244) and a complaint about “Sargeants” and their



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“comon’law” (2.3.12–3); the specific “Judge” was softened to “magistrate” (2.1.165) and elsewhere removed altogether (3.2.139); “­great” was substituted for “courtier” (3.3.8); and a reference to a cowardly “constable” was deleted (3.3.7). Delicacy certainly called for a change to Millecert’s mention of “female baud[s]” tempted by “ambition / [To become] a ­great Princes mistris,” and so “man’s” replaced “Princes” (4.2.36). Emilia’s concern for the Duke’s plea­sure, expressed in the innocuous phrase “thy Princes happiness,” was changed to the rather convoluted, “his well-­growne happines” (4.3.38). Wilson’s diligence in removing specific mentions of men in power and the court in general hints that his reader was associated with the court. Aramant’s jest about many “discontents” populating the “Court” vanishes in the Rawlinson (2.4.31–39). The Duke’s suggestion that princes should “purge Corruption from a Court,” which seems to presume that corruption necessarily exists in a court, was diluted to give courtiers benefit of the doubt: rather than purge corruptions that must exist in e­ very court, the prince must simply “search the corners of corrupted courts, / Which oft contract foule m ­ atter” (4.2.91–93). Th ­ ese changes are not in keeping with Herbert’s censoring practices; more likely, Wilson voluntarily ­adopted them b­ ecause of his knowledge of the tastes and sensitivities of the reader for whom he was preparing the pre­sen­ta­tion copy. Fi­nally, Wilson rewrote or removed passages that ­were explic­itly sexual, including, again, some far less risqué than what Herbert allowed in other plays. In the Rawlinson, for example, the first scene ends with Pantarbo delivering a ludicrous but tame five-­line rhyming “straine”; in the Lambarde, Pantarbo goes on extensively about how he could “tickle vp . . . ​Chambermaids” and a “faire maid . . . ​name[d] . . . ​Rose” who was “beset with pricks” (1.1.243 et seq.). Similar jokes vanish in the Rawlinson: another “prick” joke dis­appears at 3.1.111, and a joke about the “clap” is gone at 3.4.125. Sexual jests w ­ ere not targets for the Master’s censorship but could be a target for authorial self-­ censorship.84 Such concern for delicacy, however, also wiped out serious references to sexuality: for example, in the Lambarde, when Cloris sees her beloved, she looks as if she wishes they “had bene one substance”; in the Rawlinson, the allusion to sexual ­union is replaced with the banal and vague suggestion that she looks “As if [she] ment to fixe ­there” (3.2.84). A major revision that sanitizes one of Emilia’s speeches also changes the perception of her character. Her Lambarde argument in defense of sexual infidelity—­“Satietie doth breed Contempt; the glory / of Loue and plea­sure ’s in varietie, / Who wo’d bee tyde still to one stake?”—­becomes in the Rawlinson merely a taunt aimed at her husband:

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Hee’s a foole, An narrow-­harted man, and my spirit cannot Stoope to such weakens. Meaner thoughts are fitter For his cold temper; mine are fram’d for princes; The g­ reat duke now is all my ayme. (4.3.67–71) The Lambarde Emilia defends the practice of ­women having multiple lovers on the grounds of her need for physical satisfaction. For his reader, however, Wilson softened this into a defense of using love for ambitious ends. What was sexual in the Lambarde becomes po­liti­cal in the Rawlinson. As with the water-­ imagery revisions, t­ hese changes produced generally weaker writing or other­ wise substantively affected the play, which suggests that Wilson undertook them for extrinsic reasons, that is, to satisfy his reader. Some critics, recognizing that Herbert would not have called for such draconian changes, have suggested that Wilson’s delicacy revisions w ­ ere the result of his anticipation of the Master; if so, however, he was being excessively cautious. N. W. Bawcutt, for example, suggests that “Wilson was prepared to go to extreme lengths to avoid offending Herbert’s susceptibilities.”85 Bawcutt’s theory, however, does not account for the other revisions, particularly ­those aimed at making the theatrical script more “literary.” Bald goes even further than Bawcutt and decides that an agent besides Wilson was responsible for initiating the revising pro­cess: it seems, he suggests, “much more probable that the actors, in accepting the play and insisting on some minor alterations, impressed on Wilson the necessity of conforming to Herbert’s requirements.”86 It is improbable, however, that the King’s Men—­the com­pany with the greatest level of familiarity with Herbert’s usual requirements—­would instruct Wilson to be so needlessly severe, even to the point of being, in terms of poetic quality, injurious in his revisions. Bald’s hypothesis removes agency for the revisions from the Master only to assign it to the actors. Neither Bald nor Bawcutt considers that the playgoer himself may have chosen to make the changes and that he knew what he was ­doing when he made them. ­Because the Rawlinson is a pre­sen­ta­tion copy, viewing Wilson’s revisions as a strategic effort to make his play palatable for a reader whose tastes he already knew is the simplest and best-­evidenced solution.87 The amateur understood that the needs and wants of a reader differed from the needs and wants of the actors and their audiences. Like professional dramatists, he was concerned that his work would be well received and he was ready to undertake what­ever changes seemed necessary to achieve that recep-



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tion. Rather than fall back on unevidenced hypotheses assigning authority over the play’s revisions to nonauthorial agents such as the Master of the Revels or the actors, differences between the Lambarde and Rawlinson manuscripts of The Inconstant Lady can be most reasonably explained as deliberate authorial choices. Wilson’s status as an amateur did not preclude assiduousness in revising or a sense of how revision could best obtain his par­tic­u­lar ends. Furthermore, his post-­performance authority over his play and its reception suggests that dramatists who w ­ ere not part of the theater industry might retain some control over their work, even if it was a protected part of a troupe’s repertory. Like the professional dramatist Thomas Middleton in the pre­sen­ ta­tion copies he made of A Game at Chess, Wilson held some right to duplicate and disseminate his play for readers, and he possessed the right to change his play in substantive ways as he did so. Perhaps Wilson’s status as an outsider to the industry actually served to his advantage in this re­spect: while the King’s Men asserted their exclusive right to stage the play and no doubt to change it as needed for ­future per­for­mances, the dramatist asserted his own right to change and circulate his play for nontheatrical ends. The play still belonged to the playwriting playgoer even a­ fter professional actors obtained it and continued to stage it. In her edition of The Inconstant Lady, Linda Itzoe argues that Wilson’s play offers “a glimpse of the first half of the seventeenth ­century through the eyes of a private citizen responding with the sensibilities of an artistic mind to the events and conditions of his age.”88 One of the “conditions” we see in Wilson’s play is how dramatic manuscripts circulated in the period and, in the Rawlinson, how a dramatist who was not part of the theater industry went about making a script for the stage suitable as a poem for the page. His willingness to revise as the situation needed reveals this playgoer’s understanding of dramatic text as being fluid and dependent upon context; the Rawlinson is not “the final intended literary state of the play,” as Gordon-­Craig surmises, but merely a literary state of the play.89 And in changing his text to produce that state, the playgoer displayed a depth of consideration for reception similar to that often taken to be a hallmark of professionals who had to take such care in order to make a living.

* * * Playgoers’ plays in manuscript frequently reveal their authors’ depth of commitment and sophistication when confronting the task of revising for the specific

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needs of actors and readers, contradicting the negative assumptions scholars often make when pejoratively using the term “amateur.” Most playgoers who wrote plays cared about the reception of their work and w ­ ere open to, and able themselves to make, changes required by users of the plays in the pursuit of that reception. W ­ hether revising for a professional troupe, like Mountfort, or a reader, like Wilson, t­hese consumers display in their manuscripts the kind of per­sis­tent and collaboratively minded revision often found in the works of commercial dramatists. Professionals must defer to the demands of the users of their texts or they ­will not be professional for very long. Playwriting playgoers who w ­ ere willing to overwrite their own desired versions of their plays also sought to satisfy o­ thers who used their texts, contradicting Richard Brome’s sweeping warning to his own audiences that amateurs write “lesse for your plea­sure than their own delight,” with its implicit suggestion that quality and suitability w ­ ere unimportant to amateurs.90 Rather than the detached self-­satisfaction and dilettantism Brome suggests and most scholars still take for granted when discussing “amateurs,” audience plea­sure so deeply concerned Mountfort, Wilson, and other playwriting playgoers like them that, however frustrated they became, they w ­ ere willing to forgo their own in order to ensure it. ­These playgoers understood playwriting as a continuous, revisionary activity dependent upon reception as the mea­sure of its efficacy. Mountfort’s experience demonstrates also the degree of intimacy that could exist between the professional industry and participatory playgoers: that the players had the playgoer revise his play around the Master’s censorship signals the permeability of any border that may have been thought to separate theatrical consumers from theatrical producers. Mountfort’s movement from the auditorium into the tiring-­house makes real the emigration enacted by the “stranger” in the induction to John Jones’s Adrasta (see Chapter 1). More telling—­and as the next chapter explores further—is Mountfort’s expectation, while still writing onboard ship in the Indian Ocean, that he w ­ ill be involved in the pro­cess of staging his play in London. While the playwriting playgoer was evidently unprepared for and subsequently surprised, even discontented, by the intrusion into his play of a censoring authority, that he frustratingly acquiesced to that intrusion is indicative of his primary desire to see his play performed on the public stage. ­W hether or not Wilson too was e­ ager to see his plays performed in public is unknown. Reading the Rawlinson The Inconstant Lady as an authorial pre­sen­ta­tion copy for a specific reader, however, allows us to draw some con-



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clusions about the playwriting playgoer’s understanding of his plays’ circulation in written form. Wilson’s plays ­were never printed in his lifetime, prob­ably ­because of both their success on stage and his own degree of control over them. Even though The Inconstant Lady was staged by a professional troupe, and even though that troupe blocked its per­for­mance by other troupes, Wilson still retained sufficient authority not only to copy and circulate the script but to revise it as well. Several other playwriting playgoers enjoyed similar control over their plays, exercising a considerable degree of agency over the content and circulation of their plays a­ fter they w ­ ere staged, and in some instances while they w ­ ere being staged: Clavell’s possession (and transportation to Ireland) of the King’s Men’s playbook copy of his The Soddered Citizen (1631–33);91 William Cartwright’s prohibition (enforced by the king himself ) against public per­for­mance of his The Royal Slave (1636) ­after its staging by the King’s Men at court; Barnes’s revision for print of his King’s Men play The Dev­il’s Charter (1607), “for the more plea­sure and profit of the Reader.”92 As consumers participating in the playmaking industry for nonprofessional reasons, playwriting playgoers w ­ ere insulated from the deference to industry codes and practices that constrained professionals who had to “eat by th’stage,” as amateur dramatist Jasper Mayne put it.93 In most cases, professionals ­were only able to revise for readers when the actors had no further use for the script, ­either ­because it had failed on the stage or b­ ecause of other extenuating circumstances, such as the liquidation of possessions upon the com­pany’s dissolution. Other instances of professionals revising for post-­performance circulation to readers are exceptional cases in which d ­ oing so advantaged the actors by building a relationship with a patron or capitalizing upon a sensation (as with the pre­sen­ta­tion copies of A Game at Chess). Playwriting playgoers, however, as outsiders to the industry, apparently retained creative authority over their plays, even if t­ hose plays had been staged in public and even if the right to perform them again still lay with the troupe that held the licensed copy. Like professionals, playwriting playgoers could reconsider and rewrite their plays in order to satisfy their own personal artistic vision. Also like professionals, though, playwriting playgoers could reject their own dramatic vision in order to satisfy the inherently collaborative nature of theatrical production. The examples in this chapter reveal a theatrical culture in which consumers could become active participants in shaping their plays for consumption in response to the competing interests that all playmakers had to appease. In The Launching of the Mary, one passage that irked Herbert is a brief description of the calamities that befall En­glish ships at sea:

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To ­these thus taken by our noxious freinds [that is, the Dutch] A few worne out in trade from port to port, some · 2 · or · 3 · orewhelmed by Careene, some · 7 · or · 8 · by Casualtie of sea quite Cast awaye & perisht in the deepes. [1639–43] Herbert’s objection to the lines is, except for the allusion to the Dutch, unclear. What is more puzzling, however, is that Herbert was not the only person to think the passage unsuitable: well before the Master marked it for deletion, Mountfort himself suspected the passage would have to go. In the same ink used to write out the play—­and thus written around the same time as the passage itself, while Mountfort was onboard a ship in the Indian Ocean—­t he dramatist inserted next to the lines the marginal note, “some other / may be added” (1639–40). Who was Mountfort’s intended reader for this note? Is it, perhaps like Jaques’s cryptic “more” in The Queen of Corsica, a reminder to himself that something ­else should be added in place of the passage? Or is it, as seems likely from its wording (the permissive “may” rather than the certain “should be,” “­will be,” or “must be”), a note for an actor or bookkeeper? As the next chapter shows, we know from another stage direction that, as he wrote while at sea, Mountfort expected to secure a per­for­mance. His compliant shrug that something e­ lse “may be added,” then, might signal the playgoer’s understanding, even willing ac­cep­tance, that other hands would alter his play. The consumer understood enough about the commercial production pro­cess to know that the script of his play was not a final, fixed text from a single hand but had to be, rather, collaborative and flexible—­open to revision in order to make it suitable for its intended ends. As the next chapter shows, such flexibility was particularly impor­tant when playwriting playgoers turned to the actions and materials of per­for­mance.

chapter 3

“As s­ hall be shewed before the daye of action” Playwriting Playgoers and Per­for­mance

At the Swan play­house on the after­noon of November 6, 1602, Richard Vennar failed to stage his play ­England’s Joy. ­A fter the audience had gathered and Vennar had collected their money, he delivered just six lines of the prologue before bailiffs arrested him. He ­later claimed that the play would have gone forward, but he had been arrested for debt.1 Another explanation, however, quickly circulated: the play was, according to John Chamberlain, “a cousening prancke”; ­after pocketing the money, Vennar fled and was arrested as he tried to escape down the Thames.2 ­Later, he was apparently swindled into supplying the play manuscript to pamphleteer William Fennor, who staged it at the Swan in spring 1615.3 ­W hether the manuscript used by Fennor existed in 1602 or ­whether Vennar wrote it only a­ fter 1602 is unknown, but it is likely that the play resembled Vennar’s 1602 printed broadside, Plot of the Play Called ­England’s Joy. Scholars have come to assume that Vennar did not have a script in 1602, discounting without question the possibility that he may have been a playwriting playgoer rather than just a con artist. Tiffany Stern, for example, takes for granted that Vennar’s Plot was simply “the designing work of a trickster.” 4 Assuming his motives ­were entirely criminal, she speculates, “perhaps Vennar enjoyed the idea that his money-­making plot should have a ‘plot’ to go with it; perhaps he used the plot for ‘proof’ that a play r­ eally existed; and perhaps he merely had it created as a bluff to entertain the audience while its author ran away.”5 All of t­ hese speculations presume that Vennar never intended to stage a play in 1602, but this cannot be determined from the extant evidence.

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In ­either case, it is significant that with his Plot, Vennar—­who often attended plays at the Globe6 —­was, like many playwriting playgoers, drawing upon what he had learned about per­for­mance from the professional playmakers. The document may have been bait, but in order to be effective as such, it had to read like the description of an ­actual play, and the Plot does indeed demonstrate Vennar’s familiarity with the language of the theater: actors “enter” the stage, the trapdoor is “downe into hell,” actors are costumed “in habite of Angels,” Queen Elizabeth ascends “up into Heaven,” and “­under [her, on] the Stage” “strange fireworks” are set off. The Plot had to be plausible, and so the amateur playmaker used recognizable theatrical language to describe his staging. That ­people ­were willing to pay twice as much to attend Vennar’s play as to attend a typical play at the Swan is a testament to his ability as a playmaking playgoer to appropriate the profession’s tools for his own (however criminal) use. This chapter examines several playgoers’ plays for evidence of how their authors too understood and attempted to use the materials and practices of the professional industry. Though their plays are often still dismissed as “literary,” t­ hese playwriting playgoers w ­ ere not writing for readers or with disregard for theatrical efficacy and exigency: they ­shaped their plays as scripts for per­for­mance on the stage and they display a sophisticated, if at time peculiar, understanding of the conventions, practices, prob­lems, and realities of per­for­mance. This chapter takes their stage directions seriously as per­for­ mance instructions in order to determine what they suggest about how ­these consumers saw and thought about per­for­mance on the professional stage. R. B. McKerrow posited that professional dramatists w ­ ere more likely than amateurs to write stage directions “in the form of directions to the actors . . . ​ rather than as descriptions of action viewed from the front of the theater,” implying a binary in which the audience perceives of stage action in a literal, even literary way, while the playwright perceives of stage action as artifice executed by actors playing roles.7 Audience members who wrote plays, however, did think about actions in their plays as occurring on a stage, even if the ways in which they expressed ­those actions sometimes differed from how professionals expressed them. Their use, or attempted use, of specific play­ house terms, materials, and practices, demonstrate some of the t­ hings that a playgoer might understand about the ways in which plays ­were translated from texts on the page to per­for­mances on the stage. When that usage differs from what professionals wrote, it illuminates the distance between the industry and the layperson’s comprehension of its pro­cesses. Usages that replicate or



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approximate what professionals customarily wrote, however, reveal the extent to which informed and engaged audience members could make sense of, and turn to their own ends, commercial playmaking practices. W ­ hether conforming to professional practices or deviating from them, playwriting playgoers managing the disposition of the ­people, materials, and spaces of the professional play­house illustrate the dif­fer­ent ways that playgoers thought dramatic meaning was created on stage specifically. The chapter begins with a study of asides in Robert Yarington’s Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies; though ­there is no evidence that Yarington supplied his play to a professional com­ pany, he based his play on two Admiral’s Men plays, and his peculiar formula for the aside instruction speaks to his perspective as an audience member at the Rose and his conceptualization of his play as a per­for­mance text. The second case study analyzes the copious authorial stage directions in the playbook manuscript of John Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen in order to explicate the playgoer’s understanding of actions and materials that w ­ ere conventional for the King’s Men. The chapter concludes with an examination of the stage ­directions in William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven in order to establish the amateur dramatist’s understanding of how his directions had to change depending on w ­ hether his plays ­were to be performed by an adult com­pany or the C ­ hildren of Paul’s. A complicated direction in Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary provides a good example of what playgoers’ plays can reveal about an attentive spectator’s expectations for per­for­mance. At the play’s climax, construction of the ship the Mary is complete, and the vessel is to be launched from its berth in the Blackwall shipyard: Actus quintus: the first sceane Consistinge more in action then speech. as settinge of 2 · Crabbs. the heavinge at the Capsten the whistlinge of the Boteswaines wth th wordes, sometymes heaue sometymes lanche to lengthen. the tyme, as as ­shall be shewed before the daye of action ·/. [2669–75] Nautical jargon permeates Mountfort’s direction, but so does the playgoer’s sense of theatrical space and per­for­mance. His claim that the scene w ­ ill consist “more in action th[a]n speech” justifies the detailed direction, though he undercuts his expectation that the direction ­will be sufficient by writing out the

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“speech” of the scene anyway (2726–44).8 Mountfort’s conflicted dramaturgy accepts what­ever the actors decide w ­ ill best serve in per­for­mance and yet also desires to control what is happening at key moments. The first of t­hese impulses can be seen in Mountfort’s suggestion that the actors add words “to lengthen the tyme” and have “as many gallants & ladies as the roome Canne well hold” (2678).9 In t­ hese signals, Mountfort uses the permissive phrases that Linda McJannet sees as a sign of “an insider’s awareness of limitations regarding casting [and] in keeping with the collaborative nature of the theatrical enterprise.”10 Mountfort’s use of such “insider’s” terms indicates that an engaged outsider could understand their importance and appropriate them for his own play, trusting the actors, whom he did not know, to make his play into a per­ for­mance. The playgoer’s simultaneous desire for control over that per­for­ mance, however, is conveyed in the extra-­dramatic statement that his desired actions “­shall be shewed before the daye of action.” While he drafted his play, Mountfort hoped that it would be staged, anticipated preparation, and expected to participate in that preparation despite not being a professional playwright. It is pos­si­ble that he inserted himself into the production pro­cess ­because he feared that his jargon and unorthodox properties might confuse the actors and so cause them to change or even abandon the action. Mountfort’s frank acknowl­edgment that his stage direction is out of the ordinary challenges criticism that sees such full directions as resulting from ignorance of professional practices. Playwriting playgoers signal their awareness that they are moving beyond the customary when their directions become most complex—­Mountfort’s instruction for the verisimilar launching of a ship is one example, as is Clavell’s description of a toy dog prop, considered below.11 Rather than naïveté, such overwritten directions suggest the writer’s anxiety that his instructions w ­ ill not be understood b­ ecause they are not what the players are used to seeing in their scripts. In other words, unusually full directions mark points where the playwriting playgoer called for something that was dif­fer­ent from what he was used to seeing and he knew, or suspected, that it was dif­fer­ent. At ­these points, playgoers display their understanding of the contingencies, obstacles, opportunities, and traditions of per­for­mance, not by duplicating the professional model, but by signposting their departure from it. Scholars’ frequent assumption that amateurs’ copious directions resulted from ignorance may be attributable to the influence Shakespeare has had upon the construction of our narrative of early modern theater history. Professionalism in the theater is a mea­sure of control over per­for­mance, thus the scarcity of stage directions in plays by the most canonical of professional playwrights



“As ­shall be shewed before the daye of action” 107

has been explained by calling upon Shakespeare’s proximity to the com­pany for which he wrote. If professionalism is a mea­sure of control and Shakespeare made l­ittle explicit effort to exercise control through stage directions, he must have obtained that control in some other way: as a sharer and actor, he likely realized a high degree of oversight of the staging of his plays, resulting in no need for detailed directions in his manuscripts.12 This line of reasoning implies that professionalized dramatists provide infrequent and laconic stage directions, while, conversely, ­those who ­were not part of the industry—­who, ­because of that outsider status, are often assumed (incorrectly, as we have seen) not to have been involved with the staging of their plays—­provide copious and verbose directions. Shakespeare himself suggests this with Peter Quince and Hamlet, both amateur playwrights who issue an excessive degree of controlling instructions to their actors. ­These connotations characterize most scholarship on staging in amateurs’ plays, much of which resorts to pejorative and imprecise terms, such as “naïve” and “ignorant,” to describe amateurs’ expectations and instructions. While the terse openness of professionals’ directions is usually interpreted as allowing for what McJannet terms “a means of coordinating agreed upon group activity [and] communal action,”13 verbose directions are read as signaling a lack of trust in the community and the ner­vous­ness of an outsider attempting to impose results rather than obtain them through the professional pro­cess of collaboration. And yet t­hese connotations are largely refuted by close study of stage directions in both professionals’ and amateurs’ plays. The influence of Shakespeare has amplified them far out of proportion to the evidence. Many professionals often wrote lavish and needlessly full directions that, had they been penned by an amateur, would u ­ nder t­ hese terms be dismissed as “naïve” and “ignorant.” Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa point out, for example, that Thomas Heywood, “the nearest equivalent to Shakespeare in his work as an actor and playwright contracted to a specific playing com­pany,” was extremely “explicit” in his stage directions.14 Directions in plays by other professionals, including some by actors themselves, are often remarkably full and descriptive, even in t­ hose likely derived from play­house copy. Explanations more convincing and useful than “naïveté” and “ignorance” must therefore be considered to account for playgoers’ detailed stage directions. Most professionals developed the craft of implying specific actions through dialogue, “a standard practice,” Gurr and Ichikawa note, “which reduced the need for explicit stage directions.”15 A playgoer watching an actor perform such action on stage would not be able to distinguish ­whether

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the actor did so b­ ecause it was explic­itly called for in a stage direction or ­because it was implied in the dialogue. When the playgoer then took up his pen to write his own play, his first recourse in getting the actors to carry out specific actions would be to call for them in explicit stage directions. The result is one of the few identifiable trends across most playgoers’ plays: a high rate of explicit stage directions and low rate of directions implied in dialogue. This does not mean that the amateur is attempting a greater degree of control than a professional would; it means merely that, as a spectator, he has learned from the observation of action rather than its implementation, and so his attempts at calling for stage actions manifest themselves more explic­itly. In order to establish what spectators observed, William Long has looked to extant playbook manuscripts “with the assumption that both the playwright and the players knew what they w ­ ere d ­ oing in terms of their theaters.”16 He observes a professionalized system of production in which playwrights wrote in anticipation of com­pany needs, expectations, practices, and limitations. Long’s reasoning accounts for evidence in manuscript playbooks of plays by professional dramatists, such as Fletcher and Massinger’s Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, Dekker’s The Welsh Embassador, and Fletcher’s The Honest Man’s Fortune. Long’s explanation is equally applicable, though, to plays by dramatists who w ­ ere not part of the industry, as seen in the playbooks of The Soddered Citizen, The Launching of the Mary, and The Lady ­Mother. Being consumers did not prevent playwriting playgoers from shaping directions with an awareness of professional materials and practices, though their perspective on t­ hose may at times have differed from that of the professionals. As this chapter’s first case study demonstrates, this difference can be seen in how a playgoer’s stage directions might subtly, but tellingly, reflect his par­tic­u­lar position in the play­house audience.

“To the p ­ eople”: Asides, Orientation, and Robert Yarington’s Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies The play Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies (1594–1601, printed 1601), which combines a true murder plot with an Italian murder plot in alternating scenes, pres­ents a complicated case for the study of playgoers’ plays b­ ecause of the unanswered questions surrounding its authorship.17 Many of the play’s commentators follow W. W. Greg’s speculation that Robert Yarington was merely the scribe who copied out the manuscript from which the play was printed—­his name



“As ­shall be shewed before the daye of action” 109

appears on the title page and at the end—­and that the play was actually an adaptation by Henry Chettle of two plays written for the Admiral’s Men in 1599–1600: Thomas Merry, or Beech’s Tragedy, by John Day and William Haughton, and Chettle’s The Orphans’ Tragedy.18 Bernard Wagner found that in November 1603 a “Robt Yarrington junr” obtained his freedom of the Com­ pany of Scriveners and took this as proof of Greg’s speculation.19 ­Because this Yarington would have been young when the play was written, Wagner felt he must have been an apprentice scribe at the time. Greg and Wagner’s desire to assign the play to Chettle and so maintain the authority of the profession rests upon their assumption that, with the exception of courtiers, someone outside the profession was unlikely to write a play so clearly associated with the commercial theater. ­There are loose ends to this theory, most notably the lack of evidence that scribes signed their names at the start and end of transcripts of plays for print. Indeed, in W. Smith’s play The Hector of Germany (1615), it was the dramatist who signed his name on the manuscript at the start and the end. Further complicating the idea that La­men­ta­ble represents a conflation that includes Chettle’s Orphans’ Tragedy is that the “orphan” plot of the former entails only one orphan and the plot of the latter apparently entailed more than one.20 Even more problematic is that Chettle’s play might not have been finished. Henslowe paid Chettle ten shillings “in earnest” for The Orphans’ Tragedy on November 27, 1599, and, on September 24, 1601, a further ten shillings as payment “in part” for the play; twenty shillings is far less than the usual amount Henslowe paid or lent for a play, and t­ here is no further rec­ord of payments for e­ ither the play or materials associated with its staging. Gaps and omissions appear throughout Henslowe’s rec­ords, but the lack of evidence of further payments to Chettle implies that The Orphans’ Tragedy was never actually completed. Greg suggested that The Orphans’ Tragedy had been taken over by Day in January 1600—­when Henslowe paid Day forty shillings for a play entitled The Italian Tragedy—­and that the September 1601 payment to Chettle was to combine the play with the Tragedy of Merry, but, as Chiaki Hanabusa notes, Merry had been licensed in January 1600 and was thus already complete and not in need of combination with another play.21 Furthermore, Henslowe’s rec­ords show that Day’s The Italian Tragedy was handed off to Went­worth Smith for completion in March 1603, meaning that the play had no connection to The Orphans’ Tragedy. Possibly the portions of Chettle’s unfinished play w ­ ere l­ater combined with the Merry tragedy in order to make use of them, but t­ here is, again, no evidence in Henslowe’s rec­ ords of any writers being paid for such work (the September 24, 1601, payment

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to Chettle identifies only one play, not two, and indicates that it is a payment only “in part”), nor is ­there evidence of the Admiral’s Men ever staging La­men­ ta­ble. Even if The Orphans’ Tragedy was completed, it was evidently finished too late (by September 1601) to have been a ­factor in Yarington’s play, which was apparently in print by the end of March 1601.22 Given the lack of positive evidence for his theory, it is perhaps not surprising that not all scholars concur with Greg in his hypothesis about La­men­ ta­ble. Robert Law disputes the idea that two plays had been merged into one, finding in the two plots only one “bungling, inexperienced hand.”23 Based on the play’s debt to Richard III and King Leir and its “exceedingly crude . . . ​ form,” Law guesses that La­men­ta­ble was the work of “some obscure hangeron at the theatres, perhaps an actor, or even a ballad-­writer.”24 S. R. Golding likewise argues that it was the work of “a mere novice in the dramatic art, one who was perhaps a keen student of the works of Marlowe and of Kyd.”25 Henry Adams also does not question the play’s attribution to Yarington and identifies a connection to the earlier morality play tradition in the use of allegorical characters between the acts, though he also dismisses the play as “unquestionably the worst of [the domestic murder] plays” ­because it “omits impor­tant parts of the action the better to preach.”26 While the play owes a debt to the work of t­ hese earlier dramatists, however, it does not slavishly adhere to the generic conventions of “true crime” domestic tragedy but, rather, as Lena Cowen Orlin observes, “diverges from its dramatic pre­de­ces­sors” in innovative ways.27 Chiaki Hanabusa, who also decides that “it is reasonable to conclude . . . ​that the author of the play is none other than Yarington,” concludes that b­ ecause some of the play’s stage directions show evidence of an awareness of theatrical practice while ­others do not (see below), “the author may have had less theatrical experience than his colleagues amongst professional playwrights [and] may have given up his c­ areer before he became full-­fledged,” but he does not consider the possibility that—­since t­here is no evidence that the play was staged or sold to a com­pany—­the playwright was not attempting to professionalize at all.28 Knowing that highly engaged playgoers could, and did, write their own plays based upon their experiences in the theater, and lacking positive evidence that the title page ascription is in error, it is more than pos­si­ble that Yarington wrote the play, perhaps by borrowing from plays he had seen staged at the Rose.29 ­Because t­ here is no evidence that Day, Haughton, or Chettle wrote the extant play, it is perfectly plausible that the man whose name appears on the quarto’s title page was the man who wrote the play.30



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­W hether that man was, indeed, the scribe is less clear. Young amateurs writing inexpert plays in imitation of professional plays ­were not uncommon (as with, for example, seventeen-­year-­old Eton schoolboy William Peaps’s Love in Its Ecstasy [1649, written ca. 1634], nineteen-­year-­old Trinity College, Cambridge, student Francis Verney’s Tragedy of Antipo [1603–4], and fifteen-­year-­old Westminster schoolboy Abraham Cowley’s Love’s Riddle [1638, written ca. 1633–36]). If, however, the scribe identified by Wagner was the author, t­ here is the question of the play’s likely date. The Beech incident occurred in summer 1594, and the play refers to the plot as having been “done in famous London late” (95); Hanabusa argues that this indicates that the play itself was written soon ­after the executions of Merry and Rachel, around the time the numerous ballads and pamphlets about the murder w ­ ere satiating public demand for the 31 story. This might be true, but equally pos­si­ble is that Yarington did write his play around 1600–1601, ­after having seen the Beech narrative “done” on stage at the Rose in Day and Haughton’s play; at the very least, Henslowe’s decision to pay for a play on the topic in 1599–1600 shows that it was still current (indeed, it would have been a good fit in t­ hose years, given the popularity of true-­crime and domestic tragedy plays with the public theater audiences).32 If Hanabusa is correct, however, 1594 would likely make the play too early to have been the work of a scribe who completed his apprenticeship only in 1601. As it turns out, besides the scribe, t­ here ­were at least six or seven other individuals named Robert Yarington (or some variant of that name) at the time: Robert Yarington (1572–?) of St. Mary Woolchurch Haw and his f­ ather, Robert Yarington (who married in 1564); Rob[ert] Yarranton, draper of London (who obtained his freedom on August 2, 1592); Robert Yarrington, scrivener of London (who obtained his freedom on November 3, 1603, and was active in Surrey in June 1604 and London in 1612, when he, along with Admiral’s Men player Antony Jeffes, paid bail for two men), and his ­father, Robert Yarrington, merchant tailor; Robert Yerrington of St. Nicholas Acons, merchant tailor (possibly the ­father of the scrivener); and Robart Yarrantonn of St. Dionis Backchurch (died 1625).33 Like the scribe, ­there is no evidence that any of t­ hese was involved in the theater industry; no m ­ atter which Yarington wrote La­men­ta­ble, then, it is likely that he was not a professional dramatist but a playwriting playgoer. For my purposes, I work h ­ ere from the position that La­men­ta­ble was indeed written by Yarington, the playgoer, in order to consider what the ramifications might be for the play’s use of one par­tic­u­lar, peculiar stage direction. As noted, scholars usually assume that, ­because amateurs ­were not part of the industry and so must have only written for readers, their stage directions

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can only properly be considered “literary” signals. Playgoers’ plays, however, frequently show heightened concern with staging, though that concern might take expression in ways that reflect its origins in the audience. One example of this is the orientation Yarington’s version of “aside” assumes in terms of spatial relations within the play­house. La­men­ta­ble consists of two alternating plots depicting the gruesome lengths to which even the most seemingly virtuous w ­ ill go when spurred by greed, the inescapable course of justice, and how vio­lence only begets more vio­lence. The “En­glish” plot pres­ents the incidents of a true crime, in which Thomas Merry kills and dismembers his neighbor, Beech, to obtain his money, and then kills Beech’s servant who witnessed the murder; in the “Italian” plot, Falleria murders his nephew, Pertillo, in order to steal his inheritance. The scenes of the two plots are divided from each other by choric dialogues from the figures Avarice, Hom­i­cide, and Truth, providing commentary on the action. In the first scene of the Italian plot, as Pandino lies ­dying, his ­brother Falleria promises that he ­will raise Pandino’s son ­until the boy is old enough to inherit the f­amily estate: “The God of heaven can truely testifie,” he swears (254). In his next line, however, Falleria reveals his true intentions: “Which to speake plaine, is nere a whit at all” (255). Obviously, this is an aside; in the margin alongside the line is the direction “To the ­people.” Yarington uses this phrase sixteen times, at times truncating it to “­People” (447, 2137, 2429) or “to ­people” (722), but never using another formulation, such as “aside” or “to himself.”34 Professional dramatists in the 1590s and early 1600s used a range of signals to indicate that a speech was to be delivered to the audience, but t­here was no standardized term in the shared discourse of the profession—no accepted jargon—­for this.35 The most common aside stage direction employed by professionals in ­these years was “to himself” or “to herself” (both appear in Richard III and Leir, plays Yarington knew well).36 Such instructions straddle the world of the play and the world of the per­for­mance: they may be ­either “fictional” or “theatrical.”37 In a theater in which all actors are male, “herself” is fictional; but it is unclear ­whether “himself” refers to the actor (a theatrical signal) or the character (a fictional signal). No such ambiguity exists with “To the ­people,” a phrase that is expressly theatrical, referring to a (perhaps only i­magined) audience. “To the ­people” instructs the actor; “to himself” constructs the character. More than that, Yarington’s signal orients the reader (actor or other­wise) outward from the stage, t­ oward the audience, as opposed to “to himself” or “to herself,” which imply an inward orientation that excludes the audience. The professionals’ “to himself” or “to herself” implic-



“As ­shall be shewed before the daye of action” 113

itly ignore the audience that the amateur’s “to the p ­ eople” explic­itly acknowledges. While ­there is no positive evidence that La­men­ta­ble was staged, this phrase demonstrates that the amateur did not write with a reader in mind. The playgoer envisioned actors performing before an audience, and, unlike professionals writing at the same time and for the same com­pany, he acknowledged the presence of the spectators watching t­ hose actors. The amateur, in this case, was more theatrical than the professionals. If Yarington was a dedicated playgoer, he was likely a play reader as well; thus, he may have come across the direction “to the ­people” when reading the anonymous Locrine (published 1595), the anonymous A Warning for Fair ­Women (published 1599), or the anonymous The Maid’s Metamorphosis (published 1600).38 In Locrine, Strumbo reacts to Dorothy’s ac­cep­tance of his love suit by “Turning to the ­people” and giving some brief advice on courting ­women.39 In The Maid’s Metamorphosis, Joculo “speakes to the ­people” and asks them to safeguard his master as he himself departs.40 More tellingly than ­either of t­hese, however, the author of A Warning for Fair ­Women draws attention to the fact that the phrase calls for an action within the real context of the play­house rather than the fictional context of the world of the play. In the play, “aside” is used for all speeches to the audience or delivered privately to other characters, with two exceptions: at the end of the induction, Tragedy’s speech to the audience begins with him “Turning to the p ­ eople”; l­ater, Tragedy participates in a masque, at the end of which he, “againe turning to the ­people,” explains its moral.41 In other words, characters within the fiction of the play speak “aside,” but characters outside the fiction speak “to the p ­ eople.” By restricting use of “to the p ­ eople” to the metadramatic figure of Tragedy, the dramatist emphasizes that the direction, unlike “aside,” is a purely theatrical signal. Besides sharing this stage direction, however, ­there is no clear evidence of borrowing between La­men­ta­ble and any of t­ hese other plays. Yarington’s play does include a number of remarkably full directions that have often been read as “literary,” such as the grisly precision of the directions for Merry’s murders: he “strickes [Beech] in the head fifteene times” (463–64), he “striketh six blowes on [Winchester’s] head & with the seaventh leaves the hammer sticking in his head” (752–54), and he “cut[s] the body, and bindes the armes behinde his backe with Beeches garters” (1209–10). L ­ ater, a waterman picks up a “Sack by the end [and] one of the legs and head drops out” (1679–80). This specificity might suggest that Yarington was working from a published account of the murders and was reluctant to deviate from his source, even when it was not entirely compatible with what the players would require

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(or want). Yarington’s detailed directions might also, however, be recollections of how the Admiral’s Men had staged similar moments in the two plays that served as his sources.42 Judging from Henslowe’s March 10, 1598, list of props at the Rose, dismemberment effects w ­ ere well within the com­pany’s usual 43 ­ attle of Alcazar, acted by the Admiral’s practice; likewise, the plot of The B Men between 1589 and 1603, calls for “mens heads” and “bones.” 44 Yarington’s specific instructions may thus reflect his understanding, as an audience member, of the kinds of actions and materials the players at the Rose could use in per­for­mance. That Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies is such a theatrically oriented text is not without other evidence. For example, despite their often being overwritten, many of the play’s stage directions employ conventional theatrical signals that, to an early modern actor, would indicate specific materials, such as “a hunt within” (1388), properties such as halberds45 and a sick bed, and actions such as the peculiar “strive curtesie” (139) and enter “sad” (2010). At the same time, ­there are other directions that are “so exceptional as to violate the conventional locution for directions,” such as “Turne of[f] the Lather: Rachel shrinketh” (2676) and two uses of “Exit up” (478 and 495).46 La­men­ta­ble thus blends directions that are conventional and familiar with many that are, as Hanabusa puts it, examples of how “the author’s magnitude of imagination slipped beyond theatricality.” 47 Perhaps the play’s most obvious and frequent theatrical signal is “to the ­people,” a phrase that demonstrates that Yarington wrote with a per­for­mance context in mind—­possibly the context of the Admiral’s Men at the Rose. With this direction, it is clear that the playgoer ­imagined other playgoers “watching” his play. Indeed, as Catherine Richardson points out, the play’s narrative itself reveals “a self-­consciousness about audience response: it is a play concerned with the importance of waking the consciences of the audience themselves.” 48 Another aspect of Yarington’s play that suggests that he envisioned it as a script for actors performing before an audience is his use of “must” in five of his stage directions.49 Inclusion of the forceful (and redundant) “must” in directions was uncommon in early modern plays but not unknown;50 ­every other play that does use the term, though, was staged or intended for the stage. Perhaps Yarington was simply imitating what he read in printed plays; nonetheless, the jussive “must” indicates that he envisioned his directions being read by actors requiring instruction. Despite Yarington’s debt to the stage and use of theatrical language, ­there is no evidence that his play was ever performed. Stern notes that the reading of Pandino’s w ­ ill is truncated similar to other scenes in which documents are



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used onstage—­“Reade the W ­ ill. / In the name of God, Amen. I, &c.” (282–83)—­ and suggests that the speech following this, in which Pandino explains the ­will, “indicates that [the w ­ ill] must have been read out on the stage,” meaning the “&c.” implies that the play was performed.51 Given the lack of any other evidence of a per­for­mance and the author’s status as a playwriting playgoer, another explanation is perhaps more likely. Yarington often shortens stage directions with the cryptic “&c.,”52 which seems yet another mark of a writer uncertain of what details stage directions should include. As Grace Ioppolo points out, “ ‘Etc.’ . . . ​appears frequently in vari­ous types of early modern manuscripts to signal authors’ indecision or uncertainty, or even the lack of any need to determine certainty.”53 Another possibility is that Yarington’s use of “&c.” h ­ ere was an imitation of what he saw in professionals’ printed plays. In ­either case, however, “&c.” alone cannot be taken as reliable evidence that a per­for­mance of the play definitely occurred. Recognizing that the playwright may have been a playgoer, however, might help us better account for some of the other aspects of what Richardson refers to as the play’s “idiosyncratic dramaturgy”: for example, Richardson shows how the use of the balcony in La­ men­ta­ble is “very dif­fer­ent [from] the habitual uses of this space in con­temporary plays.”54 Such difference might arise from the playwriting playgoer’s lack of understanding about the “habitual uses” of the balcony; however, if we allow the writer some credit as a dedicated and attentive playgoer, it might reflect his capacity to think about the stage space in ways less constrained by tradition than the professional. In other words, rather than dismiss difference as the product merely of ignorance or naïveté, the disposition of materials and actions in an amateur’s play might very well be innovative and experimental to a degree not seen in plays by a professional, commercial dramatist who must conform—or feels as if he must conform—as much as pos­si­ble to the set ways of ­doing ­things. Yarington’s ­imagined staging reflects the sense of theatricality an attentive amateur could obtain from seeing and reading plays from the commercial theaters. Lest Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies and “to the p ­ eople” be dismissed as merely an outlier, we should note that such attention to theatricality is not limited to Yarington’s play; many other amateurs include similar signals in their scripts as well. Stage directions in Francis Jaques’s The Queen of Corsica (1642), for example, signal the playgoer’s depth of understanding about specific practices, even if his directions are imperfectly formed or, at times, excessive. Beyond his authorship of the play that bears his name on the scribal manuscript, nothing is known of Jaques, though he was deeply familiar with

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late Caroline tragic styles and knew especially Shirley’s The Coronation (1635), The Doubtful Heir (1640), and The Court Secret (1642).55 As with Yarington, detailed directions that imagine a per­for­mance fill his play, though it was prob­ably never actually staged.56 The most notably theatrical direction appears at the play’s climax: “A shrike wthin. Arist: and Lady runne ouer the Stage, in yeir: Actions expressing feare. They enter againe, And say ye Court is up at the Noyse, & in yt perplexity runne in and Out” (1215–24).57 In this direction, Jaques uses a sound effect to draw attention to a dramatic offstage event and the stage’s architecture to create the impression of a fictional location for that event. The explicit reference to the stage itself is the clearest signal that Jaques had per­ for­mance in mind when he wrote.58 Most impor­tant, however, is Jaques’s awareness of convention: rather than state that Ariste and the Lady “are afraid” (a “literary” direction that describes an interior state, rather than an outward action observable by a spectator), he calls for conventional per­for­mance gestures “expressing feare.” This direction imagines the scene in a play­house, with actors communicating meaning to an audience by means of repre­sen­ta­tional “actions” that are legible to both performers and playgoers. If we consider the position that ­these writers occupied as playwriting playgoers rather than professional playmakers, the pertinent question to ask about such stage directions in The Queen of Corsica, Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies, or, as in the next case study, The Soddered Citizen—­the question that professionals’ plays cannot answer for us—is, “What did ­these playgoers think they w ­ ere seeing?”

