Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger

Joanne Rochester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754630807
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351898188
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The playwrights composing for the London stage between 1580 and 1642 repeatedly staged plays-within and other metatheatrical inserts. Such works present fictionalized spectators as well as performers, providing images of the audience-stage interaction within the theatre. They are as much enactments of the interpretive work of a spectator as of acting, and as such they are a potential source of information about early modern conceptions of audiences, spectatorship and perception. This study examines on-stage spectatorship in three plays by Philip Massinger, head playwright for the King's Men from 1625 to 1640. Each play presents a different form of metatheatrical inset, from the plays-within of The Roman Actor (1626), to the masques-within of The City Madam (1632) to the titular miniature portrait of The Picture (1629), moving thematically from spectator interpretations of dramatic performance, the visual spectacle of the masque to staged 'readings' of static visual art. All three forms present a dramatization of the process of examination, and allow an analysis of Massinger's assumptions about interpretation, perception and spectator response.

Chapter 1
“What Doe wee acte to day?” Plays within the Play: The Roman Actor

The Roman Actor is Massinger’s most metatheatrical play, and is thus the logical starting point for this study. Although many of his plays present the responses of onstage spectators to inset spectacles, The Roman Actor is unique, both in Massinger’s canon and in the period as a whole; it contains three plays-within performed by Paris’ company before the Emperor Domitian over the course of the main play. Not only are the plays-within Massinger’s most elaborate inset pieces, but their relation to the outer play is the most complex of all his works. Most importantly, The Roman Actor’s analysis of the function of spectatorship, presented via the reception and interpretation of the plays-within, is at the heart of Massinger’s approach to all his forms of inset art. The play is an examination of how drama and audience interact—essentially, an analysis of how the theatre works. That Massinger claims to have “euer held it the most perfit birth of my Minerua” (“Dedication” 19–20; E&G III: 15) suggests that this analytic impulse is central to the rest of his work. In many ways, The Roman Actor is a map of Massinger’s wider concerns about the nature of theatre, and his approach to drama in general.

The Roman Actor is significant in other ways as well. It is the first play Massinger wrote for the King’s Men as their attached playwright, a position he took following the death of John Fletcher, his writing partner of 10 years. It was played at Blackfriars, possibly exclusively, since the title page of the 1629 edition specifically mentions Blackfriars performances; Massinger probably had this theatre and its audience in mind when he composed it.¹ The play is licensed at the very opening of Charles’ reign, in October 1626, and is the earliest of the plays treated in this study. Although it is not the earliest of Massinger’s solo works, it occupies a unique position in his canon, marking a stylistic shift between his Jacobean solo plays, which deal with social and political issues, and the more metadramatic Caroline plays which he wrote for the King’s Men. Like the earlier plays, it is a political commentary, dealing with the relations between tyranny and art; like the later Caroline plays, it is dramatically structured by the complex interrelation between the metadramatic insets and the frame play.

The Roman Actor is temporally a Caroline play, but its formal roots are deep in Jacobean soil. Massinger’s context is the Roman plays of the previous three decades, and the framing vision of this Romanism is, as Goldberg argues in his James I and the Politics of Literature, a political one. But conflicting critical responses suggest that The Roman Actor’s political message is unclear; it has been argued to be both a tract in support of absolutism and an attack upon it. Goldberg reads the play, together with the Roman plays of Jonson and Shakespeare, as pro-absolutist drama, a treatment of “the king as actor” that ties together “the staging of power and the power of the stage” (166). He argues that Massinger’s Caroline play is a recurrence of the “high Roman style of Jacobean absolutism” (203), the crowning proof of the link between the Roman plays and Stuart royal authority. In contrast, both Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation (1984) and Martin Butler in “Romans in Britain: The Roman Actor and the Early Stuart Classical Play” (1986) see the play as a critique of state policy. Patterson reads Paris’ defence before the Senate as a keynote example of oppositional theatre, a direct if veiled critique of Stuart censorship. Butler reads the play in the context of lesser-known Roman tragedies of the early 1620s, which use Tacitus to present a model of Republicanism violated by tyranny.² Responding directly to Goldberg, Butler sees The Roman Actor as an anti-absolutist play, which presents “Paris and his fellows in a light which is powerfully ‘puritan’” (160). All three readings link the play’s treatment of theatricality and power to Stuart politics and argue that the work is a specific comment on them, but reach contradictory conclusions. I would argue, however, that the play’s politics are slippery because Massinger’s interest lies as much in the play’s structure as in its plot; in fact, the play’s politics are built into its structure. Although Massinger is working in the tradition of the Jacobean Roman plays, framing contemporary political questions in the classical past, the play’s political concerns are contained within its treatment of its metadrama.

