The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare

Postscript: Where’s the Stage at the End of Satisfaction?

This book began with a discussion of a distinct Reformation doctrinal change; it then traced the significance of this change as it was intuited by and fashioned for the early modern stage. It has thus been concerned largely with dramatic content, with the ways in which the theater represented to its audience an early modern problem of satisfaction. But the stage also presented this problem, showing it to be an intrinsic element of theatrical performance and reception, a feature of theater-going.1 How can we describe and then explain this particular instance of the theater ’s metadramatic function, and what does it suggest about the place of the stage at the end of satisfaction? The provisional answers I offer here hinge on the highly overdetermined relationship between Renaissance drama, repentance, and satisfaction. As a business enterprise, the theater, like the systems of revenge, credit, and marriage we have studied, was poised upon a notion of compensatory exchange: the new and thrilling premise of the Elizabethan and Jacobean commercial stage was that patrons paid to see gratifying entertainment. This theatrical Postscript Where’s the Stage at the End of Satisfaction? exchange shared the signature quality we have observed in other matters of satisfaction: it straddled the boundaries of enough and more, of contentment and demand. Indeed, as Susan Cerasano has eloquently written, the professional theater depended upon the ambiguity of satis in order to “make money. In order for a spectator to enjoy a performance, he or she had to pay for admittance to see the play; and because of the evanescent nature of the performance, the spectator was required to pay admission again if he or she wished to see either a different play or a repeat performance of the same play.”2 And Jeremy Lopez suggests that the spectator’s enjoyment was bound up in theatrical excess, in the way early modern plays offered the audience a “surfeit of information.”3 Given the theater’s particular aesthetic and affective as well as business economy, then, it is not surprising that the enterprise absorbed and reproduced the period’s pressures on the parameters of satis. We can hear this response in various theatrical and para-theatrical texts, from prologues and epilogues that try to orchestrate audience approval to antitheatrical texts tormented by the excesses not only of the plays themselves but of the entire operation of play-going. Henry Crosse’s complaints about both a surfeit of contemporary plays and the class-defying extravagance of theater professionals are instructive in their rhetoric of increase: But if we oppose our quotidian interludes to them of former time, and consider the multitude of ours with the paucity and fewness of theirs, we shall see a great diversity as well in the method of writing, as in the time, place, and company: for now nothing is made so vulgar and common, as beastly and palpable folly; lust, under color of love, abstract rules artificially composed to carry the mind into sinful thoughts, with unclean locution and unchaste behavior.4 He similarly challenges the actors and dramatists who “grow rich, purchase lands by adulterous players . . . so are they puffed up in such pride and selflove as they envy their equals, and scorn their inferiors.”5 I want to suggest that this kind of sensitivity to theatrical exchange and its threat of increase would have been exacerbated by the concrete, performative connections between the stage and repentance. One of these connections , promulgated by antitheatrical opponents of the stage, was that the theater was a source of sin and thus required repentance. As Stephen Gos148 Postscript Where’s the Stage at the End of Satisfaction? 149 son suggests in his School of Abuse (1579), “the abuses of poets, pipers, and players . . . bring us to pleasure, sloth, sleep, sin, and, without repentance, to death and the devil.”6 At the same time, various writers and commentators insisted that drama actually encouraged—rather than obliged—repentance. A Warning for Fair Women, a Chamberlain’s Men’s play from the close of the sixteenth century, offers a suggestive anecdote of this function when one of its characters recounts the way in which a woman who killed her husband responds to a play with a similar plot: A woman that had made away her husband And sitting to behold a tragedy At Linne a towne in Norfolke, Acted by Players travelling that way, Wherein a woman that...