Rude Mechanicals: Shakespeare’s Engagement with Provincial Theater

Theseus, for example, seems to consider the play a necessary part of the lavish wedding festivities befitting a ruler of Athens. These “revels” will last a “fortnight,” and will aim to “stir up the Athenian youth to merriments” in honor of Theseus’s victory over the Amazons and marriage to their queen (5.1.386, 1.1.13). Perhaps the revels serve to show off Athens’s wealth and Theseus’s liberality to other potential rivals; they also emphasize the finality of the Athenian conquest of the Amazons. Two weeks of parties ostentatiously mark the transition from war to long-term peace, from work to play. Hippolyta, whom Theseus “wooed[…]with my sword,” must transition from fighting as a warrior queen to advising her husband on courtly entertainment choices. Their marriage also gives legitimacy to one final conquest: Theseus can hardly wait to consummate his marriage (and in Act V assumes that the other couples share his overwhelming impatience). In the play’s very first scene, he frets about “how slow/This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires” (1.1.3-4). After the ceremony, he demands a play to “while away this long age of three hours/Between our after-supper and bedtime” and insists on picking one even when the options seem underwhelming (5.3.36-37). He seems to think that entertainment, any entertainment, will distract everybody from the urge to run off and start their wedding nights too early. The three couples, meanwhile, use the play not only as a way to pass the time but as an opportunity to show off their own intelligence and wit, especially as compared to the players. Theseus claims that “Our sport shall be to take what they mistake/And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect/Takes it in might, not merit” (5.1.96-98). Lysander, Demetrius, and Hippolyta spend the rest of their time onstage exchanging quips and puns with their benefactor, Theseus. They provide the offstage spectators with another layer of humor, and perhaps model for them the reactions Shakespeare hoped to provoke with his depiction of amateur theatrics.

As we learn, though, the performers do have their own (admittedly comic) interiorities and their own motivations for putting on a play. It seems that Athenians of all classes regularly participate in their rulers’ periods of holiday and celebration. Peter Quince has compiled “every man’s name which is thought fit, through all Athens, to play in our interlude before the Duke and the Duchess,” implying that some group of citizens has organized a process of auditions and rehearsals, however slapdash, to win the nobles’ favor (1.2.5-7). The lower-class employees and entertainers probably hope to benefit from Theseus’s largesse on his wedding day: just before Bottom returns from the forest, Flute laments that he will miss out on an extra “sixpence a day for playing Pyramus” (4.2.19). (Conversely, the players worry that displeasing their powerful audience will lead to punishment–they decide to add a prologue and tone down the lion’s performance so that they are not hanged for “frighting the ladies” (1.2.76)). Finally, Quince and Bottom seem to approach the project with genuine artistic ambitions. Quince, though sincere, sympathetic, and quite well-organized, nevertheless fails to whip his amateur actors into shape in time for opening night. Bottom famously overflows with enthusiasm to show off his skills in every possible role, finally insisting, “Let me play the lion too” (1.2.68). However, once onstage he misremembers lines, breaks character, and fails to recognize the mockery in his patrons’ comments (5.1.374). While the audience likely sympathizes with Bottom, having followed him on his fairyland adventure and miraculous return to civilization, the play makes it almost impossible to take him seriously as an actor.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then, features one of Shakespeare’s less rosy depictions of players and playgoing, despite its affection for the Athenian actors and apparent faith in the theatrical devices of mistaken identity and magic potions. A comparison between the rude mechanicals and the traveling players in Hamlet, who stand ready to recite affecting speeches or rework The Murder of Gonzago at a moment’s notice, or those in The Taming of the Shrew, who team up with their host for the trick on Christopher Sly, demonstrates the distinctiveness of Midsummer’s portrayal. The other two plays show us touring professionals with organized props and scripts and good, even friendly relationships with their noble patrons. Hamlet, we learn, has praised the “tragedians of the city” in the past and has no problem calling them his “friends” (Hamlet 3.2). The unnamed lord in Taming of the Shrew compliments one player’s standout performance and commands that the company “should want nothing that my house affords” (Induction 108). Granted, Quince, Bottom, and friends are clearly amateurs who assume they can mount an impressive production in two days. Still, it seems odd that Shakespeare would depict his own source of income–and the carpenters, weavers, and tailors who likely made up a portion of its audience–in such an unflattering light, at a time when theater was already under attack as an immoral and frivolous hazard to public health.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Midsummer’s “Athenians” says more about early modern England than it does ancient Athens. The custom of celebrating Theseus’s wedding with a play and other entertainments recalls the elaborate revels put on at country houses to mark holidays and special occasions. The available evidence suggests that groups of players did in fact have to present themselves before a master of ceremonies, like Midsummer’s Philostrate, who then served as their intermediary with the host.[1] Some employers did take a special interest in theater, as Theseus, Hamlet, and the lord all seem to, inviting specific troupes to perform, commissioning plays for events, or even becoming patrons of their own companies. Siobhan Keenan, in Traveling Players in Shakespeare’s England, notes an uptick in the building of country houses, intended as “places of, and for, entertainment” for their owners, throughout the early modern period, and thus an increase in the number of events requiring hired entertainers.[2] The heyday of touring, often by London-based professional companies, in the 16th and early 17^th centuries also coincided with a decline in local theatrical activity outside London—processions, reenactments, and cycle plays descended from medieval drama.[3] These provincial entertainments were organized by municipalities and sometimes depended on the participation and sponsorship of craftsmen’s guilds (of carpenters, tailors, bellows-menders, and weavers, perhaps). Records suggest that, before their eventual suppression by a monarch hoping to eliminate cultural echoes of Catholicism, they could be impressively produced affairs, a far cry from Shakespeare’s ragtag group of “hempen homespuns” (3.1.76). Midsummer’s genial snobbery towards its local players reflects a shift from a decentralized theatrical culture to a London-centric one dominated by professionals and controlled by single patrons. This essay will explore that transition and how it informs Shakespeare’s construction of a theatrical encounter between his “high” and “low” worlds.