“Our habites too are meane . . . ​Our action maymd”: Actions, Materials, and Conventions in John Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen About two or three years ­after his 1627 release from the King’s Bench Prison, where he had been held awaiting execution for theft, John Clavell wrote a romantic city comedy, The Soddered Citizen, which was subsequently staged by the King’s Men in 1630. In the play, the melancholy Witworth woos Modestina, the chaste ward of the wealthy Undermine, who seeks to secure the girl’s hand in marriage for himself. Undermine, with the aid of the conman and former convict Mountain, schemes to make it seem as if Modestina rejects Witworth, which drives the young man mad. Through a device involving a fictional passage through hell, Doctor Makewell cures Witworth, and ultimately the young lovers are united. In the play’s comic subplot, Undermine’s ­daughter, Miniona, is successfully courted by the riotous, drunken, debt-­



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plagued Brainsick. As with many city comedies, the play explores the rise of the merchant class through the narrative device of a blocked romance. Scholars long assigned The Soddered Citizen to professional dramatist Shakerley Marmion; in 1936, however, John Henry Pyle Pafford demonstrated that it was written by the reformed gentleman-­highwayman John Clavell.59 In the play, Clavell’s criminal past is hinted at a few times, though never overbearingly or in a way necessary to the plot itself: the prologue (in which the writer disavows a life of crime) recounts Brainsick’s experiences as a prisoner, and—­ most clearly—­Mountain is a highwayman who was driven to thievery by the loss of his ­family fortune but who, pardoned by the king, turned instead to poetry (2809–18). Like Mountain, Clavell took up a life of crime ­because his inheritance was in arrears; he was captured and imprisoned but then was pardoned by Charles and turned to poetry.60 Clavell’s own life experiences are glimpsed in many of the play’s depictions of the shadier aspects of London life, including debt and imprisonment, financial confidence tricks, excessive drinking and smoking, and questionable medical practices, particularly the treatment of madness (several years ­after his play was staged, Clavell moved to Ireland and passed himself off as a doctor). The extant manuscript of his play is a professional scribe’s transcription, marked up by five hands, including Clavell’s (he also signed his name on the document twice).61 This suggests that Clavell, like Mountfort, helped prepare his play for the stage a­ fter he had written it and ­after the actors had obtained it. One of the other hands that marked up the manuscript was that of Edward Knight, bookkeeper for the King’s Men, indicating that the copy was to be used for per­for­mance.62 The final leaf, on which the Master’s license would appear, is missing, and ­there is no evidence of Herbert’s hand in the manuscript, but the King’s Men cast list in the manuscript suggests that a cleaner copy was submitted to the censor and the play was eventually staged.63 Clavell’s play thus demonstrates that even the period’s leading troupe might acquire new plays from writers other than professional dramatists and courtier amateurs: a dedicated nonaristocratic playgoer who was not part of the industry could write a play and see it prepared for the stage by a prominent professional troupe. Clavell’s fame as a repentant highwayman led Bentley to assume that it was the King’s Men who approached Clavell about writing a play, as opposed to Clavell ­going to them with a manuscript.64 Other scholars have followed Bentley’s assumption; for example, Barbara Wooding states that the King’s Men “presumably hoped to benefit from the publicity Clavell’s name would provide.” 65 Except for the prologue and the nine-­line allusion to

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Mountain’s previous ­career, however, the play does not exploit the sensational life of its writer. As Wooding herself points out, “The play has nothing to do with highwaymen.” 66 Indeed, Clavell seems e­ ager not to draw attention to his past: the reference to Mountain’s p ­ ardon by the king was heavi­ly deleted when the play was revised for per­for­mance. Bentley was perhaps misled by his skepticism that someone outside the theater industry (other than a courtier) could take an active role in producing a script for the industry: for Bentley and many other scholars, that a play written by an amateur was staged by the King’s Men can only be explained by assigning impetus to the professionals. This constructs a narrative in which agency over writing for the commercial stage was fully u ­ nder the control of commercial companies; as the playwriting playgoers demonstrate, however, that was not the case. Continuing his implicit distrust of the amateur, Bentley further speculates that the play caused the King’s Men embarrassment. In March 1631, however, Clavell contributed a commendatory verse to The Emperor of the East, a play by the King’s Men’s regular professional, Massinger. In his verse, Clavell refers to Massinger as “deare friend” and speaks of often attending the Blackfriars.67 He l­ater became an “adoptive” son of King’s Men dramatist Ben Jonson. ­A fter Soddered Citizen, Clavell maintained a connection to the King’s Men and some degree of literary or social caché in the view of the com­pany and its usual dramatists. This would hardly be the case if Soddered Citizen had been, as Bentley assumes, an embarrassment. Bentley’s highlighting of Clavell’s life of crime overshadows the motivating importance the theater had for him. Even before his arrest in January 1626, Clavell was familiar with the professional theater and admired “the straine / Of [the] Black-­friers Poets.” 68 He was acquainted with Marmion and friends with Massinger and Jonson.69 His knowledge of the King’s Men, and his forethought as to which of its members would be appropriate for certain parts in his play, is suggested by the character Hodge making a sly joke on the name of the actor who played that part (John Shank).70 ­Later, Clavell apparently looked nostalgically upon his brief time as a dramatist, for he took his play manuscript to Ireland.71 In Dublin, he continued to pursue his interest in theater and built relationships with members of the emerging profession ­there.72 Bentley’s narrative, in which the professionals approached the playgoer, underestimates the relative ease with which a playgoer such as Clavell could become a participant in the playmaking pro­cess. Clavell’s engagement with the stage suggests the opposite of Bentley’s profession-­centered model: the playgoer may have just as easily taken it upon himself to write a play and offer it



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to the professionals—­that is, the playgoer’s desire to write the play could precede the com­pany’s intention to stage it. Furthermore, and more impor­tant for my purposes h ­ ere, the manuscript of Clavell’s play shows us what such a playgoer thought a per­for­mance would or should look like and what conventional and unconventional actions and materials might be needed to make it. When Clavell’s directions are particularly complex, they seem to indicate his recognition, and concern, that what he is calling for deviates from what was normal for the King’s Men. If so, such signals display not ignorance of professional practices but a heightened awareness of them. The clearest signal of Clavell’s heightened attention to the stage are the numerous, often highly detailed stage directions in his play, all of which, Pafford notes, are “of a theatrical rather than literary kind.”73 The directions in The Soddered Citizen show that Clavell was particularly aware of and concerned about how per­for­mance exigencies might influence his play’s staging.74 His experiences as a playgoer helped him to understand some of the constraints and opportunities of per­for­mance. Explicating Clavell’s stage directions can thus help explain the kinds of signals an attentive playgoer recognized as reasonable for the professional stage. In fact, the playgoer’s play is suited to this purpose in a way that a professional’s is not, for the former’s loquacious stage directions (so detailed that one could use them, Wooding remarks, “to block the scene[s] and reproduce [them] with reasonable accuracy”)75 rec­ord the play’s choreography in far more detail than the latter’s laconic directions would. Characteristic of Clavell’s detailed directions is his close attention to tempo, particularly the pace of gestures and the order in which actions are to occur.76 Often Clavell calls for an action to begin and then stop before it is completed (for example, at 1287–89, 1307–9, and 1667–68), making use of the fact that moves prevented or unfinished create tension by leaving the moment unresolved. Similarly, he controls pace by emphasizing the rapidity of entrances and exits, repeating the adverb “hasty” five times (144, 1121, 438, 1253, and 2788). Speedy entrances and exits contribute to a sense that the world of the play extends beyond the doors of the frons scenae. Hastiness also suggests that the character feels it imperative that he or she arrive as soon as pos­si­ble, creating the impression that stakes are being raised. Like interrupted actions, rapid entrances and exits build tension by manipulating tempo. Clavell often employs directions that specify the timing of entrances in relation to specific onstage business, a style of direction that Linda McJannet points out was exceptionally rare in the professional theaters.77 All of Clavell’s signals concerning pace can be read as clues about what he, as a playgoer, had seen in use as a per­for­mance

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practice—­clues that, paradoxically, are not always recorded in such detail in professionals’ plays. The Soddered Citizen maps out the kind of speed and timing of actions that an attentive Caroline playgoer expected to see acted upon the professionals’ stage but which are largely absent from the professionals’ printed plays. In addition to speed, Clavell frequently indicates when players should execute actions si­mul­ta­neously with other actions or with specific lines of dialogue. With the latter, the dramatist again betrays his position as a playgoer: it is obvious to an actor that a stage direction beside a line of dialogue indicates that the action is to occur with the line. To a spectator, however, no such clear, discrete alignment of action and word exists; rather, actions and words in per­for­mance occur as a cohesive ­whole. Concerned to ensure correct timing, Clavell often resorts to directions that make needlessly explicit the simultaneity of actions and lines (336, 432, 971, 1301–3, and 2690–92). When Witworth kisses Modestina’s hand, for example, the direction, “Kisse, then her hand” (777–79), with its explicit statement of timing (“then”), is followed two lines l­ater by Witworth’s reference to “this kisse.” The delay in the verbal signal was deliberate (the character speaks of a kiss that has already happened), as the stage direction was written in the margin ­after the scribe had written out the dialogue. In this case, the implied direction contradicts the timing of the explicit direction; had Clavell not supplied the explicit direction, we would assume that Witworth does not kiss Modestina’s hand u ­ ntil 781. Similarly, he often specifies the order for sequential actions, such as entrances (438, 784–85, 2216–17, and 2603). This is a degree of control—or attempted control—­over the timing of stage business which is not typically found in professionals’ stage directions but which shows us what Clavell, as a playgoer, thought he was seeing the King’s Men do when they staged t­ hose plays and what he thought a script calling for such actions must look like.78 Often Clavell indicates not just what the actor should do and when but also the quality of that action. In many of ­these directions, his technical language suggests the degree to which consumers ­were aware of the typical signals of the profession: the “argot” of the stage and the meanings it encoded ­were not reserved for the ranks of the professional playmakers, but could be accessed by playgoers as well.79 This sharing of jargon hints at the porousness of any supposed boundary between producers and consumers in early modern theatrical culture. For example, when Brainsick enters “wth. both hands at his breast &c.” (145), the sequence of movements (“&c.”) must have carried conventional, widely understood meaning (at least six other plays use the ges-



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ture); Clavell assumed that this meaning would be clear to the actor (Thomas Pollard) and so did not explain what he intended further in ­either the direction or the dialogue. Other playwriting playgoers, of course, do detail how such symbolic gestures ­were to be carried out. Though often dismissed by scholars for being unduly prescriptive, such directions recognize and parse the meaning of par­tic­u­lar acting conventions and thus rec­ord details of what an early modern per­for­mance may have looked like. Again, rather than read such directions as “literary,” we should adopt the theatrical perspective of the playgoer himself and see in them his view of how certain actions performed by the professional players signaled the specific emotional states of the characters in the play. At other places, however, Clavell only states what quality an action is to be given, leaving ambiguous how that quality is to be conveyed. In ­these instances, he may have known that the players had conventions for translating qualifiers and trusted them to employ ­those methods without instruction. Alternatively, Clavell—­like Mountfort—­may have expected to be involved in preparing his play for the stage and so to have the opportunity to explain or demonstrate what he meant by, for example, the cryptic “geringly” in 5.4 (2605).80 He likewise does not specify how to stage Sly’s entrance “halfe druncke” (3) or the instruction to Brainsick and his fellows to carry their drinking paraphernalia “in Antick state, with Ceremony” (995 and 1108). The actors, Clavell trusts, have the means to translate t­ hese directions into actions that ­will convey the appropriate meaning to the audience. Despite his detailed instructions, Clavell’s knowledgeable deference to convention in fact fills out the majority of the play’s directions (for example, 669–73, 1280, 1892, 1901, 1996, and 2013–17). The playgoer understood that the actors possessed conventional actions to convey specific emotions or intention, and his signals indicate that he knew t­ hose actions and how they worked. When Clavell does not rely upon convention but instead goes into detail about the qualities of actions, he reveals an awareness that what he is calling for may not be the players’ usual practice. For example, when Hodge complains of the cold, “he claps his hands to Ketch heate” (1758–60).81 The business affords Brainsick the opportunity for a gestural joke: “Hould thy hands,” Brainsick tells the farmer, “Ile saue thee a l­abour,” and then, “Brain: strikes him” (1760–63). Clavell’s indication of why Hodge performs the action (“to Ketch heate”) suggests that he knew the gesture was not conventional on the stage and the players would need an explanation for it. Indeed, Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson not only rec­ord no uses of the action in other plays but mistakenly state that Hodge is clapping his hands “to strike a blow.”82 No doubt it was

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to avoid just such confusion that Clavell provided his seemingly “literary” clarification for the “theatrical” action. In this way, explanatory directions by playwriting playgoers can serve as negative evidence about play­house practices, detailing what an audience member recognized as not typical. Like most dramatists, Clavell also uses directions to h ­ andle the disposition of materials, including the per­for­mance space itself. He writes for a generalized stage with two doors (144–45, 1121–22, 1452–53, and 2725–26), but other­wise imposes no demands that would limit the play to a specific venue. While Clavell certainly had attended plays at the Blackfriars, the playgoer’s generalized expectations of his venue contradict Bentley’s assertion that the play was designed specifically for that play­house; rather, Clavell—­perhaps having learned from professional playwrights that spatial permissiveness was a practical, and financial, virtue—­understood that his play should be flexible enough for any potential space.83 Clavell’s use of costuming also reveals an informed playgoer’s familiarity with how clothing on stage visually communicates information beyond that in dialogue or action.84 For example, Witworth’s cloak serves as a means for dramatizing his relationship with Modestina when he offers it to protect her (1303–6), and she rejects his offer (1361–62). At times, the playgoer uses costuming to signal setting,85 as when Witworth’s entrance “in a Nnight-­capp” (2414) informs the audience that it is eve­ning. His costumes also indicate offstage events: “Enter (from Church” (2327–28) implies costuming that tells the audience that a wedding has just occurred. In one instance, he draws explicit attention to a par­tic­u­lar costume that remains the same over the play: “a spruce Servingman in blacks” (1184) returns as “the servingman in blacks” (1500) and, t­oward the play’s end, as “the Ladies Servant, in Blacks” (2726). The servant’s unchanging costume marks the unrelenting force of death that—­Marcade-­like—­intrudes into the play’s merriment. Conversely, one character’s clothing changes over the play to reflect her changing situation. Modestina appears in a variety of costumes, each communicating her state at that point in the plot. Undermine pays Mountain’s “varlets” to “stripp of all” her clothing and “rende [it] into raggs” (1240–43), and she next enters “in her smock & a tattard pettycoate” (1268), items that would have conveyed to the early modern audience par­tic­u­lar connotations about her character.86 ­Humble clothing—­a smock and “plaine Wastcoate” (1667)—­signal Modestina’s socioeconomic status as well as her moral character. The “shrowde” (1803) she dons for Makewell’s masque indicates the role she plays in the staged event, but it also foreshadows her mourning over the



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(as she thinks) dead Witworth. In The Soddered Citizen, costuming is not a peripheral detail added carelessly by a playgoer unconcerned with dramatic effect; quite the opposite: Clavell’s attention to the subtle clues clothing provides demonstrates what an attentive playgoer understood about how material context constructs and inflects meanings in per­for­mance. In the same way, Clavell displays an understanding of properties, their ­handling, and the meanings they encode in the system of theatrical shorthand provided by stage materials. While most historians limit use of that shorthand to communications from, as Dessen puts it, “one professional (for example, an attached dramatist such as Shakespeare or Heywood) [to] another [that is, an actor],” Clavell shows that it was quite pos­si­ble for a playgoer to recognize and appropriate that language.87 For example, Clavell encodes a sophisticated and dynamic set of connotations into one of the properties that Dessen himself examines: the sick chair.88 The chair is first used to bring Witworth to a demonic masque that Doctor Makewell hopes w ­ ill cure him (1809). Terrified by what he sees, Witworth grows hysterical, yet he is forced to remain seated, a compulsory spectator of the “show” being performed for him. As the masque proceeds, Witworth is drawn deeper into the action u ­ ntil he rises up and transforms from spectator to performer in the dance (1916–19). Fi­nally, exhausted, he collapses into his chair and sleeps. The chair begins the scene associated with restraint and panic; it concludes the scene a place of respite and calm. At Witworth’s next appearance, he is still nonresponsive in the same chair (2216–17). Makewell informs Modestina “that the stronge Phisicke / I sent in to relieue, could not prevaile” (2223–24), but Witworth is, in fact, fully cured; this is yet another of Makewell’s “shows,” with Modestina and the play­house spectators the unknowing audience. The sick chair evolves from a vantage point for spectatorship to a material component of the “show” being watched (2259–73). Like both the playgoer, John Clavell, and the character, Witworth, the prop itself crosses the boundary between audience and stage, transforming from a place of observation into a place of per­for­mance. In addition to conventional materials such as the sick chair, Clavell employs nontraditional props that would have proven novel, perhaps one-­use only, additions to the players’ stock. He anticipates this novelty and, foreseeing potential confusion, lingers on descriptions of t­hese objects and their purposes. For example, when Brainsick jokes that he ­will pay his debts with “Babyes, Rattles, Brouches, Wooldoggs” (2588), he produces a peculiar object to explain his meaning:

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Brain: Baw, waw, waw, waw, waw &c’. Hee produceth sodainly I must tell yee theis nowe, as they doe ye Toombes, A wooldogg wth. a brooch Or you’le loose the Iest—­This is the Brooch, in ye. forehead, a rattle at This is the Dogge, Vndermyne the Tayle, And a— Heere is the Rattle, poynte too his owne head Baby leadinge And ­here was the Baby, himselfe  [2591–96]

The three parallel columns of speech, gesture, and prop visually display the fundamental ele­ments Clavell considers necessary for per­for­mance: dialogue, action, and material. Brainsick’s explication of his joke is itself explicated in the performative cue to “poynte” and the textual work done by the layered brackets (Undermine is the “dogge,” Brainsick’s head the “Rattle,” and Brainsick “the Baby”). The overwritten explanation suggests Clavell’s awareness that what he is asking for is neither conventional business nor a common prop. Such directions in amateurs’ plays are customarily dismissed as displays of ignorance about typical professional stage materials, but they may in fact display precisely the opposite: the playgoer’s understanding of what is and what is not typical. Clavell’s stage directions also contain the high degree of explicit instructions for actions typical of amateurs’ plays, though he also provides clues in t­ hose directions about pieces of business he must have known to be conventional for the players. For example, a­ fter Undermine falsely informs Modestina that Witworth has left her, he suggests that she write him a letter. ­A fter she does so and departs, Undermine reads the letter and forges content to ensure that Witworth abandons Modestina. She catches him in the act, however, and accuses him of “makeinge addic[i]ons” to the letter (975). To assure her that his additions are harmless, Undermine pretends to read them. The lines he “reads” are innocuous, but they are also, unbeknown to Modestina, not actually written into the letter: earlier, when Undermine reads aloud what Modestina had written, Clavell uses the direction “hee reades” (965); ­here, however, his direction is “he coynes extempore” (979–80). B ­ ecause what Undermine “coynes” is written into the script, the signal is fictional: “he” refers not to the actor but to the character. The playwriting playgoer assumes that the actor, John Lowin, w ­ ill use a certain be­hav­ior to suggest that he is making up the words as he goes along, and the audience ­will understand that it is the character, not the actor, extemporizing. The action to signal such scripted spontaneity was no doubt conventional: in Marston’s Histriomastix (1599), for example, Landulpho gives Posthaste a “theme,” and the ballad writer



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invents a “song extempore”; as with Undermine’s addition to the letter, the song is written out. The actors apparently had a gesture or method of delivery for indicating that a character improvises; Clavell understood that and expected the actor and audience to understand it as well. For Clavell and many other playwriting playgoers, that understanding extended beyond observations about materials and actions—­which are, a­ fter all, apparent to any audience member interested in marking them—to include an implicit trust in his collaborators, the professional playmakers, in the shared endeavor of making his script into a play. Like Mountfort, he consented to changes to his vision of that script in order to bring it into line with what the ­others in that shared endeavor required. At the same time, however, Clavell desired a degree of control over his play’s per­for­mance (­whether the actors acquiesced is a dif­fer­ent m ­ atter), characterized by assumptions about what was and was not pos­si­ble and desirable, but especially conventional and familiar, on the professional stage for which he wrote. His use of t­hose conventional signals is one way in which he placed trust in the actors and the professional systems of playmaking. Indeed, at one point Clavell leaves an explicit opening for the actors to exercise their own creativity. He wrote out lyr­ics for most of his play’s many songs, but the very first song in the play, sung by a drunken Brainsick, is cued with the direction “he sings and daunces to his owne tune” (333–35). A snippet of nonsense lyric is provided, but Clavell evidently trusted the actor (Thomas Pollard) to come up with a song. This brief moment of explicit openness differs from Undermine’s “coining” of words as he reads the letter b­ ecause ­there is no indication that Clavell expects a par­tic­u­lar per­for­ mance convention. Instead, the playgoer leaves the decision entirely to the actor’s discretion. Unlike most playwriting playgers, Clavell left other dramatic writing that further illustrates his conception of per­for­mance. In the manuscript that served as both his diary and commonplace book, Clavell wrote, among other dramatic texts, “An introduction to the sword daunce at Christmas 1632 / At my Lord Barries in Ireland.”89 The masque makes clear the extent to which Clavell understood that the dif­fer­ent theatrical contexts of the professional play and the amateur entertainment required dif­fer­ent details of staging; for example, in The Soddered Citizen he calls for a “noyse wth​.­in” (1251), but in the introduction, as was typical of most masques, he calls for a “Noyce without” (1 and 18). Similar to Wilson’s revision of “within” to “without” in The Inconstant Lady (see Chapter 2), the reversal of the offstage area from “within” to “without” suggests a shift in the dramatist’s conceptual orientation ­toward the stage from

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one in keeping with the professional convention (“within” the tiring-­house) to one in keeping with the needs of the amateur entertainment (“without” the room in which they are staging the show). As in his play, Clavell controls the actions and materials of the introduction in ­great detail. Unlike the context of his play, however, such control is a commonplace practice in the masque tradition, and so his directions often expand considerably, g­ oing into far more detail about what and how the performers are to carry out his actions. His entrance directions for Peace, for example, provide the same minute control over timing, quality, and materials displayed in The Soddered Citizen: “Then Enter peace in a white habite ct’ trembling” (2). Clavell’s specificity with materials such as props and costumes also appears in the masque: “Then Enter the Maskers for the sword dance (as in serch) / Attired in Cassocks, Bases, Helmetts, their sowrds drawne” (19–20). Detail increases exponentially as the introduction continues: ­ ere they make upp t­ owards the Ladies H with their swords aduanced, then Enter Mars in fury his Coate of Mayle and target borne by a Page his sword Aduanced, stepping betweene the Ladies and the and the [sic] souldiers sayes Angerly[.] [35–41] As in his play, Clavell’s principal concern ­here is to mandate timing and the quality of actions. When he sees Peace, “Mars goes gracefully upp / Takes peace by the hand” (54–55), a sudden change of emotional tenor, though with the same touching symbolism seen in gestural instructions for Witworth and Modestina. The gentleness with which the god of war approaches Peace contrasts with the soldiers, who, representing crude militaristic aggression, spitefully watch Peace exit: “The souldiers cast a threttning countenance / as shee passes” (60–61). In his play, Clavell often evokes such emotional states and relationships through s­ imple, unexplicated directions for conventional actions; such implicitness is absent, however, in his instructions for the amateur actors, particularly in the introduction’s final direction, which expands enormously to detail actions and materials (65–76). Throughout the introduction, Clavell’s level of direct explanation far surpasses that in his play: writing a masque for amateur actors, Clavell knew he had to be clearer explaining what he wanted; writing a play for professional actors, the playgoer knew that he could rely



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upon conventional signals when pos­si­ble, and, despite his status as an amateur, he knew what t­ hose signals ­were. In addition to the introduction, Clavell’s diary includes other paradramatic scraps that he wrote, including a prologue for Fletcher’s The Beggar’s Bush, acted in 1637 at the New Theater in Dublin.90 This prologue explains that the theater in Ireland, still in its “Infant dayes” (7), relies upon plays no longer fash­ion­able in London. Clavell asserts that when t­ hese plays premiered in London they ­were highly acclaimed and, with the feigned modesty typical of prologues, worries that the com­pany staging them now lacks the means to do them justice. Th ­ ose means once again represent the two qualities of greatest concern to the playgoer in staging his own play years earlier—­materials and actions: “Our habites too are meane; the same / Our action maymd, decrepite, feeble, Lame” (9–10). In his prologue’s parting words, however, this audience member considers such physical exigencies secondary to the power of audience reception: “As A generall Rule wee ever make it / Not what? or how we Act? But how you take it” (13–15). Clavell himself exemplified this attitude in his own crossing of the threshold between the audience and the tiring-­ house; for all of his attention to “what” the players are to “Act” in his play and “how,” his main concern was with audience experience and satisfaction. J. L. Styan suggests that an “efficient convention” is one “that the spectator forgets as soon as the pro­cesses of theatre are u ­ nder way.”91 Clavell’s investment in controlling his play’s per­for­mance and his comprehension of how to execute that control are not the work of someone who “forgot” what he saw in professionals’ plays; rather, his directions reveal an intense interest in the practicalities of staging in the professional theater. Dessen and Thomson point out that the “language used by a professional dramatist may not be exactly the same as that used by . . . ​an amateur writer,”92 but, as Clavell’s play shows, an amateur could indeed appropriate the purposes of the profession’s language, if not its precise linguistic and textual forms. Clavell’s directions enact an early modern per­for­mance as seen by an audience member who was not a member of the theater industry: Clavell calls for familiar props and costumes and understands the meanings encoded in common acting conventions, but he also deviates from both and signals that deviation to the actors when he thinks it necessary, at times overexplaining what it is that he wants the players to do or use when he recognizes that they might not understand his departures from convention. Most fundamental of all, the manuscript of The Soddered Citizen demonstrates that a playgoer, a “stranger” in the commercial theater, could participate in that theater’s playmaking activities, working with the players

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and bookkeeper to fit his creative vision into the forms and traditions of an established and largely professionalized system of per­for­mance. As a producing consumer, Clavell enjoyed—if only for a moment—­the kind of access to the industry for which other playwriting playgoers, such as, for example, William Percy, desperately hoped.

“Whither the better you may chuse the better”: Relinquishing Control in Mahomet and His Heaven and the Other Plays of William Percy As we have seen, despite the detail of most directions in The Soddered Citizen, Clavell was occasionally willing to cede to the actors some control over staging b­ ecause he trusted that they would sometimes be more effective than him at translating his script into a per­for­mance. In a similar, though more complex, way, the manuscript plays of William Percy repeatedly abdicate to the players freedom to use their expertise however they see fit in staging the amateur’s plays, while at the same time attempting to impose some degree of control over that staging.93 Although his deferential stage directions clearly indicate his awareness of his status as an outsider to the industry, they also reveal what Percy thought was feasible and how specific actions and materials might be changed to suit dif­fer­ent per­for­mance auspices—­more specifically, the contexts of per­for­mance by an adult com­pany and per­for­mance by a boys’ com­pany. In this, Percy’s plays provide further insight into the kind of deep, though inflected, understanding of the professional industry that an attentive audience member might develop. Between 1601 and 1604, Percy wrote six plays, including a comedy based upon typical early modern Eu­ro­pean misconceptions about Islam, entitled Mahomet and His Heaven.94 Drawing from a variety of sources, including sixteenth-­century anti-­Islamic texts, Eu­ro­pean travel narratives, medieval pseudo-­scholarship on Islam, and En­glish lit­er­a­ture (including The Canterbury Tales and John Lyly’s The W ­ oman in the Moon), Percy’s play follows the angels Haroth and Maroth, whom Mahomet (that is, Muhammad), disgusted with the disorder in Arabia as Muslims fight among themselves, has dispatched to earth in search of one virtuous person. Their mission fails, however, and instead they both lust for Epimenide, empress of Arabia; when they bring her to heaven, Mahomet also desires her, and she uses her influence over them to create chaos. Mahomet restores order, however, by banishing her to the moon



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and making peace with Ali (that is, Ali Ibn Abi Talib), resulting in a unification of the Sunni and Shia sects. In a subplot, two other spirits, Pyr and Whisk, are sent to earth to find the most arrant villain they can; in their quest, they come across a friar and a l­awyer who vie with one another for the ignominious title. Though a satire on the dangers of unbridled greed and lust, as well as the mendacity of l­ awyers and religious profiteering of friars, the play is also filled with broad comedy and buffoonery, as well as a considerable number of special stage effects requiring elaborate props to produce the illusion of magic. In the years immediately following the composition of his plays, Percy returned to them and made a number of changes with an eye t­ oward obtaining professional per­for­mance by two dif­fer­ent London troupes. Fi­nally, in 1636 he began a recopying pro­cess during which he made further revisions. In the 1640s, forty years ­a fter he had first written the plays, Percy’s fortunes w ­ ere worse, and he was r­ unning up crippling debts while drinking himself to an idle death in Oxford, but he completed the copying pro­cess, for some plays producing multiple fair copies. Mahomet survives in three of ­these ­later autograph fair copies (1644, 1646, and 1647), each slightly dif­fer­ent from the other two; none precisely represents the play as written in 1601 or revised shortly thereafter, and, despite Percy’s aspirations for a per­for­mance at the time of his Jacobean revisions, nothing indicates that any version of his plays saw the stage.95 In the early twentieth c­ entury, several scholars disagreed as to w ­ hether Percy’s manuscripts provided evidence of per­for­mance practices and materials on the professional stage. One side in that debate took it for granted that a strict barrier divided amateur dramatists from the professional industry: if Percy wrote as an amateur, he could not have looked to, or i­ magined his work in, the commercial play­house. ­These critics argued that Percy’s plays ­were meant for readers and ­were thus valueless as evidence of staging practices at the professional theaters.96 ­Others, however, thought it pos­si­ble to excavate from the plays clues about the professional stage.97 George Reynolds, for example, concluded that Percy “was familiar enough with the London theaters to know at least the outward details of their staging,” and though he “may not have known . . . ​the technical details of Elizabethan stage management, . . . ​ he did know the obvious t­ hings, what the average spectator would know.”98 Percy’s attention to theatrical effectiveness derived, Reynolds observed, from his “ardent . . . ​hope to get [his plays] performed in London.”99 Harold Hillebrand concurred that Percy eventually “looked about for professional engagements [and] thought it probable that his plays would be accepted by [a] com­pany,” but he speculated that the plays ­were first “written to occasion,”

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likely ­family cele­brations, and ­were acted privately, ­either “by amateurs, or a com­pany of professional actors.”100 Contradicting Reynolds, Hillebrand suggested that Percy’s plays must therefore be “utterly oblivious to the fashions of the professional theater in the period.”101 While a valid explanation for the plays as first written, their ­later lives contradict Hillebrand’s claim that beyond “the history of private theatricals and the amateur theatre [they] have l­ittle significance.”102 Most critics following Hillebrand, still stymied by the assumed barrier preventing amateurs from becoming or imagining themselves as playmakers in the professional theater, focus on Percy’s plays as private entertainments exclusively. Perhaps some aspects of Percy’s original manuscripts contained evidence of amateur theatrical practices, but this is only a guess: Percy undoubtedly had the professional theater in mind when he revised in the Jacobean and Caroline periods, and the revised states of his plays—­the only states extant—­therefore reflect his assumptions about what would be useful, desirable, or typical in a professional script. As with The Soddered Citizen, we can therefore turn to Percy’s plays for evidence of what one playgoer thought happened on the professional stage and how he thought it happened. The young Percy’s unpublished poems show that, in addition to frequenting the theaters, he read plays and was intrigued by the working habits and lives of professional dramatists. His Epigram 140, for example, refers to reading Dekker’s plays, and Epigram 8 mocks Peele for living in “an Ale-­howse” in order to get drunk enough “to pen a playe.”103 Other epigrams refer to the manuscript culture of the theater, such as Epigram 276, which warns actors, “in your rooled Parts, you do not misse / For, on you, ­there be many eyes, I wisse”—­indicating Percy’s knowledge of cue scripts.104 His understanding of the specifics of that manuscript culture, however, was not always accurate: Epigram 91, for example, describes a dramatist filling a quarter quire of paper with “narrow-­line[s] within-­without” to create “two commodious Bookes” of a play. A quire was twenty-­four or twenty-­five sheets;105 a quarter quire would thus be around six sheets. The i­magined playwright’s “lines” would have to be extremely tight for such a small amount of paper to produce “two commodious Bookes” (by way of comparison, Dekker required two sheets for just one act). This, combined with his description of a dramatist rather than a play­ house scribe copying out the book of his play, suggests that Percy’s familiarity with the theater did not extend to certain professional manuscript practices that occurred beyond the view of most playgoers. In general, though, Percy’s epigrams show him to be a play consumer familiar with gossip regarding, and curious about the practices of, members of the professional theater industry.



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In some instances, such as the mockery of Peele, they seem the work of a young aficionado of the stage who fantasized about being a part of the social world of the London playmakers. Two manuscript plays found in the library of the Percy f­amily home at Alnwick ­Castle might provide further evidence that Percy took an active interest in learning about professional play­house practices.106 One of t­ hese, the untitled play now known as John of Bordeaux, is a peculiar document marked up for play­house use by the Lord Strange’s Men around 1590.107 The other, The Wasp, is an autograph manuscript that also bears evidence of use in a professional play­house, prob­ably by the King’s Revels in the early 1630s.108 Percy thus may have had the John of Bordeaux manuscript as a model as early as the 1590s; as noted, many of his own plays show a familiarity with professionals’ plays of this period, and it would make sense that at the time he was writing them he sought out an example of a professional playbook manuscript. But he could only have acquired The Wasp ­later than its probable use by the King’s Revels in the 1630s—­a time when he was not writing his plays but rewriting them. If Percy did have access to the manuscript (a possibility, though one for which no direct evidence exists), it must have been in the 1630s, which would suggest that he was still actively seeking professional models well into the period of his Caroline-­era copying. Hillebrand points out that Percy’s plays ­were anachronistic by the time he finished his copying pro­cess in the late 1630s: “­There is no hint in [his plays] that Percy was aware of what was g­ oing on in the con­temporary theater. Instead, all his reminiscences go back, seemingly, to his first period at Oxford.”109 During that time as a student Percy had frequented the London theaters, and so not surprisingly his plays owe debts to vari­ous professional plays, but especially ­those of the boys at St. Paul’s in the 1580s and 1590s;110 Mahomet, for example, borrows much from Lyly’s The W ­ oman in the Moon (1590–95).111 Hillebrand’s charge that Percy’s plays ­were anachronistic for the 1630s overlooks the fact that although he wrote and first revised his plays in the early 1600s, it was only l­ater, in the 1630s, that he copied the extant manuscripts. While other playwriting playgoers, such as Wilson, revised their plays while copying them to better fit their new contexts, in one telling way Percy did not: boys’ com­pany stage directions in his Caroline copies must be remarkably faithful to his Elizabethan originals, since, by the time he made ­those Caroline copies, t­ hose companies no longer existed. Both when he wrote his plays and when he revised and copied them, Percy tried to put some of what he saw in professionals’ plays into practice in his

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own. Above all, however, if anything struck him as a pos­si­ble impediment to per­for­mance, he went out of his way to indicate that the players ­were ­free to change it to make the play ­viable. This is most evident in his alternative stage directions for per­for­mance by e­ ither a boys’ com­pany or an adult com­pany. Percy often words t­ hese directions as options aimed at obtaining the “best” pos­ si­ble per­for­mance. Rather than the detailed finality of literary stage directions often taken to be the hallmark of amateurism, t­ hese directions leave the play, in a manner, unfinished—an invitation to professional actors who know from experience which option would make the “better” (to use one of Percy’s favored terms) per­for­mance choice. Most professional dramatists who used such permissive and deferential language in stage directions wrote in the last two de­cades of the sixteenth ­century, and their plays ­were published in or around 1590, making it pos­si­ble that Percy encountered this style by reading some of ­these plays.112 The dramatis personae list in Mahomet, for example, details costuming, age, stature, and so forth; mitigating this specificity, however, is Percy’s deference to the producer to work around potential exigencies: the angels are to be costumed “in a severall cullour whither you please,” Percy suggests, “However at your best conformity be it” (Names.9–10, 13–14). With Epimenide, Percy recognized that what he ­imagined the character to look like might not be pos­si­ble with the available cast: she is to be “lowe of stature, and Imperially crowned[,] or taller (if so you can not get a lesse so con­ve­nient an Actor) which ­will shew better of the two I know” (Names.18–23). Contrary to Hillebrand’s claim that Percy wrote only for private per­for­ mance, his permissive directions often directly refer to a par­tic­u­lar London com­pany. In two of Mahomet’s character descriptions, for example, he adds instructions for a per­for­mance by the C ­ hildren of Paul’s: Mahomet is to be “without Moustach if for Pouls” (Names.4–5), and Mahomet’s angels are to be “without cumber of wings, if for Powles” (Names.12–13). Whisk and Pyr are “writt for Boyes or for a c­ ouple of l­ittle men, if for Actors” (that is, adults).113 If played by boys, Mahomet’s “bare face”114 requires a change of action when Gabriel resorts to vio­lence: “He held him by the Bearde, or clawd him by the face if for Poules” (1.1.41 SD).115 Differing per­for­mance contexts also suggested to Percy different-­sized casts: when Mahomet enters at the start of 4.5, for example, three angels follow, but Percy stipulates that ­there should be “more Angells if for Actors. Th ­ ese but for Poules” (4.5.1 SD). Evidently, this playgoer assumed that the boys’ companies staged such scenes using fewer cast members than the adult troupes did, ­either out of aesthetic taste or, more likely, physical demands (smaller stage space, less sophisticated apparatus for lowering



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angels, or perhaps simply fewer players to spare). Percy’s conditional instructions suggest that he was both ­eager for per­for­mance and worried about writing a play that might strike a producer as appropriate only for a dif­fer­ent com­pany, but they also hint at what a playgoer thought about the differing conditions in t­ hose two contexts. Some of Percy’s distinctions between the companies certainly derive from his awareness of the dif­fer­ent materials and practices of the two per­for­mance contexts. For example, Percy introduces the ball dance in 4.1 with the direction “For Poules with Balles” but “For Actors vide Finem Comædiæ”;116 at the end of one of the manuscript copies of his play, he appended “An Alteration for Actors” in which the dance takes on a nautical theme and becomes, as Reavley Gair states, “much more complex.”117 This “Alteration” includes optional interpretive meanings as well as actions deferentially presented as choices for a producer: the chorus represents “coasts or winds, chuse each of them Indifferently as you s­hall find cause.”118 When Mahomet pronounces sentence against his foes, the direction states: “Upon t­ hese last words appeared out of the ­whole cloth over the stage cherubin heds with their wings of gold on e­ ither side of the Tribunal: Thus for Actors” (5.10.5 SD). Percy assumed that certain effects w ­ ere within the capabilities of an adult com­pany but e­ ither beyond the boys’ means or, perhaps reflecting Percy’s own experience as a spectator at Paul’s, not in accord with what the boys’ audience wanted. He draws a similar distinction in the play’s final direction: If for Actors, A huge Globe of Fyre pendaunt from Roofe of the howse, with ever and anone a chatting, howling, singing and laughing betweene, within the globe, on e­ ither side, by the Two Angells supposed: If for Poules, a full Moone onely appearing aloft on syde thourough the cloth and just and right over the Tribunall, so till the w ­ hole companie be departed[.] [Epi.10 SD] For the adults, the play concludes with cacophony and spectacle. For the boys, ­there is “a full Moone onely”—no fiery globe, noises, or angels. Why Percy so starkly distinguishes the endings in this way is not clear, but the best explanation would be an assumption on his part about the dif­fer­ent practices and styles appropriate to the two types of companies—an assumption no doubt grounded in his experiences as a theatrical consumer. Percy would have seen professional actors stage an effect like his globe of fire at the January 5, 1606,

