Abstract
Certain spectacular moments in plays recruit their audiences to transform: Lavinia, her hands cut off, her tongue cut out, and ravish’d; Hermione, “stone no more”; Richard II’s improvised self-deposition. These instances—largely visual but in cooperation with dialogue—encourage audiences to change from spectators into witnesses. The audience witnesses in a basic sense any time they see a play. They are “present” as a spectator or auditor, seeing and hearing with their own senses.1 What certain spectacles such as stage murders can do in such presence, however, is more profound. Onstage deaths, perhaps more than any other theatrical moment, contain the potential to engage or alienate an audience. To be a witness in these instances is to become “one who is called on, selected, or appointed to be present at a transaction, so as to be able to testify to its having taken place.”2 The members of the audience are enlisted by what they see and hear on stage in order that they might be made to interpret for themselves. To quote the prologue of Christopher Marlowe’s Tam-burlaine the Great, Parti, such witnessing audiences are compelled to “view but his picture in this tragic glass,/And then applaud his fortunes as you please” (7–8).3 Applause signifies spectatorial judgment in Marlowe’s phrasing. With the imperative “view,” the prologue demands attention and then requests feedback. The audience has been appointed and is expected to testify.
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Notes
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburline the Great, Part I, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, eds. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Cf. Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London: Routledge, 1990), 3–6.
Other scholars have asserted a widespread familiarity with judicial and legal practices during the period. Subha Mukherji notes the law backgrounds of many English Renaissance dramatists, who had studied law at the Inns of Court, and the theater audience itself, which contained lawyers and law-students. Additionally, “the jury system that replaced older forms of trial in England reinforces, in this period, the role of people’s representatives in independently evaluating evidence, including witness testimony.” Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2–4. Similarly, Lorna Hutson avers that “the strongly participatory structures of English criminal justice, which depended on unpaid officers of the peace and on the institution of jury trial, ensured that these evidential concepts, which were transforming legal practice, were not part of some esoteric professional doctrine, but were relatively widely diffused throughout society.” The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
See Philippe de Beaumanoir’s thirteenth-century manual, Coutumes de Beauvai-sis (1283), quoted in Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 13. The modern translation most frequently cited is Coutumes de Beauvaisis, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Amédée Salmon (Paris: Picard, 1899–1900) and the English translation by F. R. P. Akehurst (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), but Frisch does not note a translation.
Thomas Alfield, “To the Reader,” in A true reporte of the death and martyrdome of M. Campion Lesuite and preiste, and M. Sherwin, and M. Bryan preistes, at Tiborne the first of December 1581 Observid and written by a Catholike preist, which was present therat Wheruuto [sic] is annexid certayne verses made by sundrie persons (London: printed by R. Rowlands or Verstegan, 1582), Av1.
Elizabeth Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 83.
Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7.
Thomas Alfield, A True Report of the Death and Martyrdom and M. Campion (London, 1591)
Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players and Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 246.
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 2nd ed. (London, 1587), 4:914–16
Quoted in Margaret E. Owens, Stages of Dismemberment: The Fragmented Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 122.
Ruth Lunney, “Marlowe’s Edward II and the Early Playhouse Audience,” in Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 27.
Critics such as Erika Lin have noted how considerations of the dynamics of the performance medium, including “the circulation of cultural attitudes and practices” on stage can strengthen cultural history and literary criticism as well as performance scholarship and theater history. Erika T. Lin, “Performance Practice and Theatrical Privilege: Rethinking Weimann’s Concepts of Locus and Platea,” New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2006): 283–84.
Caroline van Eck and Edward Winters, eds., Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture, Histories of Vision (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 2.
John K. G. Shearman and National Gallery of Art (US), Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Ltalian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 2.
See also Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, The New Version (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974)
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983)
Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams, eds., The Beholder. The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe, Histories of Vision (Alder-shot, UK: Ashgate, 2006)
Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)
Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
John Ward, “Disguised Symbolism as Enactive Symbolism in Van Eyck’s Paintings,” Artibus et Historiae 15, no. 29 (1994): 13.
The New Art History argues that “whereas vision is a physical act, an operation of the organ of sight, visuality is a social construction.” Van Eck, Dealing with the Visual, 3. See also Marcus Nordlund, who argues for “transitional nature of early modern visuality,” suggesting that early modern audiences were not completely clear about how vision functioned biologically, psychologically, or spiritually. Marcus Nordlund, The Dark Lantern: A Historical Study of Sight in Shakespeare, Webster, and Middleton, Gothenburg Studies in English 77 (Goteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999), iii. Stuart Clark’s most recent cultural history addresses this issue as well.