Provincial playacting

It may have become a cliché that more facets of our identities than we suspect, from gender to nationality to political affiliation, require a good deal of performance and outward signaling—we cannot simply be who we are, we must consistently act the part. However, this theory held especially true in late medieval and early modern England, where a system of scheduled rituals and organized outward show created what Gervase Rosser calls a “drama of everyday life,” which blurred the line between performance and reality. [4] The OED places the earliest use of the English word “theater” in 1374, but people would have performed and pretended outside formal structures (not to mention had some knowledge of preexisting drama) before that.[5] By becoming “both an active and a passive participant in a dramatic process of personal and social formation,” each individual could fashion a personal identity and accept an assigned place in the family and society.[6] The church, for instance, was so entwined with its congregation’s lives that its rituals and pageantries likely became part of everyday routine without being recognized as “drama.”[7] Religious celebrants had to memorize a kind of “script” and convey a message to an “audience,” who in turn performed certain words and actions to show their devotion. By the early modern period proper, according to Peter Burke, “from the preacher gesticulating in his pulpit it was only a short step—too short for some moralists—to the popular play.”[8] Secular authorities also made the governed the spectators for such public demonstrations of their power as announcements, important entrances and exits, and, especially, punishments. Public whippings and hangings might involve a procession of the condemned, speeches and prayers, and audience participation in the form of shouted taunts and thrown mud—all of it “carefully managed by the authorities to show the people that crime did not pay.”[9]