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marriage of the Earl of Essex and Lady Frances Howard. As a son of the Earl of North­umberland, Percy likely attended the event and so would have witnessed Jonson’s masque Hymenaei, in which, as designed by Inigo Jones,119 a “Region of Fire [in] a continuall Motion, was seene to whirle circularly,” an image similar to what Percy calls for at the end of Mahomet: “Most taking in the Spectacle, was the Spheare of Fire; in the top of all, encompassing the Ayre, and imitated with such art, and industry as the Spectators might discerne the Motion (all the time the Shewes lasted) without any Moover.”120 Jonson and Jones’s nuptial masque would have demonstrated to Percy the technical capacity of professional theater artists. Similarly, as a playgoer at Paul’s, he may have recalled Lyly’s The W ­ oman in the Moon, in which the moon descends from the “heavens” (as noted, Percy borrowed from The ­Woman in the Moon for Mahomet, and he likely owned a copy of the 1597 quarto).121 If he sought an image to conclude a boys’ com­pany per­for­mance of his play, it is reasonable that he would turn to one of the more striking effects that he once saw them use. In addition to materials and effects, Percy provides directions on acting styles, such as frequent instructions to the actor playing Epimenide on how to deliver his lines. Matthew Dimmock sees t­ hese as evidence that Percy intended the play, as with many closet dramas, “for reading, not only privately, but aloud.”122 If Percy had intended the play for reading aloud, however, it is probable that he would have included similar vocal instructions for other characters as well. Furthermore, his concern for the repre­sen­ta­tional portrayal of the character’s vocal qualities is in keeping with stage per­for­mances (in which an actor played a character) but unnecessary for oral readings of closet dramas (in which readers recited parts with ­little attempt at, or at least concern for, verisimilitude). This is borne out by Percy’s instructions at the start of 3.4: “This scene be it acted flat and sharpe by Epimenide lyke unto a right weather ­woman as she was, vide, Parts in the scene following for other­wise it w ­ ill be too sharpe and shrill in a boyes or ­womans voice I conceive” (3.4.0 SD). Reference to a “­womans voice” might suggest that Percy was thinking of a reading, in which a ­woman could take the part of Epimenide, but two other points in the direction speak specifically to theatrical per­for­mance: the instruction that the “scene” is to be “acted,” and the indication that Percy expected a boy to take the role (valid for ­either an adult or a boys’ com­pany). ­There are other places where Percy signals his expectation that his manuscript ­will be read by actors, to whom he relinquishes certain final decisions about performance-­oriented materials and practices. When Whisk removes his “­womans mask,” for example, he has e­ ither “a dog, swine, or Apes face”



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(3.2.21 SD); similarly, when Epimenide threatens Gabriel she indicates ­either “her Teeth or nayles” as weapons (4.6.15 SD). Th ­ ere would be no need for such elective instructions in a literary text meant for reading; they make sense only in a script. Percy offers two options for the play’s conclusion, both also testifying to his hope for a per­for­mance rather than a reading: “One part of the chorus went furth, The other remained with a Song, or went furth together all singing Prayse to God, whither the better.”123 “Whither the better” is an appeal to actors, not readers: Percy recognized that in per­for­mance one option would be more effective than the other, and he deferred to the players to make that choice. Dimmock suggests that the play’s “intricate stage directions” ­were not “incompatible” with a reading, but the many expressly theatrical signals in ­those directions make such a conclusion unlikely; the many optional signals make it improbable. Expectation of a reading only would not result in instructions such as the one appended to the end of the epilogue: “You may bring in a banquet h ­ ere. A banquet, if you please so, I meane by Actors.”124 Likewise, Percy’s addition to the ball dance is concerned with per­for­mance reception: “If this ­shall not be so fitt for the understanding (it being uncouth to the Audience) The other alteration . . . ​may well serve.”125 Fi­nally, Percy’s note on which character delivers the prologue speaks to casting exigencies relevant in a theatrical context but irrelevant to a reading: “Whither that this the now weather ­woman . . . ​or Dervis . . . ​­shall speake the Prologue, I referre it to your opinions, Gentlemen. . . . ​W hither the whither You may chuse the E ­ ither.”126 The amalgamation of verb tenses in many of Percy’s directions also hints at his expectation of per­for­mance. Hillebrand convincingly suggests that Percy had read published masques (which often use the past tense to describe actions that had been staged in their one enactment) and “wished to imitate” what he assumed was conventional for per­for­mance directions.127 Evidence supporting this theory is seen in Percy’s “optional” directions that straddle both past and ­f uture tense. For example, the instruction to Gabriel to attack Mahomet demonstrates that Percy wrote with an optative, not retrospective, view: “He held him by the Bearde, or clawd him by the face if for Poules” (4.6.15 SD). “He held him” reads as if a past per­for­mance is being recalled, but “if for Poules” suggests expectation (or hope) of a ­future per­for­mance. The phrases “if for Poules” and “if for actors”—­repeated throughout Mahomet—­ imply, not per­for­mances that have happened, but per­for­mances the playwriting playgoer hopes w ­ ill happen.128 ­These kinds of directions—­theatrical, hopeful, flexible—­feature regularly in all of Percy’s plays, serving as further evidence that when he revised his plays

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he envisioned an appearance on the London stages. In Aphrodysial, for example, Percy again indicates that beards are not required “for Powles” but should be used “for Actors”; he also distinguishes between how to produce sound effects at the dif­fer­ent venues: “Chambers” (cannons) are to be used by “Actors” but are only “supposd For Powles.”129 Like the reduction in angels for the boys’ per­for­mance of Mahomet, A Country Tragædye in Vacunium calls for a smaller final chorus if staged at Paul’s.130 Concern for decorum in casting emerges in other ways as well: the adults’ prologue of The Cuck-­Queanes and Cuckolds Errants, delivered by the ghost of Richard Tarlton, is “to be omitted if for Powles, and another Prologue for him to be brought in Place.”131 Tarlton was a figure from the adult stage, and so his appearance on the boys’ stage must have struck Percy as being out of place. Other directions do not bifurcate between boys and adults but still register the playgoer’s awareness that some choices are best left to actors. In Necromantes Percy’s ambivalence over entrance methods suggests his recognition that “discovering” a character and having that character enter are not equivalent actions in per­for­mance, though he himself is uncertain as to which is preferable: “The Arras being drawn by, Lauender was discouerd in a wodden chaire sitting and sleeping, or so brought furth and sett in midde of the Floore. Whither the Better.”132 Similarly, in Aphrodysial, Percy offers two alternatives for a group exit and yields to the professional playmakers’ judgment as to which would be most effective: “­Here went furth the ­whole chorus in a shuffle as ­after a Play in a Lords howse . . . ​or went furth in state all, as riding vpon Dolphins . . . ​whither the better you may chuse the better.”133 The clearest evidence of Percy’s interest in professional per­for­mance practices, however, is his note “To the Master of c­ hildren of Powles,” appended to The Cuck-­Queanes and Cuckolds Errants.134 This note unambiguously indicates Percy’s hopes for per­for­mance by the boys. More impor­tant—­ and in keeping with the permissiveness of his stage directions—in it he attempts to make such a per­for­mance more likely by preemptively allowing for nonauthorial revisions to work around what the playgoer understood to be the unique contingencies of per­for­mance at Paul’s: To the Master of c­ hildren of Powles Memorandum that if any of the fi[n]e and fore= most of ­these Pastoralls and Comoedyes conteyned in this volume ­shall but ouereach in length (The ­children not to begin before Foure a­ fter Prayers



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And the gates of Powles shutting at six) the Tyme of supper, that then in time and place conuenient, you do let passe some of the songs and make the consort the shorter, For I suppose t­ hese Plaies be Somewhat too long for that Place.135 Percy’s note signals his hopes for a per­for­mance but also his understanding of how the boys’ com­pany operated: despite being aware that his plays at adult-­ company length might “be Somewhat too long,” he submits them anyway, trusting—­indeed, expecting—­the master to cut them to make them suitable. Like his stage directions, Percy’s note points to the playgoer’s sensitivity to the exigencies of per­for­mance by adult companies and boys’ companies. He has expectations about the dif­fer­ent needs of the two and anticipates changes to his plays, and how they ­will be staged, to meet t­ hose needs. Perhaps Percy first wrote his plays for private per­for­mance; not long ­after, however, he revised them with an eye t­oward professional per­for­mance by ­either an adult com­pany or the ­Children of Paul’s. ­Because the second Paul’s com­pany was active only ­until 1608, Percy prob­ably added his hopeful, open-­ ended stage directions very soon a­ fter writing the plays.136 An additional f­actor makes this dating scenario attractive. As students at Oxford in the late 1580s, Percy and fellow poet Barnabe Barnes ­were both members of a Catholic literary coterie at Gloucester Hall. Barnes dedicated his sonnet collection Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) to “his dearest friend” Percy; the following year, Percy included in Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia a poem in response to Barnes’s sequence.137 In 1606, Percy was still friends with Barnes and familiar with his work, for he contributed a commendatory madrigal to Barnes’s Four Bookes of Offices.138 It is probable, therefore, that Percy knew about and had possibly seen the King’s Men’s per­for­mance of Barnes’s play The Dev­il’s Charter at court on February 2, 1607.139 Perhaps inspired by his friend’s foray into playwriting for a professional com­pany, Percy returned to his own plays and revised them with alternatives for staging by ­either the adult actors he had seen at court or the boy actors he so often patronized.140 When Percy again returned to his plays in the 1630s, his intentions may have involved, as Dimmock proposes, a “move t­owards a more ‘readerly’ script.”141 Perhaps he planned to pres­ent the copies as gifts; perhaps he hoped for publication. Thirty years earlier, however, when he first revised his plays, he aimed to obtain per­for­mance in the London theaters whose plays he had seen and read, and possibly even collected. Mahomet was revised for ­those theaters,

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and, as with all of Percy’s plays, that revision pro­cess left in the play signals of the playwriting playgoer’s objectives and assumptions regarding the differences in style, materials, and practices between adult and boys’ companies. Like Mountfort and Clavell, Percy was a playgoer concerned for the staging of his plays and willing to change his own vision of them in order to obtain that per­for­mance. As he allowed to his would-be producer in an explanatory note in his Mahomet manuscript, “­These Alterations The one or the other You may chuse the Better.”142 Resigning control, ­these directions are aspirational, demonstrative of desired, but not necessarily a­ctual, effects. Rather than recover what was staged, Percy’s plays recover what a playgoer thought could be staged and what he wanted to see staged. Considering Percy’s Caroline recopying of his Elizabethan plays and his retention of directions written for a desired per­for­mance at Paul’s more than four de­c ades earlier, Hillebrand suggests that the amateur was living “over again the brief period when he was a busy and ‘successful’ dramatist.”143 Boys’ companies w ­ ere rare in the Caroline era (with the exception of the C ­ hildren of the Revels at Salisbury Court in the 1630s); by the 1640s, the boys ­were only a memory, and yet Percy kept the instructions for them in his play copies. Like Clavell taking his manuscript of The Soddered Citizen to Ireland, ­there is in this a hint of his nostalgia for his brief flirtation with the theater he had loved so much. What do ­these directions—so impor­tant to Percy even half a ­century out of context—­suggest about the playwriting playgoer’s perceived place in early modern dramatic culture? Most fundamentally, they negate the possibility that the plays ­were meant only for reading: like Yarington, Percy thought of his plays as scripts, and, unlike with Yarington, ­there is direct evidence that he wanted ­t hose scripts to be used for per­for­mance. Indeed, even if his late recopying was an effort to make the texts more “readerly,” he still chose to retain ­those directions that directly reference per­for­mance. Many of t­hose directions imply that he expected, and was willing, to relinquish control over staging to actors in order to obtain performance—­something plausible in a professional theatrical setting but unlikely for a domestic reading. While Mountfort gave up on his elaborate direction ­because he expected to be able to show the players what he wanted, Percy evidently did not expect to be on hand when his plays w ­ ere prepared for the stage. Paradoxically, then, despite their detailed directions, Percy’s plays signal the playwriting playgoer’s willingness to cede authority over staging to t­ hose who could, based on their practiced expertise, “chuse the better.” Though drawing upon his familiarity with the theater as an audience member and reader in order to write his plays, the



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outsider to the industry ultimately assumed that t­ here w ­ ere certain limitations that his position in the play­house placed upon his scripts—an indication that even a dedicated play consumer perceived constraints on what a “stranger” playmaker might be able to accomplish in an increasingly closed playmaking industry. With this recognition, he deferred to the professionals whose practiced training he assumed gave them an advantage over his reception-­oriented training as a playgoer.

* * * During their preparations for “The Most La­men­ta­ble Comedy and Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe,” Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, and the other “rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream express two general concerns over the materials and practices they w ­ ill use for their play. In representing t­hese concerns, Shakespeare satirizes amateur playmakers as disconnected from the real prob­lems, and possibilities, of theatrical production. First, they worry about dramaturgical propriety and conforming to accepted traditions or conventions. For example, the task Quince undertakes of dividing the makeshift space into the familiar parts of the playhouse—­stage, tiring-­house, implied place for the audience—­reflects his assumption that rehearsal ­will be effective only if the material conditions of per­for­mance are replicated as closely as pos­si­ble.144 His use of forest vegetation may be inventive, but his need to “re-­make” the architecture of the play­house in order to prepare the play suggests a desperate desire for theatrical precision that, so to speak, misses the forest for the trees. An even more pressing concern for ­these amateurs, however, is theatrical efficacy. Recalling Percy’s allowance that “wither the better” the actors may “chuse the better,” Bottom won­ders: “What beard ­were I best to play [Pyramus] in?” Dif­fer­ent styles of beards—­“your straw-­colour beard, your orange-­tawny beard, your purple-­in-­grain beard, or your French-­crown-­colour beard”—­create dif­fer­ent images of the character and so, by implication, ­will change its reception by the audience.145 Finding the most suitable material is a priority for ­these amateurs, but their understanding of “suitable” is comically askew. As Quince prepares for their first rehearsal, one of his principal jobs is “draw[ing] a bill of properties, such as our play wants.”146 When they meet to rehearse, the prob­lem of ­those missing materials takes on heightened importance. Allowing theatrical propriety to defer to efficacy, the amateurs come up with a series of ludicrous solutions that involve e­ ither the clumsy manipulation of materials—­the lion’s costume with

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the hole for Snug’s face, the open casement win­dow, the bush of thorns and lantern for Moonshine, the loamy costume for Wall—or the adoption of ridicu­lous practices—­Snug’s apol­o­getic and disruptive self-­identification, for example, and Wall’s crannied fin­gers. Though t­ hese solutions are impractical and inelegant, the amateurs nonetheless desire to stage their play in a manner that is both acceptable and effective; it is the practical translation of the script into a per­for­mance that frustrates that desire. The mechanicals display an amateurism unaware of the function of repre­sen­ta­tion in per­for­mance but neither negligent nor uninterested in results; it is, rather, markedly, perhaps unduly, concerned with theatricality, convention, and reception. The mechanicals are, of course, hyperbolic; Shakespeare uses them to mock a supposed incongruity between what amateurs want to achieve and how they go about achieving it. The professional’s attempt to realize comic value from lampooning this incongruity does not provide reliable evidence about a­ ctual amateur playmakers. Plays by ­actual amateurs, in fact, reveal a far more nuanced attempt to appropriate the materials and practices that they, as playgoers, saw the profession using. Knowing dramatists’ relationship to the industry ­matters when we look at the evidence of how they wanted their plays to be staged. When Shakespeare relinquishes authority to the actors, he signals his proximity to them as well as his familiarity with their practices. When a playgoer displays such openness—­such as Percy’s optional stage directions or Clavell’s invitation to Pollard to make up a song—we must eliminate proximity from the relationship; instead, their openness marks their assumption that the actors already know what to do, and thus of the playgoers’ familiarity with what the actors are likely to do. Similarly, Shakespeare’s silence on how to execute elaborate actions differs from Mountfort’s silence when he gives up trying to write out how to stage the launching of the Mary. In both, the dramatist intended to explain in person what he wanted, but while such an intention is to be expected from a professional such as Shakespeare, Mountfort’s silence indicates that an outsider to the industry could also anticipate collaborating with the actors in staging his play. Perhaps ­because of the association between Shakespeare and professionalism, scholars have long held that amateurs’ plays, even ­those written for and acted upon the commercial stage, have l­ittle to tell us about what happened in the early modern play­house. T. H. Howard-­Hill, for example, sweepingly charges that “plays written by authors not experienced in the theatrical mechanics of drama . . . ​­were originally imperfectly fitted for per­for­mance.”147 Alfred Harbage dismisses nonprofessional playmakers who



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attempt to deploy the materials of per­for­mance as “naïve amateurs.”148 Scholars commenting on how theater artists who w ­ ere not regular members of the industry attempted to use its practices often repeat this charge of naïveté. Such a broad claim assumes that playgoers’ plays are, or should be, equivalent pieces of evidence to professionals’ plays, and expects that the two should therefore display the same features. This is a prob­lem of asking the wrong questions, given what the evidence can reasonably tell us. Rather than discussing playgoers’ plays as “imperfect,” it is more precise, and useful, to read their plays as revealing a dif­fer­ent understanding of dramaturgy, one that evolved in a dif­ fer­ent part of the play­house. Instead of “naïveté ” about materials and practices, stage directions in playgoers’ plays reveal a frequent heightened concern for theatrical effectiveness specifically from the audience’s perspective. Concomitant to that concern was an interest in how the play­house worked, to seeing the artifice beneath the art, to following or attempting to follow professional conventions in the use of practices and materials. Based upon this close interest in the materials and practices of per­for­ mance, playwriting playgoers also provide a dif­fer­ent model of spectatorship from the “distracted” audiences that the “orchestration” method of audience study assumes filled the early modern play­houses. For example, proposing that the early modern audience experience was one of “collective participation” controlled by the professional playmakers’ ability to exercise “enchantment” over the viewer, Anthony Dawson theorizes that individual playgoers w ­ ere subsumed into the crowd and that their engagement with the play was limited to “rapt attention and power­ful emotional responses” to the visual splendor and dramatic fiction that they saw.149 Playwriting playgoers had precisely the opposite kind of audience experience: they ­were individuals rather than cogs in a collective, they ­were engaged intellectually rather than just enchanted emotionally, and they w ­ ere alert to the workings of the per­for­mance rather than just ­under the spell of its spectacle trappings. Playgoers who wrote fantastic and complex (sometimes impossible) stage effects contradict Dawson’s view of “playgoers [who] took in the theatrical spectacle . . . ​deeply colored by their ambivalent sense of the power of images.”150 For ­these playgoers, intense plea­sure in and fascination with, rather than ambivalence over, the rich dramatic and significating potential of theatrical spectacle carried over into their own stage directions, where the materials of per­for­mance become dramatic signs carry­ing intentional meanings greater than the sum of their physical parts. As comically absurd as they are, Quince’s suggestion that one of the actors can “disfigure” the moon and Bottom’s flash of inspiration

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that another actor can “signify” a wall speak to a faith in the interpretive power of the audience to decode per­for­mance conventions and identify figurative meanings beneath theatrical actions and materials (though, in the end, fearing incorrect interpretation of t­ hose figurative signs, “Moonshine” and “Wall” offer explicit glosses of their identities). As a result of their position in the play­house, playgoers did often deviate from how professional playmakers went about staging a play—­deviations, such as Yarington’s “to the p ­ eople,” that nonetheless reveal the playgoer’s unique perspective on the stage. Invested in marginalizing amateurs’ plays from serious study, however, scholarship on the early modern stage has unhelpfully fixated on t­ hese differences rather than tried to piece together just how ­those differences lined upon with amateurs’ par­tic­u­lar position as consumers. Furthermore, and perhaps even more significant, playwriting playgoers did not always deviate from professionals in how they used play­house materials and practices; many plays by playgoers are remarkable not for how much they differ from professionals’ plays but for how much they resemble them. Vennar’s plot, with which this chapter began, succeeded in securing an audience precisely ­because a consumer appropriated recognizable theatrical language. The success Vennar had in ­doing this correlates with his own understanding of that language as well as his capacity to adapt the language to his own par­tic­ u­lar (perhaps criminal) ends. Gurr and Ichikawa argue that staging choices in any play w ­ ere “influenced by the period of development in which the play was written, the design of the play­house for which it was written, and the par­ tic­u­lar kind of audience expectation prevailing at that type of play­house.”151 We must also, however, ­factor in the dramatist’s position in that play­house. Not all writers for the professional players ­were professional playmakers; we should not read their stage directions as if they ­were.

chapter 4

“Watching e­ very word” Playwriting Playgoers as Verse Dramatists

In The Art of En­glish Poesie (1589), George Puttenham lamented that average playgoers ­were largely unaware of the poetry that they ­were hearing. “The ­common p ­ eople, who rejoyce much to be at playes and enterludes,” he complains, “. . . besides their naturall ignoraunce, have at all such times their eares so attentive to the m ­ atter, and their eyes upon the shewes of the stage, that they take l­ittle heede to the cunning of the rime, and therefore be as well satisfied with that which is grosse, as with any other finer and more delicate.”1 Puttenham’s theory of reception is a zero-­sum game: if the audience enjoys visual spectacle, that enjoyment must come at the expense of listening to the poetry. ­These playgoers have “their ears . . . ​attentive” to the plot (“the m ­ atter”), auditory attention equivalent to their enchantment with the visual spectacle (“the shewes”), and so are unable to discern how the poetry in which that plot is expressed works. To Puttenham, the capacity to detect and, most impor­tant, understand the workings of stage poetry marks a playgoer as uncommon. This stratifies the audience between the few, who are poetically literate, and the many, who are interested only in being entertained without any concern for how that entertainment is produced. While many modern scholars have refuted this sweeping disparagement by arguing that “even modestly educated persons could hear the meters of poetry as they would occur, on the stage or in everyday speech,”2 as late as the mid-­twentieth ­century some critics perpetuated Puttenham’s skepticism of the audience’s capacity to comprehend how dramatic poetry produced theatrical effects. E. E. Stoll, for example, argued that, though “by ear the audience through lifelong attendance responded to the niceties of the [poetic] art in

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the . . . ​London theatres[, t]he technique as such they did not understand.”3 Plays by professional dramatists cannot tell us w ­ hether audience members might indeed be able to develop the degree of understanding about the workings of dramatic poetry that Puttenham and Stoll deny them; plays by audience members, however, do afford evidence of the kinds of dramatic poetry certain playgoers recognized as theatrically efficacious. Some playwriting playgoers possessed experience as nondramatic poets, which may have aided them in making strategic choices about the use of poetry in their plays. Their choices reflect an awareness of how the poetry that they heard in plays had specifically theatrical ends dif­fer­ent from the nondramatic poetry they ­were accustomed to writing. Considering plays by playgoers who ­were also nondramatic poets, of course, limits focus to a specialized subgroup of amateurs. Unlike Puttenham’s “common” playgoers, poets watching plays ­were thought of as being highly alert to the poetry and its effects. Joseph Hall describes a convocation of poets in a play­house behaving like “professional” playgoers by judging another poet’s work with synesthetic attention to verse. Assembled “in high parliament,” the poets Sit watching everie word, and gesturement, Like curious Censors of some doughtie geare, Whispering their verdit in their fellowes eare. Wo to the word whose margent in their scrole, Is noted with a blacke condemning Cole. But if each periode might the Synode please, Ho, bring the Ivy boughs, and bands of Bayes.4 The “high Parliament” serves as a peer review system, a tool of occupational closure suggesting that poets in the audience form a specialized coterie of playgoers listening for and evaluating specific signals of language and meaning. While Hall’s example is satiric, many a­ ctual poets ­were, as this chapter shows, marking the verse and “watching e­ very word” from the audience, a specialized subgroup of playgoers practiced in a poetic tradition that differed from the uses of poetry on the stage. By employing certain conventions of stage poetry that ­were distinct from this nondramatic tradition, however, t­ hese playwriting playgoers give evidence of their experiences as audience members and readers of plays. Sustained practice writing for per­for­mance refined for many professional dramatists their understanding of the nature and function of dramatic poetry,5 but b­ ecause ­these playwriting playgoers lacked that experience, we must read



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their plays recognizing that ­these dramatists developed their understanding of verse on stage as regular consumers rather than regular producers of dramatic poetry. This chapter examines the prosodic practices of three playwriting playgoers who had also written nondramatic poetry and whose plays, in comparison to that nondramatic poetry, demonstrate their understanding of how poetry on the stage could, and indeed had to, work differently, and draw upon dif­fer­ent conventions, from poetry on the page. Although they came by that knowledge in a way dif­fer­ent from the way the professionals did, ­these playgoers often display professional-­style sensitivity ­toward the expressive and dramatic functions of verse. In this, they challenge the view, a­ dopted by some scholars, that attention to and care for technical precision and poetic artistry w ­ ere concerns only of professionals with experience writing for the stage.6 The chapter begins by exploring how Robert Chamberlain’s shifts between verse and prose achieve specific theatrical ends in The Swaggering Damsel (1625–40). Th ­ ese shifts signal the nuanced understanding an attuned playgoer possessed of how switching between modes could produce a range of signifying effects. The second case study examines patterns of rhyme in Alexander Brome’s The Cunning Lovers (1632–39) and juxtaposes t­hose patterns against rhyme in plays by con­temporary professionals writing for the same com­pany as Brome. The marked differences between the use of rhyme by the playwriting playgoer and by the professionals raises some challenges for how we go about recovering an understanding of theatrical fashion in the period. The chapter concludes by analyzing metrical variants in the speeches of two characters in Barnabe Barnes’s The Dev­il’s Charter (1606), considering how the playgoer appropriates from the professional stage poets the practice of deliberately modulating and disrupting the blank verse line for par­tic­u­lar theatrical ends. Th ­ ese three examples exemplify how thoroughly and carefully playgoers could comprehend and make use of verse in performance—­demonstrating that, despite Puttenham’s pessimism, t­hese theatrical consumers knew not just what effects dramatic poetry could have but also how it creates t­hose effects and how to shape their own writing to obtain them.

“Lets mixe our selves”: Robert Chamberlain’s The Swaggering Damsel and the Prose/Verse Distinction In an unaired episode of John Barton’s 1982 Royal Shakespeare Com­pany televised master classes for the BBC, a group of actors grapple with the theatrical

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difference between Shakespeare’s prose and his verse. “What is it,” ponders David Suchet, “that makes Shakespeare decide to use one or the other at a par­tic­u­lar moment?”7 Barton explains that it is the transition between them that ­matters theatrically: “I believe such changes often contain hints to an actor about character. So I want to ask why Shakespeare uses one or another in a given instance. I suppose we would expect him to use verse for romantic, heightened passages and prose for naturalistic and low-­life ones. And indeed he often does so. But not always.”8 By the episode’s end, the actors agree that such modal transitions are clues about character that indicate the presence of “Shakespeare the director.”9 Like the RSC players, most modern actors of Shakespeare use the verse/prose system to identify and communicate impor­ tant dramatic information to their audience, a practice endorsed also by much of the scholarship on Shakespeare’s prose and prosody.10 In the early modern play­house too, shifts between prose and verse may have signaled the actors, but they ­were aural markers for playgoers as well. As Brian Vickers argues, when the audience heard changes from verse to prose, it would have known that the deviation was “made for a par­tic­u­lar reason.”11 It was this expectation of a theatrical purpose from the modal shift that caused amateur dramatist Thomas Goffe to complain about the “common stager” who, in his delivery of stage poetry, “turnes to prose / The most fild Lynes” of verse: distinction between prose and poetry, Goffe implies, is essential to dramatic meaning, and so erasing that distinction ruins the playwright’s work.12 The deliberate transition from verse into prose or prose into verse was a means for the writer to indicate to the actor and audience a specific change in the play’s narrative, emotional level, stakes, or other dramatic qualities.13 In plays by competent dramatists, then, the prose/verse distinction was neither a literary exercise nor a mere rhetorical move to discriminate between social or generic categories but a malleable and specifically performance-­oriented tool. Such dramaturgical competence was not limited to professionals; for example, playwriting playgoer Robert Chamberlain carefully deployed the prose/verse distinction in order to produce a number of deliberate dramatic effects in his single play. Chamberlain was not one of Puttenham’s “common” playgoers. Clerk to the queen’s solicitor-­general and with an ecclesiastical education from Exeter College, Oxford, Chamberlain was a man of learning and letters. He was also part of a coterie of late 1630s writers who appended commendatory verses to one another’s works.14 Not ­every member of the group was a professional dra-



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matist, but all ­were evidently playgoers and play readers, and, like Chamberlain, writers of nondramatic poetry and prose as well. In his own nondramatic writing, Chamberlain made the typical generic distinction in the use of prose and verse. In the late 1630s he wrote Nocturnal Lucubrations (1638), which includes poems in vari­ous forms and styles. This was followed soon ­after by a series of prose jest books, including Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimsies (1639) and Jocabella, or A Cabinet of Conceits (1640; the title page promises “Epigrams, and other Poems” but the book does not include any). L ­ ater, some of Chamberlain’s poetry appeared in the anthology The Harmony of the Muses (1654).15 The versification in Chamberlain’s nondramatic poetry is, as Lisa Hopkins remarks, functional and, largely adhering to established rules of genre, form, and imagery, rarely innovative, only occasionally engaging in the “rather heavy-­handed metrical experiment.”16 Except for ­these experiments Chamberlain’s poems consist of regular iambic pentameter couplets marked by frequent, plodding monosyllables. The occasional hypermetric line seems accidental as often as purposeful. Simplistic alliteration abounds, and favorite words (“starry” and “veil,” for example) repeat obsessively. Chamberlain filled his poems with references to my­thol­ogy and nature, while the imagery in his prose jests belongs instead to the workaday worlds of village and city life. Besides content, the clearest delineation between Chamberlain’s prose and poetry is by genre, with the former used for comic material and the latter for serious. This strict binary does not, however, account for Chamberlain’s entire output. The moral aphorisms in Lucubrations demonstrate the awareness Chamberlain had that prose need not be reserved for comic ends, just as—if Balaam’s Ass Cudgeled is his—he could use verse for satire. Furthermore, he employed a theatrically strategic blend of the modes in The Swaggering Damsel (1625–40).17 Chamberlain’s play is a “charming . . . ​romantic comedy,” in keeping with the Caroline vogue for Neo-­Platonist romances involving witty repartee.18 Structurally, Chamberlain experimented with several devices that ­were peculiar for the period, such as orchestrating stage action to create the impression of scenes emerging from the scene before them; likewise, the epilogue emerges as part of the final speech in the play rather than standing alone as a separate speech. The play incorporates many stock comedic figures En­glish drama inherited from Greek New Comedy, such as the clever servant, the foolish servant, the greedy old man, and the shifty ­lawyer. Layered onto ­these classical

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motifs, however, are a number of typically En­glish themes; most notable of ­these is the play’s withering depiction of the decay of the landed gentry and rise of the usurers who preyed upon it. In addition to the usual crossed lovers of romantic comedy, The Swaggering Damsel includes the less common practice of a man cross-­dressing as a w ­ oman. Valentine convinces his beloved Sabina to sleep with him before they are married; ­after, however, he worries that the ease with which she acceded presages her sexual looseness. He breaks off the marriage, much to the ire of her ­father, Sir Timothy Testy. To escape Sir Timothy’s revenge, Valentine’s kinsman, Fairfaith, aids him in disguising himself as a maid. Fairfaith, however, is in love with Sabina’s ­sister, Mirabell, and the two concoct a plan to set all right. Mirabell disguises Sabina as a “swaggering” cavalier. Sabina-­cavalier claims that “he” is in love with Valentine-­ maid and forces “her” to marry “him.” In their marriage bed, Valentine discovers that “he” is a “she” and thinks that he has been tricked into marrying a prostitute. In the end, Sabina reveals herself, and Valentine repents for ­having wronged her. Greasing the action are Sir Timothy’s servant Hilts, Valentine’s servant Trash, an avaricious ­lawyer, Muchcraft, and Valentine’s friend, Sportlove. As with most Caroline romantic comedies, the play blends social humor with sexual tension and sets virtuous intentions against emotional instincts. Accordingly, it is ripe with shifts in levels of discourse marked by the modal binary of verse and prose. As with many plays, unfortunately, the printing of the quarto complicates analy­sis of that binary. The compositor who set the manuscript was e­ ither not familiar with play printing or worked from unclear copy.19 Despite this, it is pos­si­ble to discern certain deliberate patterns for the distribution of verse and prose in the play. As would be expected, the primary pattern Chamberlain follows obeys the usual modal rules with which he was familiar from his nondramatic writing, presenting most serious material in verse and most comic material in prose; for example, Valentine’s elaborate professions of love are verse, while Trash’s jokes are prose.20 Not all of Damsel, however, accords with this simplistic rubric of genre, nor can all of the passages that deviate from it be dismissed as compositor’s errors. At certain points, Chamberlain clearly uses the transition between verse and prose for dramaturgical ends. The playwriting playgoer recognized that such modal shifts could be used to create dramatic effects and add complicating layers to characters. Chamberlain’s deliberate deployment of such shifts suggests the extent to which the playgoer modeled his own playwriting upon what he heard and read in professional dramatists’ plays.



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The dual-­wooing scene in act 1 is a particularly good example of how Chamberlain sets verse against prose for a specific dramatic purpose. Valentine opens his heart to Sabina with halting verse, his lines broken by metrical imperfections and trite rhymes; in reply, Sabina offers brief prose interjections that reveal nothing of her own heart and only provoke him to further prosodic grotesqueries. “When Cupid’s thirstie, and desires a sip,” Valentine orates, “Of Nectar, than he runnes unto thy lip.”21 When this style fails, he shifts gears and tries to win her over with heavi­ly laden prose, but when that too fails he returns to inelegant poetry. Sabina refuses to play Valentine’s game, reserving her transition into verse for a rejoinder to his observation that her ­father approves of their marriage: “I scorne to be directed, / I am my selfe sir, and my onely soule / Is my owne w ­ ill and humour.”22 Rather than a mere per­for­mance of emotional depth, Sabina’s switch to verse signals the authenticity of her emotions. When Valentine uses poetry, his language comes across as feigned and rehearsed; Sabina, by contrast, reserves poetry for genuine sentiments. The scene is a dual wooing ­because, while Valentine and Sabina whisper together aside, Fairfaith woos Mirabell almost entirely in verse. Valentine’s modal vacillations juxtapose with Fairfaith’s nearly consistent use of verse to win his beloved; while the former’s poetry comes across as fake and scripted, the latter’s, like Sabina’s, efficaciously conveys his honest interior state: “This discourse,” recognizes Mirabell, “has beene a true prospective glasse, whereby / To peepe into your minde.”23 Chamberlain thus orchestrates the two wooing sequences—­one failed, one successful—in part through the characters’ alternate uses of verse: Valentine alone adopts a melodramatic and affected mode of stage poetry; for Sabina, Mirabell, and Fairfaith, verse is a mode that indicates, and thus requires, sincerity. In addition to Trash, Hilts, and Muchcraft, a good portion of the play’s humor derives from the conflict between Sir Timothy and Valentine’s ­father, Sir Plenteous Crambag, which impedes the young c­ ouple’s marriage. Both ­fathers are ste­reo­t ypical “blocking” agents in the romantic plot: Sir Timothy is an “old angry decayd” knight whose ­family fortune has fallen into the hands of nouveau riche merchants, such as the penny-­pinching usurer, Sir Plenteous. Pronounced verbal tics mark Sir Timothy’s prose, including heavy-­handed rhetorical questions and repetitive interjections (“Ha” and “Umph”), creating an aural signature of the character as a sputtering buffoon. When Mirabell brings word of how Valentine has dishonored Sabina, however, Sir Timothy transforms his discourse into polished, anguished verse. His shift into this heightened mode dramatizes his heightened emotional distress: “My passive

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fortitude wherewith I once / Out-­fac’d misfortune now is fled and gone.”24 Like his ­daughter, Sir Timothy expresses his honest feelings in the elevated mode of blank verse. He only returns to prose when he regains his composure and tries to take action, first banishing his ­daughter and then blaming Hilts for not protecting her. The old knight experiences the same slippage at the play’s climax when he learns that Valentine has married a ­woman he does not even know: his enraged reproaches are verse, but he returns to his usual stuttering prose (some set incorrectly as verse) as he seizes control of the situation and dispatches officers to find the w ­ oman. This prose interlude again heightens to impassioned verse, however, when Sir Timothy discovers that the mystery w ­ oman is, in fact, Sabina. By establishing prose as the mode to which Sir Timothy owes his “normal allegiance,” to use Vickers’s term, Chamberlain can dramatize his changes in mood by having the knight switch to verse as his circumstances change.25 Chamberlain uses the verse/prose distinction for more than just signaling characters’ moods, however; the shift becomes integral also to the play’s central dramatic device of cross-­dressing. When Sabina (pretending to be a cavalier) forcibly “woos” Valentine (pretending to be a maid), prose and verse take on gendered implications. Earlier, when Valentine expressed his love to Sabina he used verse, and Sabina deflected him with prose; but when they reverse gender roles, they also reverse modes of speech. “Lets mixe our selves,” Sabina-­c avalier urges, a sexual joke which plays off the fact that they have “mixed” their gender repre­sen­ta­tions, but which also describes their changed modes of speech:26 Sabina-­cavalier uses bellicose verse for her threats, while Valentine-­maid only manages to slip in the occasional, submissive line of prose. Sabina adopts a per­for­mance of hypermasculinity that requires a medium capable of conveying bombastic aggression, and so she takes on the same verse style that Valentine deployed against her in his sexualized overtures in the first scene. Si­mul­ta­neously, Valentine abandons that verse and, giving his new mode a feminized valence as a result of his cross-­dressed disguise, adopts acquiescent and timid prose to express his fear of the “cavalier.” Chamberlain most clearly puts the verse/prose distinction to dramaturgical use in his mixed-­mode speeches. In ­t hese, the speaker begins in one mode—­usually verse—­and then, mid-­speech, shifts to the other. At the end of act 1, for example, Valentine soliloquizes in prose on Sabina’s rejection of him. A single sentence embedded within the prose juts out in iambic rhythm, marking Valentine’s decision that she is simply too good for him (“tis her im-



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mortall minde that wings her thoughts above my reach”).27 Such a modal turn would have been—as Vickers says of Sly’s similar transition in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew—­“a crucially revealing change of media to an Elizabethan audience.”28 In despair, Valentine returns to his prose meditations, ­until he concludes, “Nay, what can I doe—­what? I can die.” Once death enters his thoughts, he shifts fully to verse and apostrophizes the heavens to prepare for his arrival. Drawing his sword, however, he falters, stops himself with two short verse lines, and decides that life without Sabina provides more “torment” than death would offer.29 When Sabina takes on the cavalier disguise she too adopts the mixed-­mode speech. Following their marriage, Valentine-­maid remains s­ ilent and morose, but Sabina-­cavalier, first speaking prose, encourages “her” to “rush up [her] spirits”; “he” then switches to a short anaphoric verse describing their impending sexual encounter.30 The transition draws attention to the physical scene “he” envisions, painting a picture to arouse “his” dejected “wife” (though it has, of course, precisely the opposite effect). ­These mixed-­mode speeches are not arbitrary; like the professionals whose plays he heard or read, the playgoer modulates “from one medium to the other as his dramatic intention requires.”31 Though an outsider to the theater industry, Chamberlain’s coterie association with professional playmakers and his own experience as a consumer of plays in print and per­for­mance gave him a familiarity with aspects of the dramatist’s craft, including the disposition of poetry on stage. In commending his fellow playwriting playgoer and coterie member Thomas Rawlins’s The Rebellion (1637–39), Chamberlain singled out for praise his dramatic ­poetry: “Methinkes I see / The sweet tongu’d Ovid fall upon his knee,” he enthuses, “­every line, and word, / Runnes in sweet numbers of its owne accord.”32 Chamberlain recognized the importance of shaping dramatic language that sounds decorous, deliberate, and inevitable (that is, that runs “of its owne accord”), all attributes conveyed through the judicious use of, among other devices, appropriate modal shifts. In his own play Chamberlain employed those shifts in sophisticated ways that go beyond just the rules of genre, producing a range of dramaturgical effects, enriching his characters with depth and complexity, and animating the action and pace of his play. Being an amateur did not mean necessarily being insensitive to the theatrical ramifications of modulating between verse and prose. As a theatrical consumer, Chamberlain learned the potential uses of this modulation from the professionals whose “alternations between prose and verse,” Vickers argues, “[­were]

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not accidental but deliberate . . . ​a nd with a definite aesthetic intent which would have been perceived by the audience.”33 Just as, according to Russ McDonald, “the integration of the two forms subtly enriches the meaning of the action” in plays by professionals, t­ here w ­ ere playgoers, such as Chamberlain, who recognized that and appropriated the technique in their own writing.34

“What / Was once thrown down, is now again reacht at”: Alexander Brome and the (Old) Fashion for Dramatic Rhyme The language a playwriting playgoer uses indicates what that audience member wanted to hear on stage, but this might not correspond with what was considered by professional dramatists to be theatrically “fash­ion­able.” By giving voice to individual members of the audience, playgoers’ plays can distinguish par­tic­u­lar deviations from general demand, thus nuancing the necessarily (fictious) homogeneous audience “created” through plays by professional dramatists. This can be seen, for example, in how professional and amateur dramatists responded to the rise and fall of rhyme as a theatrical fashion. In the 1640 edition of Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, stationer John Spencer apologizes for the play’s old-­fashioned qualities, particularly its rhymes: “­Here & ­there you ­shall find some lines that doe answer in meetre, which I hope w ­ ill not prove so disdainefull, whereby the booke may be so much slighted, as not to be read. . . . ​[I]t is full twenty yeares since it was written, at which time meetre was most in use, and shewed well upon the conclusion of ­every Act & Scene.”35 Spencer’s concern is not mere deference to fashion but financial anxiety over the play’s use of the old style of rhyme. This leads to some overstatement: the convention of ending scenes with couplets still existed in 1640, and such aversion to rhyme was not exclusively a ­later development. The fierce debate over the suitability of rhyme for En­glish poetry dates back at least to Roger Ascham’s 1570 dismissal of it as “rude [and] beggerly” and demonstrative of “barbariousnesse.”36 Much of the disagreement among early modern prosodists such as Ascham, however, involved nondramatic poetry and did not touch on the usefulness—or appropriateness—of rhyme on stage. Except for a few (Samuel Daniel and Thomas Nashe, in par­tic­u­lar), as Frederic Ness shows, “both the upholders and the opponents [of rhyme] w ­ ere 37 not thinking of rhyme in relation to the drama.”



