A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England

A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England

A Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection—the spectator—a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation. While audience and film studies have theorized the spectator, these fields tend to focus on the role of twentieth-century media (film, television, and the computer) in producing mass-culture viewers. Such emphases lead to a misapprehension that the discursive spectator is modernity's creature. Fearing anachronism, early modern scholars have preferred demographic studies of audiences to theoretical engagements with the "effects" of spectatorship. While demographic work provides an invaluable snapshot, it cannot account for the ways that the spectator is as much an idea as a material presence. And, while a few studies pursue the dynamics that existed among author, text, and audience using critical tools sharpened by film studies, they tend to obscure how early modern culture understood the spectator. Rather than relying exclusively on historical or theoretical methodologies, A Monster with a Thousand Hands reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry shaped both by changes in entertainment technologies and the interaction of groups and individuals with different forms of cultural production. "A brilliant, thoughtful, and innovative book. Writing lucidly and elegantly, Amy J. Rodgers establishes not only the possibility but also the necessity of our coming to understand the ways in which the notion of audience and spectatorship was conceptualized, discussed, and imagined during the early modern period." ― Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame Amy J. Rodgers is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Introduction Discursive Iterations/Fearful SymmetriesFor if . . . our youth seriously listen to such unworthy representations of the gods . . . hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be dishonored by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination which may arise in his mind to say and do the like. —Plato, The Republic , c. 386 B.C.E. As soon as he saw the [gladiator's] blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. He found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which he had joined . . . He looked, he yelled, he was on fire, he took the madness home with him. —Augustine, Confessions , c. 400 Also, sithen [miraclis pleyinge] makith to see veyne sightis of desgyse, aray of men and wymmen by yvil continaunse, eyther stiryng other to leccherie and debatis, as aftir most bodily myrthe comen moste debatis, as siche myrthe more undisposith a man to paciencie and ablith to glotonye and to othere vicis, wherefore it suffrith not a man to beholden enterly the werde of God over his heued, but makith to thenken on alle siche thingis that Crist by the dedis of his passion badde us to forgeten. —Anonymous Wycliffite author, Miracle Plays, c. 1360 As the style and subject matter of stage-plays is scurrilous and obscene, so likewise it is bloody and tyrannical, breathing out malice, fury, anger, murder, cruelty, tyranny, treachery, frenzy, treason, and revenge . . . which efferate and enrage the hearts and minds of actors and spectators; yea, oft times animate and excite them to anger, malice, duels, murders, revenge, and more than barbarous cruelty, to the great disturbance of the public peace. —William Prynne, Histrio-mastix , 1633 The spectator at the play experiences too little; he feels like a "Misero, to whom nothing worth while can happen"; he has long since had to moderate been obliged to damp down, or better direct elsewhere, his ambition to occupy a central place in the stream of world events; he wants to feel, to act, to mold the world in the light of his own desire—in short to be a hero. —Sigmund Freud, "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage" 1905 Where once the dime and nickel novels suggested ways of crime to unbalanced youth, the motion picture has come to make a more ready and more potent appeal. The printed word is never so ardent with an impre