Other traditions required ordinary people to become performers as well as engaged spectators. Early modern marriage ceremonies could be very informal, even perfunctory, by modern standards; in much of northern Europe, “most weddings in the fifteenth century took place outside a church,” and couples might mark their union by joining hands or jumping over a broom rather than participating in a full church service.[10] But because they had, however briefly, performed their commitment before God and a celebrant, they could now take on the roles of man and wife with the blessing (usually) of the community. (Touchstone in As You Like It, for example, respects authority very little and sees Audrey the goat-keeper as a disposable sex object, but even he insists on getting married “under [a] tree” to legitimize their relationship [3.3.64]). Rosser, in his analysis of the guilds that sponsored plays and other revels in the late medieval period, argues that participation in a guild itself required an element of performance. Guilds provided social stability to their members by assigning them “personal roles, charged with ethical responsibility” within the organization.[11] As a collective, the guild often took on an integral social role in its community, putting a public face on a craft or occupation and throwing its weight behind religious and secular projects. An awareness of performance also likely informed the sumptuary laws, which regulated the fabrics and cuts permissible for members of each social class. Players famously came under fire for their supposed violation of these laws; when they wore the clothes and acted the parts of men of higher degree (not to mention women of any degree), they symbolically assumed rights and responsibilities they did not “deserve.”[12] At some level, authorities assumed that outward presentation was so intimately bound up with their everyday identity that a person could assume a new status simply by putting on a new outfit. Sumptuary laws attempted to reinforce social order from the outside in, requiring subjects to wear the costumes of their classes.

Shakespeare may not have consciously attempted to dismantle these traditions—indeed, his plays tend to take a dim view of any deliberate disruption of class or gender hierarchies—but he did understand their inherent theatricality. Outward appearance often directly reflects inward character in the plays—the shepherdess Perdita’s beauty and grace hint at her royal birth, while Richard III’s own mother believes his ugliness foretold his evil nature (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.187; Richard III 4.4.173). At other points, though, outward presentation and its implications for identity prove surprisingly mutable. Those who change their appearance or behavior might retain their “real” personalities, but other characters treat them so differently (and often let them get away with so much more) that they might as well have become new people. The audience of The Winter’s Tale, for instance, knows Autolycus as a charlatan, but he manages to con Perdita’s kind, gullible adoptive family twice, first in his own clothes and later in Florizel’s princely ones. His tactics, though, change drastically depending on his costume. When he first meets the shepherd’s son, he can rely on nothing but his own gifts of cunning and flattery, claiming to be a noble robbery victim who must throw himself on the mercy of the locals and thank them profusely for their generosity (4.3.80). When he meets the shepherds again after changing clothes with Florizel, he feels emboldened to address them as “rustics” and claim he can speak to Polixenes on their behalf, since after all he has “the air of the court in these enfoldings” (4.4.841, 858). Only when the shepherds have themselves put on the outfits of “gentlemen born” do they address Autolycus as an equal and encourage him to “amend his life” (5.2.149,164).