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In 1582, Stephen Gosson linked dramatic rhyme with “barbaric” taste, decrying “the manner of penning ­these days, ­because the Poets send their verses to the Stage upon such feete as continually are rowled up in rime at the fin­ gers endes, which is plaucible to the barbarous, and carrieth a stinge into the eares of the common ­people.”38 Most explicit statements about rhyme in dramatic poetry invoke concerns about “fashion,” with such lines being compared to older traditions in which rhyme was used for all the lines, as in mummers’ plays and medieval religious drama. Particularly a­ fter Marlowe’s famed 1590 condemnation of the “jygging vaines of riming m ­ other wits,” unrhymed verse became the standard on stage, and rhyme became a signal of old-­fashioned and thus implicitly “amateurish” drama.39 In 1591, William Webbe claimed that Tancred and Gismunda, a collaborative rewrite of the old Gismonde of Salerene (1568), was now “clothed [in a] fashion more answerable to ­these times, wherein fashions are so often altered”;40 much of that change in “fashion” is that blank verse replaced most of the original version’s rhymes.41 Thomas Nashe, in Pierce Penniless (1593), refers to the “queint Comædians of our time, / That when their Play is done do fal to ryme.” 42 Joseph Hall, in his 1597 epigram on “Tragick Poesie,” decries the “braver braine” who, “in high Heroick rimes / Compileth worm eate [sic] stories of olde tymes” and mocks “the home-­ spun thread of rimes, / Match’d with the lofite feete of elder times.” 43 Hall’s concept of outmoded dramatic verse as being “home-­spun” is repeated in Marston’s Histriomastix (1599) when Mavortius dismisses Posthaste’s dramatic poetry as “home-­spun country stuffe,” and both, of course, recall Puck’s view of the amateur actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) as mere “hempen homespunnes.” 44 In ­these instances, the notion of old-­fashioned, lower-­class, domestically produced theatrical entertainments made of cheap, rural materials contrasts with the professionally produced per­for­mances of the new, urban, commercial play­houses. Shakespeare returned to the idea of rhyme’s archaism in Pericles (1608) when Gower admits that his “Song [of] old” is in rhyme but hopes that the audience, “borne in ­those latter times, / When Witts more ripe, [­will] accept my rimes.” 45 ­A fter 1590, excessive theatrical rhyme is repeatedly described as being b­ ehind the dramaturgical times. The selective use of rhyme, however, was generally accepted; most dramatists who mention rhyme (Marlowe, Chapman, Dekker, and Jonson, for example) decry its heavy-­ handed use but still employ the occasional couplet themselves to create specific dramatic effects.46 As Spencer’s apology in A Mad World suggests, however, by the late 1630s, nearly all rhyming was unfashionable in new plays

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by professionals.47 In Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew (1641), when Hilliard critiques a poet for reciting an unrhymed stanza (not of a dramatic poem, however), the poet proclaims defensively, “­There’s as good Poetry in blank Verse, as Meetre.” 48 The “Epilogue to the Reader” added to the 1637 quarto of Heywood’s 1602 The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, like Spencer’s note, admits that “this Play’s old” and comes from “a time [when], / Strong lines ­were not lookt ­after, but if rime, O then ’twas excellent.” 49 Fi­nally, as noted in the Introduction, in Jonson’s commendatory verse for Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass (1629), the arch-­professional dramatist explic­itly links rhyme with amateur playwriting, complaining: “Now each Court-­Hobby-­horse ­will wince in rime.”50 Rhyme’s fall from ­favor was one part of the transformation dramatic verse underwent in the first three de­cades of the seventeenth c­ entury. As l­ater writers assimilated lessons learned by experimental Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, the dramatic line shifted away from the metrical regularity required by rhyme.51 Syntax, rather than rhythm, dominated prosodic structure, as the goal of speech on stage became the imitation of realistic, rather than stylistic, patterns, resulting in speech so freed from meter that the line between prose ­ hole underwent and verse became almost entirely blurred.52 The period as a w the same transition that Frederic Ness identifies in Shakespeare’s c­ areer: “As a sincere means of conveying emotions . . . ​rhyme lost its f­avor with Shakespeare as soon as he had realized the full mastery of blank verse, for rhyme was too inflexible to convey the subtle shades of emotion which are drawn in his mature plays.”53 Loose verse that sounded “natu­ral” became the “mainstream,” replete with metrical variants, double endings, enjambment, and lines that paid ­little heed to the pentameter length.54 The highly stylized, structured mode of rhyme was not conducive to such verse. To an extent, audience demand triggered this change in the nature of dramatic verse: professional dramatists saw that audiences wanted recognizable patterns of speech, and so they explored ways of pushing against the formal rules of poetry, including using rhyme less often.55 As Marion Trousdale puts it, all “oral conventions” in the theater ­were dynamic in response to what audiences wanted to hear, and so the nature of stage poetry changed to meet changing “requirements of per­for­mance.”56 Not all playgoers, however, conformed to this trend. Many in the Caroline audience valorized Elizabethan and Jacobean plays that often featured stylized poetry, including rhyme. Looking at the broader universe of play consumption in the 1630s and 1640s by taking into account reprints and revivals demonstrates that old styles remained popu­lar with playgoers.57 The dramatic poetry written by a Caroline playwrit-



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ing playgoer gives specific evidence of this: Alexander Brome’s use of rhyme in The Cunning Lovers (ca. 1639) provides one example of a playgoer enamored with old-­fashioned stylized speech on stage.58 Brome’s comedy centers on the efforts of Prospero, son of the Duke of Verona, to win the hand of Valentia, the ­daughter of Verona’s ­enemy, the Duke of Mantua. Faced with many competing suitors for his ­daughter—­including the Lord Julio, who plans to kill the Duke and seize the city—­Mantua begins to build an impregnable tower of twelve doors in which he ­will lock his ­daughter. When Prospero learns of this, he plots to have his friend, Montecelso, disguise himself as an architect in order to be put in charge of the construction; in his guise, Montecelso recommends to Mantua that he hire the disguised Prospero as the knight of the tower, guarding Valentia. A ­ fter Prospero saves the Duke from Julio’s attempt to murder him during a hunt, the Duke readily agrees. Montecelso devises a secret passage that directly connects Prospero’s chamber to Valentia’s room in the tower. Through the comically timed use of this passage, the ­lovers are able to dupe the Duke. In the end, aided by vari­ous additional disguises used by the Duke of Verona (as a pilgrim), Valentia (as a Spanish lady), and Montecelso (as a magician), as well as the timely arrival of the Veronese army, the lovers are able to trick the Duke of Mantua into agreeing to their ­union. In the pro­cess of orchestrating this resolution, Montecelso also tricks the Duke into allowing Montecelso himself to marry a young, widowed duchess whom the Duke had been wooing. The Greek myth of Danaë and Zeus served as the archetypal source for Brome’s play (characters explic­itly reference it twice [C3v and E3r]), though the general device of the ­daughter locked in an upper room is a familiar convention in early modern comedy (such as The Merchant of Venice) and tragedy (such as The Spanish Tragedy). Less definitively, the play seems to resemble aspects of John Webster’s Queen Anne’s Men comedy The Dev­il’s Law Case (1617–21), including general plot scenarios and situations, as well as the names Prospero and Julio. In addition to the typical comedic devices of disguise, the frustrated lovers, the intervening ­father, madness, and the bumbling clown, Brome incorporates a clever use of the stage spaces at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, where his play was performed, as the 1654 quarto’s title page puts it, to “­great applause” by Beeston’s Boys. In the scenes set in the tower, Prospero’s chamber is on the stage level, while Valentia’s room is seen si­mul­ta­neously on the balcony; the entry point to the secret passage in both spaces is concealed b­ ehind an arras. Alexander Brome gained fame during the Interregnum and Restoration for his satirical, po­liti­cal ballads.59 At the time he wrote The Cunning Lovers

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he had just arrived in London to clerk for Robert Henley, master of the court of the King’s Bench.60 While in London, Brome steeped himself in theatrical culture: in 1638 he wrote a poem about the courtier dramatist Sir John Suckling’s revision of Aglaura and in 1642 he wrote an elegy, laced with theater references, upon Suckling’s death; he also contributed commendatory verses to the 1647 Fletcher and Beaumont folio, Cartwright’s 1651 play collection, and the 1652 quarto of Richard Brome’s Jovial Crew. In 1653, he put his familiarity with Caroline drama to use by assembling a volume entitled Five New Plays by Richard Brome, followed in 1659 by another collection of five Richard Brome plays. Brome’s own poems, songs, and ballads incorporate numerous explicit references to the theater. The Rump (1660) includes a verse petition to Parliament in which “the actors” beg that the theaters be reopened and pledge to omit from their plays anything controversial.61 Another poem in the collection also fantasizes that the stages may one day be restored.62 Even more telling, Brome’s second collection, Songs and Poems (1661), includes a poem of praise for Lodowick Carlell’s The Passionate Lovers (a two-­part play written in 1638 but not printed ­until 1655), in which Brome lays out the importance of sustaining E ­ ngland’s dramatic tradition by publishing plays while the theaters are closed: So though ­we’ve lost the life of playes the stage, If we can be Remembrancers to th’ age. And now and then let glow a spark in print, To tell the World t­ here’s fire still lodg’d i’th flint, We may agen b’ enlightned once and warm’d, Men ­can’t be civil till they be inform’ d. Walk wisely on: Time’s changeable, and what Was once thrown down, is now again reacht at.63 No longer able to attend plays, Brome pres­ents play reading as both a tribute to E ­ ngland’s dramatic past—­keeping just a “spark” of the old theatrical flame burning—­and a means to inform, civilize, and enlighten what he perceives as a country benighted by its lack of dramatic culture. His role in Interregnum play publishing was thus part of his vision of transforming society and restoring some of ­England’s pre-1642 cultural (and po­liti­cal) character. It is no surprise, then, that in 1654 he published his own play, which he had written fifteen years earlier, when the theaters w ­ ere still open.



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While Brome participated in Caroline dramatic culture, the Jacobean and Elizabethan stage had a special fascination for him: references in his poetry to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays (1590–91), The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green (1600), Sejanus (1603), A Mad World, My Masters (1605), Volpone (1606), and Catiline (1611) supplement quotations and allusions in his play to Endymion (1588), Doctor Faustus (1592–93), Love’s ­Labor’s Lost (1594), Romeo and Juliet (1594–96), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), 1 Henry IV (1596), The Merchant of Venice (1596–98), If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1603), Othello (1603– 4), and Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611).64 Brome often responded to and borrowed from older plays that he had seen or read, contradicting Bentley’s suggestion that ­because ­there is “nothing to connect [Brome] with the stage or theatrical affairs,” it is pos­si­ble that his name on the quarto of his play “is a misattribution.” 65 He was a playwriting playgoer deeply influenced by and nostalgic for traditions of En­glish theater prior to his own lifetime. In the work of ­these earlier dramatists, he found a model for dramatic verse unlike the loose, unrhymed lines used by Caroline professionals. For The Cunning Lovers, Brome looked to ­these forebears, not contemporaneous professionals, for his prosodic models. As in many play quartos of the period, including Chamberlain’s The Swaggering Damsel, verse in The Cunning Lovers was often erroneously set as prose;66 lines that are inarguably verse, however, are ­those that rhyme. Approximately 60 ­percent of Brome’s play is verse; of that portion more than 22 ­percent rhymes. This rate of rhyme is markedly high for the late Caroline stage: in the other 1637–39 plays written for the same com­pany, Beeston’s Boys, only an average of 3 ­percent of the verse rhymes (less than 1 ­percent in plays by the com­ pany’s most professionalized dramatists, John Ford and Richard Brome).67 Even though rhyme was no longer regularly used by professional dramatists at the time he wrote his play, Brome’s experiences seeing and reading Elizabethan and Jacobean plays taught him how it could be variously employed on stage; as Lorna Flint puts it of Shakespeare, Brome had become cognizant of and attentive to the “significance of . . . ​rime from the point of view of an audience.” 68 Like the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic poets whom he admired, Brome recognized that rhyme was more than just an aural device to make lines sound elegant; used strategically, it could contribute to a play’s “themes, plots, characterization, spectacle, atmosphere, [and] ­ music.” 69 Rhyme in The Cunning Lovers does often serve a ­simple theatrical purpose as a structural marker—­“scene rhymes,” “exit rhymes,” and “cue rhymes”70 —­ which, while common in the 1570s up u ­ ntil the early 1610s, had become a

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rarity on the Caroline stage. Brome uses such rhymes with remarkable frequency: e­ very scene that concludes in verse ends with a scene rhyme, and couplets precede three-­quarters of entrances within a scene. In this t­ heatrical rhyming, Brome modeled his playwriting on practices typical of an earlier generation of writers, which, when he wrote, ­were out of fashion on the public stage. Other, more sophisticated and dramatic uses of rhyme in The Cunning Lovers, however, serve to further distinguish the playwriting playgoer’s play from ­those of contemporaneous professionals.71 While most professional Caroline playwrights eschewed rhyme as a means for advancing plot or developing character, Brome embraced the use of rhyme to build, complicate, and resolve dramatic action. ­These rhymes help construct the world of the play and structure its movement, illuminate par­tic­u­lar qualities of characters, and contribute to and clarify the action of a scene or beat. Some of the character distinctions based on dramatic rhyme in The Cunning Lovers are no doubt coincidental; for example, about 20 ­percent of male characters’ verse lines rhyme, but for female characters the average is nearly 50 ­percent. Rather than commentary on the characters themselves, this disparity is likely a function of the kinds of scenes in which the characters appear: Brome often uses rhyme in romantic exchanges between male and female characters but rarely in the male-­dominated po­liti­cal subplot, and thus rhyme makes up a smaller proportion of male characters’ lines than female characters’. A clear example of rhyming for dramatic purposes, however, is in the trick wooing of 2.3. Mantua has commissioned Montecelso to woo the d ­ uchess on his (Mantua’s) behalf, and he secretly observes; unbeknownst to Mantua, however, Montecelso uses the opportunity to woo for himself. Mantua—­ who prior to this has spoken almost entirely blank verse—­a llows his emotions to carry himself away and delivers all of his misleadingly hopeful asides as couplets: “She talk’d a g­ reat long tale, and loud she spake, / To her again, do not that answer take,” “A match I hope, for see, they now joine hands, / My heart for joy upon the tiptoe stands,” “Good, good, well spoken, and well acted too, / He is not halfe so good to plot as wooe,” and more.72 This juxtaposes with Montecelso and the Duchess, who speak almost entirely in prose. The dramatic rhymes in this sequence create an aural fabric that underscores the staging of the scene: Mantua and Montecelso move in dif­fer­ent spheres of language, just as the wit of the latter is far above the former’s. Setting Mantua’s couplets against Montecelso’s prose allows the audience to hear the distance between them and the Duke’s ignorance of the plot against him. This subtle use of rhyme reveals how deeply Brome’s forebears influenced the playwriting



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playgoer: as Frederic Ness points out, the rhymed aside was frequently used to reveal “the inner workings of the speaker’s heart” up ­until the 1610s but fell into nearly universal disuse by the second de­cade of the ­century.73 A similar use of dramatic rhyme is found in the next scene, in which Prospero, disguised, and Valentia woo one another through the exchange of cautious rhymed couplets. When Prospero reveals his identity ­t hese split and become shared couplets: Val.  Being my friend, and court me in this kind You should have come and left your name ­behind. Pro.  I should indeed, my name is Prospero. Val. Prince Prospero, and the Duke Verona’s Son, Our profest Foe? Pro.  Give me some other name.74 The lovers share a line of iambic pentameter in which Valentia’s internal rhyme (Prospero / Foe) interweaves with Prospero’s preceding line (“my name is Prospero”), suggesting the speed of the exchange (­because of Valentia’s sudden alarm) but also the lovers’ attunement to one another. Their bond becomes clear a few speeches l­ater when, Valentia’s alarm abated, they use the same rhyme as a fully shared couplet: Val.  It was a kind foes part to save a foe. Pro.  That kind foes part perform’d Prince Prospero. As the play progresses, Valentia and Prospero share even more couplets—­what Ness refers to as the sophisticated “speech-­link rhyme.”75 Brome thus expresses the lovers’ relationship through their use of rhyme: so true are their feelings, Valentia and Prospero’s words are audibly linked. The dramatic rhyme reinforces the connection between the lovers, making their ­union at the end of the play seem not only fitting but inevitable. It is in his intrinsic rhyming, however, that Brome most vividly reveals his alliance with the earlier style of dramatic poetry and demonstrates that what might strike a professional dramatist as “outdated” could strike a playgoer as desirable. Throughout The Cunning Lovers, Brome employs rhyme for no apparent purpose other than its own musicality. Some amateurs deployed such intrinsic rhymes in an injudicious, heavy-­handed manner; Francis Verney’s Antipo, for example, is entirely in rhymed couplets, but Verney was

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evidently only able to think of a handful of rhyme pairs and so the result is monotonous rather than musical. In The Cunning Lovers, by contrast, Brome displays an ease, artistry, and freshness in his intrinsic rhymes that anticipates some of the wittiest of his ­later satires. Th ­ ese rhymes appear in dif­fer­ent situations and are distributed among the characters in roughly the same proportion as their total lines, suggesting that Brome had l­ittle specific, dramatic purpose in apportioning them. Their aural quality is formal and almost always end-­stopped, emphasizing the line’s metrical nature and drawing audible attention to the play as a scripted per­for­mance. Such intrinsic rhyming reinforces the theatrical event as a ritual by shifting into a stylized, self-­ consciously ordered discourse. For example, when Prospero reveals to Mantua how he has obtained access to Valentia, an exchange in blank verse shifts into three couplets as the tension and stakes rise: Pro.  Val.  Pro. 

. . . ​Was’t not a friendly part To lodge your only child so neare my heart? My Lord, remember he once sav’d your life, And even for that deserves me for his wife. Now as a friend a friendly League I crave, Take not away what you so freely gave.76

Mantua’s response is not to respond: “I ­will pause upon’t.” His ensuing speech puts a “pause upon’t,” both strategically and prosodically, deflating the crescendo of the lovers’ rhyming with four lines of blank verse. Similar instances of rhyme for the sake of its sound abound. For example, Verona’s outrage at the Mantuan ambassador culminates in a couplet made even more forceful through antithesis and alliteration: “Disdaine our fellowship! Mantua ­shall know / His state s­ hall lessen whilst our glories grow.”77 ­Later, when Mantua damns the clown who brings news of the Duchess’ madness, his use of rhyme adds a super­natural note, as if he is issuing a curse (or, more appropriate in this play, a riddle): “Wander for ever like a banish’d Caine / Till of her sence she be possest againe.”78 In this intrinsic rhyming, Brome demonstrates his debt to a generation of dramatists who wrote to please audiences two de­cades before he was even born. Fi­nally, it is in his blending of theatrical, dramatic, and intrinsic rhyme that Brome reveals the value of finding new uses for old fashions. In 1.4, for example, as Julio lurks, waiting to ambush Mantua, his soliloquy begins in blank verse but switches to couplets for the final four lines:



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Or light on from his Traine, but thus, tis done, The Dukedome seiz’d, and faire Valentia wonne; Auspicious hell I thanke thee, thou art still True to black deeds, and friend to such as kill[.]79 Julio’s sudden rhyming (his only couplet thus far in the play has been a scene rhyme) serves multiple functions: the first couplet is intrinsic and emphasizes motives; the second is dramatic, dev­ilishly “sanctifying” Julio’s undertaking with a prayer; furthermore, immediately a­ fter ­these lines Mantua enters, and so ­these couplets are also theatrical cue-­rhymes. ­Later in the play, Mantua unexpectedly discovers Valentia in her room in the tower—­ unexpectedly ­because he saw her in Prospero’s chamber, but she has gotten back to her room before him by means of the secret passage. The two exchange a dance of end rhymes and internal rhymes across adjacent and alternate lines that, as an example of dramatic rhyme, points to both the attunement and contest between ­ daughter and ­ father, but also, as intrinsic rhyme, showcases the intricate aural patterns Brome recognized ­were available, even desirable, with the medium of shared verse lines: Man.  What at your booke so close? Val.   Books are Companions To them who are compell’d to single lives. Man.  Thou art ranke ’mongst Virgins. Val.   Virgins would be wives—­W hy come you sir? Man.  Only my girle to see How well thou farest, thou one day shalt be f­ ree.80 ­ ecause rhyming in Brome’s play is so much more wide-­ranging than in plays B by contemporaneous professionals, this overlapping of types occurs more often in The Cunning Lovers than in any other Beeston’s Boys play or, indeed, in almost all professionals’ plays from the period. The playgoer’s play thus achieves a degree of prosodic complexity greater than that found in professionals’ plays—­a complexity si­mul­ta­neously old-­fashioned and, for its time, innovative. Rather than merely aping what he heard professionals of his time writing, Brome synthesized his own poetic sensibilities with the practices of previous generations, resulting in a play that to audiences at the Cockpit in 1639 would have sounded like an old play in revival. The playwriting playgoer

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deliberately emulated an older dramatic style, even though his attraction to that style in the waning days of the Caroline era marked him as an outlier in the theater that he patronized. And yet, perhaps most crucially, this did not prevent The Cunning Lovers from succeeding in per­for­mance; indeed, quite the opposite: not only does the title page testify that the play was “Acted, with g­ reat Applause,” but in 1639 Beeston had the Lord Chamberlain protect it for his repertory. If ­these signal that Beeston’s audiences enjoyed Brome’s play, we might extrapolate beyond this individual playgoer’s flirtation with a past dramatic tradition and entertain the probability that ­others in the audience shared his taste for the older fashion. This is a nuanced view of the audience that would be invisible if we deduced their tastes only from plays written by Beeston’s professional dramatists. As other Beeston’s Boys plays from 1637–39 show, Brome’s professional contemporaries avoided the use of rhyme on stage, prob­ably ­because they assumed their audiences would find it contrived and archaic. Even Henry Glapthorne—­the least professional of t­ hese writers—­proudly announced that his play for the com­pany avoided rhyme and used only language “such . . . ​as men should speake in.”81 As noted, the quantity of rhyme in the professionals’ plays is substantially less than in Brome’s; perhaps more impor­tant, however, the ends to which t­ hose rhymes are used are also dif­fer­ent. In The Cunning Lovers most rhymes are intrinsic or dramatic, and fewer are theatrical, but in the professionals’ plays nearly 80 ­percent of rhymes are the more mechanical scene rhymes and exit rhymes and the occasional cue rhyme, 15 ­percent are dramatic, and only 5 ­percent are intrinsic; Ford’s The Lady’s Trial has no intrinsic rhymes at all. When characters in ­these plays do rhyme, it is generally to mock, not use, the mode: Sir Amphilus, in Richard Brome’s The Damoiselle, announces when he is about to “give a Rhime” and notes the artificial nature of scene rhyme when he proclaims, “We w ­ ill off in Rhime.”82 A group of “Blades” in Nabbes’s The Bride use couplets to taunt a French victim, whom, they say, “speakes ends out of a puppet play” (that is, a down market, outdated entertainment).83 The prologue to Richard Brome’s A Mad ­Couple Well Matched warns that anyone expecting “a set speech, / Put into Rhyme” ­will be disappointed (the play is mostly prose).84 For comparison, though only 9 ­percent of Shakespeare’s dramatic output was rhymed verse, he (as with many of his contemporaries) used t­hose rhymes for a wider range of purposes than the Caroline professionals—­but largely the same purposes as the Caroline amateur.85 Perhaps the greatest irony of Alexander Brome’s relationship with the theater is that, a­ fter the reopening of the play­houses in 1660, he apparently lost



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interest in drama, even though it was upon the Restoration stage that the vogue for the rhymes he so loved at last returned. “The advantages which rhyme has over blank verse are so many,” noted John Dryden in 1664, “that it ­were lost time to name them”86 —­a sentiment with which Brome would no doubt have concurred. Rhyme, Dryden observed, is “not so much a New way amongst us, as an Old way new reviv’d”;87 or, as Brome had enthused, “What / was once thrown down, is now again reacht at.” In a way, Brome’s sophisticated use of rhyme foreshadowed its return to popularity on stage in the works of Dryden and the other Restoration dramatists; the amateur was further ahead of the times than the professionals. Brome’s use of rhyme demonstrates how playgoers’ plays might complicate how we determine theatrical fashion and, more broadly, how we reconstruct early modern audiences’ expectations. To reconstruct what playgoers wanted using professionals’ plays alone is insufficient ­because ­doing so creates the impression that what the majority of consumers desired was what all consumers desired. The epilogue added to the 1637 quarto of Heywood’s The Royal King and the Loyal Subject asks rhetorically, “And what’s now out of date, who is’t can tell, / But it may come in fashion, and sute well?”88 How do we determine what kind of dramatic poetry—or any aspect of drama, for that ­matter—is “in fashion” with audience members at any moment? Looking only at Richard Brome, John Ford, and other professionals writing new plays for the stage is to approach this question in one, potentially misleading, way. ­Because t­hese writers earned a living from playwriting, they must have ­shaped their work to please as many consumers in the audience as pos­si­ble, and so we might use their plays to draw conclusions about what the majority of the audience wanted. But amplifying ­those conclusions into a totalizing view of audience demand oversimplifies the necessarily diverse and complex nature of early modern theatrical consumption. Looking at plays written by individuals in the audience adds a dif­fer­ent voice to the conversation—­one that speaks directly from that audience and that might, as in the case of Brome, contradict the homogenized picture of the “audience” drawn for us by the professionals. An attentive theatrical consumer, Brome was well aware of the prosodic fashions of his time, and yet he tied his play to the style of writing rejected by the professional dramatists attempting to please the audience of which he himself was a part. His example speaks to the fact that early modern audiences ­were pluralistic and diverse, not unified and uniform, sources of demand. Our understanding of the early modern playgoing experience can thus be made more precise by rejecting the pejorative, circular idea that

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certain techniques in amateurs’ plays (such as Brome’s rhymes) are merely markers of the writer’s distance from the professional field. They may be, rather, markers of the field’s distance from some in its audience.

“In rugged verse, vile m ­ atters to containe”: Barnabe Barnes and the Variation of Meter in Dramatic Poetry How should metered language on the stage move? Should it, as John Clavell puts it, “amble, trot, or flie”?89 That is, should its rhythm proceed smoothly and slowly, bouncing and faster, or effortlessly and rapidly? Metered language’s movement—­its patterns, tempo, and beat—­was of par­tic­u­lar concern for writers crafting effective dialogue for the stage, where poetry was expressly meant to be heard and where its aural qualities could shape the pace and tenor of per­for­mance. Thomas Carew, in his commendatory verse for Thomas May’s The Heir (1622), offers one answer to the question of how stage poetry should move, praising May’s style for its metrical purity: You ­shall observe his words in order meete, And often stealing on, with equall feete Slide into equall numbers, with such grace As each word had beene moulded for that place.90 Dramatic poetry, Carew suggests, should flow in balanced mea­sure: realism of speech patterns should be made to fit metrical decorum, with individual words seeming to find their “place” naturally in the verse line. By the time Carew wrote this, however, professional dramatists had largely broken ­free from arbitrary classical rules of “equall feete” and “equall numbers.” Dramatic blank verse on the Elizabethan stage was usually governed by the iambic pulse and pentameter length, but, as noted earlier, in the Jacobean and Caroline periods, the norm for dramatic blank verse was much looser, with lines governed not by meter but by semantic units.91 This shift in practice was perhaps a result of dramatists trying to find appropriate ways to make characters on stage sound more natu­ral and dramatically plausible. In amateur dramatist Robert Tailor’s The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (1613), the playwright Haddit attempts to sell a jig to a commercial player for his troupe, but the actor complains that “the end of this staffe is a foote too long” (the song ends with the lines “And you that delight in truls and minions, / Come buy my fowre ropes



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of hard S. Thomas onions,” to which the player notes that “S. Thomas might very wel have been left out” in order to make the line metrically sound); Haddit defensively retorts that intentionally “dismembering” the meter actually “shewes the more efficacy in the writer”—­t hat is, it reveals a writer skilled enough to craft language that, as dramatic language by its very definition should, does something rather than just disappearing into its “place” in the line.92 In contrast to Carew’s opinion, this view holds that verse on the stage should conform to the needs of the theatrical moment rather than theoretical edicts on metrical decorum. Tailor, of course, is satirizing both Haddit and the player (a rejoinder, perhaps, to all of the times that the profession satirized the amateurs); nonetheless, the joke only works if Haddit’s view of stage poetry is essentially sound: meter should be sacrificed to “efficacy,” but ­t here is nothing theatrically efficacious about the inclusion of “Saint Thomas” in Haddit’s verse. Stage poets could—­indeed, to Tailor, should—­communicate dynamic, emotional contexts to the audience through strategic deviations from the usual iambic pentameter; as playwriting playgoer Barnabe Barnes puts it, poets should “containe” any “vile m ­ atters” in suitably “rugged verse.”93 Scholars often read such metrical variants in the poetry of a professional’s play as a marker of the writer’s sensitivity to the theatrical medium; as the writer becomes familiar with the capacity of dramatic verse to create dif­fer­ent effects in per­for­mance, his verse becomes less rigid in order to display a range of character attitudes and actions and line lengths vary to control the pace and energy of per­for­mance.94 Theatrically sensitive dramatists molded the pliable line of blank verse to express emotions or intentions, regulate action, and convey subtext to the audience or implicit instructions to the actors. This use of verse for theatrical ends emerged from the dramatist’s familiarity with the unique needs of per­for­mance; thus, for example, as Trousdale states, Shakespeare learned to write “verse [that] tells the actors what to do.”95 Metrical sophistication in the interests of a specific, deliberate theatrical effect, in other words, is one marker of professionalism. Implicit in this narrative is the assumption that amateurs failed to use such metrical variation ­because being outsiders to the regular pro­cess of theatrical creation rendered them incapable of grasping its most sophisticated practices, and being only occasional writers for the stage denied them the opportunity to develop command over the variation of dramatic meter. Frequently scholars dismiss amateur dramatists’ verse for being e­ ither too irregular (implying a lack of control) or too consistent (implying a slavish devotion to the ideal metrical form). While certainly true for many amateurs, many deeply engaged playgoers did understand the value of

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purposeful nuances in dramatic meter, and in plays by t­ hose playgoers we can discern more precisely what poetic variants attentive audience members recognized and what they understood to be the theatrical results of ­those variants. Playgoing poets in par­tic­u­lar w ­ ere likely to hear dramatically affective metrical variants and thus attempt to incorporate t­ hose purposeful shifts into their own plays. As the one extant play by Barnabe Barnes demonstrates, playwriting playgoers could understand the per­for­mance value in breaking from “equall numbers” and deploying metrical variants for specific theatrical effects. In his time and ours, opinions on Barnes’s character and poetry have been divided. Starting at a young age, Barnes penned a large quantity and variety of poetry, developing over time a practical, or at least practiced, understanding of poetic technique and experimenting with how dif­fer­ent verse forms could create dif­fer­ent effects. His first collection of poetry, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), is an assemblage of sonnets mixed with other forms, including madrigrals, elegies, canzons, eidyllions, pastoral odes, and—­for the first time in published En­glish poetry—­Petrarchan sestines. In style, the poems range from the melodramatic to the metaphysical, with verses that adhere to traditional devices (he was fond of echo, anaphora, apostrophe, double ending, and antimetabole) as well as using some more exotic meters, such as the Greek asclepiad and anacreonteus. Philip Blank observes that Barnes’s ­metrical experiments in Parthenophil and Parthenophe “make fresh use of conventional models and . . . ​a re diversely patterned in structure.”96 Importantly, Barnes married his metrical and stylistic experiments with the content of the poems, using par­tic­u­lar effects to emphasize and even dramatize specific ­ ill see, this practice—­what Tailor terms “effiideas and emotions.97 As we w cacy” in a writer—­anticipates his ­later practice of strategically varying the verse spoken by two characters in his play, The Dev­il’s Charter (1607). On the merits of Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Thomas Churchyard ranked Barnes equal to Spenser and Daniel, and second only to Sidney, among En­g lish poets.98 Barnes’s friend from youth, Thomas Bastard, remarked that “Barneus verse (unlesse I doe him wronge,) / Is like a cupp of sacke, heady and strong.”99 But from ­others, Barnes’s experimentation earned only mockery.100 John Harington targeted Barnes (“Lynus”)101 for his elaborate variety: When Lynus thinkes that he and I are friends, Then all his Poems unto me he sends: His Disticks, Satyrs, Sonnets, and Exameters, His Epigrams, his Lyricks, his Pentameters.102



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Even more damning than his motley of forms, Harington continues, is the penchant Barnes has for broken and imperfect metrical patterns and, as a result, his apparent inability to master the seamless fitting of content to form, of “­matter” to “manner”: But yet his rime is harsh, unev’n his number, The manner much, the ­matter both doth cumber. His words too strange, his meanings are too mistick. Besides his metrical experimentation—or b­ ecause of it—­many critics in the period took umbrage with Barnes for being only, as Mark Eccles puts it, “occasionally a poet.”103 Satirists often describe him as an avocationalist uncommitted to improving the quality of his work and dabbling, as Harington complains, in “more trades then any man alive,” including writing. “He takes the best” fields of l­abor, Harington taunts, “yet proves the worst.”104 Shortly ­after Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Barnes had a change of spiritual inclination and expressed regret for the collection’s worldly topic and graphic language. In 1595 he published A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets, a collection of meditations on Christ’s suffering. Perhaps Barnes had a poetic as well as spiritual change of heart: the content is less wide-­ranging and the style less engaging, and it is metrically far less experimental than Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Barnes’s next work, Foure Bookes of Offices (1606), remained in this religious and poetically unadventurous vein: dedicated to King James, the work is a lengthy prose essay expounding upon the Christian virtues and their relation to how subjects might best serve their prince. Barnes’s interest in appealing to the monarch through his writing continued the next year, 1607, when the King’s Men staged his one surviving play, The Dev­il’s Charter, at court on Candlemas night.105 An anti-­Catholic tragedy modeled on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Barnes’s play portrays the ascent and fall of the arch-­machiavel Alexander Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, as the result of a pact he makes with the Devil. In his reign, Alexander is joined by his son, Caesar, and they become tangled in a web of murder, deceit, black magic, sodomy, incest, fratricide, and war that ends, ­ultimately, with the Devil betraying them and Alexander’s death by accidentally drinking his own poison. In a subplot, Alexander’s ­daughter, Lucretia, murders her husband, who has discovered Lucretia’s infidelities; Alexander, however, learns of the murder and kills Lucretia by means of poisoned makeup. The play is, in many re­spects, a characteristic Jacobean revenge tragedy within that genre’s traditions

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of the Italian setting, a dumb show, deception and betrayal, the super­natural, vio­lence repaid with escalated vio­lence, the elaborate use of poison, and the broader po­liti­cal ramifications of domestic and familial disputes. Along with Macbeth (1606) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1605–6), The Dev­il’s Charter is an early example of the kind of violent, dark plays which ­were increasingly in vogue in the early years of James’s reign and which would, within the following de­cade, come to fill much of the King’s Men’s repertory. The Dev­il’s Charter was written by someone who clearly patronized the public theaters, for it demonstrates knowledge of theatrical styles, popu­lar genres, and even individual actors. No evidence, however, suggests that Barnes had more than a spectator’s relationship with the professional theater. His only connection with the stage was his apparent connection to the young John Ford at a time before that writer’s entrance into playwriting: Barnes’s Foure Bookes includes a commendatory verse by Ford (his earliest printed work), and in it Ford urges his “very good friend” Barnes to “Write on rare Myrrour of ­these abject dayes; / Thy good example o­ thers ­will advise.”106 Ford’s verse is the only documented link between Barnes and a professional dramatist; nonetheless, his play shows a clear familiarity with other professionals’ work.107 To account for why the King’s Men would “choose [Barnes’s] crude melodrama for Court per­for­mance,” Eccles speculates that James had demanded another play like Macbeth but that Shakespeare was unwilling to write it, and so Barnes was hired by the troupe to “writ[e] to order.”108 As with Bentley’s assumption that the King’s Men approached John Clavell to write The Soddered Citizen (see Chapter 3), this denial of the playwriting playgoer’s agency is without evidence and seems the product of the per­sis­tent fallacy that nonaristocratic amateurs did not, or could not, think to write for the professional players (it does not stand to reason that the King’s Men would turn to an unknown, such as Barnes, to write a play for what Eccles guesses was a royally demanded court per­for­mance).109 The Dev­il’s Charter is another work by a playgoer who drew upon his experiences as a theatrical consumer to write for one of the professional companies he evidently admired. ­Because of this, any evidence about per­for­mance that it might contain—­whether in its stage directions or its poetry—­can only be reliably considered descriptive of what the playgoer wished, rather than what the players actually performed. Analyzing verse in The Dev­il’s Charter is further complicated by Barnes’s revision of the play ­after its per­for­mance and prior to—­indeed, expressly for—­ publication. On the title page, Barnes advertises his interference: the text is given “as it was plaide before the Kings Majestie,” but it has also been “more exactly revewed, corrected, and augmented since by the Author, for the more



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plea­sure and profit of the Reader.” Barnes’s role as playwright extended beyond making the script for per­for­mance and encompassed also, like Wilson’s revisions to The Inconstant Lady, revision to make it more suitable for readers (“the publique tipographicall Theatre,” as Barnes terms it in Divine ­Century).110 His awareness of a difference between the needs of players and the needs of readers can likely be attributable to his own experience as a play reader. Unfortunately, it also means that Barnes may have bleached out (“corrected”) many deliberate dramatic variants in the verse in order to make it more similar to nondramatic poetry. Despite this, t­here is some evidence in The Dev­il’s Charter to suggest a specifically theatrical sensitivity in the play’s prosody. The metrically variant lines of the play’s only two dynamic characters—­Pope Alexander VI and his ­daughter, Lucretia—­show that Barnes understood how to break from metrical conventions in order to dramatize shifts in his characters’ emotions and intentions. David Livingstone—­predicating his analy­sis upon Barnes’s status as a “novice” (and hence, apparently, bad) playwright—­generalizes that “Barnes always wrote verse of uneven quality, and in the blank verse form his passion for variety and experiment rarely succeeds.”111 If we place Barnes’s “uneven” meter into its theatrical context, however, we find blank verse being subjected to “variety and experiment” not ­because of “passion” (lack of control) but, rather, for conscientiously dramatic ends. While it may be tempting to dismiss ­these peculiarities as the product of a poet untrained in writing for the stage, Alexander’s and Lucretia’s changing poetic styles over the course of the play demonstrate that Barnes possessed an understanding of how to use poetry to convey dramatic information and action, even if he put that knowledge to work with only two of his play’s characters. At his first appearance, Alexander is newly invested with power and surrounded by the trappings of authority. The poetry of his first speech reinforces this image gradually, moving from initially hesitant double endings and disruptions of the iambic pulse into a smooth and alliterative rhythm only as his confidence grows. Alexander first grapples with the material and spiritual cost of his rise to power: With what expence of money plate and jewels This Miter is attayn’d my Coffers witnesse: But Astaroth my covenant with thee Made for this soule more pretious then all trea­sure, Afflict my conscience, O but Alexander

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Thy conscience is no conscience; if a conscience, It is a leoprouse and polluted conscience. But what? a coward for thy conscience? The divill is witnesse with me when I seald it And cauteriz’d this conscience now seard up To banish faith, hope and charity, Using the name of Christian as a stale. [352–63]112 His meter stutters, often tripping out beyond the pentameter length. The awkward word flow reinforces Alexander’s efforts to come to grips with what he has done. T ­ oward the end of this troubled first half of the speech, Barnes employs a short line in the midst of five adjacent long lines, allowing Alexander to pause briefly on the possibility of rejecting his feelings of guilt: “But what? a coward for thy conscience?” (359). As he pivots t­ oward justification of s­ igning away his soul, he pumps out a series of strong trochaic and spondaic variants in four lines interlinked through alliteration, giving him the energy to force a recognition of what he has done. Following this, the meter calms as Alexander reflects on the profit that his deal ­will bring his sons: For Arcane plots and intricate designes That all my misty machinations And Counsels held with black Tartarian fiends ­Were for the glorious sunne-­shine of my sonnes; That they might mount in equall paralel With golden majesty like Saturnes sonne To darte downe fire and thunder on their foes. That, that was it, which I so much desir’d To see my sonnes through all the world admir’d. [364–72] Barnes’s intentional effort to produce balanced blank verse is seen in the pointless repetition of “that” (371)—­a gimmick he often uses to achieve a full line (when he fails to use it, we are thus justified in assuming that he deliberately left the line short). Throughout Alexander’s speech, lines are often enjambed, but the only strong caesuras occur in the first part (357 and 359); in the second, Alexander is more sure of himself, matching syntax to meter and completing full lines with his thoughts. Barnes thus creates a dynamic aural image of a man growing increasingly more committed to his course of action. When



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his sons enter bickering, Alexander attempts to make peace between them by using similarly balanced blank verse, but he is prevented by language that embodies the tension between the ­brothers. First, a list of places defies the blank verse, as if the fraternal competition for power can be topographically mapped onto Italy: From France and Swisserland I w ­ ill beginne With Naples and t­ hose Townes in Peadmont And all the signories in Lombardy From Porto di Volane to Savona And Genes on th’ other side of Italy Upon the Mediterranean ­towards Greece; Allotted Candy for his patrimony. And in Romania from Pontremoli And Prato to faire Florence; and from thence In Tuskany within the River Narre And fruitful Arno t­ hose sweete Provinces Event to Mont Alto, Naples, Policastro And Petrasilia in Calabria The furthest horne of Italy for Caesar. [398–411] An ornate rhetorical device comparing the ­brothers to the mythological twins Castor and Pollux pres­ents similar metrical prob­lems and double-­ended lines, suggesting that the cosmic harmony found in the classical example ­will elude ­these worldly ­brothers: Castor and Pollux would not live in Heaven Unlesse they might be stellified together[.] . . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. . . . ​. Castor would not be called but Pollux Castor And Castor Castors Pollux: so my Candy Be Caesars Candy, Caesar, Candies Caesar. [416–25] The implausibility of Alexander’s desire is hinted at in his logical convolutions and disjointed alliterative matching of the harsh “c” with the insinuating “s.” The audience hears how Alexander must overwork his language to try to make peace between his sons; division and discord cannot be far ­behind such straining.

