Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater

By Matteo A. Pangallo

Among the dramatists who wrote for the professional playhouses of early modern London was a small group of writers who were neither members of the commercial theater industry writing to make a living nor aristocratic amateurs dipping their toes in theatrical waters for social or political prestige. Instead, they were largely working- and middle-class amateurs who had learned most of what they knew about drama from being members of the audience.

Using a range of familiar and lesser-known print and manuscript plays, as well as literary accounts and documentary evidence, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater shows how these playgoers wrote and revised to address what they assumed to be the needs of actors, readers, and the Master of the Revels; how they understood playhouse materials and practices; and how they crafted poetry for theatrical effects. The book also situates them in the context of the period's concepts of, and attitudes toward, playgoers' participation in the activity of playmaking.

Plays by playgoers such as the rogue East India Company clerk Walter Mountfort or the highwayman John Clavell invite us into the creative imaginations of spectators, revealing what certain audience members wanted to see and how they thought actors might stage it. By reading Shakespeare's theater through these playgoers' works, Matteo Pangallo contributes a new category of evidence to our understanding of the relationships between the early modern stage, its plays, and its audiences. More broadly, he shows how the rise of England's first commercialized culture industry also gave rise to the first generation of participatory consumers and their attempts to engage with mainstream culture by writing early modern "fan fiction."

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812294255

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Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater

PLAYWRITING PLAYGOERS IN SHAKESPEARE’S THEATER

MATTEO A. PANGALLO

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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

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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

CONTENTS

Introduction. "All write Playes"

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

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

Chapter 3. As shall be shewed before the daye of action: Playwriting Playgoers and Performance

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

Conclusion. I began to make a play

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

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 after 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 houses, 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 Company 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, were bleak.

It was during this trial that Mountfort found the strength to stop by one of his old haunts: the Red Bull playhouse. There 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 fingers 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 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 after 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 eager 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. These dramatists attended, read, and wrote plays, but they were not members of the industry that developed around those theaters. They were 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 were, 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 these playwrights were not regular producing participants in that industry, they were 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 things 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: it is a book about what particular members of its audience thought that it did. In their use of specific materials, conventions, and techniques, these 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: these consumers were 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 these 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 these 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 were composed of discrete socioeconomic groups, because every 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 precisely discerning audience reception.⁹ This is also why, incidentally, plays by individual playgoers can only reliably tell us about what that one particular 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 those groups as groups might have desired in their plays or understood about the theater (or, at least, what playwrights assumed those 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 these 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 playhouse, 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 under the assumption that the audience’s experience can be accurately presumed based upon the cues given it by the dramatist—and, very often, that its responses to those 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 those 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 presents essential complications for understanding actual 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 factor 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 performance, 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 responded 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 those 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 actual 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 others’ 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 these 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 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 these plays is in what they can tell us, not about playgoers’ thoughts about individual professionals’ plays, but about those 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 England

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 these accounts, spectatorship is often described as a pastime, a concept connoting the leisure of 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, those most likely to be found seeing a Playe were men that are their owne masters.²⁶ Likewise, Edward Guilpin satirizes a lazy Lord who, after a day of lounging, eating, gambling, and whoring, gets him to a play … before doing 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, others who attended more infrequently might also have considered playgoing no more than passive escapism; as the author of Historia Histrionica recalled, Very good People think a Play an Innocent Diversion for an idle Hour or two.³⁰ 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 Preiss puts it, they have been put under 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 rose up, every 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 were 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 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 others 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 were not interested in, and thus not bound by, the professionals’ standard of commercialization. Simply because their ends differed, though (when those 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 to do that activity well: Every real amateur feels responsible to some notion of doing 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