Crime, Community, and Audience Engagement in Late Medieval and Early Modern Theater

Abstract

Crime, Community and Audience Engagement in Late Medieval and Early Modern Theater addresses forms of audience engagement that are revealed especially by early English dramatic performance of narratives of crime. Spanning late fifteenth-century biblical drama to early seventeenth-century playhouse prologues, this project focuses on onstage communities that react to the threat or presence of crime by working to surveil, solve, redefine, or avoid it. These crimes require the renegotiation of community structure and norms, a process that is often explored through audience engagement. These plays therefore often represent or reimagine crime in contemporary terms, creating a sense of asynchrony that heightens the stakes of engagement by removing historical, allegorical, or geographical difference. As audiences are called to be participants in, proxies for, or mirrors to these onstage communities, their response is imbued with a sense of ethical or social responsibility.

Each chapter focuses on a form of engagement— beholding, witnessing, voyeurism, investment— and its corresponding affect in performances of different genres. Chapter 1 tracks minor characters in the York Corpus Christi plays who offer modes of quiet resistance to tyrants such as Herod and Pilate. While the York audience is beckoned into playful defiance of these tyrants, these minor characters also offer opportunities for the audience to behold their distress with empathy. Both comic subversion and compassionate beholding cast theatrical engagement as a form of resistance against tyranny. Chapter 2 examines Nice Wanton, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, Like Will to Like, and Enough is as Good as a Feast, moral interludes that replace an omniscient God with neighborhood surveillance. Using the surveillance pedagogy of American Neighborhood Watches as a conceptual lens, this chapter argues that these plays teach their audiences prospective witnessing as a way to police and persecute suspicious bodies. Chapter 3 draws on contemporary debates about the ethical work of true-crime entertainment to argue that the domestic tragedy Two Lamentable Tragedies confronts its local audience as complicit in the creation and dissemination of the crime narrative that it dramatizes. Chapter 4 addresses playhouse prologues as negotiations of audience investment, reading laterally across plays by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Heywood, and others. While antitheatrical tracts allied theater with the transgressive economies of usury and prostitution, casting them as practices of contagion and predation, prologues attempted to negotiate the affective economies of audience investment in their own terms.

Crime, Community and Audience Engagement thus offers crime narratives and their onstage communities as a new forum for exploring the structures and stakes of theatrical engagement in medieval and early modern theater. Attending both to the cues of desired response within playtexts and the knowledge, power or experience that audiences might have wielded to accept or resist those cues, it develops a new approach to early theater audiences at the intersection of scholarship focusing on the representational and rhetorical strategies of the plays and studies of audience demography. The asynchrony these plays produce prompts another key aspect of this project’s method: reaching outside of the historical parameters of its primary texts, Crime Community and Audience Engagement uses modern forms of unofficial community policing and investigation as comparative lenses for reconsidering how early drama employs narratives of crime to think more broadly about the nature of audience engagement.