Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England by Allison P. Hobgood (review)

In Passionate Playgoing Allison Hobgood invites us to imagine the porous, susceptible, 'corporeally gener[ous]' (61), humoural bodies of playgoers in the theatres of early modern England and consider not only what they might have felt, but also how their presence was essential to the production of affective meaning. If, in other words, as recent studies of the passions demonstrate, early modern playgoers understood their bodies as porous conveyors of emotions that were in constant flux, then it follows that playgoers were not merely passive receptacles of the passions imposed upon them by theatrical conventions and passionate acting, but also active participants in the communal market of emotional exchange that was the early modern playhouse. Hobgood's hypothesis makes sense within the framework of humoural theory, and she succeeds in articulating the importance of this vantage point for gaining a more nuanced understanding of early modern drama. Her work contributes to the growing field of audience studies in which, as Nova Myhill and Jennifer A. Low explain, even though 'audiences … are imaginary creations, assemblages of ambiguous fragments of textual and external evidence, there is a great deal to be said for allowing these pieces of evidence to speak to each other … to develop hypotheses that let us conceive of the early modern audience as a vital partner in the production of meaning in early modern England'.¹ In an introductory essay, five case studies, and a coda, Hobgood harnesses an impressive range of scholarship in pursuit of this objective. As her 'initial foray' into how early modern playgoers may have influenced the drama (24), she approaches the 'The Mousetrap' in Hamlet from a new angle, arguing that Claudius's abrupt departure from the play demonstrates 'the King's conscious refusal to enable or collaborate further with a performance he knows to be dependent upon — even exploitative of — his capacity to receive emotion' (25). Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 present Macbeth, The Spanish Tragedy, A Woman Killed With Kindness, and Twelfth Night respectively as case studies in the reciprocal performance of early modern affectivity. Each chapter explores the fluid exchange of passion from a different perspective that conceives of the early modern playhouse as an emotionally risky, sometimes dangerous place where playgoers 'might have attended performances to experience their passions fully and meet head-on their terrifying "fury"' (187).

Her essay on Macbeth focuses on the 'insidious' nature of fear that pervades the play (42). Playgoers were likely to have been 'irradiat[ed]' by this fear (61), a phenomenon that would become augmented in the communal atmosphere of the playhouse as it coursed through the audience. In this way playgoers 'collaborated in an emotional transaction that depended, at the very least, on their deeply embodied presence' (61). If Macbeth posed a perilous adventure for playgoers who exposed themselves to the dangers of 'fear-sickness', The Spanish Tragedy offered an antidote to a different kind of fear.

In chapter 2 Hobgood argues that audiences of The Spanish Tragedy helped to produce the 'Genre-effect' of Revenge Tragedy, which she construes as assuaging 'annihilationist fears' by immortalizing the protagonist (77). In her view the audience 'affectively resonates' Hieronimo's emotions as he 'narcissistically shifts the focus from Horatio's passing to his own intense affective responses to death' (70). This shift transforms his 'vengeful act of honoring his dead son' into 'a desperate act of self-commemoration made possible only via the emotional participation of early modern playgoers' (70). Hieronimo's longevity in English memory attests to the success of the genre-effect Hobgood intuits.

Chapter 3 proposes an opposite method of theatrical humoural remedy, moving from Hieronimo's self-immortalization to Anne Frankford's self-immolation. While The Spanish Tragedy served as a salve against obliteration, Heywood's A Women Killed with Kindness offered a Paracelsian form of theatrical homoeopathy in which poison is cured with poison. Drawing upon Tanya Pollard's work in Drugs and Theater,² Hobgood argues that the audience ingested the wayward emotions...