Watch Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind Online (2017)
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Henry Jenkins. Thanks to several decades of research on the audiences for contemporary popular media, we now know much about various forms of fan engagement and participation. Yet, I am always hungry for more historical work that explores these same questions, if for no other reason, so we have a context for understanding what is distinctive about the current moment and what have been recurring issues around media audiences across a broader time span.
I was, thus, very excited to learn of a new book, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater, which provides deep insights into the forms of participation desired and achieved by theatergoers in Elizabethian England. Its author, Matteo A. Pangallo, has uncovered a range of original scripts written by amateur playwrights with fantasies (in many cases) that they might join the repertoire of the various theater troops of the era. Through careful readings of this archival material, Pangallo gains deep insight into the forms audience engagement and participation took during this formative moment in Western popular theater. Given a chance to interview Pangallo, who contacted me because he was interested in the parallels and differences with contemporary fan culture, we were able to explore the historical roots (or lack thereof) of contemporary phenomenon, such as fan fiction, spoiling, catch phrases, and fan service. I appreciate his willingness to engage with my questions, since this interview offers a productive bridge between historians and cultural studies researchers writing about audiences. We both try hard not to get too anachronistic in describing these practices as an early form of fandom, a word and concept not in use during this period, but we can certainly see playgoers as forming intense relations with plays, characters, and performers, which encouraged them to return for multiple viewings, to share their insights with each other and the producers, and to create their own works in the same genres of the plays they admired.
This is the first of a number of interviews I plan to run through the fall, exploring the current state of fandom and fan studies. Keep reading. You write about “an audience- stage relationship that was intensely dialogic, participatory and creative.” In what ways?
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What forms did audience participation take and what did the professional theater troops do to recognize this grassroots creativity? Most fundamentally, as a commercial enterprise—indeed, England’s first regular, cultural commercial enterprise—Shakespeare’s theater empowered its audience with the ability to shape through consumer demand the kinds of content produced by the playmakers. If a particular genre, style of writing, or type of narrative were to fall from favor, attendance at those plays would fall off and the playmakers would have to shift the repertory away from that kind of material or risk losing paying customers to a rival playhouse or troupe. This power of the purse created a dynamic in which playgoers came to understand themselves as collaborative participants in shaping the plays that they were watching and the repertory of the companies. And many of the playmakers acknowledged as much; often epilogues delivered at the end of a play would invite playgoers to identify what parts of a play they did not like, implying that the play could be revised and revived to align more fully with their desires (whether or not playmakers actually followed through on such promises is unclear). Playmakers frequently drew attention (some positively and some negatively) to the fact that each audience member individually had the capacity to imagine and interpret the fiction that they were watching. But even beyond that kind of internalized participation, we have ample evidence of playgoers participating in an externalized fashion, making comments, both favorable and unfavorable, on plays in the midst of performance.
These responses included shouting out their own ideas for lines, bantering with the clown, mocking bad actors, throwing objects, hissing villains, cheering heroes, calling for popular bits to be done again and again, asking for particular jigs or songs, and so forth. In some instances, playgoers’ externalized responses during performance evidently prompted the actors to change or even abandon their original intentions (that is, the playwright’s script), though in other instances they likely ignored the outburst.
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Even when the outburst was ignored, however, in the context of a live performance, an unscripted response from any one playgoer necessarily informed for the rest of the audience their experiences and understanding of the play, with potentially radical results. There are a few accounts of a single spectator laughing at a tragedy or weeping at a comedy and, by virtue of their generically inappropriate conduct, changing how other playgoers thought about the play, subverting the playwright’s and actors’ generic intentions for the play and, in effect, undermining the supposed “authority” of the mainstream cultural producers. We shouldn’t forget that Shakespeare’s playhouse, with its shared light and three- quarters seating (sometimes with patrons even sitting on the stage or on the balcony behind the stage), was a venue in which audience members were as much on display as the play they had come to watch.
It was an environment that encouraged consumers to connect with the producers and even intervene in the act of production, rather than, as in the modern proscenium- arch theater, obediently disappear from view and observe silently. You have stumbled onto such a rich mine of materials here that offer us perspectives on what audiences of Shakespeare’s time thought about the theater. Why are people just now writing about such practices? Shakespeare’s audience has long been the subject of interest for scholars, though earlier audience studies—such as Alfred Harbage’s 1. Shakespeare’s Audience, Ann Jennalie Cook’s 1. The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, and Andrew Gurr’s 1. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London—focused less on audience experience and more on resolving the fundamental questions of who comprised those audiences, their demographics, playgoing habits, and preferred venues.
A separate branch of audience studies took an interest in audience desire and experience, but addressed themselves to recovering evidence of that desire and experience through the critical study of plays written by professional playwrights. These studies—such as Arthur Colby Sprague’s 1. Shakespeare and the Audience, Ernst Hongimann’s 1. Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies, The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response, Jean Howard’s 1. Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration, Ralph Berry’s 1. Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, and Jeremy Lopez’s 2. Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama—center upon the reasonable premise that successful commercial playwrights (such as Shakespeare) were successful because they understood what their audiences wanted; furthermore, truly effective playwrights (like, again, Shakespeare) could even control, or orchestrate, audience experience and desire.
This approach, of course, does not actually study the audience itself; rather, it studies the playwright’s understanding of, and assumptions about, his audience—that is, it’s really a study about the playwright, which is naturally going to be of interest when the playwright you are talking about is Shakespeare.