Autolycus shows an admittedly high affinity for imitation and deceit, but even Shakespeare’s more upstanding characters playact to survive in a difficult world. Despite their inner “frailty,” the female crossdressers of the comedies make for a series of surprisingly effective boys. Their ability not only to don the “doublet and hose” but to perform the attitudes that come with it—confidence, outspokenness, flirtation—literally saves lives: Imogen and Rosalind dress as men to escape death threats, and Portia argues Antonio’s case disguised as a young lawyer (As You Like It 2.4.6). Jean E. Howard, in an essay on “monarchical theatricality in the Shakespearean history play,” argues that Shakespeare came to view “performative prowess” as an essential aspect of good kingship over the course of his history-writing career.[13] In practical terms, a leader must know how to flatter his supporters, win over potential followers, and intimidate (or occasionally show mercy to) his enemies; he must adorn pure military or political competence with carefully modulated shows of emotion. In Shakespeare’s telling, Richard III and Henry V, whatever one thinks of their actions, owe many of the successes of their short reigns to their ability to work a room and to tailor their rhetoric to audiences of different classes and genders. Howard’s fascinating reading factors in Shakespeare’s possible moral perspective in the histories. She claims that he associates theatricality with “the monstrous and the seditious” in the first tetralogy, but with virtuous ruling in the second.[14] Henry VI, kind yet ineffectual and earnest to a fault, finds his dominion threatened by more skilled “performers”—his queen, the squabbling nobles, the cross-dressing Joan of Arc, the rebellious Cade, even Saunder Simpcox the alleged blind man.[15] These tricksters destabilize the kingdom, leaving room for Richard, a skilled performer, to lie and murder his way to the throne, only to be defeated by his own hubris and the painfully sincere Richmond. In contrast, Howard views the second tetralogy as a more modern work, one that acknowledges performance, along with military prowess and good judgment, as “a tool for effective modern kingship.”[16] Richard II, a “player king” who understands the value of spectacle, still lacks the practical skills and common touch required of a modern ruler.[17] Unlike Bolingbroke, he fails to prove himself to the people, with the Duke of York remarking that the commons rejected him the way an audience rejects the lackluster “prattler” who follows a “well-graced actor” onstage (5.2.26). Prince Hal, later Henry V, seems symbolically to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors. As a young man, he plays the part of a wastrel (and, for a few moments, a mock king) expertly, but plots to rehabilitate his image in battle and manages to do so at Shrewsbury. In Henry V, the Dauphin’s tennis ball taunt forces him to prove, both rhetorically and militarily, that he has grown from the playful prince, “the thing I was,” into a man who knows how to act like a king (2 Henry IV 5.5.56). He “stage-manages,” in Howard’s words, a series of scenes that do exactly that: the threatening response to the French messenger, the apprehension of the conspirators, the warning to Harfleur, the hanging of Bardolph, and the wooing of Katherine, which puts a palatable face on a marriage of convenience and conquest.[18] He becomes one of Shakespeare’s most triumphant and charismatic rulers, mythologized as a man “too famous to live long” (1 Henry VI 1.1.6). While Howard’s narrative concerns kings and nobles rather than regular people, it does position the public as, again, both spectators to a royal performance of authority and creators of their own private ritual dramas.

Despite the detailed roles and responsibilities assigned to ruler and subject, the English citizenry does seem to have found time to let loose. The drama of everyday life was punctuated by religious holidays, which replaced workday rhythms with new sets of rituals and performances. Christmas, Easter, Shrove Tuesday (or Carnival), May Day, the feast of Corpus Christi, and various saints’ days, among others, meant time off work and time for occasion-specific food, drink, games, and community events. Celebrations also involved the organization of drama separated from everyday ritual: morality plays and cycle plays, descendants of medieval drama that dramatized religious tales or lessons. Along with this clearly recognizable “theater” came a number of holiday traditions requiring participants to act roles that often stood in opposition to their everyday ones. In “processions, races, mock battles, mock weddings, and mock executions,” people acted the parts of authority figures, criminals, and those younger or older than themselves.[19] Some holidays allowed the suspension of social rules and roles, leading to temporary outbursts of widespread extramarital sex, public shaming, and rioting.[20] Perhaps most famously, some Christmas traditions required the appointment of a lower-class Lord of Misrule who played the role of lawgiver and presided over the festivities. Peter Burke theorizes that, despite their subversive elements, these “carnivalesque” activities ultimately served to reinforce a social hierarchy; by ritualizing and “stereotyping” forms of social protest into another kind of playacting, they allowed commoners to “channel” and eventually any impulses toward organized rebellion.[21] Whatever function they served, though, and whatever their practitioners thought of them at the time, festival games and drama became an important factor in the development of British drama. Furthermore, while London came to dominate professional theater, the provinces did not entirely lack formal theatrical systems. Annual cycle plays contributed significantly to the economies and local cultures of such towns as York, Coventry, and Chester. Evidence appears for purpose-build playhouses, presumably hosting local or touring professionals, in Bristol, Lancashire, and York between 1559 and 1625.[22] Since local drama in general tends to be less well-documented than performances in London, we still have only a limited sense of the provincial theatrical landscape.