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Barnes’s effort to fit the sound of Alexander’s lines to his emotional state becomes increasingly evident as that emotional state begins to collapse. In 4.1, Alexander resorts to magic to descry the identity of Candy’s murderer. Again, the pope’s properties signal his power, but now that power has shifted from control of events t­oward mere observation: through his “Magicall glasse” he sees what is happening, and by summoning the Devil he obtains information, but he has no influence over what he observes. Metrical disruptions reflect his loss of control when he discovers his son’s murder: Fore god ’tis Candie, ’tis Candy, I know ’tis Candie, Where is that traiterous hom­i­cide? where is hee? I cannot see him: he ­shall not scape me so. I must and w ­ ill find him, though he went invisible, Appeare appeare; not yet; ha and Candy murthered too, Let me looke forth.    Alexander commeth upon the Stage out of his study       with a booke in his hand. Oh, oh, very good very good: well I perfectly perceive, By this escention of Arctophilax, What time of night it is, sorrow give place; Revenge in blood and fierie sacrafice Commaundeth: nature now prevents her current: yeeld, Let us adore the second eye of heaven[.] [1844–58] The lines break into sharp, short units, packed with strong caesuras (sometimes more than one to a line [1849 and 1857]) and a flood of end-­stopping. Combined with numerous monosyllables, this demands a slow, staccato ­delivery, u ­ ntil Alexander summons the Devil to help him identify the murderer. At that point (1854), his poetry—­though still marked by strong caesuras and end-­stopping—­fills with polysyllabic words, demonic names, and fluid alliteration (for example, “O sacred season for nocturnall Ceremonies” [1861]) that juxtapose sharply with his halting, uncertain language at the scene’s start. The effect is both an increase of pace and a heightened sense of unnaturalness, even possession, as if the language flows beyond any control Alexander has over it. Throughout, his meter never calms: of his forty-­one



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lines before the ritual to conjure the Devil (1844–93), twenty are hypermetric, four are short, and in twenty at least one iamb is replaced by a more emphatic foot; only eleven are iambic pentameter, and even t­hese—in a radical shift from his first speech—­incorporate strong caesuras and end-­stopping. Up to this point t­here is only one enjambment, in his manic chant: “Candie my sonne, is murthered, Candie my sonne, / Candie my sonne is murthered: I ­will raise / All the ­great divills to hew the murtherer” (1876–78). When Alexander fi­nally learns that Candy’s murderer was his other son, his prosody fails, and he collapses into confused prose (1956–57). Shattered meter manifests his shattered emotional and psychological state; the language he uses creates this effect, and the way in which he uses it speaks to how Barnes, the playwriting playgoer, thought that such an effect could be achieved in per­for­mance. By the play’s end, Alexander’s verse undergoes a last dynamic turn ­toward metrical chaos as he fi­nally comes to repent. Removed from its dramatic context, such turmoil in the poetry would seem sloppy; within the frame of Alexander’s emotional arc, however, such turmoil both expresses and, in per­for­mance, creates the character’s disordered inner state. The pope’s new emotional condition is particularly evident in his “What is repentance?” speech (3306–38). The panic surrounding his discovery of Candy’s murder was marked by abruptly end-­stopped lines, but now, confronting the inescapable fact of his own damnation, Alexander’s meter gains terrifying speed from numerous enjambments: of his thirty-­t wo lines before the Dev­il’s appearance, fifteen run over the end of the line, as if his fear defies the bound­aries of the verse. This speed is often brought up short by strong midline caesuras—­particularly ner­ vous questions (six of the ten strong caesuras)—as Alexander’s racing mind suddenly stops on a single awful idea. Breathlessness is conveyed, also, through repetition and hyperbolic alliteration, but t­ hese are intermixed with pace-­ slowing monosyllables. Tension between ­these conflicting tempos is also generated rhythmically; unlike earlier, the many disruptively hypermetric lines are not accompanied by consistent disruptions of the iambic beat (only six of the lines include a foot that breaks the iambic pulse). The speech’s mea­sured iambic quality contributes to the relentless drive of Alexander’s thoughts, as fears of damnation give way to pride in the face of death, and then back again. The extra feet in eleven lines seem an attempt to squeeze as much life as ­pos­si­ble out of his remaining time. The metrical variants in this part of Alexander’s speech—­frequent, unequal segmentation of the line along phrasal units, enjambment, increased autonomy of the semantic unit, and hypermetric line length—­are all features that George Wright identifies as

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prominent in Shakespeare’s mid-­career plays, staged just before and during Barnes’s brief foray into the theater.113 As an attendee at the Globe, Barnes would have heard ­those plays, and perhaps they modeled for him the ways in which dramatic poetry could, in pursuit of plausible emotion, be liberated from the constraints of blank verse. Alexander’s tension between sheer panic and desperate scheming signals his divided emotional state as he vacillates from repentance to resignation. His only short line allows a pause as the truth of his situation sinks home; the aural power of that silence is heightened by juxtaposing the truncated line against a manic outpouring of ideas interlocked by repetition: Why repentance is a spirituall martiredome, Which mortifieth sinnes and heales the soule Having beene wounded with the spirits sword: This sword Gods booke: that booke by me profain’d And by which booke of God my soule is damn’d, I damn’d undoubtedly. [3308–13] Following this, the Devil disputes with the pope on the terms of their contract. Realizing that he has been duped, Alexander collapses into hypermetric exclamations and inversions of the iambic pulse, accompanied by linguistic and syntactical repetitions. McDonald notes that in Shakespeare such “forms of lexical and phrasal repetition help to pull words together, creating a poetic coherence that ameliorates the loss of iambic consistency.”114 Barnes’s echo of the professional’s prosody again suggests his awareness of how t­ hese techniques produce specific theatrical effects. When Alexander tries to reason with the Devil by citing the absoluteness of divine forgiveness, his meter regains strength, regularity, and coherence. But no amount of academic theology can overcome the Dev­il: as Alexander’s reason fails, he falls into a fit of nonsense repetition and, at last, prose. The Devil, all the while, has been gaining metrical confidence, creating an inverse relationship to Alexander by moving from banal prose during the contractual legalities to alliterative blank verse and eventually, at the height of his case, admonishing rhyme. Livingstone evaluates Barnes’s poetic capacity in this sequence based upon an idealized model of balanced meter appropriate for nondramatic poetry but, as an audience member at the Globe would have known, inappropriate for the stage; in ­doing so, though, he coincidentally points out Barnes’s most innovative theatrical experiment: “Not being enough of a poet to depict ­great



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spiritual anguish within the framework of blank verse, as Marlowe had done, Barnes is trying to duplicate the speech of a terrified man in an almost naturalistic fashion.”115 The parallel with Marlowe misses Barnes’s other prosodic influences; while the model for his plot may have been Doctor Faustus, the model for his verse is, more often, Macbeth. Words as “mere sounds” and repetitive prose are, Livingstone himself notes, “taken from the stage tradition of madness, where the verse breaks down into incoherent prose as the mind of the character crumbles.”116 In Alexander’s demise, then, we see (or, rather, hear) Barnes’s attempt to exploit a prosodic convention specifically designed to create the theatrical illusion of psychological dissolution. Writing on the same effect in Shakespeare, McDonald observes: “The unreliability of the beat aurally conjures up a world of uncertainty and change.”117 Knowing that, in its sound, poetry on the stage serves, even creates, dramatic meaning, this playgoer learned, from listening to professionals’ plays, how to vary metrical style to accord with the needs of the stage.118 Alexander’s theatrical prosody might be dismissed as chance or simply inconsistent verse if not for the fact that a similar pattern of deliberate metrical change distinguishes the speech of the play’s only other dynamic character: Lucretia. Indeed, Lucretia’s metrical sophistication is even more elaborate than her f­ ather’s. In her first appearance, plotting her husband’s murder, Lucretia’s lengthy speech is propelled by enjambments that run in counterpoint to phrasal junctures, disruptions of the iambic pulse for emphasis, and shifts in line lengths for pace: Lucretia cast off all servile feare, Revenge thy selfe upon thy jealous husband That hath betraid thine honor, wrong’d thy bed: Feare not; with resolution act his death: Let none of Borgias race in policies Exceed thee Lucrece: now prove Caesars ­Sister, So deepe in bloudy stratagems as hee: All sinnes have found examples in all times. If womanly thou melt then call to minde, Impatient Medeas wrathfull furie, And raging Clitemnestraes hideous fact, Prognes strange murther of her onely sonne, And Danaus fifty D ­ aughters (all but one) That in one night, their husbands sleeping slew.

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My cause is just as theirs, my heart as resolute, My hands as ready. Gismond I come, Haild on with furie to revenge ­these wrongs And love impoison’d with thy jealousie: I have devised such a curious snare, As jealous Vulcan never yet devis’d, To graspe his armes unable to resist Deaths instruments inclosed in t­ hese hands.   Shee kneeleth downe. You griesly D ­ aughters of grimme Erebus, Which spit out vengeance from your viperous heires, Infuse a three-­fold vigor in t­ hese armes; Imarble more my strong indurate heart, To consumate the plot of my revenge. [578–605] Rhetorically, a set of repetitions weaves Lucretia’s ­whole speech together, not unlike her f­ather’s l­ater meditation upon his damnation (3308–13). Lucretia builds her self-­confidence upon the comforting reiteration of key terms, such as “jealous” (579 and 595), “resolution” (581 and 592), and “policies” (582) “stratagems” (584), and “plot” (605), and anatomizes her weapons by verbally dissecting her body into parts and then repeating them as well, as if conjuring with her “heart” (592 and 604), “hands” (593 and 599), and “armes” (598 and 603). And, of course, the impetus of “Revenge” runs throughout (579, 594, and 602). ­These deliberate, intricate verbal patterns create the impression that Lucretia has already deci­ded upon her plot and is committed to it. Like her ­father, Lucretia also uses a short line to pause as she gathers resolve (593). ­Later in the scene, the style Lucretia adopts in her feigning speeches to Gismond deviates radically from her style in t­ hese private speeches, signaling Barnes’s understanding that characters can use poetry to control how other characters see (or hear) them. Though the stage direction indicates that she “walketh passionately” (606), her prosodic calm actually increases as she speaks to her husband. With the exception of her first, outraged line (615) and two angry lines in response to his protestations of innocence (646 and 654), her twenty-­one lines before fi­nally cornering him are formulaically iambic, with nothing that might put him on alert. Her speech becomes simplistic and artificial as she attempts to get Gismond into the chair without signaling



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her intentions. Barnes has thus shifted from metrical sophistication to metrical staidness in order to express the character’s awareness of her situation. The clearest evidence of this shift is Lucretia’s return to irregular blank verse once Gismond is fi­nally in the chair: the meter of her first speech ­here is not uneven, but the rate of enjambment increases considerably, suggesting that her rhetorical questions increase in speed and severity. When she “stoppeth his mouth” her meter reverts to the disordered state of her earlier soliloquy and emphatic, hypermetric disruptions to the iambic pulse (682–84). A ­ fter this, however, her style of speech shifts to accord with a new tactic: convincing Gismond to sign what she claims is an admission that he has slandered her (it is actually a fake suicide note). Her lines suddenly become not only smooth iambic pentameter once more but also couplets, as if she is attempting to soothe her panicked husband with reassuring rhyme.119 Her diction is slowed by monosyllables, end-­stopping in all four lines, and strong caesuras in the first two: Take pen and incke: tis not to make thy ­will; For if thou wilt subscribe, I ­will not kill. Tis but to cleere t­ hose scandals of my shame, With which thy jealousie did me defame. [687–90] Once he has subscribed, she reveals her true intentions, erupting into a litany of polysyllabic insults; the poetry collapses into frenzied arrhythmia (nine of the speech’s fifteen lines [692–708] are variant), culminating with six knife stabs. Her murder done, Lucretia exits with three horrifyingly tranquil couplets: Now w ­ ill my ­father Alexander say That I did take the best and safest way And Caesar w ­ ill approve it with his heart, That Lucrece hath perform’d a cunning parte. If o­ thers aske who Gismonde kild or why It was himself repenting jealousie. [714–9]120 Another shift in her meter dramatizes the radical change Lucretia undergoes during her final appearance in the play. Early in the scene’s first speech, as she applies makeup to herself (with cosmetics that are, unknown to her, poisoned) her verse is unremarkable except for conventional short lines for stage business and some disruptions to the iambic pulse for small discoveries of her beauty as she admires herself. The more she narcissistically

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itemizes that beauty, however, the more luxuriant her poetry becomes, u ­ ntil in the second half of the speech it is almost impossible to find a line that is not part of a rhyme, is not hypermetric, or does not include at least one non-­ iambic foot. This half of the speech paints a rich blazon, sounding like something out of the experimental poems of Parthenophil and Parthenophe. In the third part of the speech, the anatomizing gaze Lucretia casts—­previously used to equate parts of her body with weapons of revenge—­falls suggestively downward, her lines rich with sexually charged alliterative imagery: Sweet mouth the Ruby port to Paradice Of my worlds plea­sure from whence issue forth, Many false brags, bold sallies, sweet supplies, A chinne the matchless fabricke of faire nature, A neck, two brests upon whose cherry nipples So many sweet solucions Cupid suckt. [2225–31] The changing style of her poetry, from spare and conventional to ornate and variant, aurally dramatizes her moral fall into the deadly sins of lust and vanity. As the poison in her makeup takes effect, Lucretia continues to use many of the same poetic devices, but to very dif­fer­ent ends. Hypermetric lines now generate a sense of urgency, not luxury; frequent, often adjacent, repetitions reveal panic, not idleness. Lucretia’s alliteration now sounds breathless rather than languid. Line breaks separating subject from verb (2277–78) launch the actor (and listener) forward. Disruptions of pulse convey, not playful discoveries, but desperation, ­until, like her f­ather, Lucretia collapses into prose. Her final speech in the play returns to verse, however, and resembles her first speech in the play: repetitive, alliterative, heavi­ly non-­iambic, and concluding in prayer. Mercyfull ­father let not thy mercy passe, Extend thy mercy where no mercy was. Mercyfull ­father for thy sonnes deere merit ­Pardon my sinnfull soule receive my spirit.                Expirat Lucrece. [2311–15] Where Lucretia’s first sinister prayer to hellish powers was discordant and unrhymed, in this plea to heaven, Lucretia does at last resort to the poetic harmony of repentant rhyme.



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Barnes’s use of metrical variants to dramatize changes in Alexander and Lucretia reveals his awareness of how dramatic poetry differs from poetry for readers. While many prosodic qualities of The Dev­il’s Charter recall Barnes’s nondramatic works, in other places—­most clearly with Alexander and Lucretia—­its poetry is uniquely designed for per­for­mance. Other dramatists, particularly professionals, might more consistently and expertly deploy such variants, but it would be uncritical simply to decry Barnes’s experiments as the work of an incompetent: he was an experienced poet and, as Eccles observes, no mere “metrician murdering poetry.”121 McDonald points out that the “mature Shakespeare’s metrical freedom with the poetic line permits him to exploit the sound of verse in the ser­vice of vari­ous dramatic ends. The most striking use he makes of such variation is to represent character in action . . . ​by establishing a poetic baseline for the protagonist and then violating or eroding that norm as the action proceeds.”122 Barnes likely learned this prosodic maneuver by listening to and reading plays by professionals like Shakespeare. We expect competent professionals to employ dramaturgical variants for expressive ends; conversely, we often assume that writers like Barnes, who w ­ ere not part of the profession, stumbled upon such variants only accidentally.123 A close analy­sis of the poetry of Alexander and Lucretia shows, however, that a playgoer sensitive to theatrical poetry could purposefully employ variants in order to communicate theatrically relevant details of emotions and intentions. Just as the characters, plots, themes, and imagery in plays such as Macbeth and Doctor Faustus influenced Barnes, their poetry provided him with a model for how meter could be ­shaped for per­for­mance. ­Because so many variations in poetic style in The Dev­il’s Charter can be convincingly tied to a specific dramatic need, we should attribute them to the engaged and attentive playgoer’s heightened awareness of how and why to vary meter for theatrical ends. The ability of a poet to break f­ ree from the “grim authority” of the “system of limited choices” mandated by the blank verse line only fully comes with practice.124 Dramatic poets learned over the course of their c­ areers how to “organically” incorporate figures that suited the “emotional and intellectual . . . ​ needs or situation of each character at each moment.”125 A primary objective of early modern literary art, Vickers shows, was thus concealing “artifice” in such a way as to make it look and sound “natu­ral”—an objective that for dramatic poets meant exploiting the tools of the medium without making them audible as tools,126 what one early scholar of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, borrowing from Castiglione, described as the “art of veiling art.”127 While professional dramatists like Shakespeare had the opportunity to learn through

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experience how to craft dramatic poetry to conceal its artifice, playwriting playgoers had to come by that sense of craft indirectly, as a product of their exposure to plays as audience members and readers. As an experienced poet, Barnes was equipped with some of the tools to that end, and as a dedicated play consumer he would have learned how and why to use t­ hose tools, even if his use of them was limited to just two characters. Barnes understood the ­concept of using metrical variation to create and communicate emotion, action, and mood on stage, and with Alexander and Lucretia he attempted to employ it. The fact that he recognized the importance of the professional technique and attempted to appropriate it for his own play speaks to the depth of his attunement to the dramatic poetry he heard when he attended the play­houses or perused the lines in a play quarto.

* * * The professional dramatist Thomas Nabbes begins his unacted play The Unfortunate ­Mother (1640) with a defensive “Proeme to the Reader” itemizing the ele­ments of per­for­mance from which his reader is, in his view, thankfully ­free: no bombastic delivery of speeches, no heavy-­handed asides to “­those in the Pit,” no ridicu­lous disguises and “false beard[s].”128 Also in Nabbes’s list is a reference to the audience’s need to extricate meaning from a play’s language: “­Here is no sence that must by thee be scann’d, / Before thou canst the meaning understand.” Although the actors refused to stage his play, Nabbes’s dramatic verse incorporates the kinds of variant meter for theatrical effect and character development typical on the Caroline stage. In other words, in its poetry, The Unfortunate ­Mother was designed for per­for­mance, not for reading. The suggestion, then, that readers w ­ ill not need to “scan” suggests that Nabbes thought of interpreting dramatic poetry as something done audibly, by playgoers, rather than visually, by readers. Playwriting playgoers such as Chamberlain, Brome, and Barnes provide positive evidence of the kind of “scanning” that Nabbes assumed audiences did in the play­house; their status as “stranger” dramatists was no barrier to comprehending how the professionals ­were using poetry and attempting to achieve similar poetic efficacy in their own plays. Trousdale contends that “audience [members possessed] a set of formal expectations” about the dramatic poetry that they heard;129 this expectation can be seen reflected in the plays that audience members wrote and the dramatic poetry they contain. Very ­often the apparent roughness or imprecision of that poetry is the reason



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scholars set amateurs’ plays aside as not meriting closer study; Bentley, for example, explic­itly links what he considers “undistinguished” verse in The Soddered Citizen with the playwright’s a­ ctual vocation, shrugging that it “is not so bad as one might have expected from a highwayman.”130 Critics who dismiss the poetry in playgoers’ plays as merely poorly crafted often do so by first dismissing the importance of the status of ­these writers as playgoers who came to their understanding of dramatic poetry as consumers rather than producers. Playgoers with an understanding of poetic language (whose ranks certainly included more than just the nondramatic poets and playgoers who wrote plays) would have recognized that dramatic action and emotion lie not just in what characters say but also in how they say it. Indeed, in a theatrical context, how a character says anything is how action and emotion are created at all. The previous chapter demonstrated how playwriting playgoers’ heightened attention to theatricality, and how that theatricality communicated dramatic meaning, suggests the visual cues that playgoers could recognize as both conventional and peculiar in the commercial play­ house. In this chapter, the work of playwriting playgoers has been used to show the kinds of aural cues audience members could recognize and their capacity to understand how the shape, pace, and rhythm of language could affect the play’s dramatic meanings and theatrical expression. Given their prior experience as poets, Chamberlain, Brome, and Barnes could simply have incorporated into their plays the techniques, conventions, and styles they already knew from writing nondramatic verse. All three, ­however, elected to pursue a dif­fer­ent course, drawing on their experiences as playgoers and play readers to make their prosodic choices. In ­these examples, the playwriting playgoers’ transition from consumers to producers becomes not a mere reversal of position but a sharing of two positions at once, a “double position”—to return to Anne Barton’s term—in which the amateur playmakers’ practices w ­ ere informed and guided by their experiences as playgoers.131 In the poetic nuances used or attempted by playwriting playgoers, we can find evidence of what par­tic­u­lar playgoers knew about poetry on stage and thus we can make deductions about what they heard—or thought they heard—in the play­house. Puttenham complained that audience members took “­little heede to the cunning of the rime,” but playwriting playgoers show that t­ here w ­ ere indeed some in the audience attending to the workings of dramatic verse.

Conclusion

“I began to make a play”

In the spring of 1612, suffering debilitating bouts of seasickness, the young sailor Richard Norwood returned to London from the Mediterranean. He found work as a navigation tutor, and his mind began to turn ­toward the fields in which he would ­later earn fame—­mathe­matics, astronomy, and diving. In his ­free time, however, he made his way to the Fortune play­house, where he was, as he put it years ­later in his manuscript autobiography, “bewitched” by the histories and city comedies of Prince Henry’s Men.1 The seed for his love of the theater had been planted early in his life. While a grammar school student at Stony Stratford, Norwood had a theatrical experience that proved transformative: “At Stratford when I was near fifteen years of age being drawn in by other young men of the town, I acted a ­woman’s part in a stage play. I was so much affected with that practice that had not the Lord prevented it I should have chosen it before any other course of life.”2 Reading plays and acting in them filled his young mind with “childish conceits and fancies,” raptures of “a fantastical but strong imagination.”3 As an older man, Norwood came to repent of his juvenile fascination: “I think that acting a part in a play, the reading of playbooks . . . ​, and the vain conceits which they begat in me was the principal t­ hing that alienated my heart from the word of God.” 4 But in 1612, Norwood was still, at least for a time, enchanted by the theater: “I did not prosecute my laudable exercise but went often to stage plays wherewith I was as it w ­ ere bewitched in affection and never satiated, which was a ­great means to withdraw and take off my mind from anything that was serious, true, or good, and to set it upon frivolous, false, and feigned t­hings.”5 The stage had a galvanizing effect on the young Norwood, leaving him hungry for more. While the older Norwood considered this a distraction from his vocational duties, the young Norwood grew

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increasingly connected to the stage. His engagement as a playgoer eventually transformed and expanded into active engagement as a would-be playmaker: “Yea, so far was I affected with ­these lying vanities that I began to make a play and had written a good part of it. It happened a­ fter some time that I fell out with the players at the Fortune (which was the h ­ ouse I frequented) about a seat which they would not admit me to have, whereupon out of anger, and as it ­were to do them a despite, I came ­there no more that I remember.” 6 Despite Norwood’s retrospective repentance for his “frivolous” time wasting, the stage infatuated the young man. That infatuation resulted in the exact experience warned against by Richard Brathwait when he cautioned that making “Morall Enterludes . . . ​too familiar” would be to “invert a Recreation / And by day-­practice make it a Vocation.”7 As Brathwait feared, Norwood’s playgoing shifted from recreation to avocation in his attempt to “make” a play. Tellingly, he started writing as a direct response to being a playgoer at the Fortune and he stopped writing as a result of his falling out with the players; he therefore likely expected or hoped that Prince Henry’s Men would stage his play. He did not give up on writing ­because he assumed that the actors would not want the play or would not accept it on the grounds of his externality to the industry, nor does he ever suggest that he thought he was crossing a line between the receptive be­hav­ior of the playgoer and the creative be­hav­ior of the playmaker. For Norwood, as for all of the playwriting playgoers, no such line existed: to be part of the play­house community meant to share in the making of dramatic meaning. Being an attentive cultural consumer was to be part of the pro­cess of cultural production. The language Norwood uses to express his “anger” at the shattering of his devotion to that community and his belief that no longer attending the Fortune ­will somehow “do them a despite” suggests the “bewitched” playgoer’s assumption of a personal connection with the industry. To state “I fell out with the players” implies that he was, or at least thought that he was, at some point “in” with them. Whitney assumes that “some of the players [who] actually knew him” conferred with Norwood in the writing of his play.8 As with Clavell’s The Soddered Citizen and the King’s Men (see Chapter 3), however, ­there is no reason to suppose the playwriting playgoer required the assistance of t­ hose within the industry in order to write for it. Norwood’s “strong sense of entitlement” is itself a sufficient explanation for his attempt at playwriting.9 As Whitney himself observes, Norwood’s autobiography shows him to have been experimentally minded, “freethinking, curious, industrious” but also “rebellious and adventurous.” He was a playgoer in whom all the characteristics

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of avocational commitment to the stage w ­ ere to be found in abundance. Norwood’s choice of the verb “make” to describe his action is particularly revealing: the playgoer describes himself as a playmaker, that is, a playwright, implying that his concept of the “play” is not merely the written text but the text’s expression in per­for­mance. As Sir Richard Baker and many o­ thers in the period observed (see Chapter 1), it is for this reason that it is the playgoer who ultimately “makes” the play, for it is the playgoer, the consumer, who, in the final stage of the play’s pro­cess of transmission, determines what meaning to “make” from the performed script. And yet, ­after having written some of his play, Norwood gave up before it could be “made” to completion: not part of the industry, he was ­under no compulsion—­financial or artistic—to see it through. He had no interest in becoming a professional playwright; navigation, sailing, and mathe­matics remained “his earnest calling” during his months of idleness in 1612.10 As much as he loved the theater and had as a boy considered it for a c­ areer, by this point in his life he had no desire to make it his means of living. That lack of interest in professionalizing, however, did not prevent him from seeking to participate in the pro­cess of playmaking for the professional stage. Had Norwood’s play survived, it may have elucidated how this par­tic­u­lar audience member understood that pro­cess. For example, to what extent did his faithful attendance at the Fortune influence his use of par­tic­u­lar features of play­house architecture or of properties in his play? Did he envision certain parts played by certain members of Prince Henry’s Men? Which professional plays did he see, and how did they enter into or affect his own? Was his play in keeping with the generic signature of the troupe or was it, like Alexander Brome’s use of rhyme, a telling deviation from their usual repertory? To ask ­these questions of a playwriting playgoer such as Norwood means something dif­fer­ent from asking them of one of the Fortune’s professional dramatists who w ­ ere trained in and familiar with how to write useful scripts and how t­ hose scripts ­were then made into plays. Norwood’s example is indicative in other ways as well. For example, while scholars traditionally associate the term “amateur dramatist” exclusively with aristocratic rank, opportunities for nonprofessional participation in the commercial theaters w ­ ere not restricted to the upper classes, nor ­were such opportunities dependent only upon existing or potential patronage relationships or standards of education. Committed, literate playgoers of any status or class could participate in the playmaking pro­cess, b­ ecause the border between theatrical consumer and producer was a porous one, no m ­ atter how vigorously some professionals, such as Jonson, contested the attempted intrusion of

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“strangers” like Norwood from the auditorium. Theater always requires audience members’ imaginative involvement, but early modern audiences often extended that involvement into a­ ctual interactions with the per­for­mance. Th ­ ose interactions inevitably reshaped the per­for­mance and its reception by ­others, changing in varying degrees the experience, and often the meaning, of that play for o­ thers in the audience. Playwriting playgoers represent another, heightened form of such interaction, one that involves not mere reaction but creation, an engagement with the stage that produces a fixed rec­ord allowing us to glimpse some of the details of that consumer’s experience with, and understanding of, the stage. Unlike the playgoer intruding into the per­for­mance of a professional play, the playwriting playgoer becomes not a responsive collaborator in (re)making the meaning of someone ­else’s play but an innovating agent expressing an imaginative vision within the terms of his own specific understanding of the constraints, needs, and opportunities of the professional play­house. Norwood provides one example of a dedicated playgoer acting upon the perception of an intimate bond between the individual and the stage by “making” a play for the professional actors whom he enjoyed seeing in per­for­ mance. For Norwood, as for the other playwriting playgoers, being a cultural consumer was not a passive recreation but an active, productive avocation. J. W. Saunders regretted that “what the respectable London tradesman made of [plays by professional dramatists] is not recorded.”11 Alfred Harbage, too, lamented the challenge of recovering what audience members actually thought about the stage; a­ fter criticizing scholars such as J. Dover Wilson, who used Shakespeare’s plays to hypothesize about “what Shakespeare’s audience believed,” Harbage cautioned, “We must not decide upon the attitudes and beliefs held by the rank and file of Elizabethans through reading [Shakespeare’s plays]. . . . ​The difficulty is that we cannot consult the spectators at the Globe.”12 As noted in the Introduction, Harbage’s warning has failed to prevent many subsequent critics from making assumptions about the Shakespearean audience based upon what the critics see in Shakespeare’s plays. Plays by audience members offer a new means of recovering audience understanding, experience, and desire that suggests what individuals in the audience—­ including, as Saunders had wished, nonaristocratic spectators—­thought of the plays they saw and of the theater itself. ­These plays allow us to see the stage through a playgoer’s eyes—­admittedly, inflected by that playgoer’s biases, imperfections, assumptions, conditions, and aspirations, but still a set of eyes (and ears) actually situated in the early modern play­house audience in a way unlike even professional playmakers in that audience.

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In the early modern period, individuals of any social or economic class could, and did, undertake activities for plea­sure, including writing plays for the public stage. For dedicated playgoers, socioeconomic standing was no ­barrier to the pursuit of a degree of participation in the play­house, even if it required trade-­offs against the logistical pressures of their lawful vocations. Norwood, for example, continued his work as a navigation tutor while he wrote his play, which implies that he wrote for the intrinsic plea­sure of it, even though he wrote with the commercial theater in mind. Without explicit evidence that playwriting playgoers w ­ ere attempting to professionalize, we cannot justifiably interpret their temporary foray into playwriting as a signal other­wise. To do so is to impose a theoretical model upon the evidence, rather than using evidence to shape our model. Recognizing that t­ hese writers worked from a perspective distinctly dif­fer­ent from that of the professional dramatists—­even if their plays seem to resemble certain aspects of plays by the professionals—­ also helps to avoid the fallacy of dismissing their work for failing to conform to certain standards, models, and expectations that we have for the work of professional playwrights. Too often critical commentary on amateurs’ plays falls back upon the simplistic charge of ignorance or naïveté to explain why they differ from plays by the established professionals, but, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton warns, “we may miss something if we condescend to ­people in the past.”13 Instead, we can more usefully ask what dif­fer­ent standards, models, and expectations w ­ ill prove useful, or simply applicable, by reading playwriting playgoers with an understanding of them as participatory consumers rather than inept producers. In manuscript plays that rec­ord how playgoers revised their original vision, playwriting playgoers demonstrate a deep concern for the reception of their work (see Chapter 2). This view of the amateur stands at odds with the frequent scholarly assumption (­adopted from the anti-­amateur attitude displayed by many professional dramatists) that the amateur was merely a dabbler, a dilettante inattentive to, unconcerned by, or even unaware of the needs and desires of other producers and consumers in the theatrical community. In ­these revisions, playwriting playgoers did not always solve prob­lems in the same ways that professionals did (and sometimes they did not solve the prob­ lems at all, or in the pro­cess of solving one prob­lem they created another); however, their willingness to attempt solutions indicates a recognition of their role as collaborators, and the need to compromise about their intentions, in creating a theatrical product suitable for other consumers. A similar concern for efficacy is found in many stage directions by playwriting playgoers (see

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Chapter 3). Their disposition of materials and personnel, their navigation of play­house architecture, and their instructions for acting conventions signal aspects of per­for­mance that attentive playgoers recognized and how they understood what they thought they saw. When scholars dismiss their stage directions as naïve or ignorant, a false comparison is being made. Deviations from professional practices, so often read as points of misunderstanding, suggest instead the playwriting playgoer’s awareness that his desires do not ­conform to what he usually sees on the stage, that is, that he is innovating (not, as Jonson might put it, merely aping what he has seen), and that he is concerned that the players might not understand what he is calling for. The fault lies not in the amateur’s instructions but in our desire to—­and expectation that we can—­read t­ hose instructions as categorically similar to instructions by professionals; in other words, to ignore that the amateur came at his writing as a playgoer and not as a regular member of the playmaking industry. Adjusting our expectations to account for the dif­fer­ent place of ­these writers in the play­house requires us to adjust what we can reasonably expect the evidence of their stage directions to reveal. Amateurs’ stage directions do provide answers; we simply have not been asking the right questions. While willing, even e­ ager, to dismiss its quality, few scholars have asked any critical questions at all of playgoers’ dramatic poetry, though in their use—­ and attempted use—of dramatic poetic devices and conventions, playwriting playgoers often reveal the kinds of language they ­were used to hearing on the public stages (see Chapter 4). The common critical practice of reading professionals’ plays for the theatrical efficacy of their stage poetry is not a reliable way of recovering how that poetry was necessarily experienced by audience members; simply b­ ecause the professional wrote an effect into his play does not mean that playgoers heard or understood the theatrical ends of that effect. We can make assumptions about audience reception of stage poetry by looking to professionals’ plays, but t­ hose assumptions rely upon what professionals themselves assumed about their audiences. Absent from our reconstructions of audience experience has been consideration of direct testimony from playgoers themselves about what their aural encounters in the play­house might have been like and what they understood about them. Playgoers’ plays provide such testimony, offering a rec­ord by audience members about what they thought to be both conventional and useful poetry on the public stage. In ­these ways, and o­ thers, playgoers’ plays can help us more fully recover what members of the audience who w ­ ere not regular participants in the playmaking industry thought about, and knew about, how that industry made

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plays. Further work needs to be done, then, on the work of ­these writers from a perspective that acknowledges and makes use of their par­tic­u­lar position in theatrical culture. What, for example, can we learn from their plays about audience understanding of genre and generic conventions? What do their plays reveal about the way playgoers recognized ele­ments of dramatic structure and narrative devices? What sources—­dramatic and other­wise—­did playwriting playgoers use and how did they both make use of them and depart from them? While the answers to t­ hese questions w ­ ill speak to each amateur dramatist’s unique set of circumstances, expectations, and experiences, the existence of this group of writers requires that we reassess our assumptions about the ­dynamic between the early modern stage and its audience. Rather than obedient compliance to a mass-­market entertainment that encouraged passive, collective escapism, the playgoing experience suggested by ­these dramatists was one of attention and engagement, of active creativity, and even creative autonomy. The playgoers who wrote their own plays w ­ ere exceptional; the audience experience that led to t­hose exceptions, however, was commonplace. Early modern playgoers, ­after all, ­were understood to have the capacity and authority to claim, respond to, and contradict the meanings of the plays they saw. Playwriting playgoers extended that participation in their bid to write for the theaters that they enjoyed attending and the audiences of which they ­were a part. Just as playgoing was a recreation in which they delighted, playwriting was, to borrow from Shakespeare, a l­abor in which they delighted.

Notes

Introduction 1. For Mountfort’s life, see Boas 1923, 167–82; and Pangallo 2007, 2–16. On his play, see Walter 1933; Pangallo 2007; and Christensen. 2. This account derives from his preface to his play, the only source on Jones and his playwriting (A2r). 3. Clavell gives the details of his criminal past in his poem “A Recantation of an Ill-­Led Life” (1628); details of his life may also be gleaned from his commonplace book. The fullest account of Clavell’s life and playwriting is provided by Pafford 1993; for his play, see Pafford 1936. 4. For the highlights of Barnes’s life and his play, see Pogue. 5. Professional dramatists did, of course, attend plays: Dekker states that he was often a spectator of his Keep the W ­ idow Waking in 1624; Drayton describes being in the “thronged ­Theaters” and, unknown to the audience, listening to the crowd applaud his plays (Drayton 1605, 2C4v); the dedication of Fletcher’s Wild Goose Chase (1621) refers to Fletcher as “Himself a Spectator” at its per­for­mance (Lowin and Taylor, [¶]2r). Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Killigrew, and Nathanael Richards are also known to have attended plays, and references in their plays suggest that Beaumont, Marston, Marmion, and Middleton did so too. ­These trained members of the industry could also gain from exposure to plays as consumers, but they ­were a peculiar class of spectators b­ ecause, unlike lay consumers, their understanding of what they saw was also ­shaped by their exposure to playmaking as producers. The experience of t­ hese playwrights in attending plays was therefore necessarily dif­fer­ent from the experience of playgoers who did not share their background in the industry. It is pertinent to this point that playwrights are often described as attending per­for­mances of their own plays, as if their goal was not so much to watch their play as it was—­like Hamlet watching Claudius—to watch the audience watch their play. John Stephens jokes that when a “base mercenary poet” (that is, a commercial playwright) “heares his play hissed, hee would rather thinke bottle-­A le is opening,” implying that the playgoing playwright is more interested in mea­sur­ing audience reception of his work than he is concerned with taking in the per­for­mance itself (Stephens, V4v). 6. Erika Lin, for example, looks to nontheatrical texts to try to recover “what exactly . . . ​ audience members in Shakespeare’s day [thought] they ­were ­going to see or experience at the play­house [and] their common understandings about the bound­aries of per­for­mance” (Lin, 14). 7. See, for example, Harbage 1941 and 1952; Neill; Cook; Butler 1984; Gurr 2004; Salingar. 8. See, for example, Sprague; Mack; Honigmann 1976; Howard 1984; Berry 1985; Cartwright; Lopez 2003. 9. For a further refutation of using this approach to understand audience reception, see Whitney 2006.

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10. Blackstone and Louis, 561. 11. Salingar, 226. 12. See Cartwright, passim, esp. ix. 13. Carlson, 82. 14. “Spectatorial poetics” is from Cartwright, x. 15. On the audience as the writer’s creation, see Garber, 72; Howard 1984, 3 and 6–9; Carlson, 84; and Burt, 29. 16. Gurr 1993, 8. 17. Chambers, 1:259. 18. Preiss, 24 and 26. 19. Preiss, 26. 20. See, for example, Marshall 2002; Whitney 2002 and 2006; Low and Myhill; Mc­ Innis, esp. 19–50; Hobgood; Preiss, 18–47. For a similar approach with modern audiences, see Carson 2008. Lin also draws upon many of the new audience study’s strategies (“watching spectacle did not dazzle audience members into passivity . . . ​but interpellated them as active participants complicit in what they saw” [21])—­particularly in her chapter on early modern dance (107–34)—­but in relying mainly on plays by professional dramatists (particularly Shakespeare) also falls back upon the “orchestration” model’s assumption that “early modern theatrical per­ for­mance tended to construct playgoers” (11). 21. Whitney 2006, 2. 22. Whitney 2006, 3. 23. Hobgood, 26; see also Steggle 2007, 2–4. 24. Burton, L3r–­v. 25. Dekker 1606, E2r. 26. Nashe 1593, F3r. 27. Guilpin, A8r. 28. Gurr 2004, 139. 29. Mildmay, ff. 10v, 22v, 31v, 31v, and 40v. 30. Wright, B3r. 31. Steggle 2007, 3. 32. Gosson 1582, G5r. 33. “For an early modern text to say that a par­tic­u ­lar entertainment served as ‘recreation,’ then, underscores not its function as leisure but its rejuvenating properties as well as its physiological and spiritual consequences” (Lin, 120). 34. Perkins. 35. “Amateur” was not used to describe a nonprofessional practitioner u ­ ntil 1768 (see OED defs. 1 and 2). 36. Brome 1653, Court Beggar, N4v [#2v]. 37. Booth, 6 and 55. See also, for example, Pieper, esp. 56; Stebbins 1979, 1992, and 2004; Deci; Deci and Ryan; Csikszentmihalyi; and Neville, 8, 12, and 120–42. 38. On the equation of the professional’s and amateur’s work, see Stebbins 2004; see also Pieper. 39. Brathwait 1635, A7r. 40. On early modern theories of vocation and avocation, see Marshall 1996, 27–61; also see O’Day, 18–44. 41. On the actor-­playwrights, see Johnson 2003.



