Intimacy and Schadenfreude in Reports of Problems in Early Modern Productions

Summary

Problems with putting on a play are a staple feature of drama at the turn of the seventeenth century, in both tragic and comic modes. Revenge tragedies, for example, use theatrical errors to correct moral errors, in productions like ‘Soliman and Perseda’ (in The Spanish Tragedy) and the ‘The Masque of Juno’ (in Women Beware Women). City comedies use problems on stage to comment on class, as when setting the script of ‘The London Merchant’ against the improvised plot of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Literary critics tend to approach such moments in two ways, either relishing their metadrama or finding parallels with the main themes of the play. Only William West deals with early modern confusion in plays as a topic in its own right, arguing that plays of the 1580s and 1590s dramatized errors to prompt questions of epistemology and hermeneutics; he does not discuss real-life mistakes on stage. Roger Savage looks at continental (especially Italian) playbook prefaces and production manuals which have advice implying a pragmatic understanding of what can go wrong.