Abstract
In 1588, the Lord Admiral’s Men were paid £20 for presenting before Elizabeth “twoe Enterludes or playes” and for “showinge other feates of activitye and tumblinge.” In 1590/91, “George Ottewell and his Companye the Lorde Straunge his players” were paid a similar sum for two plays and “other feates of Activitye.” 1 In addition to performances at the court, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes also note numerous payments for such activities to professional players traveling in the provinces.2 As Philip Butterworth has noted, the phrase feats of activity in early modern usage referred to acts of physical skill, such as tumbling, vaulting, and “rope-dancing”—that is, balancing acts performed on a tight or slack rope (figure 4.1). 3 Although Shakespeare and his contemporaries are best known today for their scripted drama, records of payment such as these suggest that both representational theatre and spectacular physical displays were offered by the same performers at the same events and to the same audiences.
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Notes
Malone Society Collections VI, ed. David Cook and F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 [1962]), 25, 27, quoted in
Philip Butterworth, Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 33.
On references to the words dance and fight in stage directions, see Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 64, 91.
On the politics of spectacle, see Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964);
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Era of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51;
and Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1973);
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967; repr., New York: Zone Books, 1994).
More recent discussions include Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” October 50 (1989): 96–107;
Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3–41;
Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 253–86;
and Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 33–71. I discuss Brecht’s views on spectacle in more detail at the end of this chapter.
At performance events today, though spectators are indeed absolutely crucial to the show and in many cases the line between spectator and participant is blurred, viewers are discursively constructed as ontologically separate from the action they behold. On sanctioned forms of participatory spectatorship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, see Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially 153–88.
See, for example, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., introduction to Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1–20.
On this phenomenological condition of theatre, see David Z. Saltz, “How to Do Things on Stage,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 31–45.
Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
Stage combat did, however, overlap with dance in that both involved choreographed movement and both could function as festive observance. On festive combat, see Erika T. Lin, “Popular Festivity and the Early Modern Stage: The Case of George a Greene,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 285–91.
On the cultural valences of fighting, see Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003);
Jennifer A. Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
and Charles Edelman, Brawl Ridiculous: Swordfighting in Shakespeare’s Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
See Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially Jonathan Gil Harris, “Properties of Skill: Product Placement in Early English Artisanal Drama,” 35–66, and Juana Green, “Properties of Marriage: Proprietary Conflict and the Calculus of Gender in Epicoene,” 261–87;
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Elizabeth Williamson, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009);
and Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38–66, 111–30.
R[ichard] V[ennar], An apology (London, 1614), B6r, quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 243.
William Kemp, Kemps nine daies vvonder Performed in a daunce from London to Norwich … (London, 1600). On the clown’s dance, see John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 236–41;
and Max W. Thomas, “Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Dancing Carnival into Market,” PMLA 107 (1992): 511–23.
On differences between Kemp and Armin and their stage roles, see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 136–63.
Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 69–80. On leaping and movement, see Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum sixe bookes. First three bookes, of tooth-lesse satyrs. 1. Poeticall. 2. Academicall. 3. Morall (London, 1597), B5v, discussed in a different context by Steggle, Laughing and Weeping, 70.
Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 41. Knutson observes, “Nearly half of the twenty-seven plays offered by Strange’s men in 1592–93 were some kind of comedy (or seem to have been one from the title). Of the fifty-two new plays that the Admiral’s men brought into production from June 1594 to July 1597, at least thirtythree were comedies (or seem to have been)” (41). Although she notes that “[t]he percentage of comedies appears to drop slightly in the repertories in the diary after 1597,” they still composed the lion’s share of the plays in production. “In 1599–1600, for example, the Admiral’s men made payments on thirty-six projects. At least seventeen of these appear to have been comedies” (ibid.).
For further discussion of early modern divisions between seeing and hearing plays and the audience demographics they imply, see Andrew Gurr, “Hearers and Beholders in Shakespearean Drama,” Essays in Theatre 3 (1984): 30–45.
Gabriel Egan, “Hearing or Seeing a Play? Evidence of Early Modern Theatrical Terminology,” Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 327–47.
David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 13–49.
On dis order in early modern music onstage, see Amanda Eubanks Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
Johannes Leo Africanus, A geographical historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian …, trans. John Pory (London, 1600), 309 [Dd5r]; Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory, ed. Robert Brown, 3 vols. (London, 1896), 3:874. Given that this famous travel narrative circulated widely on the Continent, presumably the reference in Banchieri is drawn from a European edition published prior to Pory’s 1600 translation.
Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 20;
Katharine Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 264. Theories about the emanation of particles later morphed into those about the multiplication of “species” (that is, nonparticle substances emitted by all objects that allowed them to be perceived), but both scientific explanations of intromission imagined vision as material penetration.
On premodern and early modern theories of vision, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). I discuss the theatrical implications of early modern visual paradigms further in chapter 2.
For a related argument about listening as a kind of aural penetration, see Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 111–59. “Protestant sermons on hearing,” she demonstrates, “characterize the ideal Christian as a womb that is both receptive to the implantation of God’s Word and vulnerable to being pillaged by the devil” (113). As in Northbrooke’s description of spectatorship, the hearer is gendered female. See also Winkler, O Let Us Howle, 7, on kinds of music thought to seduce the beholder.