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42. Of the eight dramatists who wrote for the King’s Revels, five ­were first-­time playwrights: John Mason (The Turk), Lewis Machin and Gervase Markham (The Dumb Knight), and Robert Armin (The Two Maids of More-­C lacke), though Armin’s previous work as a ­professional actor must have meant that he was familiar with professional, commercial per­for­ mance, and Lording Barry, long known as the dramatist responsible for Ram Alley, though the earlier ­Family of Love has been proposed as an addition to his miniscule canon (see Taylor, Mulholland, and Jackson). Edward Sharpham’s second play (Cupid’s Whirligig) was staged at Whitefriars (his first, The Fleer, had been staged by the ­Children of the Revels). The only writer for the King’s Revels who had prior experience as a professional dramatist was John Day (Humor out of Breath); also involved as a shareholder was Michael Drayton, who had been a prolific writer for the Admiral’s Men in the late 1590s and early 1600s. As Mary Bly argues, “Given that John Day and Michael Drayton w ­ ere the only playwrights involved in the Whitefriars who had any known professional experience before 1607, and that rec­ords indicate both invariably wrote in collaboration, it is a reasonable assumption that the Whitefriars plays should be regarded as the product of a collaborative mode of textual production” (Bly, 119). 43. In his induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614), Jonson refers to Brome as “his man, Master Broome” (Jonson 1631, [A4r]). Brome boasts of the relationship in his commendatory verse for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio collection and writes of “Most knowing Johnson” as “the Master of [Fletcher’s] Art [that is, playwriting] and Me” (Brome 1647, g1r). For other references, see Bentley, 3:49–52. 44. Jonson 1632, A3r. 45. On the actors’ apprenticeship system, see Astington, 76–107. 46. “Occupational closure” is the term for prac­ti­tion­ers in a par­tic­u ­lar field controlling both who may enter the field and how the field w ­ ill operate (through training, licensing, ­regulating, setting standards, and so forth). For the socioeconomic and historical views of professionalism and the ways in which occupational closure serves to form and protect professions, see Carr-­Saunders and Wilson; Johnson 1972; Larson; Burrage and Torstendahl 1990 (both); and Leicht and Fennell. On early modern professionalism, see O’Day, esp. 13–14; Mathew, 56–77; and Prest. For a connection between “profession” and playwriting, see Gieskes, 162–248. 47. See Ioppolo, 12. 48. Jonson 1607, A4v. 49. Taylor, 70. 50. Mayne, A2v and B1r. 51. Gurr and Ichikawa, 3. 52. Wickham, 2:83. 53. Wickham, 1:passim, esp. 297–301; Bentley 1986, 3–4; Lamb, 63–88 and 124. 54. Transcribed in Wickham, 2:99–100. 55. The fictional amateur players in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are motivated by, above all, the opportunity to receive financial reward from the Duke. Real amateur players ­were also able to profit off their avocational l­ abor; for example, on December 21, 1617, officials in Coventry paid amateur players led by James Crawford (see Bentley, 2:416–17), and in 1635, the amateur player Adam Gerdler was paid by Lord Clifford for taking a role in a per­for­mance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle in North Yorkshire (see Bentley, 2:441). As ­every volume in the Rec­ords of Early En­glish Drama makes clear, the entire tradition of local and guild pageants around E ­ ngland involved compensating amateur players.

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56. Smith, A2v. 57. Smith, A2v. 58. Burton, 2Q1r. 59. Pepys, 2:357. 60. On The Resolute Queen, see Pangallo 2011. 61. Chambers, 1:369. 62. See Chambers, 3:498. Not only did Tomkis make money writing a play, his payment happened to be the same as what Henslowe paid professional dramatists at the Fortune in the same year (Bentley 1986, 105–6). 63. For Sir Henry Wotton’s account of this amateur production, see Smith, 2:13–14. 64. Fermedo, f. 2v. The question of ­whether the extant manuscript entitled The Governor is the play written by Fermedo is disputed (see Cerasano). Even if the author was not Fermedo, however, the prologue and epilogue clearly imply an amateur dramatist and most likely a courtly one. 65. Fermedo, f. 48v. 66. Fermedo, f. 48v. 67. Brathwait 1638, S11v. 68. Brathwait 1638, S12r. 69. Wickham, 2:99; see also 17, 44–45, 141, and 149. 70. Amateurism often forms in response to a newly evolving “professional” counterpart; thus it is usual to see “emerging professionalism . . . ​paralleled by an emerging amateurism” (Stebbins 1979, 19). 71. Saunders, 31–48. 72. Saunders’s view is repeated by many o­ thers. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett ­Sullivan place “aristocratic writers” on “the opposite end of the spectrum” from “commercial writers,” who ­were “professional poets” (Cheney, Hadfield, and ­Sullivan, xxii). Ira Clark likewise considers the courtier amateurs direct opposites to Caroline professionals (Clark, 3–5). The binary thus constructed (“aristocratic” against “commercial”) elides entirely ­t hose writers who ­were neither aristocratic nor commercial. 73. On the potential to earn a living from playwriting, see ­Sullivan, 313; see also Sheavyn. On professionals’ pay, see Bentley 1986, 88–110. 74. On courtier drama, see, for example, Harbage 1964; and Butler 1984. The courtier dramatists had an extremely significant role to play, of course, in the development of relations between the profession and amateurs: by the 1630s, tension between t­ hese amateurs and professional dramatists intensified as many professionals came to see t­ hese writers as a direct threat to their trade (see Clark, 3–5; and Bentley, 1:57–63), and indeed, ­a fter 1660, “courtly playwright-­ spectators” came to dominate the commercial theaters (Nicoll, 1:20; on Restoration courtier amateurs as playwriting playgoers, see Nicoll, 1:19–25). 75. Bentley 1986, 17 and 24. 76. See, for example, Wickham, Berry, and Ingram, 7; and Ioppolo, 36 and 140. 77. Whitney 2006, 185; on Norwood and his playwriting, see the Conclusion to this book. 78. Sharpe, A4v. 79. Fitzgeoffrey, A5r. 80. Rhodes, A2v. 81. Bentley 1986, 18. 82. Bentley 1986, 23. 83. Bentley 1986, 79.



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84. Bentley 1986, 25. 85. Butler 2006, 120. 86. Butler 2006, 119. 87. On the manuscript of this play, see Chapter 2. 88. Rawlins, an engraver, wrote the tragedy The Rebellion, which was staged by the King’s Revels in 1637–39, including for a notable nine-­day run. In the play, Count Machvile uses the occasion of France’s invasion of Spain to orchestrate the removal of his foe, the noble Antonio, and joins with the French moor Raymond in an ultimately failed attempt to seize the Spanish throne. The play includes numerous connections to Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, including references to The Spanish Tragedy (a troupe of amateur actors rehearse a per­for­mance of Kyd’s play) and King Lear and echoes of Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 89. Bentley 1986, 19. This is not the same as a disdain for the theater. Indeed, most amateurs display a profound connection with and love for the theater as dedicated playgoers and play readers. 90. Brome 1653, Court Beggar, N4v [¶2v]. 91. Gurr 2004, 134. 92. On fan fiction, see Jenkins 1992. 93. Th ­ ere are, of course, crucial differences between modern writers of fan fiction and early modern playwriting playgoers, chief of which is that most writers of fan fiction do not think that their work w ­ ill enter substantially into the mainstream medium with which they are engaging (and many do not want it to). A further difference is that fan fiction typically appropriates directly the texts of its target. Rarely did such practices exist in the early modern period. One notable exception is theater aficionado Sir Edward Dering’s adaptation and combination of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV for a private per­for­mance by h ­ ouse­hold members at his f­ amily’s home at Surrenden (on Dering as a dedicated playgoer and play reader, see Lennam; and Butler 1984, 104 and 124–29; on Dering’s adaptation of the Henry IV plays, see Lennam, 145; Williams and Evans; and Yeandle). Besides Dering, perhaps the closest t­ hing to early modern fan fiction of the professional stage is the appearance of several ­actual actors (including Richard Burbage and William Kemp) as characters in the anonymous student play The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, staged at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in the late sixteenth ­century.

Chapter 1 1. Elliott and Nelson, 2:789. 2. Technogamia was first staged, to lackluster response, in 1617 for students at Christ Church, who gave it, Anthony à Wood observes, “no g­ reat applause” (Wood, 2:M3r). On the play’s failure, see Bentley, 4:590–96. 3. Wood, 2:M3r. 4. Transcribed in Bentley, 4:593. The manuscript is Folger MS 452.4, ff. 71v–76. 5. Killigrew, A4r. 6. Preiss, 38. 7. Preiss, 43. 8. Preiss, 32–35. 9. “Play” ­here describes the event rather than the document; as Styan observes, “The script is not the play” (Styan 1995, 7; see also, for example, Gurr 2004, 3; Altman, 86; Carlson, 86; Preiss, 23).

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10. Book historians have shown how early modern readers exercised active, individualized, and often counterauthorial creativity; see Marotti and Bristol; Jackson; Roberts; Hackel; Sherman; the introduction to Daybell and Hinds; and, for a study of active play reading in the period, Estill. As Martyn Lyons summarizes, “Reading is a creative pro­cess. The reader is not an empty or transparent receptacle who automatically receives the ‘imprint’ of what is read. Readers select, interpret, re-­work and re-­imagine what they read; their responses are far from uniform. The princi­ple of the reader’s autonomy is fundamental to the history of reading” (3). 11. Altman, 85. 12. “­Every spectator’s interpretation of the text is in effect a new construction of it” (Elam, 95; see also Chaudhuri, 284–85). On the audience as a collaborative playmaker during per­for­ mance, see, for example, Elam; Pavis, 67–94; Chaudhuri; Chaim; de Marinis; Carlson; Bennett; Styan 1995, 224–41; Kattwinkel; and Brown, 41–62. This theoretical commonplace of per­ for­mance studies is akin to the postmodern reader-­response theories of such critics as Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes, who argue that meaning is not inherent in a text itself but is dependent upon the receiver of the text. 13. Bennett, 21. See also Myhill and Low, 5; Elam, 95–96; Whitney 2006, 9; Kattwinkel, ix; Styan 1995, 4 and 24; Gaylor, 136. 14. Baker, C8r–­v. 15. In Plutarch’s version, the “bee”—or industrious, moral reader of poetry—­derives honey from even the most toxic of “plants,” that is, poems. Besides Baker, other period writers who adopt the meta­phor include Thomas Churchyard in “Surjoinder unto Camel’s Rejoinder” from The Contention Betwixt Churchyard and Camel (1560); Geffrey Whitney in his epigram “Vitae, aut Morti” from A Choice of Emblems and Other Devices (1586); Thomas Freeman in his ­Epigram 86, “In Thuscum,” from Rub and A G ­ reat Cast (1614); and George Wither in his Satire 3, “Of Weakness,” from Iwenilia (1633). In Jonson’s Volpone (1606), Sir Politic Would-be uses it as an analogy to describe his wife’s habit of learning about fashion by studying Venetian courtesans. On the classical roots of the bee and spider meta­phor, see Vickers 1989, 24–25. 16. Bavande, 2B3v. 17. Perkins, a3r. 18. Munday, A8r; emphasis added. 19. Middleton, A2r. 20. The banquet meta­phor is used by Jonson in ­Every Man out of His Humor (1599), Epicoene (1609), Neptune’s Triumph (1624), and The New Inn (1629), Heywood in A ­Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Beaumont and Fletcher in The Coxcomb (1608–10), Henry Shirley in The Martyred Soldier (1619), Fletcher in Wife for a Month (1624), Carew in his preface to Davenant’s The Wits (1636), and James Shirley in The Duke’s Mistress (1636) and 1 St. Patrick for Ireland (1639). 21. Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, A2r. 22. Dekker and Middleton, M3r–­v. 23. Garber, 72. 24. Gurr 1993, 18. 25. Bruce, 140. 26. See, for example, Gurr 2004, 218–19; and Butler 1984, 194. 27. Tofte, G4v. 28. Whitney 2006, 142. 29. Whitney 2006, 142. 30. Gayton, 140–41. 31. May 1657, H4v.



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32. Cartwright, 10. 33. Shakespeare 1605, G4r. 34. Gayton, B2r. 35. Forman, 207r. Even this seems a case of the playgoer’s interpretation contradicting what the playwright intended, for the witches explic­itly describe the setting as upon the open heath. 36. Mayne, S2r. 37. Altman, 90. 38. Edwardes, A2v. 39. For other examples of audiences’ revisionary responses, see Stern 2009, 90–91. On the audience as a force that “controlled [plays] eco­nom­ically, and, as a result, aesthetically,” see Myhill and Low, 5–6. 40. Stern 2000, 118; see also 117–21. Stern’s claim, however, that The Launching of the Mary contains “a special second-­performance prologue” describing such revision is in error (121); no such prologue exists. 41. Beaumont and Fletcher 1628, A2v. 42. Glapthorne 1639, E2v. 43. Bennett, 21. See also Preiss, 46; Myhill and Low, 5; Myhill, 38; Elam, 95–96; Whitney 2006, 9; Kattwinkel, ix; Styan 1995, 4 and 24; Gaylor, 136. 44. Transcribed in Sisson, 58. On the incident, see Sisson 12–79; and Gurr 2004, 173–74. 45. Gurr suggests that Flaskett also “commissioned” the play—­t hat is, paid Chapman to write it—­but t­ here is no evidence of this. According to Thomas Woodford’s deposition, Chapman sold the play to Pearce (Sisson, 70–71). Gurr’s theory would mean Chapman profited twice from the play. 46. Chambers, 1:243–44. 47. Baildon, 48. 48. Transcribed in Bentley, 2:560. Sisson and Bentley both assume, on the basis of Dekker’s comment alone, that Savage had obtained Aaron Holland’s share in the Red Bull and so had taken over management of the com­pany ­there, but his name does not come up in other rec­ords or references associated with the Red Bull (particularly involving Keep the W ­ idow Waking). 49. See Wiggins 2014, 4:351–52. 50. I am grateful to Alexander Bevilacqua for assistance translating Galli’s account (for a transcription of the original Italian, see Gargàno, 125–27). A slightly dif­fer­ent translation appears in Gurr 2004, 272, in which Foscarini, not an actor, announces the play. In both, however, the audience demands the schedule change. “Friars” was prob­ably Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) (Chambers 1925, 186). On audience “authority” over professionals’ business practices, such as repertory planning, see Forse. 51. Shirley 1632, H2r–­v. 52. Gayton, 2M3r. 53. Similarly, Fynes Moryson saw at Frankfurt in 1592 a “stragling [and] broken” troupe of En­glish players, resorting to “pronowncing peeces and patches of En­glish playes” (Hughes, 304). 54. Gayton, 2M3r. 55. “Seeing ­these forms of play-­destroying as, ultimately, forms of play-­making [recognizes] the collaborative, dialogic nature of playing” (Preiss, 47). 56. Transcribed in Burney, 3:377. 57. Davies, F4v. 58. Guilpin, B4r.

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59. Fitzgeoffrey, F2v. 60. Lenton, C3r and C4v. 61. May 1657, H4r–3r. 62. Grosart, 104. 63. Jonson 1631, O4r–­v. 64. Transcribed in Chambers, 4:297. 65. Quoted in Bentley, 1:42. 66. Quoted in Blackstone and Louis, 560. 67. Blackstone and Louis, 561. 68. Fitzgeoffrey, F2r. 69. May 1657, H3v. 70. Rowlands, D1r. 71. Kemp, B1r. 72. [Anonymous,] Nobody, I1v. 73. Modern actor Mark Rylance recalls how, in the early years of the new Globe, “in Henry V one heavi­ly armed actor playing a French Duke wanted to jump into the yard and kill a small group of groundlings for throwing ­things and laughing” (Rylance, 110). The actor’s urge to suppress the “inappropriate” response from the audience makes manifest the playmakers’ desire to police against audience conduct that threatens control over the per­for­mance. 74. For rec­ords of the incident, see Galloway, 70–76; on it as entertainment, see ­Northway. 75. [Anonymous,] Warning, H2r. 76. Massinger 1629, C2v. 77. Munday, A8r. 78. See Whitney 2006, 123–32; and Rhatigan. 79. See Bergeron; also Northway, 26. 80. On how Gilbert Dugdale’s account of James’s 1604 entry (The Time Triumphant) pres­ ents the “beholders of [the] event” as actors and authors, see Preiss, 45. 81. [J. G.,] Refutation, C2r. 82. Lin, 109; see also 114 and 116. 83. Wall, “The Interactive Sermon.” 84. Ford 1652, K4v. 85. See Neill. 86. Carew, A3r. 87. Gurr 2004, 215. 88. Fennor, B2r–3r. 89. Dekker 1612, A4v. 90. Beaumont 1610, A4v. 91. Gurr 2004, 213. 92. Jonson 1635, A3r. 93. Gurr 2004, 214. 94. Lee, 89. 95. Lyly 1592, A2v. 96. Lyly 1584, A3v. 97. On the theatrum mundi, see Righter [Barton], 64–86; Stevens; H. Hawkins; Yates; and Gillies, 75–98. 98. Heywood 1612, A4r–­v.



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99. “Actor” was often equivalent to “character,” since “actor” also meant “the doer of a deed” (many dramatis personae lists with roles are entitled “the names of the actors”; also see OED def. 2.). On the conflation of “actor” and “character,” see McJannet, 190; and Beckerman 1980. 100. Whitney 2006, 10. 101. Righter [Barton], 65. 102. Greene 1599, A3r. 103. Marmion 1633, A3r. 104. Shirley 1640, A4v. 105. Dekker 1612, A3v. 106. Rider, F3r. 107. Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.0.35 and 3.0.25. 108. Howard observes that the “audience’s active participation in the drama . . . ​must occur throughout the play” and that the gaps in the play’s repre­sen­ta­tion are what allow “room for the f­ ree play of the spectator’s imagination” (1984, 7). James Calderwood notes that exploiting productive gaps in the medium has always been a defining ele­ment of theater (517–19). 109. Nashe 1592, F3r. 110. [Anonymous,] ­Cromwell, B1v and D1v–24. 111. [Anonymous,] Dev­il, A3r. 112. Dekker 1600, A2v. 113. It is for this reason that most such appeals appear in histories and adventures—­plays that, by their generic nature, travel across broad spans of time and space (see McInnis). 114. See Whitney 2006, 5. On playgoers leaving the play­house with parts of the play in their mind, see Barton, 83; for the textual expression of that exportation, see Estill. 115. Jonson 1601, F2v. 116. Stern 2000, 58. 117. Marston and Webster, A3r. 118. Heath, E3r–­v. 119. Gayton, 141. 120. Ioppolo, 57–58; Barton, 82–83 and 139–40; Estill. On Pudsey, see Gurr 2004, 240. 121. Lenton, B4r. 122. Wither, D3v. 123. Quoted in Bentley, 6:135. 124. ­These examples are satirical, but not all descriptions of engaged playgoers are such. Michael Drayton, for example, praised Henry Reynolds for his capacity to remember “some Stage pieces famous long before, / Of which your happy memory had store” (Drayton 1631, T7r). 125. Beaumont 1607, A2r. 126. Dekker 1609, E4v. 127. Marston 1598, G7v. 128. Jonson 1600, H2r. 129. Dekker 1609, E2v. 130. Roberts, 8; Marotti and Bristol, 5; Daybell and Hinds, 9; Estill. 131. Flecknoe, 104. 132. Gayton, 46. 133. Crosse, O2r. 134. Whitney 2006, 164. 135. Preiss, 43.

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136. Sharpe, G3v. 137. Jonson 1601, M2v. 138. Sharpe, G3v. 139. Sharpe, A3v. 140. Righter [Barton], 65. 141. Jonson 1607, ¶2v. 142. Clare, 18–20. 143. Jonson 1602, L2r–­v. 144. Jonson 1602, L2v. 145. Jonson 1640 [1641], D3v. 146. From “Letter 3, to Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury,” The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 147. Ioppolo, 67; see also Dutton 1991, 138. Ioppolo notes, however, that in the epilogue for the Whitehall per­for­mance Jonson restores the “power to judge” to the monarch and concedes that a playwright’s “licence” derives from the permission of the (royal) audience (67). 148. “An induction is a dramatic action which precedes a full-­length play. It contains at least two speaking roles, and exists on a dif­fer­ent narrative plane from that of the central work” (Young, 131). See also Hosley 1961; Bentley 1986, 140–44. On critical inductions, see Greenfield, 67–95; and Salingar, 215–17. 149. Marston and Webster, A4v. 150. Jonson, Magnetic, G2v. 151. Day, A2r. 152. Bliss, 7. 153. Beaumont 1613, B1v. 154. Beaumont 1613, B1v. 155. See esp. OED def. 2a. 156. From Lexicons of Early Modern En­glish (http://­leme​.­library​.­utoronto​.­ca). 157​.­ On the conflict between native and immigrant laborers and fears of immigrant l­ abor displacing native ­labor, see Archer, 131–40; and Ward, 125–43. 158. Bawcutt, 145 and 147. 159. Dulwich College, Henslowe Papers, MSS 1, Article 106. Accessed via the Henslowe-­ Alleyn Digitisation Proj­ect. 160. Transcribed in Wickham et al., 226. 161. Heywood 1638, L2v. 162. Elam, 95. See also Garber, 77 and 81. “The final form of a play . . . ​is always determined by its audience, and as a result, form is never final” (Preiss, 46). 163. Rowe Jr., 439. 164. Jonson 1600, R3r. 165. Jonson 1600, R3r. 166. Jonson 1640 [1641], R3r. 167. Massinger 1630, A4r. 168. Dekker and Middleton, A4r. 169. “The nature of playgoing . . . ​was not authorlessness, but a superabundance of authors” (Preiss, 48). 170. Fletcher, ¶2v. 171. Jonson 1611, [A3r].



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172. On the attribution of the induction to Brome, see Bentley, 4:503–4, and 1986, 256–58; also Steggle 2004, 121. Butler, however, makes the case that the induction could not have been written by Brome b­ ecause it mocks two of Brome’s plays (Butler 2006, 117–18). On the induction, see Myhill, 44–48; and Butler 2006, 116–20. 173. Brome 1656, B4r. 174. Brome 1656, B4v. 175. Brome 1656, B4v. 176. Butler 2006, 118. 177. Butler 2006, C1v. 178. On the dif­fer­ent portrayals of playmaking playgoers in critical inductions by professionals and critical inductions by amateurs, see Pangallo 2013. 179. Beyond his play, nothing is known of Jones. His preface indicates that he was a ­university student when he wrote the play and had no interest in becoming a professional dramatist. Harbage thought him the “John Jones” who graduated from Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1636 and acted in some plays ­t here (Harbage 1964, 138), but Bentley notes that the epistle’s indication that the play was finished “long since” suggests that Jones had been a student considerably earlier than 1635 (Bentley, 4:602). It would perhaps make more sense to look for Jones at Oxford, given that his play was published by Richard Royston—an Oxford-­ born London stationer with deep roots in his hometown and with the university, but, beyond Adrasta, ­little interest in play publishing. Alumni Oxonienses rec­ords five students named John Jones who graduated between 1630 and 1635 (Foster, 2:823). He is prob­ably not “John Jones, the ornament of the En­glish Benedictines in his time,” described by Anthony à Wood (Wood, 1:2K2v–3r). 180. Jones, A2r–­v. No evidence indicates which com­pany this was. 181. Jones, A4r. 182. Wild, A4v. 183. Hawkins, B2r and B5r. 184. Massinger 1629, C1v. 185. Gurr and Ichikawa, 3.

Chapter 2 1. Jaques, f. 28v. Greg describes the manuscript (1931, 1:352–55); however, his opinion that the copy was prepared by a scribe has been refuted by Leech (112–13) and Janzen (vi–­vii). On the play, see Randall, 249–52. Jaques was familiar with the professional drama of his day (Janzen, x–­x iv). His debt to Shirley is so thorough that Leech speculated that Shirley was “master” to the “young Jaques” (118). Leech also notes Jaques’s use of material from Shakespeare and Davenant (117–18). Randall observes that the play “conveys the feeling of alert amateur work” and that Jaques “obviously . . . ​had a lively interest in vari­ous aspects of ­later Stuart drama” (252). 2. Jaques, f. 18v. 3. Ioppolo, 102. 4. Bald 1937, 412–19. 5. Keenan 2010, xxi. 6. Keenan 2010, xxi. 7. Pangallo 2015.

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8. Herbert, f. 2r. The precise date and auspices of The Amazon are unclear, but its neoplatonic content and the apparent indication of amateur per­for­mance suggest a private per­for­ mance, perhaps in the Herbert h ­ ouse­hold, sometime in the late 1630s or early 1640s. 9. Herbert, f. 7r. 10. Herbert, ff. 8 and 9r. One instructive example of the amateur’s search for le mot juste is the lyric on how Love’s power “doth . . . ​ascende extend ascende extende ascende.” Ultimately, in the fair copied version, Herbert reverts to “extende”—­a reminder that simply b­ ecause something appears in foul papers does not mean that it was repeated into even the author’s fair copy. 11. The play may have been one of the pieces that Wilson, in his l­ater autobiography, says that he wrote for the entertainment of the Earl of Essex and his ­family in the 1620s (see ­later in this chapter). On its positive reception by the King’s Men audiences, see Bentley, 5:1273, and l­ater in this chapter. 12. For Mountfort’s life, see Boas 1923, 167–82; and Pangallo 2007, 2–16. 13. References to Launching cite through-­line numbering in Walter 1933. 14. Pangallo 2007, 10. 15. Walter 1933, xi; Heinemann, 210–13; Kusunoki, 196; Choi, 59–64. 16. See Pangallo 2007, 11–12. Plays sponsored by a trade com­pany or guild w ­ ere almost always licensed by the sponsoring organ­ization and not the Master (Dutton 1991, 9 and 73–74; 2000, xv). Bawcutt observes that, in the case of Launching, “Herbert’s demand to the bookkeeper to submit ‘a fairer copy’ in f­uture suggests that he was dealing with a professional ­com­pany” (117). William Long has pointed out that the bookkeeper of Launching also marked up the playbook Thomas of Woodstock—­which implies that he worked for a professional troupe (1985, 111). Many scholars assume that ­because Mountfort worked for the EIC the play is an endorsement of the Com­pany and was commissioned by it for private per­for­mance. Chris Meads compares the play to a modern “corporate promotional video”; he states, without evidence, that the Com­pany hired Mountfort to write the play and that it was “produced at their expense,” taking the assumption so far as to describe moments in the play in terms of “the Com­pany’s intentions” and “their interests” (224–25). ­There is no evidence to support this and, in fact, good reason to think the EIC had nothing to do with the play (Pangallo 2007, 3–4; Christensen, 117–36). 17. Bentley 1978, esp. 225–28 and 245. 18. On Holland’s Leaguer, see Bentley 1978, 226. 19. “This Play, called ye Seamans Honest wife, all ye Oaths left out In ye action as they are crost In ye booke & all other Reformations strictly obserud, may bee acted not otherwyse” (2974–77). 20. Herbert’s only partial deletion of oaths was not uncommon and likely reflected his ­expectation that by marking some offending words he was supplying the bookkeeper with ­examples of the kinds of material that should be removed for per­for­mance (Dutton 1991, 194–209; Dutton 2000, 10). On Herbert’s habitually inconsistent censorship of oaths, see McEnery, 61–62. 21. “I commande your Bookeeper to pres­ent mee wth a faire Copy hereafter[[r]] and to leaue out all Oathes, prophaness, & publick Ribaldry, as he ­will answer it at his peril. HHerbert” (2978–80). 22. Dutton strangely links Mountfort’s amateur status with an assumption that the play has no sexual ­matter, claiming that “obscenity is hardly an issue in the play, prob­ably ­because its author was not a professional dramatist” (2000, 56). The subplot features numerous bawdy jokes, particularly t­ hose of the unchaste sailors’ wives Isabel Nut and Mary Spark, contradict-



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ing Dutton’s claim that “smut or bawdy [­were] distinctly out of place” in the play (2000, 56)—­a claim he grounds on the erroneous reading of the play as a “glorification of the [East India] Com­pany and its policies.” Rather, ­because the subplot critiques the Com­pany, sexual humor is used to show how far into sin the two unfaithful wives have fallen since the Com­pany shipped off their husbands. Dutton further suggests that “the play is an attack on the court (or at least on Henrietta Maria’s influence ­there) as much as it is a cele­bration of the East India Com­ pany,” but t­ here is only one critique of courtiers (specifically, a courtier who—­like a soldier, a sailor, and a cleric—­tries to seduce the honest wife of the subtitle), and Mountfort lards the play with praise of Henrietta Maria (the Mary, in both the play and real­ity, was named a­ fter the queen). 23. For a summary of censorship in the play, see Bawcutt, 53–57. 24. Bawcutt guesses that “the clergyman who tries by letter to seduce Dorotea . . . ​was presumably an Anglican” and that Herbert’s deletion of the passage was b­ ecause he was “a staunch Protestant” (74). This overlooks Mountfort’s explicit description of the clergyman as a “painted priest” (2144) and “Cacolique” (2130), a term that the OED defines as “a perversion of Catholic, associating it with [the Greek] κακός (bad), and used as a term of reproach.” The dramatist’s attitude t­oward Catholics might be inferred from Fitzjohn’s reference to them as “sanguieneous [that is, bloody] Monkes” (2837) and the Governor’s suggestion that “hell-­bred Iesuites . . . ​swimme in synne [and] sinke / vnto perdition” (2760–62; see Bawcutt, 56). Unsurprisingly, Herbert also marked both of ­t hese for deletion, and Mountfort replaced neither. 25. See, for example, Bawcutt, 69; and Werstine 1990, 70. 26. Ioppolo 2006, 1 and 139; on Launching specifically as a manuscript “recirculating to the author before and a­ fter licensing,” see 130. 27. Sutton, 169. 28. On the massacre, see, for example, Keay, 47–50. 29. Dutton 2000, xviii. 30. Bawcutt observes that Herbert’s note to the bookkeeper—­which asks for fair copies “hereafter”—­“appears to mean that he wanted tidier texts in ­f uture, rather than that the bookkeeper was to send him a fair copy of the play he had just licensed” (42). Werstine construes the note to mean that Herbert required another, cleaner copy of Launching (1990, 69), though this is not implied by “hereafter.” If this ­were the case, Mountfort’s post-­censorship revisions and the bookkeeper’s subsequent revisions would have most reasonably been recorded in that “fair copy” rather than, as they are, in the original foul papers. The Master expected players to make changes in response to his censorship, but he almost never required a play so revised to be resubmitted (Bawcutt, 69; see also Dutton 1991, 203 and 207–8). Ioppolo argues that the censor “expected” authors to revise their manuscripts ­a fter his perusal (139), but such an expectation does not necessarily mean that the Master needed to see the text again. To a professional dramatist, his intentions would no doubt have been sufficiently clear; we can best account for Mountfort’s reluctance to conform to t­ hose intentions by recalling that he was a “stranger” to the professionalized systems of play production. 31. Lawson, 32; and Bawcutt, 70. 32. Dutton 1991, 197. 33. Bentley 1986, 171–72. 34. Mun, F4r. 35. Mun, F4r. 36. ­There is other material in Mun’s response that, if Mountfort had used it on the missing pages, would have attracted the Master’s pencil, including a critique of En­glish food policy

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and an admission that ­England depends on foreign (especially French) sources of coin. In June 1633, when Herbert licensed the play, t­ hese topics ­were relevant to ongoing debates in the Privy Council, so he would have had reason to object to their discussion on the stage. 37. On Herbert’s tumultuous years of 1632–34, see Bawcutt, 13–26; and Dutton 2000, 42–51. 38. Bawcutt, 55. 39. Bawcutt, 70. 40. Dutton 2000, passim, esp. xi and xvi–­ii. 41. Patterson, 10–11. 42. Burt, xi. For a summary of Jonson’s efforts to restore content cut by censors, see Burt, 6–7. 43. On Jonson’s “scene interloping” in A Tale of a Tub and his note in the 1602 quarto of Poetaster as examples of this attitude, see Ioppolo, 65–66. 44. Clare, xii. 45. “Authors . . . ​wrote with the knowledge and experience that their texts w ­ ere to be . . . ​ read by the Master of the Revels before they could be rehearsed or performed” (Ioppolo, 121). Amateurs such as Mountfort, of course, lacked such experience and so may have written without an awareness that their plays would be subjected to such scrutiny. 46. On the “incoherence” of stage censorship in the period, see, for example, Burt, 14–15. 47. Dutton, Patterson, and Clare exemplify this view of dramatic censorship; it is also ­adopted by Finkelpearl; Howard-­Hill 1988; and Long 1989 More. 48. Patterson, 17. 49. On professional dramatists anticipating the censor, see Ioppolo, 92 and 121–22. 50. Bentley 1986, 145. 51. Braunmuller 2003, 59. 52. Patterson, 18; see also Dutton 1991, 205. 53. On actors changing texts and the Master’s inability to police per­for­mances, see Clare, 213; Dutton 1991, 98, 203, and 244; and 2000, 193, n. 7; Gurr and Ichikawa, 43; Burt, 16; and Braunmuller 2003, 57. 54. Peck, 466. 55. Peck, 466. 56. Itzoe, xlv and lxiii–­l xxi. In par­tic­u ­lar, Wilson was influenced by Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600) and Macbeth (1606) and Shirley’s School of Compliment (1625). Itzoe also sees echoes of The ­Brothers in Wilson’s work, but Shirley’s play was only licensed in May 1641, well a­ fter Wilson wrote his; it is more likely that the influence was in the opposite direction, from the amateur to the professional, since the King’s Men ­were still staging Wilson’s plays in 1641 (see ­later in this chapter). 57. Wood, 1:2G4v. 58. Bathurst, 156. 59. Peck, 461. 60. Peck, 461. 61. Peck, 461. 62. In addition to his knowledge of King’s Men plays, Wilson incorporated into his work occasional references to King’s Men players; for example, The Swisser includes a joke about the famed bulk of John Lowin (see Bentley, 1:451). 63. Bald 1938, 300. 64. Peck, 469. 65. Gordon-­Craig, viii.



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66. Bathurst, 156. 67. Itzoe, xlii. 68. Symonds, 386. 69. Chambers 1911, 364–69. 70. On Rawlinson Poet.128, see Bald 1938, 294; Gordon-­Craig, xxviii and xxxiii–­x xxviii; Itzoe, xxxiv–­x l. 71. Paul Werstine, however, argues that the Lambarde “has none of the inconsistency or ambiguity in the designation of characters that is supposed to mark ‘foul papers’ ” and that ­because “the manuscript is neatly inscribed” it should “better be called ‘fair copy’ ” (Werstine 1999, 116). Werstine views Inconstant Lady as equivalent to any other King’s Men play in manuscript, including Shakespeare’s (it is, he assumes, “like Shakespeare’s” manuscripts must have been) but ­t here is no evidence that the King’s Men used or ever saw ­either extant copy of Inconstant Lady. Furthermore, unlike Shakespeare, Wilson was not a professional dramatist: he was a professional scribe, hence one would expect his foul papers to be “neatly inscribed.” 72. On the Lambarde as foul papers revised for copying as a playbook, see Adams 1933, 612; Bald 1938, 291–92 and 294–95; Gordon-­Craig, xxv–­x xvii and xxxiii; Itzoe, xxiii–­x xx. 73. Itzoe, lxxi. On the variants between the manuscripts, see Gordon-­Craig, xxviii–­x xxiii. As an author’s pre­sen­ta­tion copy, the Rawlinson was most likely meant as a gift (Love, 73; and Woudhuysen, 174–203). 74. On the Rawlinson’s derivation from the Lambarde, see Gordon-­Craig, xxix. On the Rawlinson as a pre­sen­ta­tion copy, see Bald 1938, 300; Gordon-­Craig, xxxi–­x xxii; Itzoe, xxxiv; Werstine 1999, 115. 75. “Wilson had a capacity above the average for taking pains” (Bald 1938, 300). His attention to detail is seen in his decision to correct his manuscript ­a fter he had copied it, adding punctuation and making other small revisions, such as adding a missing speech prefix (1.2.281), adjusting a misplaced direction (2.1.192), correcting a verse line accidentally split when first copied (3.2.23), and inserting a missing letter (3.2.48). Citations from Inconstant Lady reference Itzoe. 76. As Ioppolo points out, “dramatists revising for literary readers” used dif­fer­ent kinds of stage directions from t­hose employed by dramatists writing scripts for per­for­m ance (96–97). On the staging-­related changes Wilson made to the Rawlinson, see Gordon-­Craig, xxi–­x xii. 77. Many other entrances and exits only implied in the Lambarde w ­ ere made explicit in the Rawlinson (see, for example, 4.2. 270, 5.2.16, and 5.3.2). 78. Gordon-­Craig considers the “within”/“without” revision “perhaps the most telling difference of all” between the manuscripts (xxxiii). 79. Werstine 1999, 117. 80. Werstine 1999, 117. 81. See Bald 1938, 296–97. 82. See, for example, Bald 1938, 296. 83. Werstine 1999, 115. 84. Herbert’s 1633 censorship of “oaths, prophaness, and ribaldrye” in Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed is sometimes thought by scholars to have been an attempt to suppress sexual humor in the play; as Dutton shows, however, the material affected by Herbert’s censorship was primarily concerned with the po­liti­cally indelicate topic of religion, in par­tic­u­lar Catholicism—­a sensitive subject, since the 1633 revival was for a court per­for­mance and Queen Henrietta Maria

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was Catholic (in the play, Petruchio’s domineering second wife is named Maria) (Dutton 2000, 41–61; see also Livingston, 213–32; and Munro, xvii–­x viii). 85. Bawcutt, 65. 86. Bald 1938, 297. 87. Gordon-­Craig raises the possibility that the Rawlinson may have been “polished . . . ​ with a view to the intended publication noted in the Stationers’ Register but which never occurred” (xxxiii). As we lack any manuscript play demonstrably used or intended for printing, it is impossible to prove this positively. On the other hand, we have examples of pre­sen­ta­tion copies that resemble the Rawlinson closely. Furthermore, the entry in the Stationers’ Register to which Gordon-­Craig refers was made in September 1653, one year ­a fter Wilson’s death in September 1652 and well ­a fter Wilson had written his autobiography in which he considers his playwriting an embarrassment. 88. Itzoe, ­x xii. 89. Gordon-­Craig, xxxix. 90. Brome 1653, Court Beggar, N4v [#2v]. 91. On Clavell’s play, see Chapter 3. 92. Barnes 1607, title page. On Barnes’s play, see Chapter 4. 93. Mayne, B1r.

Chapter 3 1. Vennar 1614, 24–27. 2. Harrison, 3:306. John Manningham also thought it a deliberate scam, describing the event as “a notable cunnicatching tricke [that] gulled many u ­ nder couller of a play” (Manningham, 82). 3. Stern conjectures that Fennor wrote the play, but no evidence for this exists (2009, 72). In “A Cast over the W ­ ater” (1615), John Taylor accuses Fennor that he “a Poet didst beguile / To make thy selfe the Author of his stile”; specifically, Taylor suggests that Fennor tricked “poore old Vennor, that plaine dealing man,” into giving him the manuscript of the play (“So the deceiuer is by thee deceiu’d”) (Taylor, C3r). 4. Stern 2009, 72; see also 37, 47, and 71. 5. Stern 2009, 72. 6. Berry 2001, 256. Berry’s article provides the fullest account of ­England’s Joy and Vennar’s life. 7. McKerrow, 274. 8. David McInnis suggests that this stage direction was “added to the manuscript by the prompter,” but the ink and hand are consistent with the rest of Mountfort’s writing in the manuscript (119); the only text added ­here by the bookkeeper was a cue for ­music just before the lengthy stage direction. 9. For plausible speculation on how this scene could have been staged—­with actors in the gallery facing back, t­ oward the tiring-­house—­see McInnis, 118–21. 10. McJannet, 28. 11. “Might not a stage direction written to explain the staging for a specific scene have been written out so explic­itly not ­because it was standard but precisely ­because it was not to be done in the normal way?” (Gurr and Ichikawa, 47). If a professional writes an “explicit” direction, Gurr and Ichikawa imply that the dramatist is intentionally deviating from “the normal



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way”; a similar awareness of both “the normal way” and deviation from “the normal way” characterized the work of many playwriting playgoers. 12. Numerous scholars explain the scarcity and brevity of Shakespeare’s stage directions in this way. See Hart, passim; Harbage 1955, 80–81; Beckerman 1962, 24; Styan 1967, 53–55; Wells and Taylor, 57–78; Dessen 1995, 11; McJannet, 166; Wells and Taylor, 2; Gurr and Ichikawa, 45. Gurr suggests that Shakespeare’s financial stake in his com­pany led him to prefer “modest” stage directions (Gurr 1994, 193; see also 210–11). Stern alludes to Shakespeare when she states that “playwrights who ­were also actors or who had a financial attachment to a com­pany [might] take a part in the preparation of their plays” (2000, 61; see also 84), though, as we have seen, this was true too of “stranger” dramatists, such as the playwriting playgoer Mountfort. 13. McJannet, 189. 14. Gurr and Ichikawa, 45; see also McJannet, 178–79. 15. Gurr and Ichikawa, 73; see also 79ff. 16. Long 1989, 127. 17. As it was a printed play, ­there is the question of compositorial interference (I omit discussion of pos­si­ble scribal interference ­because, as a scribe, Yarington likely wrote the manuscript used by the printer, which was likely an authorial copy-­text [Hanabusa, xiii]). The repetition of the signal considered in this section seems a writer’s idiosyncrasy rather than a printer’s habit, particularly the vari­ous ways in which the signal is truncated (never in a place where the truncation might provide the compositor with additional room needed ­because of incorrect casting-­off). 18. See, for example, Gurr 2009, 101 and 248, n. 288. Throughout November and December 1599, Henslowe made payments to Haughton and Day “in earnest of The Tragedy of Thomas Merrye,” indicating that it had not yet been completed (Foakes, 62 and 127–28). The Tragedy of Thomas Merry was evidently finished (with a new title) by January 1600, when Henslowe paid the Master of the Revels seven shillings for the “lycen[c]synge of A Boocke called Beches tragedie” (Foakes, 130). Neither Beech’s Tragedy nor The Orphans’ Tragedy is extant. Identifying the plays in Henslowe’s rec­ords with La­men­ta­ble began with Collier in 1845 and was given full form by F. G. Fleay (who claimed that “Rob. Yarington” was a pseudonym) in 1891, before Greg expanded the argument in his 1904–8 edition of Henslowe’s Diary (Hanabusa, xxv–­x xvi). 19. Wagner, passim. 20. On November 27, 1599, Henslowe refers to the play as “the tragedie of orphenes” (Foakes, 127); Foakes interprets the wording as “orphan’s” (see Foakes, 127, n. 5), as do most other commentators (see, for example, Hanabusa, xxv) but the grammatical construction clearly indicates a plural form. This does not definitely indicate that the play’s ­actual title used the plural form (Henslowe was notoriously liberal in his wording of titles; elsewhere both he and Chettle refer to the play as “the orphenes tragedie” or “the orfenes tragedy” [Foakes, 62 and 182]), but Henslowe’s rec­ords do make it reasonable to conclude that La­men­ta­ble could not have derived from or included Chettle’s play (see Wiggins 2014, 4:329). 21. Hanabusa, xxv–­x xvi. 22. Hanabusa points out that a manuscript notation added to one of the copies of La­ men­ta­ble held by the British Library (shelf mark C.12.e.21), “1601.March.28,” was “prob­ably inscribed by the copy’s earliest owner as the date of acquisition” (viii). 23. Law 1910, 172. See also Law 1927, passim. 24. Law 1910, 167 and 176. For more on the relationship between La­men­ta­ble and Leir, Richard III, and Arden of Faversham, see Hanabusa, xv–­x vi. 25. Golding, 348.