More recent treatments of the play do approach it through the plays-within. Both Richard A. Burt’s “’Tis Writ by Me’: Massinger’s The Roman Actor and the Politics of Reception in the English Renaissance Theatre” (1988) and David Reinheimer’s “The Roman Actor, Censorship, and Dramatic Autonomy” (1998) use the play’s staging of reception and spectatorship in order to discuss its relationship to state censorship. Burt argues that the play is a deconstructed image of the theatre that dramatizes the ways in which “reception overrides the intentions of authors and actors” (334). He rejects Patterson’s reading of the plays-within as oppositional, since the instability of the onstage audience’s response demonstrates that authorial intention cannot control audience reception. Reinheimer reads the play as an attack on censorship, arguing that Massinger uses the onstage audience’s misreadings of the plays-within as part of a larger defence of the stage. However, he ascribes this reception failure to Domitian’s censorship, shifting the focus back to state control of the stage.

The most recent treatments of the play deal directly with its metatheatre through performance and reception theory. Andrew James Hartley’s “Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor and the Semiotics of Censored Theater” (2001) and Edward Rocklin’s “Placing the Audience at Risk” (2006) focus on the dynamics of the play in performance, arguing that Massinger uses the plays-within to force the theatre audience to an awareness of their own status as spectators. Hartley’s excellent reading is concerned with theoretical interpretations of the play’s relation to censorship as well as staging and performance, while Rocklin’s reading is more directly spectatorial, stemming from his own viewing of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play. Both readings, as well as my own, are indebted to the theatrical and critical work of Martin White, who has taken a performancebased approach to The Roman Actor since his 1996 production of the play at the University of Bristol Drama Department. White’s critical and theatrical approaches to the play feed into each other. The introduction to his definitive Revels Edition of the play (2008) develops the approach begun in his Renaissance Drama in Action (1998), which focuses on the practical issues of staging—casting, doubling and the physical space of the stage—and their effects on audience response. His approach to performance-based criticism in general, and to The Roman Actor in particular, has been a strong influence on this chapter, and on the book as a whole.³

The current critical consensus is that The Roman Actor is a play about the stage and its physical and theatrical relationships with its audience, a view I share. It is one of the few plays in English Renaissance drama with an actor as protagonist and the theatre as its subject; as both Patricia Thompson (425) and Reinheimer point out (330–31), the play can be read as a tragedy with “the theatre itself as hero” (Thompson 425).⁴ Not only does the plot deal with the trials of a theatre company in Domitian’s Rome, but, as many critics have pointed out, the play is dramaturgically structured by the reaction of the onstage spectators to a series of nested plays-within and other inset spectacles. Massinger’s play presents the murder of Paris and the fall of Domitian, but it also presents the manipulation and destruction of an independent professional theatre by a corrupt and tyrannous state. I am arguing that it is this independent theatre—Massinger’s chosen instrument, the medium through which the play is presented and about which it is written—which the play seeks to defend.

Massinger does this, not through the defence Paris delivers before the Senate, but by staging the abuse and destruction of Paris’ professional stage by Domitian’s theatre of cruelty. The play’s moral and political message, far from being contradictory or confused, is embedded in and intrinsic to his dramaturgy; the paralleling of Domitian’s tortures with Paris’ plays-within contrasts the spectacle of power with the competing spectacle of the drama, which can criticize the abuses of power. Although Paris’ theatre does not get the chance to do this, Massinger’s own theatre does; the play as a whole presents an implicit argument that freedom for the stage is not only necessary for artistic purposes, but for moral and political ones as well. I hope, in this chapter, to demonstrate how the play’s dramaturgical complexity is integrated into its political analysis; here, I will simply state that in focusing on the relation between the inset pieces, the real and dramatized onstage spectators, the framing fiction in which they are staged and the ultimate perspective of the theatre audience, I am not ignoring the play’s political message, since Massinger’s analysis of the function of power is built into this interlocking set of interpretive gazes.

