Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London

Controlling the Unruly Playgoer in Early Modern Drama

Eric Dunnum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351252638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Unruly Audiences and the Theater of Control in Early Modern London explores the effects of audience riots on the dramaturgy of early modern playwrights, arguing that playwrights from Marlowe to Brome often used their plays to control the physical reactions of their audience.

This study analyses how, out of anxiety that unruly audiences would destroy the nascent industry of professional drama in England, playwrights sought to limit the effect that their plays could have on the audience. They tried to construct playgoing through their drama in the hopes of creating a less-reactive, more pensive, and controlled playgoer. The result was the radical experimentation in dramaturgy that, in part, defines Renaissance drama.

Written for scholars of Early Modern and Renaissance Drama and Theatre, Theatre History, and Early Modern and Renaissance History, this book calls for a new focus on the local economic concerns of the theatre companies as a way to understand the motivation behind the drama of early modern London.

1 Audience response to performance

Fear of riots, closures and unruly playgoers

“the player is afraid of the statute”

Anonymous

This study seeks to trace a previously unrecognized trend in early modern drama: playwrights’ and playing companies’ effort to limit the physical responses of the audience. Most scholars of early modern drama (particularly performance critics, theater historians and reception theorists) argue that early modern performances attempted to engage playgoers’ response and actively encouraged audience interpretation.¹ Indeed, the recent “affective turn” in early modern studies tends to highlight exactly this phenomenon: plays’ and texts’ ability to produce in audiences physical and emotional responses, inseparable for the early moderns.² However, by paying attention to the subtle gestures within metadrama, I have found that the opposite is often true. Early modern playwrights and playing companies desired what I will be calling a non-reactive playgoer.

As discussed in the introduction, the concept of the non-reactive playgoer is almost necessarily defined negatively (the non-reactive playgoer is defined by what the playwrights did not want), and it never really existed in the first place, so it is necessarily vague. But in general, the non-reactive playgoer can be thought of as the playwrights’ attempt to construct a playgoing experience that limited the range of audience reactions within the playhouse. It seems the playwrights’ ideal audience member was one who sat quietly, did not interrupt the performance and, most importantly, did not use the performance as the basis for action. They seemed to want a more pensive or stoic audience than the unruly ones that seemed to have populated the early modern playhouses. Put another way, the non-reactive playgoer is the polar opposite of the ideal Brechtian playgoer; Brecht wanted to produce a visceral and emotional reaction in his audience that would lead to political action. Conversely, early modern playwrights wanted to produce a playgoer that did not respond to performance with action.

This may come as a surprise to students of renaissance drama for a number of reasons. First and most obviously, anyone who has seen a performance of an early modern play knows how powerful they can be. It is hard to believe that the playwrights who wrote these scripts would not want their original audiences to be deeply affected by the content of the performance. And anyone familiar with the rhetorical and humanist tradition in early modern England knows that the culture valued the efficacy and power of language. So it seems highly unlikely that playwrights trained in rhetoric and the humanist tradition would actively work to limit the power of language.

I don’t deny either of these assumptions. In fact, as I will argue in this chapter, it is precisely because early modern culture valued the efficacy of language and performance that playwrights sought to interrupt the effect of their performances. That is, their effort to limit the efficacy of their performances was the product of the belief that performances were effective. Many of them were, to put it bluntly, a little scared of what their performances could do. Metadrama often captures the dialectic between playwrights’ faith in the efficacy of rhetoric and their fear of that power. However, critics have generally only focused on the power of drama, not the anxiety that this power produced.

My readings of early modern plays seek to correct that imbalance by tracing this anxiety within individual metadramatic scenes. But first I want to address why the playwrights were so fearful of their audience’s responses and why so many playwrights (this study will address dozens of plays) register this anxiety in their performances. I will suggest that the audience’s unruly behavior and the tendency of the theater’s critics to causally link the audience’s behavior to the content of the performance threatened the very existence of professionally produced drama (the drama that we have come to know as early modern drama). The unruly behavior of the audience posed an existential threat to the playhouses, and so playwrights responded, in an effort to protect their livelihood and way of life, by attempting to construct a different mode of audience response.³ In short, early modern metadrama worked to replace the unruly playgoer with a non-reactive playgoer.