See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Stuart Clark’s latest work, Vanities of the Eye, is the most recent book to attend to this shift. He organizes his text around demonology, perspective, Reformation theology, and the resurgence of Pyrrhonian skepticism. See also Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
A. C. Crombie, Science, Optics, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (London: Hambledon Press, 1990)
Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljen-holm Nichols, eds., Lconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1989)
Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)
Judith Dundas, “‘To See Feelingly’: The Language of the Senses and the Language of the Heart,” Comparative Drama 19, no. 1 (1985): 49–57
Lucy Gent, “The Self-Cozening Eye,” Review of English Studies 34, no. 136 (November 1983): 419–28.
Marguerite A. Tassi, The Scandal of Images: Lconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005), 214–15.
Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002), 1039–79. All quotations from 1 Henry IV taken from this edition, unless otherwise noted. Parenthetical citations refer to act, scene, and lines.
Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002), 904–57. All quotations from Richard III taken from this edition, unless otherwise noted. Parenthetical citations refer to act, scene, and lines
In the theatrical moments that exemplify this summoning to witness, the performance penetrates from the stage into the audience’s awareness in a manner comparable to that described by Robert Weimann in his discussion of platea. Summoning, to continue Weimann’s theoretical geographies, occurs in the region termed platea. However, the platea is redefined for my purpose as a region of theatrical attention rather than the physical place nearest the spectator. It is neither solely spectacular nor linguistic, but it is distinguished by its cueing of the audience to behold and see in a particular manner that includes interpretation. Certain plays rely on their audiences to finish the scene for themselves, in other words. While Weimann works with these concepts in several books, the terms are discussed at length in Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Both Erika Lin and Jennifer Low have made similar arguments for Weimann-inspired conceptions of how stage space may function for the audience. Lin suggests that “regardless of who is socially privileged within the world of the play and regardless of what is privileged, thematically or otherwise, in a text-based analysis, moments in these plays that foregrounded the process by which elements presented onstage came to signify within the represented fiction were theatrically privileged.” Lin, “Performance Practice,” 294–95. Low also recognizes the connection between theatrical space and audience awareness: “Further, in moving from locus to platea, an actor not only penetrates an empty stage but also steps into and above space that the audience would experience as their own.” “‘Bodied Forth’: Spectator, Stage and Actor in the Early Modern Theater,” Comparative Drama 39, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1–29.
Kent Cartwright, preface to Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), ix.
Gaveston’s famous speech about his plans for masque comes to mind, but references to Ovid (particularly Actaeon) and transformation abound in the play. See Sara Munson Deats, “Myth and Metamorphosis in Marlowe’s Edward II,” Texas Studies in literature and language: A Journal of the Humanities 22 (1980): 315.
Janet Clare, “Marlowe’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty,’” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 87.
David Stymeist, “Status, Sodomy, and the Theater in Marlowe’s Edward II” Studies in English literature 1500–1900 AA, no. 2 (2004): 245.
Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 323–402. All quotations from Edward II taken from this edition unless otherwise noted. Parenthetical citations refer to act, scene, and lines.
Knutson suggests that, although Marlowe seems to have written the role of Edward II with Alleyn in mind, because Pembroke’s men premiered the play, Burbage would have had the role. See Roslyn L. Knutson, “Marlowe, Company Ownership, and the Role of Edward II,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 18 (2005): 37–48.
William B. Kelly, “Mapping Subjects in Marlowe’s Edward II,” South Atlantic Review 63, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 16.
Anthony DiMatteo, “Identifying Marlowe’s Radicalism: A Response to Christopher Wessman,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 9, no. 3 (1999): 238.
Ian McAdam, “Edward II and the Illusion of Integrity,” Studies in Philology 92, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 203.
While the executions themselves could feature lively debates between the accused and the crowd, bloodthirsty calls for pain, or displeased observations about the righteousness of the sentence, the ceremony itself was highly ritualized. In addition, many pamphlets circulated fictionalized versions of the deceased’s “final words” to stabilize the intended meaning of the execution for the state. John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason (London: Routledge, 1979), 198; and Lake and Questier, Antichrist, esp. chapter 7.
For example, the quarters of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators were deliberately placed: Fawkes and the other leaders’ heads were placed on London Bridge, but the two men who died before capture—Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy—were exhumed, decapitated, and their heads placed on stakes atop Parliament, the building they sought to destroy. Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (NewYork: Doubleday, 1996), 195
Eric N. Simons, The Devil of the Vault: A Life of Guy Fawkes (London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1963), 209.
Carla Coleman Prichard, “‘Learn Then to Rule Us Better and the Realm’: Restoration of Order and the Boy King in Marlowe’s Edward II” Renaissance Papers (1998): 30.
Manuel Gomez Lara, “Ambiguous Devices: The Use of Dramatic Emblems in Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), “Sederi 15 (2005): 103.
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© 2011 Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill
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Pearson, M.F. (2011). Audience as Witness in Edward II . In: Low, J.A., Myhill, N. (eds) Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118393_6
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