OED Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “amazed, adj. ” (defs. 1, 3); the quotation is from Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French academie wherin is discoursed the institution of maners, trans. Thomas Bowes (London, 1586). On the word rape, and its cognate rap, as describing tragedy’s ability to “strike” and “move” early modern viewers, see Marissa Greenberg, “The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and The Roman Actor,” Renaissance Drama 39 (2011): 172.
Christopher Marlowe, The tragicall history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus (London, 1616), B-text, B4r–B4v; David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, eds., Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts (1604, 1616): Christopher Marlowe and His Collaborator and Revisers, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 2.1.74–89. Because many of the changes in the revised version appear to have catered to playgoer demands for spectacle, I quote from the B-text throughout, with cross-references to the A-text as needed.
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The roaring girle. Or Moll Cut-Purse As it hath lately beene acted on the Fortune-stage by the Prince his Players (London, 1611), B3r; Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, ed. Paul A. Mulholland, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 1.2.19. On whether this figure refers only to the standers in the yard or also to those in the galleries, see Gurr, Playgoing, 303n14.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 213; and Gurr, Playgoing, 24–25.
For a compelling reading of theatrical speech acts and/as conjuring, see Andrew Sofer, “How to Do Things with Demons: Conjuring Performatives in Doctor Faustus,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 1–21.
See also Marjorie Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays,” Theatre Journal 36 (1984): 301–20.
Kristen Poole suggests that the scroll highlights its own material presence as text. In doing so, I would argue, the scene also foregrounds the semiotic disjunction between theatrical property scrolls and actual deeds with binding legal force, thus leading spectators to contemplate the materiality of performance as much as the materiality of text. Kristen Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive: Doctor Faustus and Ovidian Physics,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 203.
See, for example, Philip Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis, and the Gaze (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 167–203;
Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 236–65;
Karen S. Coddon, “‘Unreal Mockery’: Unreason and the Problem of Spectacle in Macbeth,” ELH 56 (1989): 485–501;
Huston Diehl, “Horrid Image, Sorry Sight, Fatal Vision: The Visual Rhetoric of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 191–204;
and D. J. Palmer, “‘A New Gorgon’: Visual Effects in Macbeth,” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 54–69.
Winkler, O Let Us Howle, 23. The “Musicke” that accompanies the witches’ dance in Macbeth and its later revisions is discussed more extensively in Amanda Eubanks Winkler, ed., Music for “Macbeth” (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2004). On disorderly music and early modern stage witches more generally, see Winkler, O Let Us Howle, 18–62.
If the play was performed at court, “King” may also have referred to the actual monarch, James I. However, as Nicholas Brooke argues, Macbeth is not a terribly flattering portrait of the Stuart ruler, and the oft-cited performance before James should not be taken as a given. Nicholas Brooke, ed., Macbeth, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 71–76. Certainly, the performance dynamics of this scene would support Brooke’s view. It is worth noting, however, that James was known to enjoy music and dancing. In the pamphlet Newes from Scotland, a likely source text for Macbeth, the then-Scottish monarch actually called for one of the accused women to perform before him and experienced “delight.” After hearing testimony that “Geilles Duncane did goe before them playing this reill or daunce vpon a small Trump, called a Iewes Trump,” James “sent for ye said Geillis Duncane, who vpon the like Trump did playe the said daunce before the Kings Maiestie, who in respect of the strangenes of these matters, tooke great delight to bee present at their examinations.” James Carmichael, Newes from Scotland, declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian a notable sorcerer … With the true examination of the saide doctor and witches, as they vttered them in the presence of the Scottish king … (London, 1592), B3v (mislabeled A3v in original).
D. J. Palmer proposes that the witches disappeared through a trapdoor. Glynne Wickham posits that Hecate may have used a flying machine but argues that the witches probably ran offstage. Frederick Kiefer opts for a flying machine as well. Iain Wright argues for elaborate special effects, including not only flying witches but also a magic lantern of prospective glass for the procession of kings. John Russell Brown agrees that the stage direction “provides no clue,” but he insists that the witches require “a strong exit.” D. J. Palmer, “‘A New Gorgon,’” 63; Glynne Wickham, “To Fly or Not to Fly? The Problem of Hecate in Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” in Essays on Drama and Theatre: Liber Amicorum Benjamin Hunningher (Amsterdam: Baarn, 1973), 171– 82;
Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114;
Iain Wright, “‘Come like shadowes, so depart’: The Ghostly Kings in Macbeth,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 6 (2006): 215–29;
and John Russell Brown, Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (New York: Applause, 1993), 179.
Dessen and Thomson, Dictionary of Stage Directions, 242. See also Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 196–215.
John Orrell, “The Theaters,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 109.
J. L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 189–92.
See Anne Righter [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 23–31. Barton argues that the audience’s role as populus in the Corpus Christi cycles and other biblical plays was transformed in the morality plays to generate a kind of double vision that led to the increasing divergence of play world and real world in early modern dramaturgy.
On devils and vices in morality drama as they pertain to Shakespeare and Marlowe, see, among others, David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962);
John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986);
and Ruth Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
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© 2012 Erika T. Lin
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Lin, E.T. (2012). Dancing and Other Delights: Spectacle and Participation in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth. In: Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006509_5
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