Households, patronage, and touring players

Early modern royalty and nobility did not spend all their time practicing sober stewardship, of course. Those who could afford the expense marked holidays and milestones (births, weddings, royal visits) by, like Theseus, sponsoring a period of “revels” in their homes involving food, alcohol, and performances by professionals and amateurs, some hired from outside and some retained as part of household staff. Revels seem to have been multifaceted productions, “‘devised’[…]by a group of people [probably household employees] working together to create a spectacle in which spoken text might be just one element or absent altogether” (the court itself had a Revels Office dedicated to organizing these entertainments on an even grander scale).[23] Aside from inviting touring companies of players, then, hosts might hire musicians, dancers, jugglers, and acrobats; they might also commission chamber plays or arrange masques for themselves and their guests to perform.[24] The masque or “disguising” declined in popularity after the mid-seventeenth century, but it formed an integral part of Elizabethan and Jacobean private entertainments and exemplifies the revels’ unstable boundary between actor and spectator.[25] It “not only entertained the elite but flattered them as well,” demonstrating the host’s ability to spend generously on a spectacular one-night-only performance, drawing on the classical sources educated people would have studied, and allowing guests to enjoy performing without lowering themselves to the level of paid entertainers.[26]

Shakespeare’s wealthier characters presumably use masked social events to show off their wealth, but they also take advantage of their newly ambiguous identities to take on new roles and manipulate their social world. The masked celebration in Much Ado About Nothing 2.1 sets up the conflicts and schemes that will drive the rest of the plot. Don Pedro woos and wins Hero in Claudio’s place; a masked Don John sows the seeds of doubt about Hero in the mind of Claudio, who says he is Benedick; and Beatrice, maybe a bit too enthusiastically, “puts down” Benedick to a stranger whom she may or may not know is Benedick in disguise (2.1.278). In Love’s Labor’s Lost, itself a kind of extended deconstruction of the performative rituals surrounding youth, love, and courtship, the Prince and lords try to woo their beloveds during a masked ball while disguised as Russians. The Princess of France and her ladies hear of the trick and decide to retaliate, swapping the “favors” they have received so that each man courts the wrong woman (5.2.134). Perhaps that knowledge of the lords’ continuing reliance on appearances and snap judgments informs the Princess’s decision to return to France to mourn her father rather than taking the typical comedy path and marrying a man she has just met. To prove that love means more to them than material gifts, masked games, “gaudy blossoms,” and pretty words, the ladies ask their suitors to do humble public service for a year before they propose again (5.2.879). In this case, revels do demonstrate the power and resourcefulness of the nation of Navarre (the party even includes a kind of play, a self-serious “presence of Worthies” by palace retainers Costard, Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Armado). However, they communicate very little about the innermost subtleties of romantic love.

If revels required several levels of performance within a household, we can also read the decision to host them at all as a kind of public-facing theater. Wealthy hosts tended to hold celebrations at their country houses, “places of, and for, entertainment” on their land in the provinces.[27] Nobles, gentry, and prosperous businessmen built more country houses than ever during the early modern period, using them as status symbols designed to show off surplus money and time—in other words, performances of wealth made physically manifest.[28] As discussed with regard to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a householder who put on elaborate festivities effectively demonstrated (or acted out) his wealth, influence, sophisticated tastes, and generosity to guests and employees. The choice of events for revels might also serve as a performance of goodwill to potential political allies; hosts sometimes deliberately hired acting companies whose patrons they wanted to flatter, and a courtier asked to host the queen during one of her progresses around the kingdom would likely want to give her an impressive welcome.[29] Timon of Athens dramatizes just such an attempt to curry favor with powerful acquaintances using a spectacle of wealth and goodwill. In yet another blend of ancient and early modern sensibilities, Timon hosts a lavish feast featuring entertainments that Shakespeare or his coworkers might have witnessed while visiting great houses on tour: musicians, a master of ceremonies dressed as Cupid, a “masque of ladies as Amazons, with lutes in their hands, dancing and playing,” and a dance between the lords and the “Amazons” (1.2.134). When a destitute Timon later serves his former friends a meal of water and stones in performative mockery of the previous scene, he engineers a different kind of social spectacle, one that proclaims his newly misanthropic outlook and rejection of transactional relationships. In both cases, he “stages” an event, uses representative “props,” and speaks lines, all to communicate his mental state to both onstage and offstage audiences.

