Comparative Drama

Theatre is a fundamentally collaborative artform. Any successful live performance depends upon the participation of—and cooperation between—actors and spectators. On the Elizabethan stage, this axiom was most famously pronounced by the Chorus in William Shakespeare's Henry V. The Chorus begins the play by making an apology that doubles as an appeal for help. Because the company doesn't have a real "kingdom for a stage, princes to act,/And monarchs to behold the swelling scene," the Chorus begs spectators not only to forgive "The flat unraised spirits that hath dared/On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth/So great an object" as the triumph at Agincourt, but also to assist the performers by imaginatively bridging the gap between illusion and reality: "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts."¹ While it is the job of the actors to "work" on the "imaginary forces" of spectators by staging the play, spectators in turn must work with the actors: "For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings" (Prologue.18–28). Yet as much as the Chorus unites actors and spectators in a collaborative endeavour, he also draws clear boundaries between their respective contributions ("your thoughts"; "our kings"). Where the actors' job is to physically create the theatrical illusion, the spectators' labor is mental: "Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege" (3.0.25). Where the actors play their parts onstage, the role of the spectator is confined to the mind—"the quick forge and working-house of thought" (5.0.23). Actors pretend; spectators believe.

Such a model of theatrical exchange obviously appealed to early modern playgoers: Henry V was one of the most popular plays of the period. At the same time, however, another blockbuster of the Elizabethan stage offered theatregeors a very different kind of experience, one that [End Page 61] thoroughly destabilized the distinctions—between actor and spectator, illusion and reality—upon which Shakespeare's Chorus relies. On several different occasions (that we know of), performances of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus were interrupted—and even cut short—by the intervention of apparently supernatural forces. In one account, the "visible apparition of the Devill" appeared "on the stage at the Belsavage Playhouse, in Queene Elizabeths days, (to the great amazement both of Actors and Spectators) whiles they were there prophanely playing the History of Faustus."² Another contemporary report recalls the same phenomenon occurring in a different theatre:

Certaine Players at Exeter, acting upon the stage the tragical storie of Dr Faustus the Conjurer; as a certaine nomber of Devels kept everie one his circle there, and as Faustus was busie in his magicall invocations, on a sudden they were all dasht, every one harkning other in the eare, for they were all perswaded, there was one devell too many amongst them; and so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further with this matter; the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of dores. The players (as I heard it) contrarye to their custome spending the night in reading and in prayer got them out of town the next morning.³

Critics have tended to dismiss such testimonies as little more than the scattered fragments of "a curious mythos," the superstitious excesses of a world not yet fully disenchanted.⁴ Some have attributed the unexpected cameos made by "visible apparition[s]" to the imaginative "abandon" of spectators fully immersed in the theatrical illusion.⁵ Perhaps—but such an explanation tells only half the story. For as we have seen, during performances of Faustus it was not just the audience, but rather actors and spectators collectively, who witnessed the terrifying appearance of "one devell too many amongst them" (indeed, at Exeter, the actors actually instigated the ensuing panic).⁶ The Henry V paradigm ("Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them" [Prologue.26; my emphasis]) falls apart when the actors and spectators see the same thing. How did Marlowe's play provoke such a powerful dissolution of the boundary...