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26. Adams 1943, 189 and 108. 27. Orlin 1994, 113; see 113–18. 28. Hanabusa, xxvii, xv. To account for the play’s existence, Hanabusa speculates that the play had been written “soon a­ fter Merry’s murder case” but was rejected by the players and “left unattended by any dramatic com­pany” (xv). Hanabusa guesses that the publisher, ­Matthew Law, then “procured the manuscript from Henslowe,” but t­ here is no evidence that Yarington’s play was ever owned by the Admiral’s Men in the first place and, as we have seen, good reason to believe that La­men­ta­ble is not the same play as the one Henslowe paid Day and Haughton to write (xxviii). 29. If Yarington’s play was adapted from the Admiral’s Men plays, Chambers’s earliest date, 1594, is too early (3:518); the play could only have been written by early 1600, at which time Beech’s Tragedy had been licensed and, presumably, staged. Catherine Richardson, however—­who does not question the title-­page ascription to Yarington—­suggests that the play derived from the ballads and pamphlets written about the Beech incident (129–30). 30. Chambers, 3:518, comes to this same conclusion; see also Wiggins, 3:305. 31. Citations reference through-­line numbering in Hanabusa. Hanabusa, xxvii. 32. Hanabusa assumes that Henslowe’s 1599 payments to Day and Haughton (and, inexplicably, Chettle) “show [an] attempt to recycle an old dramatic manuscript from which to ­re-­produce a number of new plays,” but ­t here is no evidence that a manuscript preexisted the first payment to Haughton on November 21, 1599, nor is t­ here evidence that what Day and Haughton ­were writing was, in fact, more than one play on the incident (xxvii–­x xviii). 33. See Orlin 2004 and Hanabusa, xxviii. Hanabusa suggests that the most likely candidate for the play’s authorship is, in fact, not the scrivener but the draper, Rob[ert] Yarranton (xxix). 34. On “to the p ­ eople,” see Dessen and Thomson, 161. None of the professional dramatists proposed as candidates for the play’s authorship uses this term. 35. Dessen 1995, 50 and 52; for Dessen’s analy­sis of the term “aside,” see 1995, 49–55; see also Beckerman 1962, 186–92; and Lopez, 56–77. 36. Dessen 1995, 52 and 233, n. 16. 37. On “fictional” and “theatrical” signals, see Hosley 1957, 16–17, and McJannet, 26–28 and 153. 38. Although all three plays ­were published without authors’ names attached, scholars typically assume that they ­were written by professional dramatists, with Locrine usually assigned to George Peele or Robert Greene, Warning to Thomas Heywood, and Maid’s Metamorphosis to John Lyly, John Day, Samuel Daniel, or George Peele. ­These are the only plays in which the direction appears, despite Hanabusa’s suggestion that the direction is one example of the play’s use of “conventional theatrical language” (xii). 39. Locrine, C1v. That the expression was considered peculiar in the period might be suggested by the fact that the compositor for the Locrine quarto set the direction in roman type rather than the italic type usually used for stage directions. 40. [Anonymous,] Maid’s Metamorphosis, B4v. 41. [Anonymous,] Warning, A3r and D1v. 42. Beech and Winchester ­were murdered on August 23, 1594; the first pamphlet account was entered into the Stationers’ Register on August 29, and five dif­fer­ent ballads on the murders and subsequent executions w ­ ere entered into the Register that September. See Collier 1862, passim.



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43. Foakes, 319–20. 44. Greg 1931, 1:148. 45. As Dessen notes, however, Yarington does not use the shorthand form preferred by most professionals who call for halberds (1995, 232, n. 10): Yarington writes “watchmen with Halberds” (I1v) and “Officers with Halberds” (K1v), whereas most professionals simply indicate “halberds” (Dessen 1995, 46–47). 46. Hanabusa, xiv–­x v. 47. Hanabusa, xiii. 48. Richardson 2006, 147–48. 49. See B3v, C4r, and F2v. 50. “Must” and “­shall” are prevalent in medieval drama, though they faded from use in late Tudor morality plays, a transition McJannet associates with the rise of theater as a profession (113–17). As Long notes, directions in playbooks w ­ ere based upon the fact that dramatists and actors “understood and respected each other’s professional capabilities” (Long 1985, 111). A number of other playgoers used “must” in their stage directions, such as William Percy and, in the stage direction from Launching of the Mary cited at the start of this chapter, Walter Mountfort. 51. Stern 2009, 193–94. 52. See B1r, E4v, G3r, and K1v. 53. Ioppolo, 96. 54. Richardson, 136–37. 55. Leech, 118. 56. Greg 1931, 1:353; Bentley, 4:598; Janzen, ix; Stern 2009, 178. 57. Citations reference through-­line numbering in Janzen’s Malone Society edition. 58. Reference to the “stage” in a direction does not, of course, imply that the play was performed or even meant to be. For example, John Gough’s closet drama The Strange Discovery (1640) includes the direction “Aristippus dragges her along, but she pulling herselfe out of the old mans hands, fell suddenlie of purpose into a pit made in the stage, and so ended her life” (G2v). Many closet dramatists refer to theatrical context in their stage directions. As one closet dramatist, Margaret Cavendish, explained, “To please me, my Fancy set up a Stage in my Brain, . . . ​a nd the Incorporeal Thoughts ­were the several Actors, and my Wit play’d the Jack Fool, which Pleased me so much as to make me Laugh Loud at the Actions in my Mind” (Cavendish, 3E4v). Karen Raber observes that closet dramatists’ habit of imaginative per­for­ mance involves an “easy translation of the theatrical stage into a stage within the mind [which is itself] an ever-­expanding, all-­encompassing theater” (32). 59. Pafford 1936, esp. x–­x xiv. Quotations from Clavell’s play cite Pafford’s edition. The idea of assigning the play to Marmion derives from entries in the Stationers’ Register made by publisher Humphrey Moseley in 1653 (“The Crafty Merchant. or the Souldred Citizen by Shakerly Marmion”) and 1660 (“The Sodered Citizen. a Comedy. by Shakerley Marmion”) (Pafford 1936, v). I omit exploration of the play’s authorship ­because Pafford provides abundant evidence that Clavell, not Marmion, wrote The Soddered Citizen. For a contrary view, however, see Schlueter. 60. For Clavell’s life, see Pafford 1993. 61. On Clavell’s hand in the manuscript, see Walter 1938, passim; and Pafford 1993, 125. A comparison between passages Pafford argues w ­ ere added to the play by Clavell and Clavell’s commonplace book (WRO 865/502/1) clearly shows they ­were both written in the same hand.

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62. The play is Wiltshire Rec­ord Office MS 865/502/2; though entered twice in the Stationers’ Register, it was never printed. In addition to Knight’s markings, the manuscript contains a cast list assigning roles to members of the 1629–30 King’s Men. 63. Barbara Wooding proposes that the extant manuscript was “a working script used for discussion among the actors prior to per­for­mance,” which is feasible, though no other manuscript of this type survives, nor is ­t here evidence that this was a customary practice for any of the professional companies (159). In terms of venue, Bentley asserts that Soddered Citizen was “performed by the King’s com­pany at their Blackfriars theatre,” but t­ here is no reason it could not have been staged at the Globe (1986, 18). It is peculiar, as Wooding notes, that of the King’s Men’s major players, only John Lowin took a role in the play; many of the other large parts are played by actors who had in the past taken only small roles, leading Wooding to assert that the other sharers “just ­didn’t like the play” (165). 64. Bentley introduces this idea as speculation in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (3:162– 65), but by the time of The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time he pres­ents it, misleadingly, as a certainty (1986, 18). Pafford shows that Bentley may not have been fully familiar with Clavell’s biography or play when he wrote his Jacobean and Caroline Stage (see 1993, 140). 65. Wooding, 160. 66. Wooding, 160. 67. Clavell 1632, A3v. 68. Clavell 1628, B3r. Clavell was familiar with plays by Massinger and Fletcher (Pafford 1993, 207–8). 69. On Clavell’s acquaintance with Marmion, see Pafford 1936, xxiii; on his friendship with Massinger, see 206–12; on his relationship to Jonson, see 41 and 46–47. Pafford relies too much on Clavell’s friendship with Massinger when he assigns the latter some responsibility for Soddered Citizen; like Bentley, he assumes that an amateur could not or would not write a play without the suggestion and assistance of a professional (1993, 32). In a similar vein, Wooding goes beyond the evidence to suggest that Clavell had some kind of professional-­style “association with the King’s Men” (161). The parallels between Clavell’s play and Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (see Pafford 1993, 136–37) are not convincing evidence that Massinger co­wrote Soddered Citizen; rather, knowing as we do that Clavell frequented the Blackfriars, they seem the result of a playgoer familiar with the work of the professional. Massinger ­returned the ­f avor, for he “seems to have drawn on ele­ments from The Soddered Citizen in creating his own successful city comedy, The City Madam” (Wooding, 161). Pafford admits the probability that the play originated solely with Clavell, who had to “negotiat[e] with the King’s Men [for the] obtaining [of] its ac­cep­tance” (1993, 32). A similar desire to disenfranchise the amateur animates Joe Lee Davis’s claim that the play was a collaboration between Clavell and Marmion (25); Pafford describes this idea as “guesswork” (1993, 130–31). 70. On the joke, see Bentley, 2:563–64. 71. Pafford 1936, xxiii–­x xiv; and 1993, 131. Possibly, then, the manuscript held by Humphrey Moseley, the publisher who entered the play in the Stationers’ Register, was the playbook licensed by Herbert, which was of no further use to the King’s Men, who did not seem to keep the work in their repertory. Pafford, however, assumes that the extant manuscript is the “allowed book”: “Prob­ably the play failed on the stage and the com­pany lost interest in it; and having no further use for the ms., handed it back, with or without request, to the person from whom they had obtained it; and this person, who would have been the author, was Clavell” (1993, 131). As noted above, the extant manuscript does not bear evidence of Herbert’s censorship, and the final leaf, which would bear his license, is missing. Th ­ ere is no rec­ord of how the



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play was received, though the fact that Clavell largely gave up writing for the stage (with a few exceptions [see Pafford 1993, 155–57 and 168–70, and ­later in this chapter]) suggests it was not the success he had hoped for: his prologue ends with the promise that “As you s­ hall rellish, or distast, / H’as but begunn, or writt his last” (22–23), and since with The Soddered Citizen he seems to have “writt his last,” it is reasonable to conclude that the audience response was indeed “distast.” 72. Pafford, 1993, 36, 40, and 139. 73. Pafford, 126; see also Long 1999, 429. 74. My analy­sis ­here is restricted to directions copied by the original scribe or added by Clavell; ­because my interest is with what the author desired or expected, rather than with what was staged, I omit from consideration directions in the hand of Knight or the other revisers. For an account of the hands, see Pafford 1936, viii–ix. Her theory that the manuscript “shows the pro­cess of editing by com­pany personnel” (166) leads Wooding to the conclusion that the copious stage directions ­were added by the players—­particularly Lowin—as a way of providing “extra guidance” to the apprentices and less skilled players who w ­ ere in need of “instructing” (173). Nearly all of the stage directions, however, ­were part of the original transcript made by the scribe and so ­were presumably in the foul papers from which that scribe worked; that is, ­t here is no evidence in the manuscript to suggest that they ­were added ­later by other hands. Th ­ ere is also the evidence of other King’s Men playbooks, in which such copious, detailed ­d irections are largely absent—­including, as Wooding herself points out, the roughly contemporaneous playbook of Massinger’s Believe as You List, in which directions are “terse” and calls for “special properties [are] handled differently” (174). The best explanation to account for this difference is not that the players added the directions to The Soddered Citizen and not to other plays but that Clavell, as an amateur, wrote stage directions in a way much dif­fer­ent, more full, from that of Massinger, the professional. This difference may also account for why the players found it necessary to subject the former’s play to such extensive revision (in much the same way that the bookkeeper and players heavi­ly cut Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary). 75. Wooding, 171 and 172. 76. McJannet observes that such deictic directions (which are typical of plays by playgoers) that seek to control timing use a theatrically “self-­conscious diction” that suggests the dramatist’s alertness to the moment of per­for­mance (112). On the historical shift from the temporal “then” to the spatial “­here,” which is more common in plays by professionals, see McJannet, 119–24. 77. McJannet, 154. 78. McJannet observes that heightened concern for the timing of stage actions is characteristic of most “amateur” plays written for the universities or readers (and, intriguingly, for boys’ companies) (104–5). 79. Dessen briefly notes that “native speakers” of that jargon could include playgoers as well (1995, 3 and 220; see also Dessen and Thomson, vii), but Dessen and Thomson also dismiss the authority of playwriting playgoers as a source for evidence of how audiences understood staging: “To rely . . . ​on stage directions [for evidence of per­for­mance practices] is . . . ​to stay within the realm of what was or could have been done in the original productions, particularly when the play in question is linked to a professional com­pany or to an experienced playwright (as distinct from university players and amateur authors)” (viii–­i x). 80. Pafford suggests Clavell “was perhaps to some extent involved in [the play’s] production” (1993, 32).

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81. “To catch heat” is an obsolete expression meaning “to generate warmth” (OED “catch, v.,” def. 31a). 82. Dessen and Thomson, 49. 83. On the importance of flexibility in staging instructions, see Long 1989, 129. 84. On costumes as symbols, see Gurr and Ichikawa, 53–57; Beckerman 1981, 156; Slater 141–48. 85. On the use of costumes to signal setting, see Dessen 1984, 96–101; and 1995, 151. 86. A number of other plays use a petticoat, smock, or similar ­simple garment to ­“ indicate . . . ​t hat a female figure is . . . ​v ulnerable” (Dessen and Thomson, 162). 87. Dessen 1995, 46. On symbolic properties, see also Beckerman 1981, 155. 88. On the “sick chair,” see Dessen 1995, 109–26. See also Beckerman 1962, 77. 89. Pafford 1993, 155–57; references to his introduction and prologue cite Pafford’s reprint. 90. Clavell [Commonplace Book], 85–6. Beggar’s Bush, which premiered with the King’s Men between 1615 and 1622, was not published u ­ ntil 1647. 91. Styan 1967, 28. 92. Dessen and Thomson, ix. 93. Percy was the third son of Henry Percy, eighth Earl of North­umberland, and so strictly speaking does not fall into the same nonaristocratic category as the other playwriting play­ goers in this book. It would be fallacious, however, to assign Percy to the ranks of the courtier dramatists, since he did not write his plays for per­for­mance at court or in the usual courtier drama venue of the Blackfriars; furthermore, while born into a titled ­family, his personal situation when he wrote and revised his plays—­economically destitute and socially marginalized—­ was closer to that of the nonaristocratic amateurs. 94. Citations are to Matthew Dimmock’s edition. The title used h ­ ere is that preferred by Dimmock. Other critics refer to the play as Arabia Sitiens, or A Dream of a Dry Year. 95. On Percy’s recopying pro­cess, see Dimmock, 48–49; for a summary of variants among the three manuscripts, see 49–51; for the full list of variants, see 167–81. See also Wiggins 2014, 4:338–46. Chambers suggests an even earlier date of composition—in the 1580s, followed by a revision in 1599 (3:464–65)—­however, for reasons explored l­ater in the chapter, this seems unlikely. The dates of composition that Percy recorded on his ­later transcripts range from 1601 to 1604. On the manuscripts of Percy’s plays, see Erler, 278–91. 96. Albright; Wallace, 131. 97. Reynolds; Schelling, 1:464; Lawrence 1912, 66. 98. Reynolds, 258 and 260. 99. Reynolds, 259. 100. Reynolds, 398 and 407–8. 101. Reynolds, 406. 102. Reynolds, 408. 103. Quoted in Dodds 1931, 59. 104. Dodds 1931, 59–60. 105. Gaskell, 59. 106. I am grateful to Grace Ioppolo for suggesting a connection between the Alnwick manuscripts and Percy’s playwriting. That Percy may have acquired the manuscripts of The Wasp and John of Bordeaux was first suggested by William Renwick in his 1936 edition of the latter (v–­vi). 107. Greg 1931, 355–56. 108. Greg 1931, 360; Lever, passim, esp. xv. 109. Greg 1931, 408.



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110. Dodds 1933, 174–75; see also Dimmock, 55–56; and Stern 2009, 138. 111. On Percy’s borrowings from other plays of this period, see Dodds 1933, passim. 112. Robert Greene, in Alphonsus (staged 1587–88, published 1599), calls for a chair to descend to the stage “if you can conveniently” (Greene 1599, I3r), and in James IV (staged around 1590, published in 1598) he indicates that huntsmen are to enter singing “if you please” (Greene 1598, G1v); Robert Wilson, in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (staged 1588–90, published 1590), asks for “musicke if ye ­will” (Wilson 1590, C1r). A ­later example is found in the manuscript of The Escapes of Jupiter, where Thomas Heywood added a stage direction asking for “A songe Iff you w ­ ill” (Heywood, Escapes, f. 77r); Bentley reads this as evidence of “Heywood’s expectation that the play would be produced,” and we might then read the same expectation in Percy’s use of the same verbal formula in his plays (4:567). 113. Dimmock, 167. On Percy’s use of “actors” to mean adults, see Hillebrand, 405. 114. Dimmock, 167. 115. SD indicates a stage direction. In the manuscripts, Percy’s habit was to write stage directions in the margin and then note their placement in the play with asterisks (Dimmock, 57). 116. 4.1.10–60; see Dimmock, 216–18. 117. Gair, 63. 118. Dimmock, appendix II, l. 10/11 SD. 119. Peacock, 10–11. 120. Jonson 1606, B4r, E1r. 121. Dimmock, 54. 122. Dimmock, 52. 123. Dimmock, 181. 124. Dimmock, 181; emphasis added. 125. Dimmock, 217–18; emphasis added. 126. Dimmock, 241. 127. Hillebrand, 407. A similar use of past tense in amateurs’ directions is in Francis Verney’s The Tragedy of Antipo (1603–4). Hillebrand proposes his theory as an alternative to Chambers’s assumption that Percy was recalling past per­for­mances (Chambers, 3:197 and 464–65). 128. On this prob­lem of “alterations for Paul’s [that] look forward to per­for­mance [but] are likewise in the past tense” elsewhere in Percy’s plays, see Hillebrand, 406–7. 129. Percy, Comodyes, ff. 120r and 126r. I am grateful to Gayle Richardson and Natalie Russell for assistance consulting the Huntington Library manuscript of Percy’s plays. 130. See Percy, Comodyes, ff. 117v and 119v. 131. Percy, Comodyes, f. 8r. 132. Percy, Comodyes, f. 156r. 133. Percy, Comodyes, f. 151r. 134. The master Percy was addressing was likely Edward Pearce, who became choirmaster in May 1599, or one of his two partners, Thomas Woodford or Edward Kirkham (who replaced Woodford in 1605). 135. Dimmock, 55–56. 136. Gurr and Ichikawa point out that such “hopeful directions” ­were often used in professionals’ plays up to the mid-1590s (46). As a regular reader of plays at this time, Percy may have thus learned the style of the hopeful stage direction from t­ hese professional plays. 137. Percy 1594, D1r. 138. Barnes 1606, [A]3r. 139. For more on Barnes’s play, see Chapter 4.

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140. Reynolds states that Barnes wrote his play “well past the date of Percy’s plays” (257); however, their date of composition was, as indicated on the extant manuscripts, between 1601 and 1604, and their initial date of revision was likely around the same time as Barnes’s play. 141. Dimmock, 49. 142. Dimmock, 242–47. 143. Hillebrand, 400. 144. Shakespeare, Midsummer, 3.1.2–5. 145. Shakespeare, Midsummer, 1.2.83–84 and 86–88. 146. Shakespeare, Midsummer, 1.2.97–99. 147. Howard-­Hill 1990, 121. 148. Harbage 1955, 33. 149. Dawson and Yachnin, 92. 150. Dawson and Yachnin, 132. 151. Gurr and Ichikawa, 47.

Chapter 4 1. Puttenham, L4v. 2. Freer, 38. 3. Stoll, 982–3. 4. Hall 1597, B4v. 5. Wright, 101. 6. For an example of this view, see Kernan, esp. 40. 7. Barton, 86. 8. Barton, 85. 9. Barton, 92. 10. On Shakespeare’s prose, see Barish 1972, 59–75; Wright, 108–13; McDonald 2001, 108–36; Muir 1971, 39–41; and Vickers 1968, passim. On Shakespeare’s “fluidity” mixing verse and prose as “a deliberate [theatrical] technique,” see Barish 1989, 32–46. For the usefulness of switching between prose and verse for actors using cue scripts, see Palfrey and Stern 2007, 332–9; and Stern 2000, 65. 11. Vickers 1968, 6. 12. Goffe(?), f. 25r. The poem is usually attributed to Goffe ­because it is appended to two of the manuscript copies of his The Courageous Turk, staged first by students at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1618, but it could have been written by a dif­fer­ent author and for a l­ater per­for­mance. 13. See McDonald 2001, 108. 14. On this coterie, see Butler 1984, 184–90. The members included Thomas Heywood, Robert Davenport, Shakerley Marmion, and Robert Chamberlain (all of whom wrote for the Phoenix), Richard Brome, Thomas Nabbes, Thomas Rawlins, and Nathanael Richards (all of whom wrote for Salisbury Court), and John Tatham and Thomas Jordan (of the Red Bull). It also included nondramatic poets, such as Humphrey Mill, Edward Benlowes, Charles Gerbier, Thomas Kendall, and Stephen Bradwell. 15. Bentley was unconvinced that Chamberlain was the “Rob. Chamberlain” responsible for the 1661 Balaam’s Ass Cudgeled (3:153), but Lisa Hopkins suggests that the po­liti­cal verse satire’s attribution to the dramatist “is now generally accepted” (Hopkins).



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16. Hopkins. 17. Andrew Crooke entered Damsel into the Stationers’ Register on April 2, 1640, and Bentley suggests it was written not long before, though ­t here is no reason that the play might not date even earlier, perhaps as far back as Chamberlain’s college days; regardless of when it was first penned, Chamberlain’s “association with Nabbes” and the fact that Crooke also included Killigrew’s The Prisoners in the same entry suggest that Damsel was eventually staged at the Phoenix (3:153). The play seems to have enjoyed some success in per­for­mance: H. Harris’s poem for the quarto claims that it “made a conquest of a thousand hearts” (A3r)—­t hough this may just be the conventional rhe­toric of the commendatory verse genre. 18. Harbage 1964, 130. 19. B ­ ecause Chamberlain himself evidently supplied the copy to the printer and wished to ensure that it was understandable it seems unlikely that a poorly written manuscript was at fault. It is pos­si­ble that the compositor was new and thus not experienced with play printing: since 1629, Thomas Cotes had printed twenty-­four other plays; most do not display the prob­ lems found in Damsel. Further evidence of the compositor’s unfamiliarity with drama is Cotes’s 1641 double edition of Thomas Killigrew’s The Prisoners and Claracilla: though both plays are entirely prose, the compositor set them entirely as verse. In the compositor’s defense, dramatic poetry by this time had become so liberated from metrical restrictions that the distinction between verse and prose was increasingly unclear (Wright, 208–10). 20. On this convention, see Vickers 1968, 6, 16–18, and 22. 21. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, B2v. 22. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, B3r. 23. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, B4r. 24. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, E4r. 25. Vickers 1968, 9. 26. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, F4v. 27. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, C2r. 28. Vickers 1968, 14. 29. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, C2v. ­L ater, Valentine uses the same structure of prose rhetorical questions leading into verse answers when he thinks that he has been tricked into marrying a prostitute. 30. Chamberlain 1640 Swaggering, G2v–3r. 31. Vickers 1968, 13. 32. Rawlins, A2v. 33. Vickers 1968, 7. 34. McDonald 2001, 129. 35. Spencer, A4r. “Meter” was often used synonymously with “rhyme.” Spencer’s “full twenty yeares” understates the age of the play: it was first performed by the second ­Children of Paul’s, sometime between 1604 and 1607. 36. Ascham, R4r and S1v. For the early modern debate on rhyme, see Ness, 8–20; Flint, 17–21; and Richardson 1909, 108–45. 37. Ness, 12. 38. Gosson 1582, F1r. 39. Marlowe, A3r. 40. Webbe 1591, *3v. 41. Atkins, 242. 42. Nashe 1593, I4v.

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43. Hall 1597, B6v and B7r. 44. Marston 1610, C4r; Shakespeare 1600, D2r. 45. Shakespeare 1609, A2r. 46. Ness, 14–16, 21, and 107. 47. Ness, 21–22. 48. Brome 1652, L4v. 49. Heywood 1637, K4r. The next year, 1638, the same epilogue was appended to Henry Shirley’s 1618 The Martyred Soldier, also printed by John Okes. 50. Jonson 1632, A3r. 51. Tarlinskaja, 44–45 and 92; see also Wright, 93. 52. Halliday, 26; see also Muir 1973, 31. 53. Ness, 88; see also 95. 54. Tarlinskaja, 335–36. See also Halliday, 27; and Wickham, 2:5–6. 55. See Fleay, 64; Flint, 17 and 19. 56. Trousdale 1981, 95. 57. Farmer and Lesser, 28–35. On Caroline companies reprising old plays in their ­repertories, see Bentley 1986, 221–24; and Gurr 1994, 20. As an example, of the sixty-­one per­for­mances Sir Humphrey Mildmay saw between January 1632 and November 1643, only five ­were new plays; more than half of the plays staged by the King’s Men at court in 1638 ­were more than five years old, and one-­third w ­ ere Elizabethan. As Gurr points out, ­“Audience preferences might have altered rather more slowly than t­ hose of the playwrights” (1993, 16). 58. Brome’s play was one of the forty-­five that the Lord Chamberlain restricted to William Beeston’s com­pany on August 10, 1639, establishing that year as the terminus ad quem for the play’s composition. The play’s source was the Italian collection of stories The Fortunate, the Deceived, and the Unfortunate Lovers (Langbaine, 32); Brome likely worked from the En­glish version of 1632, establishing that year as the terminus a quo. As Brome was prob­ably born in 1620, Bentley suggests that a date closer to the end of the range is more likely (3:48). Generically and topically, The Cunning Lovers fits in with the other plays being staged at the Cockpit in 1639 (The Lady’s Trial, Argalus and Parthenia, and Wit in a Constable). 59. On Brome’s life, see Dubinski, 1:1–8. 60. As with many other plays written by playwriting playgoers, scholars have—­despite clear, positive external evidence—­attempted to deny Brome authorship of the play that bears his name (see, for example, the discussion of Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies in Chapter 3): Bentley doubted that The Cunning Lovers was written by Brome (3:48–49); likewise, E. H. C. Oliphant made the unevidenced claim (“I have not read it,” he admits) that it was “a play originally by Heywood, afterward patched by Alexander Brome” (455). 61. Brome 1660, C8v–­D1r. 62. Brome 1660, 2M6r. 63. Brome 1661, S6v. 64. The play also includes a reference to what is e­ ither the lost 1624 play Keep the W ­ idow Waking or the ballad of the same name (see E4v). 65. Bentley, 3:48. 66. The stationer, William Sheares, was not other­wise publishing plays in the 1650s, ­a fter having been an active play publisher in the 1630s, so it seems likely that he obtained his copy from Brome himself as part of the playwright’s proj­ect to preserve En­g lish drama in print. Though no printer’s name appears on the title page, the device on A1r does not appear in any



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other play printed between 1642 and 1660, suggesting that the shop Sheares retained to print the quarto had l­ittle or no experience with play printing. 67. The plays are Glapthorne’s The Ladies’ Privilege (1637), Rutter’s 1 The Cid (1637), Richard Brome’s The Damoiselle (1638), Ford’s The Lady’s Trial (1638), Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia (1638) and Wit in a Constable (1638), Nabbes’s The Bride (1638), and Richard Brome’s A Mad ­Couple Well Matched (1639). I omit the anonymous The Bloody Banquet, which The Annals of En­glish Drama assigns to Beeston’s Boys in 1639; the play is stylistically and generically unlike anything e­ lse staged by the com­pany in t­ hese years and might more reliably be assigned to the peak years of Jacobean revenge tragedy, 1605–9. 68. Flint, 21. 69. Flint, 14. 70. On “scene rhyme,” see Ness, 70–81; on “exit rhyme” and “cue rhyme,” see Ness, 61–70. 71. To clarify the difference between “theatrical” and “dramatic” rhyme, the former orchestrates the event of the per­for­mance while the latter orchestrates the fiction of the play. On dramatic rhyme, see Ness, 26–44. 72. Brome 1654, D3v–­D4r. 73. Ness, 58. On the rhymed aside, see Ness, 56–58; and Abbott, 5:6:515. 74. Brome 1654, D4v. Brome’s debt to the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet is obvious. 75. Ness, 47–54. 76. Brome 1654, K1r. 77. Brome 1654, B2r. 78. Brome 1654, G2v. 79. Brome 1654, C1r. 80. Brome 1654, H1r. 81. Glapthorne, A3v. 82. Brome, Damoiselle, E1r and E8v. 83. Nabbes, Bride, F3v. 84. Brome, Mad, A4v. 85. This average derives from McDonald 1996, 219–20. On the variety of dif­fer­ent ways Shakespeare makes use of rhyme, see 193–94; and Ness, passim. 86. Dryden 1664, A4r. See also Dryden 1668, H4v–­K 4v. 87. Dryden 1664, A3v. 88. Heywood 1637, K4r. 89. Clavell 1628, B3v. 90. Carew, A3r. 91. On this shift, see Tarlinskaja, 44–45 and 92; and Wright, 93. 92. Tailor, B3r. 93. Barnes 1607, A4v. 94. See Flatter; Muir 1971 and 1973; Tarlinskaja (esp. 106 and 114–15); Wright; and McDonald 2001, esp. 89–107. 95. Trousdale 1981, 112. 96. Blank, 31. Blank refutes readings of Barnes’s sonnets that suggest their lack of adherence to traditional forms was a result of incompetence; rather, Blank demonstrates that Barnes was deliberately and intelligently innovating with lyric form. See also Eccles 1933, 170. 97. Blank, 77–79. 98. Churchyard, G3v. 99. Bastard, L6r.

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100. On the tradition of satirizing Barnes, see Eccles 1933, 222–29. 101. On this identification, see Eccles 1933, 223. 102. Harington, C8v. 103. Eccles 1933, 167. 104. Harington, H7v. 105. Barnes also wrote a play entitled The ­Battle of Hexham, which was lost in 1807. The play The Madcap, licensed for the first Prince Charles’s Men in May 1624, was likely by a dif­ fer­ent “Barnes” (see Chambers, 3:214; Bentley, 3:9; Eccles 1933, 235–36). Cox argues that Barnes wrote The Dev­il’s Charter even earlier than its documented court per­for­mance and that it was intended as part of a deliberate repertory pairing with Macbeth in 1606 (934–35), but no evidence of this exists. David Livingstone and David Farley-­Hill both argue that the Candlemas per­for­mance was the play’s only appearance on stage; Livingstone notes that certain ele­ments in it seem designed to appeal specifically to James, and Farley-­Hills adds to this by noting verbal parallels between certain lines in the play and some of James’s own writing (Livingstone, esp. 6–9; Farley-­Hills, 206–8). Material of interest to James, of course, might also have been of interest to an audience at the Globe—an audience of which Barnes himself had been a member. Arguing that The Dev­il’s Charter was performed in public, Jonathan Goldberg notes that all other plays performed at James’s court entered the repertories at the public theaters (Goldberg, 231). Many other critics have simply assumed that, as a King’s Men play, it was eventually staged at the Globe. This assumption has led theater historians to draw upon the play’s peculiarly detailed and copious stage directions to support vari­ous arguments about the materials and practices of the King’s Men at the Globe in the early Jacobean period (see Chambers, 3:112–13; Harbage 1952, 213; Hosley 1959, 46; Beckerman 1962, 82–95, 164, and 185; Honigmann 1982, 31; Sturgess, 135 and 181–82; Leggatt, 52–53, 58, 62–63, and 89; Gurr 1994, 149; Egan 1999, 6–7; and Lopez 2003, 103 and 106). Such arguments must be tempered, however, by taking into account not merely the lack of evidence that The Dev­il’s Charter was ever staged at the Globe but also the fact that all we can state for certain is that, as a work by a playwriting playgoer, it reveals what an engaged consumer thought pos­si­ble on the stage or, more specifically, what Barnes wished to see on the stage, which might not be the same as what was pos­si­ble or conventional (as argued in the previous chapter, in fact, such copiousness in theatrical signals likely marks an amateur’s understanding that what he is calling for is not conventional or regular practice). Perhaps most unsettling for attempts to read the play for evidence of staging practices is Barnes’s admission that he revised the play ­a fter its court per­for­mance but prior to publication (see l­ater in this chapter); if a manuscript of the play remained in the hands of the King’s Men and they did perform it at the Globe, it therefore must have differed (in now unknowable ways) from the extant quarto. 106. Barnes 1606, A2v. Ford may have taken Barnes’s writing for his own “example,” but it was nothing in the Foure Bookes that inspired him: in addition to general resemblances between the moral corruption and vio­lence in Barnes’s play and Ford’s l­ater tragedies, ­there is the specific instance of Orgilus’s ritualistic “death chair” in Ford’s The Broken Heart (1630), which seems to have been modeled on Lucretia’s use of a restraining chair to murder Viselli in The Dev­il’s Charter (Sturgess, 135). 107. Eccles 1933, 213. 108. Eccles 1933, 233. 109. For a further refutation of Eccles, see Livingstone, 7–8, who does, however, assume that “Barnes undoubtedly consulted with the players while writing it [­because a] novice would



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certainly be in need of advice” (8). Th ­ ere is, again, no evidence for this conjecture, which seems based upon the same fallacy. 110. Barnes 1595, A2v. Other playwrights who revised for readers include the amateurs John Jones (Adrasta) and Arthur Wilson (The Inconstant Lady) and the professional Jonson (­Every Man out of His Humor, The New Inn, and Sejanus). Richard Brome, similarly, advertised in the letter to his readers at the end of his The Antipodes (1638) that he had included “in this Booke more then was presented upon the Stage, and left out of the Pre­sen­ta­tion,” though in this case the reader’s version was not an expansion so much as a reversion, since Brome simply restored material originally included in “the allowed Original” (Brome 1640, M1r); Dutton proposes that Webster (The Duchess of Malfi) and Fletcher (The Humorous Lieutenant) did the same when their plays ­were printed (see Dutton 2000, 101–3). 111. Livingstone, 10; Jacqueline Latham, by contrast, finds that Barnes “has a considerable range of tone in his blank verse which is clear and supple” (Latham, 107). 112. Line numbers reference Pogue. 113. Wright, 221–23. 114. McDonald 2001, 106. 115. Livingstone, 54, emphasis added. 116. Livingstone, 55–56. 117. McDonald 2001, 103. 118. On this quality in Shakespeare, Muir notes: “We forget we are listening to poetry: we seem rather to be listening to men and w ­ omen talking” (1971, 41, emphasis added). McDonald argues that by the m ­ iddle of Shakespeare’s c­ areer “the poetic language seems less artificial, more ‘natu­ral’ than in the earlier works [­because] in his use of rhythms . . . ​t he poet seek[s] to conceal evidence of artifice” (2001, 106). To Wright, the pursuit of this naturalistic ideal was the entire purpose of using iambic pentameter in the theater: “The main movement of Elizabethan dramatic dialogue was ­toward natu­ral speech-­tones—­indeed, t­ oward a spoken language of the stage that combined natu­ral phrasing and intonation with a high degree of metrical and figurative patterning. . . . ​[ T]he movement during Shakespeare’s early life is unmistakably ­toward a verse with diminished rhyme, a less blatant meter, and an increasingly speechlike line-­ flow” (93, 96; on Shakespeare’s attempts to make his blank verse sound natu­ral, see 168 and passim). 119. Rhyme is “reassuring” ­because it “sets up an expectation of pattern” and feels predictable (Wright, 15). 120. Livingstone singles out t­ hese couplets for scorn: “The scene is almost blasted by Barnes’s unwise use of rhyme. . . . ​[T]he result is flat, jingling, and almost funny” (27). Livingstone repeatedly reads rhyme as comic, but the sense of ritualistic finality that rhyme lends to the calm and collected Lucretia can also seem more menacing than amusing—­her words, like her actions, appearing confident, calculated, and premeditated. 121. Eccles 1933, 171. 122. McDonald 2001, 100. 123. See, for example, Wright, 177. 124. Wright, 207. 125. Vickers 1989, 122. See also Halliday, 23; and Vickers 1968, 43. 126. Vickers 1968, 15. 127. Bayfield, 48–49. 128. Nabbes, A3r.

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not es to pag es 1 8 0 – 1 86 129. Trousdale 1981, 114. 130. Bentley, 3:165. 131. Righter [Barton], 65.

Conclusion 1. Craven and Hayward, 42. On Norwood’s playgoing, see Whitney 2006, 169–85. 2. Craven and Hayward, 6. 3. Craven and Hayward, 38. 4. Craven and Hayward, 17. 5. Craven and Hayward, 42. 6. Craven and Hayward, 42. 7. Brathwait 1635, A7r. On Brathwait’s view of avocational playmaking, see the Introduction. 8. Whitney 2006, 173. 9. Whitney 2006, 172. 10. Whitney 2006, 171. 11. Saunders, 76. 12. Harbage 1941, 148–49. 13. Darnton, 18.