From provincial to professional theater

According to Peter Greenfield’s analysis of “drama outside London after 1540,” the early modern period as a whole saw the “disappearance of late medieval traditions of dramatic activity without the creation of new forms to replace them”—in other words, the gradual replacement of local rituals and religious plays by London professional theater and privately commissioned works.[30] Shakespeare and his contemporaries were certainly not immune from the anti-theatrical politics that culminated in the closure of the theaters in 1642, but they could rely on urban demand for theater and the protection of powerful supporters. Playgoers outside London would not have lost all access to theater, but increasing legal restrictions on both local dramatic traditions and the circulation of plays and players took their toll.

Although many authors have analyzed early modern objections to theater in much greater detail, I will summarize them here and attempt to put them in the context of provincial drama. Commentators and clergymen worried that theater by its very nature encouraged lying, blasphemy, and disobedience wherever it occurred. Actors pretended to be people they were not, engaging in “fraudulence” for money; they created confusion about proper social order by dressing as kings, criminals, and women; and they either debased religious stories by putting them onstage or modeled degeneracy by telling villains’ stories.[31] In The Anatomy of Abuses, pamphleteer Philip Stubbs thunders spectacularly against stage plays, not only for their supposed sacrilegious content but also for their inherent falseness: “If he be accursed that calleth light darkness, and darkness light, truth falsehood, and falsehood truth, sweet sour, and sour sweet, then[…] is he accursed that faith that plays and interludes be equivalent with sermons.”[32] Instead of interpreting and modeling the word of God for spectators, as sermons do, tragedies show only “anger, wrath, immunity, cruelty, injury, incest, murder, and such like,” comedies “love, bawdry, cozenage, flattery, whoredom, adultery.”[33] Notably, Stubbs goes after “Lords of Misrule” and “May games,” rituals associated with celebrating the first of May and the arrival of spring, in the sections directly after his denunciation of stage playing, casting them as quasi-pagan celebrations of chaos. He provides a sensationalistic description of the election of the Lord of Misrule by “all the wild-heads of the parish” and the procession of the Lord and his ragtag court to the local church, where they interrupt the sermon to “solemnize” their “pageant” before the “foolish people,” then set to raucous feasting and merriment.[34] The May games, meanwhile, give all eligible members of the community the opportunity to “run gadding over night to the woods[…]where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes [sex, Stubbs implies]”; the people then fill the following days with false worship of the Maypole, a “stinking idol” protected by “Satan, prince of hell.”[35]

In other words, Stubbs takes the new stage plays and the older folk rituals to task for the same set of sins: their supposedly un-Christian origins and values, their planned performances of bad behavior, and their flagrant lack of respect for conventional authority figures (God, priests, parents, and lawgivers). His condemnation lacks nuance and perspective, of course, but it does speak to the emotional power of even the least organized of early modern performances. Alison Hobgood describes the combination of performers’ intent, actors’ transmission of emotion, and spectators’ reactions that shaped the experience of early modern theater as “an intensely corporeal, highly emotive activity characterized by risky, even outright dangerous bodily transformation.”[36] A play, she argues, had the power to transport everyone involved to a different emotional plane, whether or not they were consciously counterfeiting; actors and audience worked together to effect the “transformation.” While Hobgood focuses on the London stage in her articulation of this phenomenon, her conclusions arguably apply to all sorts of performances and performance-like activities. Writers like Stubbs certainly saw London drama and provincial rituals as proceeding from the same anarchic impulse, even though one tradition succumbed to anti-theatrical pressure much more readily than the other.

