Play-Audience Relationship in Bartolome de Torres Naharro

PLAY-AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP IN BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES NAHARRO JOHN LIHANI, University of Kentucky In this brief study I touch on the functional dramatic aspects of the play-audience relationship, look at the types of audiences that attended Torres Naharro's plays, and note his reactions to them as these reactions are expressed in his prologues and in the body and epilogues of a selection of his dramatic works.(1) An examination of the play-audience relationship provides information not only for a better understanding of the plays and the nature of the dominant forces that shape them, but also provides an insight to the character of the dramatist himself. Torres Naharro composed his dramatic pieces between the years 1503 and 1520 and had them performed during that period before mixed Spanish and Italian audiences in Rome and Naples, and possibly in other Italian localities as well.(2) The playwright either consciously or subconsciously weighs various factors, besides literary tradition and the type of story he is writing, when he determines the essential elements of the play's structure. He considers the duration of the play, the place of the performance, and to a significant extent the kind of audience for which he is writing. These concerns are reflected in different ways in different works. I will examine here a portion of Torres Naharro's plays to view how the play-audience relationship is manifested, and to note how it functions in them. First, a few general observations are in order. There are at least two types of audience: the popular audience and the particular audience.(3) Each has certain characteristics: members of the popular audience generally delight injokes at the expense of their employers. They also enjoy anecdotes on strangers and foreigners because a popular audience tends to have a strong sense of patriotism. On the other hand, members of the particular audience get much of their satisfaction from the fact that they are an elite group.(4) The particular audience finds pleasure in the exotic and in humor that is exclusive. Yet both the popular and the particular audiences seek diversion; even in this, however, the particular audience is especially interested in the entertaining aspect of the function. Since both types of audience are pleased when they see a version of a familiar story with coetaneous overtones, Torres Naharro's comedias a noticia such as the Tinellaria and the Soldadesca, dealing with current events, were especially geared for«the here and the now» aspect of audience gratification. The spectators were probably quick to spot references to contemporary events and persons, and enjoyed recognizing such topical allusions. 95 96Bulleetin of the Comediantes In the search for evidence of the types of audiences that attended Bartolom é de Torres Naharro's plays, it becomes clear that his audience was not limited to an elite or courtly one, as J. A. Meredith once believed,(5) but rather it embodied a cross-section of the populace representing various levels of society. Granted, the audience was comprised in part by the particular or court audience, but it likewise included the servant and popular class. Consequently, even when the playwright catered to the noble element, as he did in the prologue to his Tinellaria, there were in the audience, in addition to nobles, many chance visitors such as soldiers, merchants, foreigners, newly acquired servants, and others drawn from different walks of life. When the audiences assembled to forget for a brief period their struggles for livelihood, or perchance when they gathered to escape the boredom of a leisurely life, both types, the particular and the popular audiences, expected to be amused and amazed by the actors, and also to discover, or be reminded of, some meaning to their existence. When private festivities were celebrated by histrionic presentations in affluent palaces, it was probably the servant class which most appreciated such occasions. In the kitchens, the servants enjoyed the pickings of the feast offered in the palace, and from around or behind the tables and chairs, or just standing in the doorways and along the walls of large dining halls, or up in their galleries, they caught views of the day's entertainment, as they sought a...