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Index

actors. See players Adams, Henry, 110 Admiral’s Men, 105, 109, 110, 111, 114, 191 n.42, 206 nn.28–29 Altman, Joel, 34, 40 amateur dramatists. See amateur playwrights amateur playwrights, 3–4, 11–13, 16–26, 48–49, 61; audience perspective and, 141–42; authorial choice and, 96–99; players and, 78; revisions by, 74–102, 186; Shakespeare and, 139–40; stage directions and, 107–8, 186–87; use of verse, 143–81, 188 Amboyna massacre, 82–85 antitheatricalists, 12, 16, 35, 48 Armin, Robert, 191 n.42 Arminianism, 37 Ascham, Roger, 152 asides, 105, 112–13, 142, 158–59, 180, 206 nn.34–35, 215 n.73 audience: amateur playwrights and, 141–42; be­hav­ior of, 43–47; criticism of, 50; expectations of, 67–68; influence on per­for­mance by, 42–44, 62, 185, 196 n.73; intrusions by, 31–32, 64; Jonson and, 50, 55, 61–63; participatory spectatorship and, 10, 18, 38, 42–49, 52–55, 61–71, 72–73, 195 n.39, 197 nn. 108, 124, 198 n.162; understanding of censorship, 89–90; understanding of dramatic verse, 143–45, 146, 151–52, 166, 179. See also interpretation, by the audience; playgoers audience application, 37–38, 62 audience studies, 190 n.20; banquet meta­phor, 36, 41, 73; bee and spider meta­phor, 34–35, 41, 59, 71, 194 n.15; demographics and, 4–5; individual playwrights and, 7–8; orchestration

approach, 5–8, 10, 33, 72, 141, 190 n.20; participatory spectatorship and, 7; reception response, 5, 33–41, 56, 59; reflection response, 5–6 avocation, 11, 12, 20, 167, 183, 184, 185, 190 n.40, 191 n.55, 218 n.7 Baker, Sir Richard, 34, 35, 59, 71, 184 Bald, R. C., 91, 94, 96, 98 banquet meta­phor, 36, 41, 73, 194 n.20 Barnes, Barnabe, 2, 24; The B ­ attle of Hexham, 216 n.105; The Dev­il’s Charter, 2, 29, 101, 137, 145, 166, 167–80, 212 n.140, 216 n.105; A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets, 167; dramatic verse of, 29, 145, 168–80; Foure Bookes of Offices, 167, 168; nondramatic poetry of, 137, 166–67, 178, 215 n.96; Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 137, 166, 167, 178; players and, 216 n.109; revisions by, 101, 168–69, 217 n.110; stage directions by, 176, 216 n.105; use of rhyme, 174, 177, 178, 217 n.120 Barry, Lording, 191 n.42 Barton, Anne, 52–53, 61, 181 Barton, John, 145–46 Bastard, Thomas, 166 Bathurst, Edward, 91, 92 Bavande, William, 35 Bawcutt, N. W., 87, 98, 200 n.16, 201 nn. 24, 30 Beaumont, Francis, 13, 50, 70, 189 n.5; 1647 folio of, 156, 191 n.43; The Coxcomb, 194 n.20; The Fair Maid of the Inn, 84; The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 25, 64; Philaster, 40; The W ­ oman Hater, 57 bee and spider meta­phor, 34–35, 41, 59, 71, 194 n.15 Beeston, Christopher, 24

238 Index Beeston, William, 162, 214 n.58 Beeston’s Boys, 155, 157, 161, 162, 215 n.67 Benlowes, Edward, 212 n.14 Bennet, Susan, 41 Bentley, G. E., 195 n.48, 199 n.179, 211 n.112; on amateur playwrights, 22–26, 118; on Brome, 157, 214 nn. 58, 60; on censorship, 89; on Chamberlain, 212 n.15; on The Launching of the Mary, 85; The Profession of Dramatists in Shakespeare’s Time, 22, 208 n.64; on The Soddered Citizen, 117, 118, 122, 168, 181, 208 nn.63–64, 69 Bentley, John, 47 Berkeley, Sir William: The Lost Lady, 26, 75 Blackfriars play­house, 2, 21, 24, 32, 45, 51, 118, 122, 210 n.93; playgoers at, 38, 44, 46, 49, 50, 64; The Soddered Citizen, 208 n.63; Wilson’s plays at, 92 Blackstone, Mary, 5, 46 Blank, Philip, 166 blank verse, 153–54, 164–65; Barnes’s use of, 145, 169, 170, 171, 174–75, 177, 217 n.111; Brome’s use of, 158, 160; Chamberlain’s use of, 150; Dryden’s opinion of, 163; Mountfort’s use of, 87–88; Shakespeare’s use of, 217 n.118. See also iambic pentameter; verse Bliss, Lee, 64 Bly, Mary, 191 n.42 Bradwell, Stephen, 212 n.14 Brathwait, Richard, 12, 20, 183 Brome, Alexander, 180, 181; The Cunning Lovers, 25, 29, 145, 155, 157–62, 214 n.58; nondramatic poetry of, 156, 157; The Rump, 156; Songs and Poems, 156; use of rhyme, 29, 145, 155, 157–64, 184; use of verse, 145, 152, 155, 157–64, 180, 181 Brome, Richard, 13, 21, 26, 100, 157, 163, 212 n.14; The Antipodes, 217 n.110; The Careless Shepherdess prologue, 199 n.172; The Court Beggar, 11; The Damoiselle, 162, 215 n.67; Jonson and, 14–15, 191 n.43; A Jovial Crew, 154, 156; A Mad ­Couple Well Matched, 162, 215 n.67; The Northern Lass, 14–15, 55–60, 154 Brown, Henry, 47 Burbage, Cuthbert, 65 Burbage, Richard, 193 n.93 Burbage, William, 65 Burghley, Lord Trea­surer, 41

Burton, Robert, 18; The Anatomy of Melancholy, 9 Butler, Martin, 24, 26, 68 The Cardinal’s Conspiracy (anonymous), 37 Carew, Thomas, 49, 164, 165, 194 n.20 Carlell, Lodowick, 23; The Passionate Lovers, 156 Carlton, Dudley, 50–51 Cartwright, Kent, 38 Cartwright, William: The Royal Slave, 101 Cavendish, Margaret, 207 n.58 Cecil, Sir Robert, 63 Cecil, Sir William, 41, 42 censorship, 16, 100, 117, 202 nn.46–47; audience and, 89–90; Fletcher and, 203 n.84; Herbert and, 80–90, 200 nn. 20, 22, 203 n.84, 208 n.71; The Inconstant Lady, 96–98; The Launching of the Mary, 2, 28, 77, 79–90, 200 nn. 20, 22, 201 nn. 23, 24, 30. See also revisions Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote, 79 Chamberlain, John, 103 Chamberlain, Lord, 92 Chamberlain, Robert, 146–47, 180, 181, 212 nn.14–15, 213 n.17; Balaam’s Ass Cudgeled, 147; Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimsies, 147; The Harmony of the Muses, 147; Nocturnal Lucubrations, 147; stage directions by, 147; The Swaggering Damsel, 29, 145–52, 157, 181; use of verse, 147, 148–52, 180, 181 Chamberlain’s Men, 53–54 Chambers, E. K., 6, 19, 206 n.29, 210 n.95, 211 n.127 Chapman, George, 13, 153, 195 n.45; The Old Joiner of Aldgate, 41 Chettle, Henry, 205 n.20, 206 n.32; The Orphan’s Tragedy, 109–10 ­Children of Paul’s, 41, 105, 132, 137, 213 n.35 ­Children of the King’s Revels, 14, 191 n.42 ­Children of the Queen’s Revels, 50, 63 ­Children of the Revels, 138, 191 n.42 Churchyard, Thomas, 166, 194 n.15 civic pageants, 48 Clare, Janet, 88 Clavell, John, 2, 19, 21, 24, 116–19, 138, 164, 189 n.3, 208 nn. 69, 71; diary and



Index 239

commonplace book of, 26, 125–27, 207 n. 61; Jonson and, 118, 208 n.69; King’s Men and, 118, 119, 120, 168, 183, 208 n.69; revisions by, 117–18; The Soddered Citizen, 2, 23, 29, 101, 116–28, 138, 168, 181, 207 n.59, 208 nn. 63, 71; stage directions by, 29, 105, 106, 119–28, 209 n.74; use of costumes, 122–23, 126, 127; use of properties, 123–24, 126, 127; use of songs, 125, 140 Clifton, Sir Gervase, 45–46 closet drama, 22, 134, 207 n.58 Cockpit-­in-­Court, 53 Cockpit play­house, 24, 155, 161, 214 n.58 corantos, 44 costumes, 44–45, 47, 65, 104, 210 nn.84–86; Mahomet and His Heaven, 132; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 139–40; The Soddered Citizen, 122–23, 126, 127 Cotes, Thomas, 213 n.19 courtier dramatists, 19–20, 21–24, 26, 55, 109, 117, 184, 192 nn. 72, 74, 210 n.93 Court of High Commission, 87 Cowell, John: The Interpreter, 64 Cowley, Abraham: Love’s Riddle, 111 Crawford, James, 191 n.55 Crooke, Andrew, 213 n.17 Crosfield, Thomas, 91, 92 Crosse, Henry, 59 cue rhymes, 157, 162, 215 n.70 currente calamo revisions, 75, 76, 79, 93 Curtain play­house, 17, 42, 56, 57 Daborne, Robert, 13 Daniel, Samuel, 13, 152, 166, 206 n.38 Darnton, Robert, 186 Davenant, Sir William, 199 n.1; The Just Italian, 49; News from Plymouth, 84; The Wits, 194 n.20 Davenport, Robert, 212 n.14 Davies, John, 44, 91 Dawson, Anthony, 141 Day, John, 110, 191 n.42, 206 n.38; The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, 157; Humor Out of Breath, 191 n.42; The Isle of Gulls, 63–64, 69–70; The Italian Tragedy, 109; The Tragedy of Thomas Merry, or Beech’s Tragedy, 109, 111, 205 n.18, 206 nn. 28–29, 32; The Travels of the Three En­glish ­Brothers, 36, 41

Dekker, Thomas, 9, 50, 57, 58, 79, 130, 153, 195 n.48; If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil is In’t, 53; Keep the ­Widow Waking, 41, 189 n.5, 195 n.48, 214 n.64; Old Fortunatus, 54; The Roaring Girl, 36, 66–67, 69; The Welsh Ambassador, 108 Dering, Sir Edward, 193 n.93 Dessen, Alan, 121, 123, 127, 207 n.45, 209 n.79 Devereux, Robert (Earl of Essex), 90–91, 134 Dimmock, Matthew, 134, 135, 137 dramatis personae lists, 75, 76, 93, 132, 197 n.99 Drayton, Michael, 189 n.5, 191 n.42, 197 n.124 Dryden, John, 163 Dublin, Ireland, 127 Dutch East India Com­pany (VOC), 81, 82, 84 East India Com­pany (EIC), 1–2, 78, 79, 81, 84–87, 200 n.16, 201 n.22 Eccles, Mark, 167, 168, 179 Edwardes, Richard: Damon and Pithias, 40 EIC. See East India Com­pany (EIC) Elam, Keir, 65 The Emperor’s Favorite (anonymous), 75 epilogues, 198 n.147; audiences and, 40; Bartholomew Fair, 198 n.147; The Broken Heart, 49; The City Match, 40; Cynthia’s Revels, 60; The Governor, 20, 192 n.64; The Launching of the Mary, 78; Mahomet and His Heaven, 135; The Martyred Soldier, 214 n.49; The Queen of Corsica, 74–75; The Roaring Girl, 36–37, 67, 69; The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, 154, 163; The Swaggering Damsel, 147 exit rhymes, 157, 162, 215 n.70 fair copy, 81, 200 nn. 10, 21, 201 n.30; The Amazon, 76; The Inconstant Lady, 203 n.71; John a Kent and John a Cumber, 75; The Queen of Corsica, 74–75 The Fair Foul One, 64–65 Falkland, Viscount, 32–33, 35 fan fiction, 30, 193 n.93 Fenn, Ezekiel, 40 Fennor, William, 49–50, 103, 204 n.3

240 Index Fermedo, Sir Cornelius, 192 n.64; The Governor, 20 Ferrarius, John, 35 Field, Nathan, 13 Fitzgeoffrey, Henry, 23, 44–45, 46 Flaskett, John, 41, 42, 195 n.45 Flecknoe, Richard, 58, 59 Fleetwood, William, 17, 45 Fletcher, John, 25, 208 n.68; 1647 folio of, 156, 191 n.43; The Beggar’s Bush, 127; The Coxcomb, 194 n.20; The Fair Maid of the Inn, 84; The Faithful Shepherdess, 25, 67; The Honest Man’s Fortune, 108; The Humorous Lieutenant, 217 n.110; Philaster, 40; The Prophetess, 54; Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, 50–51, 108; The Tamer Tamed, 203 n.84; A Wife for a Month, 194 n.20; The Wild Goose Chase, 189 n.5 Flint, Lorna, 157 Ford, John, 13, 157, 163, 168, 216 n.106; The Broken Heart, 49; The Lady’s Trial, 162, 215 n.67 Forman, Simon, 39–40 Fortune play­house, 37, 49, 56, 64, 182, 183, 184, 192 n.62 foul papers, 75, 200 n.10; The Inconstant Lady, 28, 203 nn.71–72; The Launching of the Mary, 81; The Soddered Citizen, 209 n.74 Freeman, Thomas, 194 n.15 gallants: as playgoers, 44, 57 Galli, Antimo, 42, 43 Garber, Marjorie, 37 Gayton, Edmund, 38, 39, 43–44, 47, 56, 58–59 Gerbier, Charles, 212 n.14 Gerdler, Adam, 191 n.55 Glapthorne, Henry, 40, 162, 215 n.67 Globe play­house, 64, 208 n.63, 216 n.105; new Globe, 196 n.73; playgoers at, 42, 46, 50–51, 56, 104, 174 Goffe, Thomas, 146, 212 n.12; The Careless Shepherdess, 68 Golding, S. R., 110 Gordon-­Craig, Christopher, 91, 99, 204 n.87 Gosson, Stephen, 10, 153 Gough, John: The Strange Discovery, 24, 207 n.58 The Greeks and Trojans (anonymous), 39

Green, John, 92 Greene, Robert, 13, 206 n.38; Alphonsus, King of Aragon, 53, 211 n.112; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 195 n.50; James IV, 211 n.112 Greene’s Tu Quoque (anonymous), 157 Greg, W. W., 81, 108, 109, 110, 199 n.1, 205 n.18 Guilpin, Edward, 9, 44 Gurr, Andrew, 6, 9, 29, 49, 72, 107, 142, 195 n.45 Hall, Joseph, 144, 153 Hanabusa, Chiaki, 109, 110, 111, 114, 206 nn. 28, 32, 33, 38 Harbage, Alfred, 140–41, 185, 199 n.179 Harington, John, 166–67 Harris, H., 213 n.17 Haughton, William: The Tragedy of Thomas Merry, or Beech’s Tragedy, 109–10, 111, 205 n.18, 206 nn. 28, 32 Hawkins, Richard, 40 Hawkins, William: Apollo Shroving, 70–71 Heath, John: Two Centuries of Epigrams, 56 Henslowe, Philip, 13, 65, 109, 111, 114, 192 n.62, 205 nn. 18, 20, 206 nn. 28, 32 Herbert, Edward: The Amazon, 76–77, 200 nn. 8, 10 Herbert, Sir Henry, 64–65, 117, 202 n.37; censorship by, 200 n.20, 203 n.84, 208 n.71; The Inconstant Lady and, 96–98; The Launching of the Mary and, 2, 79, 80–90, 101–2, 200 nn. 16, 20, 201 nn. 24, 30, 202 n.36 Heton, Richard, 24 Heylyn, Peter, 57 Heywood, Thomas, 13, 50, 79, 206 n.38, 212 n.14, 214 n.60; An Apology for Actors, 10–11, 35, 48, 52; If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, 157; The Rape of Lucrece, 65; The Royal King and the Loyal Subject, 154, 163; stage directions by, 107, 123, 211 n.112; A ­Woman Killed with Kindness, 194 n.20 Hillebrand, Harold, 129–30, 131, 132, 135, 138, 211 n.127 Hobgood, Alison, 7 Holland, Aaron, 195 n.48 Holyday, Barton: Technogamia, 31–32, 193 n.2



Index 241

Hopkins, Lisa, 147, 212 n.15 Hoskins of Oxford, 31–32, 35, 39, 42, 51, 67 Howard, Lady Frances, 134 Howard, Jean, 5 Howard-­Hill, T. H., 140 Howe, Agnes, 41 iambic pentameter, 29, 164–65; Barnes’s use of, 169, 173–78; Brome’s use of, 159; Chamberlain’s use of, 147, 150–51; Shakespeare’s use of, 217 n.118. See also blank verse; meter; verse Ichikawa, Mariko, 72, 107, 142, 204 n.11 induction scenes, 55, 63, 66, 74, 198 n.148, 199 n.178; Adrasta, 69–70, 100; Alphonsus, King of Aragon, 53; Bartholomew Fair, 5, 61, 63, 191 n.43; The Careless Shepherdess, 68–69, 199 n.172; ­Every Man out of his Humor, 57–58; The Isle of Gulls, 63; The Malcontent, 56, 63; The Taming of the Shrew, 151; A Warning for Fair W ­ omen, 113; What You W ­ ill, 67–68 Inns of Court, 13, 48, 56–57 interpretation, by the audience, 7, 33–35, 51, 59, 194 n.12; Hamlet, 37; Jonson’s opinion of, 62–63, 65; Macbeth, 195 n.35; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 142; The Roman Actor, 71 Ioppolo, Grace, 63, 74–75, 115, 198 n.147, 201 n.30, 203 n.76, 210 n.106 Ireland, 101, 117, 118, 125, 127, 138 Islam, 128 Itzoe, Linda, 93, 99, 202 n.56 Jaques, Francis: The Queen of Corsica, 25, 74–75, 76, 102, 115–16, 199 n.1 Jeffes, Antony, 111 jigs, 42, 50, 164 John of Bordeaux (anonymous), 131, 210 n.106 Jones, Inigo, 134 Jones, John, 2, 70, 71, 189 n.2, 199 n.179; Adrasta, 2, 69–70, 100, 217 n.110 Jonson, Ben, 13, 16, 21, 23, 28, 70, 153, 184, 187, 189 n.5, 198 n.147, 208 n.69; audience and, 5, 50, 55, 61–62, 65; Bartholomew Fair, 5, 61, 63, 191 n.43; Catiline, 67, 157; censorship and, 77, 88, 202 n.42; Clavell and, 118, 208 n.69; Cynthia’s Revels, 55, 60; The Devil is an Ass, 45; Eastward Ho, 63; Epicoene, 25, 194 n.20; E ­ very Man out

of His Humor, 57–58, 65–66, 194 n.20, 217 n.110; Hymenaei, 134; The Magnetic Lady, 62, 63, 68; Neptune’s Triumph, 194 n.20; The New Inn, 194 n.20; The Northern Lass commendatory verse, 14–15, 55, 154; Poetaster, 60, 62, 202 n.43; revising plays for readers, 217 n.110; rhyme, 153, 154; Sejanus, 157; The Staple of News, 84; A Tale of a Tub, 202 n.43; Timber, 66; Volpone, 15, 61–62, 157, 194 n.15 Jordan, Thomas, 212 n.14 Kemp, W ­ ill, 46, 47, 193 n.93 Kendall, Thomas, 212 n.14 Killigrew, Henry: Pallantus and Eudora, 32, 35, 51 Killigrew, Thomas, 18, 189 n.5; Claracilla, 213 n.19; The Prisoners, 213 n.19 King’s Men, 21, 24, 26, 40, 65, 203 n.71, 208 nn.62–63, 209 n.74, 210 n.90, 214 n.57; The Dev­il’s Charter, 2, 101, 137, 167–68, 216 n.105; The Inconstant Lady, 77, 91–92, 94, 98, 99, 200 n.11, 202 nn. 56, 62, 203 n.71; The Royal Slave, 101; The Soddered Citizen, 2, 101, 105, 116–20, 168, 183, 208 nn. 62, 63, 69, 71 King’s Revels, 131, 193 n.88 Kirkham, Edward, 211 n.134 Knight, Edward, 117, 208 n.62, 209 n.74 Kyd, Thomas, 110; The Spanish Tragedy, 155, 193 n.88 Lady Elizabeth’s Men, 65 Law, Matthew, 206 n.28 Law, Robert, 110 Leake, Robert, 45–46 Lenton, Francis, 45, 56–57 Lin, Erika, 48, 189 n.6 Livingstone, David, 169, 174–75, 216 n.105 Locrine (anonymous), 113, 206 nn.38–39 Lodge, Thomas, 13 Long, William, 108, 200 n.16, 207 n.50 Lopez, Jeremy, 6 Lord Strange’s Men, 131 Louis, Cameron, 5, 46 Lovelace, Richard: The Scholars, 24 Lowin, John, 124, 202 n.62, 208 n.63 Lyly, John, 206 n.38; Campaspe, 51–52; Endymion, 157; Midas, 51; The ­Woman in the Moon, 128, 131, 134

242 Index Machin, Lewis, 191 n.42 The Maid’s Metamorphosis (anonymous), 113, 206 n.38 Manningham, John, 204 n.2 marginal additions, 74, 81, 102, 120, 211 n.115 Markham, Gervase, 191 n.42 Marlowe, Christopher, 13, 110, 153; Doctor Faustus, 157, 167, 175, 179 Marmion, Shakerley, 117, 118, 189 n.5, 207 n.59, 208 n.69, 212 n.14; A Fine Companion, 53, 80; Holland’s Leaguer, 80 Marston, John, 13, 57, 189 n.5; Histriomastix, 124–25, 153; The Malcontent, 56, 63; What You ­Will, 67–68 Mason, John, 191 n.42 masques, 44, 113, 135; Hymenaei, 134; Introduction to the Sword Dance, 125–26; The Soddered Citizen, 122, 123 Massinger, Philip, 2, 13, 209 n.74; Clavell and, 118, 208 nn.68–69; The Emperor of the East, 118; The Renegado, 66; The Roman Actor, 47, 71; Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, 50–51, 108 Master of the Revels, 19, 64–65, 75, 81, 200 n.16, 201 n.30, 202 nn. 45, 53; The Inconstant Lady and, 96–100, 102, 117; The Launching of the Mary and, 2, 28, 77, 79, 82–86, 88–90, 201 n.36; The Soddered Citizen and, 117; Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies and, 205 n.18. See also Herbert, Sir Henry May, Thomas, 45, 46; The Heir, 164; The Life of a Satirical Puppy Called Nim, 38 Mayne, Jasper, 101; The City Match, 15, 40 McDonald, Russ, 152, 174, 175, 179, 217 n.118 McJannet, Linda, 106, 107, 119, 207 n.50, 209 nn. 76, 78 McKerrow, R. B., 104 Mennis, John, 18 The Merry Devil of Edmonton (anonymous), 54 meter, 143, 154, 164–66, 213 n.35; Barnes’s use of, 29, 166, 169, 170, 172–74, 177, 179; Nabbes’s use of, 180; Shakespeare’s use of, 217 n.118. See also iambic pentameter; verse Meynell, Edward, 41–42 Middleton, Thomas, 189 n.5; A Game at Chess, 99, 101; A Mad World, My Masters,

152, 157; No Wit, No Help Like a W ­ oman’s, 36; The Roaring Girl, 36, 66–67, 69 Mildmay, Sir Humphrey, 9, 10, 214 n.57 Mill, Humphrey, 212 n.14 Mitchell, Francis, 41–42 mixed-­mode speech, 150–51 Moryson, Fynes, 195 n.53 Moseley, Humphrey, 207 n.59, 208 n.71 Mountfort, Walter, 1–2, 13, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 200 n.12; censorship and, 201 nn. 24, 30, 202 n.45; The Launching of the Mary, 1–2, 23, 28, 78–90, 105, 108, 200 n.16, 201 nn. 26, 30, 207 n.50, 209 n.74; playgoing, 10, 27; prologue to Launching of the Mary, 26, 195 n.40; revisions by, 2, 77–90, 100, 101–2, 200 n.16; stage directions by, 102, 105–6, 108, 121, 140, 204 n.8, 207 n.50; use of verse, 88 Mun, Thomas: Discourse of Trade from ­England unto the East-­Indies, 79, 86 Munday, Anthony, 35, 48; John a Kent and John a Cumber, 75 ­music, 44, 65, 77, 125, 137, 140, 204 n.8, 211 n.112 Nabbes, Thomas, 212 n.14, 213 n.17; The Bride, 162, 215 n.67; The Unfortunate ­Mother, 180; use of meter, 180 Nashe, Thomas, 9, 13, 53, 152; Pierce Penniless, 153 Ness, Frederic, 152, 154, 159 Nobody and Somebody (anonymous), 46–47 Norwood, Richard, 22, 23, 24, 86, 182–85, 186, 192 n.77, 218 n.1 occupational closure, 14, 54, 144, 191 n.46 orchestration approach to audience studies, 5–6, 7, 8, 10, 33, 72, 141, 190 n.20 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 110 Pafford, John Henry Pyle, 117, 119 Palsgrave’s Men, 65 Patterson, Annabel, 88, 89, 202 n.47 Peaps, William: Love in Its Ecstasy, 111 Pearce, Edward, 41, 195 n.45, 211 n.134 Peele, George, 13, 130, 131, 206 n.38 Percy, Henry (Earl of North­u mberland), 134 Percy, William, 210 n.93, 212 n.140, 211 n.111; Aphrodysial, 136; A Country



Index 243

Tragedye in Vacunium, 136; The Cuck-­ Queanes and Cuckolds Errants, 136–37; Mahomet and His Heaven, 29, 105, 128–29, 132–36; Necromantes, 136; nondramatic poetry of, 130, 137; revisions by, 131–32, 137–38, 210 n.95; stage directions by, 29, 105, 128, 129–39, 140, 207 n.50, 211 n.115 Perkins, Richard, 10–11, 35, 59 Phoenix play­house, 212 n.14, 213 n.17 plagiarism, 28, 56, 57–58, 68 playbook (manuscript), 75, 108, 131, 207 n.50, 209 n.74; The Inconstant Lady, 94, 96, 203 n.72; The Launching of the Mary, 77, 80, 200 n.16; The Soddered Citizen, 101, 105 players, 64–65, 195 n.53, 197 n.99; amateur, 17–19; apprenticeship system, 14, 191 n.45; Barnes and, 216 n.109; Clavell and, 118–19; compensation of, 191 n.55; conventions used by, 121, 124; improvising, 124–25, 140; Mountfort and, 79, 80, 90; Norwood and, 182–83, 185; Percy and, 128, 134–35, 140; playwrights and, 78, 90; rejecting plays, 2, 23, 69, 206 n.28; revising plays, 132, 202 n.53, 209 n. 74; verse and, 146; writing plays, 13 playgoers: acquisitive, 58–59; application and, 37–38; authority of, 52–55; collaborating, 26–27, 32, 33, 34, 53, 59–60, 63, 73, 185, 194 n.12; creative participation by, 33; criticism by, 49–52; demographics of, 4–5; double position of playmaking, 53, 61, 181; dramatic verse and, 143–45; idleness and, 9–10; intrusions by, 31–32; participatory spectatorship, 7, 38, 54–55, 61–62, 72–73; recreative, 10–11, 12, 27, 42, 53, 58, 61; revising, 49–52, 195 n.39. See also audience play reading, 3, 30, 113, 144, 180, 181, 193 nn. 89, 93, 194 n.10, 203 n.76; Brome and, 156, 157, 179; Chamberlain and, 147, 148, 151; The Dev­il’s Charter and, 101, 168–69; The Inconstant Lady and, 94–95, 99; Norwood and, 182; Percy and, 129, 130, 132, 134–35, 137, 138; Yarington and, 114–15. See also closet drama playwrights: academic, 13, 15, 21, 22, 209 n.78; closet dramatists, 22, 207 n.58, 209 n.78; courtier, 15, 19–22, 26, 55, 75, 109, 117, 192 n.74, 210 n.93; criticism of

audience, 49–50; generic identity and, 39; preparing plays for stage, 138; use of verse, 144–81. See also amateur playwrights; professional playwrights plot (document), 75, 103–4, 142 Plutarch, 34–35, 194 n.15 poetry, nondramatic, 144–45, 152; Barnes’s, 137, 166–67, 169; Brome’s, 155–57; Chamberlain’s, 147; Clavell’s, 2, 117; Percy’s, 130, 137. See also verse Pollard, Thomas, 121, 125, 140 Preiss, Richard, 6, 10, 32–33, 60 Prince Charles’s Men, 1, 65, 79, 216 n.105 Prince Henry’s Men, 182, 183, 184 professional playwrights, 3–4, 6–8, 12–16, 19, 60–61, 100, 115, 186; attitudes ­toward nonprofessionals, 57, 63, 69; censorship and, 85, 201 n.30, 202 n.49; collaborating with nonprofessionals, 41–42; failure of, 22, 25; playgoing, 189 n.5; revisions by, 75, 77, 81, 98–99, 101; stage directions by, 104–5, 107–8, 112–13, 127, 132, 204 n.11, 209 nn. 76, 79, 211 n.136; stage poetry of, 144–46, 152, 154, 157–58, 159, 161–65, 175, 179 prologues, 40, 74, 125; The Beggar’s Bush, 127; Campaspe, 51–52; The Careless Shepherdess, 68; The City Match, 15; The Coronation, 53; The Court Beggar, 11; The Cuck-­Queanes and Cuckolds Errants, 136; Damon and Pithias, 40; ­England’s Joy, 103; The Governor, 192 n.64; The Hector of Germany, 17–18; The Launching of the Mary, 26, 78, 195 n.40; A Mad C ­ ouple Well Matched, 162; Mahomet and His Heaven, 135; The Malcontent, 63; The Merry Devil of Edmonton, 54; Midas, 51; No Wit, No Help Like a W ­ oman’s, 36; Old Fortunatus, 54; The Roaring Girl, 66–67; The Soddered Citizen, 117, 208 n.71; Volpone, 15; The ­Woman Hater, 57 properties, 47, 139–40, 184, 210 nn.87–88, 211 n.112; Mahomet and His Heaven, 129, 133–34; The Soddered Citizen, 106, 123–24, 126, 127; Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies, 114, 207 n.45 prose, 63, 154, 157, 162, 167, 212 n.10, 213 n.19; The Cunning Lovers, 158; The Dev­il’s Charter, 173–75, 178; The Swaggering Damsel, 29, 145—51 Prynne, William, 34

244 Index Pudsey, Edward, 56 Puttenham, George, 145, 146, 181; The Art of En­glish Poesie, 143–44

Royal Shakespeare Com­pany, 145–46 Royston, Richard, 199 n.179 Rylance, Mark, 196 n.73

Queen Anne’s Men, 155 Queen Henrietta’s Men, 24 Queen’s Men, 47

Salingar, Leo, 5 Salisbury Court play­house, 24, 68, 80, 138, 212 n.14 Saunders, J. W., 22, 25, 185, 192 n.72; Profession of En­glish Letters, 21 Savage, Raph, 41, 42, 195 n.48 scene rhymes, 158, 161, 162, 215 n.70 school plays, 13, 48, 70–71, 182 Second Maiden’s Tragedy, 81 Shakespeare, William, 2, 13, 185, 188, 190 n.20; amateur playmakers and, 107, 139–40; Hamlet, 37, 39, 58, 85, 107, 189 n.5, 202 n.56; 1 Henry IV, 157, 193 n.93; 2 Henry IV, 58, 193 n.93; Henry V, 53, 58; Henry VI plays, 53, 157; influence on playwriting playgoers, 91, 157, 174, 193 n.88, 199 n.1, 202 n.56; King Lear, 193 n.88; Love’s ­Labor’s Lost, 38, 157; Macbeth, 40, 168, 175, 179, 202 n.56, 216 n.105; manuscripts of, 203 n.71; The Merchant of Venice, 155, 157; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 38–39, 79, 139–40, 141–42, 153, 157, 191 n.55, 193 n.88; Othello, 157, 193 n.88; Pericles, 53, 153; Romeo and Juliet, 157; stage directions by, 106–7, 123, 140, 205 n.12; use of verse, 146, 153, 154, 157, 165, 174, 175, 179–80, 212 n.10, 215 n.85, 217 n.118 Shakespeare Association of Amer­i­ca, 6 Shank, John, 118 Sharpe, Lewis, 23; The Noble Stranger, 24, 60–61 Sharpham, Edward, 191 n.42 Sheares, William, 214 n.66 Shirley, Henry: The Martyred Soldier, 194 n.20, 214 n.49 Shirley, James, 13, 50, 55, 66, 91, 199 n.1; Changes, 42; The Contention for Honor and Riches, 84; The Coronation, 53, 116; The Court Secret, 116; The Doubtful Heir, 116; The Duke’s Mistress, 194 n.20; The School of Compliment, 202 n.56; The Triumphs of Peace, 44 Singer, John, 47 Sir Thomas More, 81 Skinner, Sir John: True Relationship of the Unjust, Cruel, and Barbarous Proceedings Against the En­glish at Amboyna, 82

Rawlins, Thomas, 24, 25, 193 n.88, 212 n.14; The Rebellion, 23, 151 reader-­response theory, 34, 194 n.12 reception response, 5, 33–41, 56, 59 Red Bull play­house, 1, 17, 18, 49, 64, 195 n.48, 212 n.14 Red Lion (Norwich), 47 repertory system, 42–43, 55–56, 64, 80, 168, 184, 195 n.50, 216 n.105 The Resolute Queen (anonymous), 19 revision, 28, 31, 200 n.10, 201 n.30; by amateur playwrights, 74–102, 186; by Barnes, 2, 101, 168–69, 216 n.105, 217 n.110; by Clavell, 117–18; by copyists, 58; currente calamo, 75, 76, 79, 93; by Jaques, 74–75; by Mountfort, 2, 77–90, 100, 101–2, 200 n.16, 201 n.36; by Percy, 131–32, 137–38, 210 n.95; playgoers and, 39–40, 42, 50–51; by professional playwrights, 75, 77, 81, 98–99, 101; for readers, 69, 217 n.110; by Wilson, 77, 90–101, 125, 169, 217 n.110. See also censorship Reynolds, George, 129, 130, 212 n.140 Reynolds, Henry, 197 n.124 Rhodes, John, 23 rhyme, 66, 152–54, 213 nn. 35, 36, 217 n.119; asides and, 159, 215 n.73; Barnes’s use of, 174, 177, 178, 217 n.120; Brome’s use of, 25, 29, 145, 155, 157–64, 184; Chamberlain’s use of, 149; for male and female characters, 158; Shakespeare’s use of, 153, 215 n.85, 217 n.118; speech-­link rhyme, 159; types of, 157–59, 215 nn.70–71 Richards, Nathanael, 189 n.5, 212 n.14 Richardson, Catherine, 114, 115, 206 n.29 Rider, William: The Twins, 24, 53 Rose play­house, 105, 110, 111, 114 Rossingham, Edmond, 37 Rowe, George, 65 Rowlands, Samuel, 46 Rowley, Samuel, 13 Rowley, William, 13; The Travels of the Three En­glish ­Brothers, 36, 41



Index 245

Sly, William, 56, 63 Smith, Went­worth: The Hector of Germany, 17–18, 109 Spencer, John, 152, 153, 154, 213 n.35 Spiller, Sir Henry, 91 stage directions, 4, 203 n.76, 204 n.11, 206 n.39, 209 n.76; asides, 112–13; by Barnes, 168, 176, 216 n.105; by Chamberlain, 147; by Clavell, 29, 105, 106, 119–28, 209 n.74; closet dramas and, 207 n.58; by Heywood, 107; implied and explicit, 93, 94, 107–8, 120, 126, 204 n.11; literary and theatrical, 104, 111–12, 113, 116, 119, 121–22, 132, 134, 203 n.76; by Mountfort, 102, 105–6, 108, 121, 140, 204 n.8, 207 n.50; by Percy, 29, 105, 128, 129–39, 140, 207 n.50, 211 n.115; per­for­mances and, 103–8; permissive, 102, 106, 122, 132, 136, 137, 211 n.112; by playwriting playgoers, 28, 104, 106–8, 111–12, 122, 140–42, 186–87, 204 n.11, 207 n.50, 211 n.127; professional playwrights and, 104–5, 107–8, 112–13, 127, 132, 204 n.11, 209 nn. 76, 79, 211 n.136; in The Queen of Corsica, 74, 115–16; by Shakespeare, 106–7, 123, 140, 205 n.12; by Wilson, 93–94, 203 n.75; by Yarington, 24, 28–29, 105, 110, 111–16, 206 n.38. See also costumes; properties Star Chamber, 1, 41, 87 Stationers’ Register, 204 n.87, 206 n.42, 207 n.59, 208 nn. 62, 71, 213 n.17 Steel, Michael, 42 Stephens, John, 189 n.5 Stern, Tiffany, 40, 56, 103, 114–15, 195 n.40, 204 n.3, 205 n.12 Stoll, E. E., 143–44 Strand (London), 19 strangers, 64–65; playgoers as, 64, 69–70, 100, 127, 185; playmakers, 78, 139, 180, 201 n.30, 205 n.12 Styan, J. L., 127, 193 n.9 Suchet, David, 146 Swan play­house, 103, 104 Tailor, Robert, 166; The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, 18, 19, 164–65 Tarlton, Richard, 47, 136 Tatham, John, 212 n.14 Taylor, Gary, 15 theatrum mundi meta­phor, 52–53, 196 n.97

Thomas Lord ­Cromwell (anonymous), 53–54 Thomson, Leslie, 121, 127 Thornton, Frances, 42 Tofte, Robert, 38, 39 Tomkis, Thomas, 192 n.62; Albumazar, 19 Trousdale, Marion, 154, 165, 180 University of Cambridge, 19, 193 n.93, 199 n.179 University of Oxford, 2, 92, 131, 137, 146, 199 n.179, 212 n.12 Vaux, Ambrose, 46 Vennar, Richard, 142, 204 n.6; Plot of the Play Called E ­ ngland’s Joy, 103–4 Verney, Francis: The Tragedy of Antipo, 111, 159–60, 211 n.127 verse, dramatic, 4, 29, 143–55, 154, 164–66, 180–81, 217 n.118; audience awareness of, 144–45; Barnes’s, 145, 164, 166, 167–80, 181, 217 n.111; Brome’s, 157–63; Chamberlain’s, 145–52, 180, 181; Clavell’s, 181; Mountfort’s, 88; players and, 146; prose and, 146–47, 148, 149–51, 212 n.10, 213 n.19; Shakespeare’s, 146, 153, 154, 165, 174, 175, 179–80, 210 n.10, 212 n.10, 215 n.85, 217 n.118. See also blank verse; iambic pentameter; meter; poetry, nondramatic; rhyme Vickers, Brian, 146, 150, 151–52, 179 VOC. See Dutch East India Com­pany (VOC) Wagner, Bernard, 109, 111 A Warning for Fair W ­ omen (anonymous), 47, 113, 206 n.38 The Wasp (anonymous), 131, 210 n.106 Webbe, William, 153 Webster, John, 56, 63, 189 n.5, 217 n.110; The Dev­il’s Law Case, 155 Werstine, Paul, 94, 201 n.30, 203 n.71 Whitefriars play­house, 14, 18, 19, 191 n.42 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 44 Whitney, Charles, 7, 22, 38, 52, 59, 183 Whitney, Geffrey, 194 n.15 Wickham, Glynne, 16, 20 Wild, Robert, 71; The Benefice, 70 Wilkins, George, 41; The Travels of the Three En­glish ­Brothers, 36

246 Index Wilson, Arthur, 91–92, 100, 131, 200 n.11, 202 nn. 56, 62; censorship and, 96–98; The Corporal, 92; The Inconstant Lady, 28, 77, 91–101, 125, 169, 203 nn. 71, 75, 76, 204 n.87, 217 n.110; King’s Men and, 77, 91–92, 94, 98, 99, 202 nn. 56, 62; revisions by, 77, 93–101, 125, 131, 169, 217 n.110; stage directions by, 93–94; The Swisser, 202 n.62 Wilson, J. Dover, 185 Wilson, Robert, 211 n.112 Wither, George, 57, 194 n.15 Wood, Anthony à, 31–32, 91, 193 n.2, 199 n.179

Woodford, Thomas, 195 n.45, 211 n.134 Wooding, Barbara, 117–18, 119, 208 nn. 63, 69, 209 n.74 Wright, George, 173–74 Wybarn, Elizabeth, 46 Yarington, Robert, 108–11, 116, 138, 205 n.18; stage directions by, 24, 28–29, 105, 110–16, 207 n.45; Two La­men­ta­ble Tragedies, 24, 29, 105, 108–16, 205 n.17, 206 nn. 28, 29, 214 n.60; use of asides, 105, 108, 112–14, 142 Yarranton, Rob[ert], 111, 206 n.33

A c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

The idea for this book first took form when I was preparing a modern-­spelling edition of Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary. While I was working on the Launching manuscript in the British Library one day, a chance conversation with Grace Ioppolo planted the seed that grew into the central questions of this book: What does it mean that someone who was not part of the theater industry could write a play for it, how might such a situation come about, what does that suggest about the commercial theater of Shakespeare’s time, and what can that amateur’s play tell us that a professional dramatist’s play might not? As I pursued t­ hose questions and the proj­ect took shape, Grace very kindly provided constant, generous, and astute commentary on my ideas. I am grateful also to Arthur Kinney for his insights and observations, all of which improved and focused the book. I am especially indebted to Adam Zucker, who provided keen contributions and always useful suggestions, and whose professional and scholarly advice I continue to value tremendously. Harley Erdman also provided helpful and supportive feedback over the several years that the book took shape. I am grateful to Tim Zajac, Philip Palmer, Ann Garner, Valerie Gramling, Megan Conine, John Yargo, Timothy Watt, Marie Blackman, Jessica Landis, Gregory Sargent, and Nathaniel Leonard for so many helpful conversations and suggestions in the early stages of the proj­ect. Joe Black, who has enriched my understanding of early modern literary and book history in many ways, provided me with invaluable guidance navigating the pro­cess of preparing the book for submission to a press. I am indebted to the many scholars and teachers who have over the years generously and so graciously shared their knowledge and inspired my own journey as a scholar and teacher, particularly Farah Karim-­Cooper, Gordon McMullan, John Jowett, Ann Thompson, Sonia Massai, William Proctor Williams, Cristina Malcolmson, Sanford Freedman, Pierre Hecker, Martin Andrucki, Ann Christensen, and Emily Todd. My thinking about the playwriting playgoers and their work has benefited from the many readers who have provided feedback on the publications

248

A c k now l­edg m ents

that originated with this proj­ect, including Lucy Munro and the anonymous readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press and for my articles “ ‘Mayn’t a Spectator write a Comedy?’ Playwriting Playgoers in Early Modern Drama” in RES and “ ‘I w ­ ill keep and character that name’: Dramatis Personae Lists in Early Modern Manuscript Plays” in Early Theatre. I am grateful, too, to Roslyn Knutson and David McInnis for allowing me to find a home on the Lost Plays Database for some of the lost plays by amateur dramatists. At Penn Press, Jerome Singerman has been a steadfast, enthusiastic, and sharp-­eyed guardian for my proj­ect; I am deeply grateful for every­thing that he, Erica Ginsburg, Otto Bohlmann, and Hannah Blake have done to not only bring this book to fruition but also make it better in the pro­cess. Thanks are due especially to Karen Pangallo for providing the index to the book. I must also thank the judges of the 2011 Shakespeare Association of Amer­i­ca Open Paper contest for giving me the chance to share some of my work from Chapter 1 with the members of the association. Likewise, I am grateful to Arthur Kinney and Thomas Hopper for the opportunity to share my work on ­these dramatists with a wider audience in A New Companion to Re­nais­sance Drama from Wiley-­ Blackwell, and to Brett Greately-­Hirsch and ­Will Sharpe of Digital Re­nais­ sance Editions for the opportunity to bring my editorial attention back to the play that launched me on this proj­ect, Mountfort’s Launching of the Mary. This book came about thanks to funding for research and conference attendance provided by a UMass Amherst Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Research Grant, Bibliographical Society of the U.K. Minor Grant and Barry Bloomfield Award, Shakespeare Association of Amer­i­ca Conference Grant, and Malone Society Research Travel Grant. My proj­ect would not have been pos­si­ble without the generous support of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. The p ­ eople who have contributed the most to this book, however, are—­ appropriately enough, given its subject—­not professional scholars or editors: my ­family—­Nettie, Atticus, Toby (whose first full sentence was, a­ fter all, “I need a book”), Dominick, Kristin, Aurelia, Lucy, Karen, and Sal—­has been a constant source of encouragement and motivation over the nearly seven years that this book has grown and evolved. Like most academics, during that time I have relied upon the love and support of my f­amily to keep me, paradoxically, both moving ahead intellectually and grounded in real­ity. They have listened politely as I brainstormed aloud, waited patiently while I secluded myself for long hours in libraries and at my desk, and shared their own frank and welcome opinions about my work whenever I asked. No author could ask for more.