If paranoia about informal riots and lawlessness sparked by plays motivated crackdowns on theater, so did fears that noble patrons critical of the queen or her allies would deliberately commission or support “seditious” plays and foment political rebellion among the commoners. The powers of censorship granted to the Master of the Revels expanded steadily during the second half of the sixteenth century, until companies needed his personal approval to publish or perform on pain of imprisonment. Even so, the authorities apparently lived in constant fear that a play would goad the assembled crowd into rebelling; in fact, “censorship legislation was often produced in reaction to an offending play.”[37] The Earl of Essex did indeed order a production of Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of his unsuccessful rebellion against Elizabeth, presumably drawing a comparison between the queen and the tyrannical yet weak Richard. Recusant Catholic nobles may also have continued commissioning plays with pro-Catholic themes for private performance in their homes throughout the Reformation, though any political agitation that went on seems not to have led to much concrete action.[38]

Still, worries about Catholic rebellion, or at least sentiments that might lead to it, likely also inspired the restrictions on provincial religious plays imposed in the later sixteenth century. The government had dissolved the monasteries and religious guilds that supported cycle plays, and the last recorded cycle performance (at Coventry) took place in 1579.[39] Despite enthusiastic private patronage, there were also efforts to restrict touring and increasing pressure against it during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds required touring companies to have the protection of patrons and “in theory[…]restricted the right to patronize players to nobles and royalty.”[40] In fact, Suzanne Westfall finds evidence that “potentially seditious materials were sometimes permitted to be performed in household auspices” as long as hosts kept their politics confined to themselves, their performers, and trusted guests. Meanwhile, although municipalities sometimes hired companies to perform in their town halls, Siobhan Keenan finds increasing instances of towns paying travelers not to perform, probably to avoid the condemnation of either higher authorities or disapproving groups of citizens.[41] As a result of these pressures, by the seventeenth century provincial performance had declined significantly and opportunities for patronage were restricted to royalty and powerful nobles, even as several types of professional, commercial theater remained popular in London despite opposition.

Histrio-mastix and the morality of amateur theater

A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects the tensions and contradictions inherent to this moment in British theatrical history, and perhaps even the feelings of actors about their precarious social position. On the one hand, one can detect attempts to distance professional actors from the uneducated rude mechanicals. Despite “how close poets, actors, and artisans remained at the close of the sixteenth century, in social status, economic organization, and in working methods,” Shakespeare seems to align himself with the erudite Greek spectators rather than the performers, who talk as if imported from a farce set in an Elizabethan city.[42] At the same time, he does demonstrate an empathetic understanding of that closeness between the two groups with its dramatization of the “mechanics” of putting on a play—the writing and learning of parts, the planning of rehearsals, and the attempts to predict the reactions of powerful and capricious patrons. As Henry S. Turner notes, many players, including Shakespeare, came from workmen’s families and even belonged to guilds, and the play shows performers (including the fairies) trying to craft and shape human appearances and emotions just as a glover or carpenter might craft and shape his product.[43] Midsummer mocks the mechanicals’ assumption that they can do actors’ jobs with very little practice but does not question the hands-on performance tradition in which they participate.

We can better understand Midsummer’s relative subtlety by comparing it with another play that lampoons lower-class actors. John Marston’s Histrio-mastix, Or, the Player Whipt, likely written around 1598, depicts a societal collapse brought on by human greed, selfishness, and foolishness, and positions the rise of an amateur acting company as a sign of that collapse. The cast includes broadly drawn nobles, lawyers, merchants, and workmen, along with Chrisoganus, the scholarly voice of reason; they take advice from the allegorical personifications of various vices, virtues, and situations. Early on, the personifications of Peace and Plenty, though not malicious themselves, usher in an era of excessive leisure time in which upper-class characters reject the opportunity for study with “Grammer, Logick, Rhetorick, Arithmatick, Geometrie, Musick, and Astronomie” and embrace “Pride, Vaine-glory, Hypocrisie, and Contempt,” along with the carousing represented by Bacchus. With nothing better to do, the idle lower-class characters Incle, Belch, Gut, and Post-haste form “Sir Oliver Owlet’s players” while out drinking, and a group of landowners, lawyers, and merchants hires them to perform as part of lavish household revels. Pride and Envy, among others, then lead the wealthy characters to make war against each other, and the players are pressed into military service. War leads to destruction and poverty, whose representatives can only be defeated by a miraculous intervention from Peace and the goddess Astraea (personified, of course, by Queen Elizabeth). The chastened nobles repent their previous behavior and realize that true fulfillment comes from following rather than breaking rules, since “law is that which Love and Peace maintain.” Meanwhile, after a hostess almost gets them arrested for failing to pay their bill, the players, like a troupe of failed Falstaffs, agree to return to their “real” jobs and make honest livings. Needless to say, Histrio-mastix, a play that seems to hate players and the theatrical economy, can be a baffling document for modern readers. Philip J. Finkelpearl argues that the play’s aggressively anti-theatrical bent, references to legal language, and antiquated-for-1598 dramatic devices suggest that Marston wrote it for performance by non-professionals at the Christmas celebrations of the Inns of Court.[44] The performing lawyers could associate themselves with the older, nobler traditions of classical drama while mocking and condemning the supposed debasement and venality of early modern commercial theater.[45]