I The unruly playgoer: riots and discipline in the playhouses

Scholars of the theater have long noted the unruliness of London playgoers. Ann Jennalie Cook, Andrew Gurr and S.P. Cerasano have thoroughly recorded the disruptive activities that audience members were accused of engaging in.⁴ For instance, playgoers would routinely talk (to one another and to the performers), loudly crack nuts, obtrusively open beer bottles, gamble during a performance, and occasionally, it seems, jump on stage to enact the battles that they were witnessing. For instance, Edmund Gayton, writing in 1654, claims to remember the audiences causing more mayhem on stage than the actors:

or if it be on Holy dayes, when Saylers, Water-men, Shoomakers, Butchers and Apprentices are at leisure, then it is good policy to amaze those violent spirits, with some tearing Tragaedy full of fights and skirmishes: as the Guilphs and Guiblins, Greeks and Trojans, or the three London Apprentises, which commonly ends in six acts, the spectators frequently mounting the stage, and making a more bloody Catastrophe amongst themselves, then the Players did.⁵

Jannet Dillion nicely summarizes the evidence by noting that the “several accounts of audiences throwing things, mounting the stage and rioting at playhouses, suggest an audience that was neither silent nor passive.”⁶ And it wasn’t unusual for pickpockets and prostitutes to frequent the playhouses; the combination of crowds and liquor no doubt provided a lucrative business opportunity for both professions. For instance, Thomas Platter noted the “great swarms” of prostitutes that “haunt the town in the taverns and playhouses” during his 1599 visit to the Globe.⁷

Furthermore, as Steven Mullaney has argued, the location of the theaters permitted, if not encouraged, the kind of unruly activity of the early modern playgoer. The liberties, according to Mullaney, were the “outskirts of the premodern city,” and embodied a “complex and contradictory sort of freedom, ambivalent zones of transition between one realm of authority and another” and constituted “a borderland whose legal parameters and privileges were open-ended and equivocally defined.”⁸ This characterization of the suburbs, and by extension the audiences and general milieu of the playhouses, has been usefully challenged by Mark Bayer, who argues that the liberties were not the unruly den of subversion that early modern writers describe.⁹ Looking beyond the clichés and stereotypes, Bayer finds a remarkably stable and cohesive community. He is surely right to challenge the too easy connection historians have made between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century potshots about the suburbs and the actual lived experience of early moderns. However, we do have evidence that playwrights shared and contributed to some of the negative stereotypes about their audiences.

In fact, some of the evidence for unruly playgoer activity that Bayer questions comes from the playwrights themselves.¹⁰ Cersano suggests “some of the well-known on-stage audiences represent the players’ impressions of their spectators; and perhaps when these representations are unlikable, this was the players’ (and dramatists’) way of getting back at the audience.”¹¹ For instance, the citizen couple in Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle is an unflattering representation of playgoers who interrupt performances. Or consider this prologue spoken at the Red Bull, which practically begs the audience to be nice: “only we would request you to forbear/Your wonted custom, banding tile or pear/Aginst our curtains, to allure us forth.”¹² On a superficial level, the playwrights’ preoccupation with audience behavior can be understood as a concern that playgoers (like the citizen couple) would simply disrupt their performances. Early modern audiences, it seems, could be fairly obnoxious, or so thought the playwrights.

This is about as far as critics are generally willing to go: audiences sometimes annoyed the performers and the playwrights would gently mock the audience in return.¹³ However, we know that audiences’ behavior went beyond the bothersome and into decidedly more dangerous territory. On occasion, playgoers would riot. And I believe that this form of unruly activity actually posed an existential threat to the institution of the playhouse. Although these riots have been documented by historians of the early modern theater (indeed I will be borrowing much of their research), few literary critics or historians have taken them too seriously. But as I will attempt to show, the London authorities, the Crown, antithetical writers, the acting companies and the playwrights all took them very seriously, and so should we.

As I will go on to argue in detail, riots were a fairly common occurrence in early modern London and often took place in or around the theatres. London authorities and the Crown feared these riots for a number of reasons. Then, as now, riots seemed to pose a significant threat to the state, but more specifically, the early modern authorities feared playhouse riots because of a widespread belief in the efficacy of language – the belief that individuals and groups of individuals could be controlled through language. Hence, playhouse riots represented a particularly troubling form of disorder. From the perspective of London authorities, playgoing crowds were not just rioting; they were rioting because they were playgoing crowds. In other words, playgoing produced the riots. As a result, playing companies were routinely punished whenever citizens rioted near the theaters. These theater closures could have a devastating economic effect on the theater companies, giving these companies a financial incentive for keeping their audiences in check.

Put another way, Renaissance drama as we define it today (professional theater produced in London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century) was contingent on a small number of playhouses staying open, and this contingency was itself contingent on the state supporting the existence of the playhouses. In turn, this support was partially contingent on the behavior of the audiences. Playing companies knew about these contingencies (it was their business to know) and worked to control them.

The most serious playhouse riot occurred fairly early in the history of London playhouses. Famously, on Jul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the alterity of early modern audiences
• 1 Audience response to performance: fear of riots, closures and unruly playgoers
• 2 Performance’s response to audience: the relationship between audience, performance and reality
• 3 Fictional audiences’ responses to fictional performances: the didactic role of metadrama
• 4 Unstable texts, active readers; stable performances, non-reactive playgoers
• 5 Anti-mimetic drama: performance’s relationship to reality and the playgoer’s interpretive agency
• Coda: return to Malfi: the secrecy of performance and the consequences of constructing playgoing
• Bibliography
• Index