Massinger’s metatheatrical play takes place within a stable temporal and spatial frame; everything we see takes place in Domitian’s Rome. Within this stable outer frame, however, Massinger aggressively blurs theatrical ostention codes. Much of the action is self-consciously framed theatre; of the play’s 11 scenes, six contain some form of framed metatheatrical device. These performances and their reception are the focus of the play’s action and the engine of its plot. The most obvious are the three formal ‘plays-within’ staged by Paris the actor and his colleagues: “The Cure of Avarice”, “Iphis and Anaxerete” and “The False Servant”. But the play is thick with less formally marked pieces of metadrama: Paris’ speech in defence of the players before the Senate, the Emperor Domitian’s triumphal entry, the execution of the philosophers Rusticus and Sura, and Domitia’s seduction of Paris. All these are consciously or unconsciously staged for onstage spectators whose reaction to the framed events they witness is vital to the interpretation of the framed scene and the events of the larger play. The play is also a virtual catalogue of dramatic genres. The formal plays-within are a Tudor moral interlude, a Fletcherian romance, and a domestic tragedy, respectively, while the torture of the Stoics recalls a Red Bull miracle play, such as Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1620) and Domitian’s fall is presented as a providential tragedy, complete with supernatural interventions and soliloquies which expose the emperor’s psyche. Finally, the characters often imagine themselves as performers: Domitian describes his union with Domitia as the union of Jupiter and Juno, “the lesser gods applauding the encounter” (1.4.65), Domitia refers to Plautus’ Amphitruo when she seduces Paris (4.2.110), and when the actors are charged by the Senate in Act 1, Scene 1, Paris cheers his colleagues with the suggestion that they treat the experience as a performance and “act our selues… with vndaunted confidence” (1.1.53–4).

The number of spectatorial insets and metadramatic references emphasize the play’s metatheatrical theme: it is made up of the relation of spectator to stage, and shows how the drama is structured by its spectators and structures them in its turn, in a number of ways. The interpretive freedom of the audience in this tacit contract of attention is the foundation of Paris’ defence of the stage in Act 1, Scene 3, although he argues paradoxically that the audience’s interpretive freedom undercuts the intention of the performance. As he says, the actors cannot control the audience’s interpretation of the play:

[w]hen we present

An heyre, that does conspire against the life

Of his deare parent, numbring euery houre

He liues as tedious to him, if there be

Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him,

He is of the same mould, we cannot helpe it. (1.3.109–14)

Paris’ argument is that the players (the targets of the Senate’s censorship) cannot be held responsible for audience reaction—a somewhat disingenuous argument, since the point of playing is always to influence audience response. But Paris’ argument still emphasizes the fact that theatre is an open-ended process of judgment, intrinsically structured around representational ambiguity and freedom of interpretation.

Massinger’s play stages this process of interpretation three times, with each of the plays-within. But in this staging something happens to the freedom implicit in the spectator-drama contract, for Paris’ plays-within are subject, not only to the judgment of their audience, but to the control of Domitian and Domitia, both of whom act as patrons and “directors”.⁵ First they frame the context in which the players will play, then cut and adapt the texts to be performed and, finally, they attempt—with a notable lack of success—to direct the spectators’ reaction to the plays as they are staged. Domitian, in particular, tries to reduce the freedom of interpretation inherent in the theatre to a dictatorial, univocal contract: to expunge the ambiguities innate to the form and replace them with a single “correct” interpretation dictated by himself. At no time is he successful in this, since Domitian’s only power is execution. He can kill resistant audiences, but he can’t make them agree with him (Myhill, “Judging Spectators” 213).

In fact, Massinger’s defence of the stage actually lies in the imperial failure to dictate the responses of the audiences of the play’s plays-within, performances and tortures; this, ironically, despite the fact that the resistance of the onstage spectators also ruins Paris’ plays. This is because the resistant spectators of Paris’ stage parallel the independent spectators of Massinger’s own stage, who are, in their capacity of audience, in control of the interpretation of all The Roman Actor’s characters (Domitian included) and as such pass judgment on their actions. Domitian’s attempted control of the spectatorial process only serves to highlight his own status as a product of the theatre, subject, however little he may suspect it, to the spectatorial process himself.

Furthermore, the presence of multiple analogues for the audience in Massinger’s play serves to focus the Blackfriars audience on their own position as spectators; the plays-within set up a pattern of repeating reflections which cause the theatre audience to become aware of their own relation as audience to Massinger’s play. Paris’ defence of the theatre is a speech within the play, the performance of an actor, which can only have an effect insofar as its auditors allow. By contrast, Massinger’s defence of the theatre is the whole play, frame...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “What Doe wee acte to day?” Plays within the Play: The Roman Actor
• 2 “For your sport / You shall see a masterpiece”: Masques-within in The Picture, The Guardian and The City Madam
• 3 “Speculations / On cheating pictures”: Visual Art as Dramatic Inset: The Picture
• Conclusion “Make your howse the stage on which weel act / Our comick sceane”: Trials and Paradramatic Scenes
• Bibliography
• Index