hello and welcome to the latest quarantine quartos brought to you by the Shakespeare
Institute, spiritually in Stratford-upon-Avon but dispersed a little
bit more widely just for the present moment. My name's Simon Smith, I'm
a lecturer here at the Shakespeare Institutes, in Shakespeare and Early Modern
Drama and I want to talk to you today about Hamlet, but also a bit more broadly
about stagecraft in the play and an in drama of the period
approaching that question through the staging conditions the audience culture
of of the late 16th and early 17th century now this might seem like an unexpected
approach to a play that boasts possibly the most famous of all Shakespearean ears, allowing
into ‘[t]he natural gates and alleys’ of Old Hamlet’s body the poison that sets
the play’s events in motion (1.5.67). Perhaps more significantly, it departs from recent
work approaching Hamlet on broadly page-based terms, in which the kinds of spatial, visual
and sensory stagecraft brought into focus by the ‘turn to performance’ in Shakespeare
studies are not typically foregrounded. Whilst it is many decades since Alan C. Dessen questioned
the critical habit of ‘poring over Hamlet as a dramatic poem’ rather than ‘a play
on stage in performance’, it remains central to accounts of Shakespeare as a literary dramatist.
Looking more widely, the idea that an early modern play would particularly seek to stimulate
the eye also runs counter to one lingering scholarly narrative: that Reformation concerns
about idolatry and visual worship meant that in any context, devotional or otherwise, ‘Elizabethans
were extremely wary’ of ‘[s]etting up any kind of illusion’. Prominent visual
stagecraft would seem an unlikely dramatic tool for a playwright to rely upon under such
conditions of production. In fact, full consideration of Hamlet, of
early modern theatrical culture more generally, and of the many and varied influences shaping
contemporary English attitudes to sight, reveals a rather different picture. In truth, vision’s
status in post-Reformation England was not settled but highly contested: sensory critics
now recognise that sight was a much-disputed sense, sometimes doubted or denigrated but
also widely praised, and often understood quite differently from one context to another.
Moreover, where scholars once proposed all-pervasive, iconoclastic anxiety about visual illusion
and seduction from the 1580s onward, more recent work instead emphasises the cultural
impact of multiple influences beyond reformed theology, and proposes more nuanced relationships
between shifting religious doctrine and wider visual culture than previous claims of ‘severe
visual anorexia’ have suggested. As Matthew Milner urges, ‘[n]o longer can we stereotype
Reformation sensory changes as a switch from eyes to ears’.
Furthermore, Hamlet’s stagecraft makes systematic and sustained use of sight, qualifying the
recent suggestion that the play appears in some ways to endorse aural over visual experience,
and despite the persistence of wider theatre-historical claims that much early modern drama, especially
Shakespeare’s, was a primarily verbal rather than visual art form – that ‘the Globe
… was designed for listeners, not viewers’. In fact, Hamlet not only relies upon the staging
of particular sights – some, like the ghost and the dumb show, long recognised as dramatically
significant – but invites playgoers repeatedly to engage with its precise visual design through
active, judicious and critically reflective looking. As this talk will explore, vision
and visual stagecraft are rather more important to Hamlet than is typically acknowledged,
just as spectacle is a more substantial, sophisticated and conventional component of early modern
dramatic craft than theatre histories centring on complaints about illusionistic spectacle
and gazing spectators have tended to suggest. Given the critical commonplace – or even
‘cliché’ – that early modern play-makers and playgoers differentiated between the ‘common
sight’ and the ‘judicious ear’, it may seem misguided to seek sophisticated visual
stagecraft in a play like Hamlet that was said to ‘please the wiser sort’. Scholarly
understandings of differentiated sight and hearing can often be substantially traced
back to Andrew Gurr’s field-defining an important work, in which he distinguishes
‘the learned ear’ from ‘the shows of the common stage’, and ultimately, argues
that ‘Elizabethan audiences were hearers before they were spectators’, characterised
by ‘alertness to the oral rather than visual features’ of performance.
