By the commercial theater’s closure in 1642, frequent playgoers commanded a vast trove of knowledge regarding the devices, tropes, character types, and genres of the commercial theater. But those conventions were as exploitable as they were familiar, and Chapter 5 shows how theater practitioners managed to surprise those spectators with especially long horizons of dramatic expectation. The chapter examines the striking durability of revenge tragedy in the commercial theater by juxtaposing two plays that nearly bookend its heyday: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. In revealing the ways that The Roman Actor exploits spectators’ knowledge of Kyd’s play, as well as the tropes of revenge tragedy more broadly, the chapter outlines the techniques by which Caroline theater practitioners made the eminently familiar newly strange.

By the Caroline era, London’s broader theatergoing public contained within it the smaller subset of a theatrical community – those playgoers collectively invested in the cultivation of their dramatic knowledge and interpretive acuity. Chapter 4 offers a phenomenological prehistory of this community, locating its activation in the moment of performance itself. The chapter traces the formation of this theatrical community alongside the dramatic trope of impersonation, which constructed the unknown depths and vicissitudes of individual identity as a function of the bifurcated structure of the playhouse. Through readings of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, the anonymous Look About You, John Fletcher’s Love’s Cure, and Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, this chapter argues that the formation of spatially relational identities in impersonation plots extended from the stage to the amphitheater: constituted as a series of mirror images only partially revealed, London’s theatrical community was produced by spectators’ mutual recognition of their uncertainty about one another.

This essay revisits the question of playgoing by apprentices in early modern London via analysis of Chapman, Jonson and Marston's 1605 play Eastward Ho! and a newly uncovered set of depositions deriving from a lawsuit over the apprenticeship of the stationer Richard Meighen. Although their origins, purposes and modes differ, these materials represent playgoing through a similar set of conventions, assumptions and clichés. Functioning like a cultural script, such conventions enable playwrights and deponents alike to articulate shared assumptions about apprenticeship and its relationship with playgoing. Simultaneously, however, they also reveal some of the fault-lines within those tropes. In neither case, is it easy to position playgoing as a misdemeanour that must be cast off in order for the apprentice to repent and be re-assimilated into the structures of civic trade and profit. On the contrary, Eastward Ho’s erring apprentice Francis Quicksilver and Richard Meighen present examples of apprentices who are able to turn their interest in theatre to profitable ends.

Standard theatre history accounts tend to assume that plays were received in the order in which they were first performed, but playgoers were not bound to watch plays chronologically. Considering Marlowe’s influential Tamburlaine plays, the chapter asks what happens when playgoers watch plays out of the expected order. While there is clear evidence that Tamburlaine had cultural cachet at this time, it does not follow, as is generally assumed, that all audience members would have encountered Tamburlaine before other, related plays.

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between pleasure and judgement in the early modern playhouse. Whilst the significance of both pleasure and judgement to early modern playgoing is long established, critical studies have often followed the lead of a few particular playwrights’ most irritable paratextual pronouncements, in which rather extreme versions of judgement and of pleasure are explicitly framed as opposites: the censure of the wisest and highest of status is contrasted with an unthinking and unlearned pleasure that is itself defined as a lack of discernment.

The introduction to Playing and Playgoing: Actor, Audience and Performance in Early Modern England argues that the study of theatrical culture is crucial to the scholarly investigation of dramatic texts: not merely of historical interest, but necessary for a full understanding of the plays themselves. Playing and Playgoing works with and reflects on approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history, and performance studies, in seeking to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers’ responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. This introduction explores three textual and archival examples that suggest the significance of the player-playgoer relationship at the heart of this book – and in so doing, it sets up the questions raised by this volume, and the shared interests that operate across the range of approaches these chapters offer.