While both Shakespeare and Marston make fun of their crews of preposterously-named amateur actors, then, Shakespeare’s portrayal seems almost affectionate by comparison. The rude mechanicals are a little dim, but not lazy or notably bad at their jobs; they perform for Theseus to gain his favor but also to pay their respects to him, and he accepts their “poor duty” in spite of its sloppy presentation (5.1.97). Compared with Histrio-mastix, Midsummer reads as a defense of professional acting, an art just beginning to surpass past dramatic forms, as a legitimate craft. The comedy comes not from the mechanicals’ desire to counterfeit Pyramus and Thisbe—after all, most of the plays characters and all of its actors have been counterfeiting since the curtain rose—but from their inability to do so effectively. In contrast, Hamlet’s Player King occupies just as low a social position, but unfailingly wins the respect of his audiences with his skill at recounting the story of the fall of Troy. Indeed, The Mousetrap and Midsummer’s play-within-a-play approach acting companies from opposite perspectives, but both make a case for the value of professional entertainment in a rapidly changing theatrical environment.

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[1] Siobhan Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 75.

[2] Ibid, 67.

[3] Peter H. Greenfield, “Drama Outside London After 1540,” The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2014) p. 178.

[4] Gervase Rosser, “Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds.” REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years, ed. Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean. University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 140.

[5] “theatre | theater, n.”. OED Online. June 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200227?rskey=3qQli3&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed July 20, 2018).

[6] Rosser, “Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds,” p. 145.

[7] Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 24.

[8] Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks), p. 134.

[9] Ibid, p. 197.

[10] Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 38.

[11] Rosser, “Roles in Life: The Drama of the Medieval Guilds,” p. 147

[12]Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, p. 99.

[13] Jean E. Howard, “Kings and Pretenders,” The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 140.

[14] Ibid., p. 140.

[15] Ibid, p. 132, p. 138.

[16] Ibid, p. 145.

[17] Ibid, p. 141.

[18] Ibid, pp. 145-150.

[19] Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, p. 199.

[20] Ibid, p. 198.

[21] Ibid, p. 202.

[22] Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, p. 144.

[23] Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, p. 127.

[24] Suzanne Westfall, “‘An example of courtesy and liberality’: great households and performance,” The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 212.

[25] Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, p. 198.

[26] Westfall, p. 216.

[27] Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, p. 70.

[28] Ibid, p. 67.

[29] Ibid, p. 74.

[30] Greenfield, “Drama Outside London After 1540,” p. 178.

[31] Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, p. 115.

[32] Philip Stubbs, The Anatomy of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), p. 138.

[33] Ibid, p. 137.

[34] Ibid, p. 142.

[35] Ibid, p. 144.

[36] Alison Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 10.

[37] Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, pp. 120-121.

[38] Suzanne Westfall, “What Hath REED Wrought? REED and Patronage,” REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years (University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 92.

[39] Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre, p. 118; Greenfield, “Drama Outside London After 1540,” p. 180.

[40] Keenan, Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England, p. 4.

[41] Ibid, p. 172.

[42] Henry S. Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London: Continuum Books, 2007), p. 82.

[43] Ibid, pp. 82-83

[44]Philip J. Finkelpearl, “John Marston’s ‘Histrio-Mastix’ as an Inns of Court Play: A Hypothesis,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (1966), p. 233.