Whilst Gabriel Egan has long since questioned the hypothesis that early modern subjects
habitually spoke not of seeing but hearing a play, the propensity to characterise Shakespearean
drama as primarily linguistic in design has persisted, as part of a general tendency to
oppose sound and spectacle as alternative, rather than complementary, dramatic modalities.
Such distinctions between verbal craft and judicious hearing on the one hand, and broad
spectacle and illusory gazing on the other, invite a tidy but ultimately problematic sensory
separation between dramatists consciously targeting the ‘judicious’, and those who,
as Lukas Erne sees it, ‘knew they were producing little more than theatrical fast food’.
There were, certainly, distinctions drawn between playhouse looking and listening. Ben
Jonson is most often cited in this regard: late in his career, he claimed overtly that
good playgoers ‘come to heare, not see a Play’, preferring to ‘have you wise, | Much
rather by your eares, then by your eyes’. Similarly, in 1638, Jasper Mayne differentiates
Jonsonian ‘land-Tragedies’ from the spectacle of ‘Red-Bull wars’ laying ‘sieges to
the Musique Roome’ above the stage, albeit in conscious accord with Jonson’s own latterly-professed
views. Yet stark generalisations based on such claims simply do not reflect the full
evidence. A full archival survey finds a range of conflicting opinion, rather than a clear
consensus that in the playhouse, ears were judicious and eyes were common. In fact, quite
another opinion appears more popular, reflecting a fundamentally different understanding of
plays and playgoing: early modern sources repeatedly argue that good drama should appeal
to ears and eyes, and that good playgoers should therefore engage judiciously through
both senses. Even Jonson himself appears somewhat sympathetic
to this position in earlier years, particularly before his fall-out with Inigo Jones over
the priority of text and scenic design in court masques. During Shakespeare’s working
life, Jonson happily offered Epicœne (1609-10) as ‘the object of your eare, and sight’,
and he even invited ‘Gracious, and kind Spectators’ to ‘feast your eies’ on
Every Man Out of his Humour (1599) with perhaps merely partial sarcasm. This trope persisted
in stage prologues and print paratexts alike throughout the period: as late as the mid-1630s,
Joseph Rutter’s The Shepherd’s Holiday ‘present[ed] unto … eares, and eyes’
its drama of pastoral love, whilst James Shirley’s The Grateful Servant received praise for ‘[t]he
full delight of every eye and eare’ evoked by its performance in 1629, ‘grac’d with
comely action’. Significantly, whilst positioning Shirley as proto-‘literary’, this printed
paratext admires his visual and linguistic stagecraft, even recognising skilled theatrical
performers as essential partners in the realisation of Shirley’s dramatic intentions. Similarly,
a commendatory poem to Philip Massinger’s The Bond-Man (performed 1623) twice claims
that playgoers ‘Saw, and Heard’ as carefully as they could in the hope of ‘Understand[ing]’
the play, even whilst asserting that the play contains nothing to ‘take, by common way,
the common sight’. Playhouse looking may encompass ‘common sight’, but, it follows,
also takes other forms. Yet
more telling are complaints about playgoers’ ill-judged attempts to engage through anything
other than a balanced combination of ear and eye. Henry Glapthorne bemoans those who attend
through ear or eye alone, or eschew both in favour of self-display:
Some in an humorous squemishnesse will say, They only come to heare, not see the Play,
Others to see it only, there have beene, And are good store, that come but to be seene:
Not see nor heare the Play: How shall we then Please the so various appetites of men.
Certainly, there are overtones of frustration here at the play-makers’ lack of control
over playgoers’ engagements, emphasising the variety, individuation and unpredictability
of playhouse response. Nonetheless, Glapthorne’s prologue echoes a widespread and, by the late
1630s, extremely longstanding playhouse expectation of careful sight as well as hearing, indicating
the conventional combination of precise verbal and visual design. It is striking, too, that
Glapthorne appears to regard exclusively aural engagement as recognisably Jonsonian, rather
than a widespread playhouse behaviour: his satirical description of a ‘humorous’
playgoer squeamishly fixated on ‘hear[ing], not see[ing] the Play’, constitutionally
imbalanced to the point of sickliness, recalls Jonson’s two comedies of humours and their
outspoken writer in unsympathetic terms. Perhaps the most suggestive evidence of all
appears in J. G.’s Refutation of the Apology for Actors, responding to Thomas Heywood’s
1612 defence of his profession:
[W]hat a doubtful case would the use of playes then stand, if none but fooles (as commonly
they are) or none but blindmen were their auditors? the one kind could not understand,
the other could not see, and consequently neither give right judgement of them[.]
Simply to suggest that sightlessness results in partial experience of dramatic performance
seems fairly uncontroversial. However, to argue that ‘blindmen’ would be as unequipped
as ‘fooles’ to ‘give right judgement’ is to go considerably further. Accordingly,
visual attention is not only required, but must be explicitly critical and judicious
in order to engage with and assess a play adequately. Separations between unthinking
sight and censorious hearing simply do not obtain under this model of playhouse spectatorship.
Instead, the key question is whether an engagement is actively judicious, regardless of the organ
of perception. Later critical traditions privileging page
over stage have shaped a modern assumption that ‘[t]o simplify matters, performance
tends to speak to the senses, while a printed text activates the intellect’, as Lukas
Erne puts it. In early modern culture, however, this distinction between active linguistic
rationality (activated by text) and passive sensory feeling (spoken to by performance)
was not always so clear. Visual engagement was expected to be judicious, censorious and
thinking, shaping a theatrical culture in which playgoers were asked to bear a rational
and critical eye as a matter of course. Recent, seminal work by Gillian Woods takes important
steps towards recovering this culture. Taking the example of the dumb show, Woods argues
that such sights were neither empty of meaning, nor reductively symbolic. Instead, like language,
dumb shows required active, critical engagement; the difference was simply that eyes, rather
than ears, were prioritised. This dramaturgy of suggestion, rather than didacticism, in
turn fostered a playhouse culture of visually engaged interpretation and polysemous meaning:
‘[d]umb shows require understanding while simultaneously emphasizing that understanding
is challenging’. A more engaged and censorious model of playhouse
looking in turn enables a more precise understanding of complaints about the ‘common sight’
within a theatrical culture accustomed to both verbal and visual stagecraft. Such remarks
are rarely criticisms of sight and spectacle per se, but rather objections to unthinking
or uncritical spectatorship – thus, The Bond-Man could be praised both for what spectators
‘Saw, and Heard’, and for refusing to ‘take, by common way, the common sight’.
A similar distinction is at work in the printer Richard Jones’s claim that certain ‘fond
and frivolous Jestures’ that ‘have bene of some vaine conceited fondlings greatly
gaped at’ in performance are excised from his 1 & 2 Tamburlaine edition (1590). Strongly
implying passive, unthinking attention, such disparaging references to ‘gaping’ or
‘gazing’ spectators are common, including Stephen Gosson’s oft-cited warning that
‘the longer we gaze’ at theatrical ‘shewes’, ‘the more we crave’. Significantly, this
terminology has specific theological connotations in an early modern context: just as George
Hakewill imagines Catholics ‘gazing upon their dumb ceremonies’, so playhouse references
to gaping and gazing spectators are deliberate attempts to equate visual passivity in the
playhouse with idolatrous looking. Thus, ‘if we flocke to Theaters to gase upon playes,
we walke in the Counsell of the ungodly’, not only lacking discretion, but visibly reminiscent
of a practicer of idolatry. It is this specific mode of looking – passively
gazing upon an illusory, seductive sight – rather than critically engaged scrutiny with precise
visual stagecraft, that early modern commentators warn against in complaints about playhouse
looking, and it is crucial that such strictures are not taken to pre-empt the possibility
of a thoughtful, precise – even rich – visual playhouse culture. In light of the theatrical
expectations of judicious looking and sophisticated visual stagecraft traced in this section,
then, and informed by the previous section’s understanding of Hamlet as encouraging self-reflexive
engagement with a range of contemporary attitudes to sight beyond iconoclasm, we can now turn
to consider Shakespeare’s dramatic uses of playhouse looking.