Matteo Pangallo

On January 13, 1583, London’s Paris Garden amphitheater collapsed, killing eight and wounding hundreds. Puritans saw divine punishment. Preacher John Field, for example, proclaimed that the people, “being thus ungodlilie assembled, to so unholy a spectacle[,] the mightie hand of God [struck] this gallerie…flat to the ground.” While theater’s opponents read the incident as a sign of divine disapproval of purpose-built entertainment venues, theater’s apologists read it as a sign that purpose-built venues should be constructed more soundly. As it turned out, thirty-one years later, John Field’s son Nathan was the starring actor at the new, sturdily built Paris Garden playhouse.

Theater’s makers, consumers, and opponents had ample opportunities to develop various, often competing, interpretations of failures and, more fundamentally, to determine how such incidents required interpretation at all. In addition to obvious sensational failure of infrastructure, as at Paris Garden in 1583 or the Globe fire of 1613, plays in performance often fell short of expectations, such as Ben Jonson’s Sejanus (1604), Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), and many others. But what was it about these plays that made them “failures”, and what did that concept mean in the period? Metatheatrical representations of plays provide one site for exploring answers to these questions since so many plays-within-plays seem to depict theatrical failure. But is, for example, “Pyramus and Thisbe” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream actually a failure? Overly literal, highly declamatory, a generic shambles, the show nonetheless achieves the goals set for it by its makers – namely, obtaining recognition and reward from the Duke. Hamlet’s “The Mousetrap” cannot complete its performance because it succeeds in doing what its maker intended for it: provoking Claudius into an involuntary display of guilt. Is “The Mousetrap” a failure? Perhaps it is more useful to ask what understandings about the productive nature of theatrical failure these moments signal.

Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England will explore aesthetic, material, commercial, and dramatic failure in early modern English theatrical culture. How and why did performances, plays, players, and theatrical materials fail in early modern England and how were those failures understood in the period? The book’s focus is upon the professional, commercial playhouses of London, but it also looks at telling examples in household entertainments, academic drama, civic pageants, and court masques. The aim of the project is to recover the constitutive role failure played in the development of dramatic culture in Shakespeare’s time and the ways in which the newly commercial theater became a site for the secularization of failure in the culture at large. In addition to understanding how these failures occurred, this project is interested in how commentators in the period made meaning out of them. As Lisa Le Feuvre notes, because “failure is endemic in the context of creative acts, [the essential] question [is] not whether something is a failure, but rather how that failure is harnessed.”[1] How was theatrical failure understood, justified, and used by different cultural and political agents in the period? How did the theater’s development from an occasional event into a network of commercialized cultural institutions contribute to the opportunistic “drift into failure” that Sidney Dekker identifies as inherent to complex, competitive systems?[2] Or perhaps the question should be reversed: how did the tendency for the complex system of early modern theatrical culture to “drift into failure” contribute to its development?

Sara Jane Bailes urges that “failure is intrinsically bound up with artistic production,” and yet little scholarship has been devoted to historicizing the occurrence and concept of failure in early modern dramatic culture.[3] Recent work by Ellen Mackay, Richard Preiss, Michael Witmore, and Julian Yates has started the conversation, but a systematic analysis bringing elements of the nascent multidisciplinary field of failure studies into the context of Shakespeare’s stage is still needed.[4] Ample material exists for such a study: the history of theater teems with disappointments and debacles, moments providing both counterexamples to help us better understand theatrical success and insights into how playmakers and consumers perceived the stakes, functions, and nature of drama itself. This project draws upon theorists who view failures as watershed moments for cultural projects. Paul Virilio, for example, argues that in any artistic context, failure “reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive.”[5] Or, as Bailes puts it, in the theater, “accident itself is positive.”[6] Equally pertinent is Julian Yates’s interest in “those moments when techniques fail…and in what kinds of knowledge may derive from such acts of misconstrual or catastrophe.”[7] Failure brings what is acceptable, traditional, and desirable to light because, as Nicole Antebi points out, “a culture’s failures…have the most to say about that culture’s beliefs and values.”[8]

Failure encompasses a broad range of potential events in the theater, but Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England focus upon three particular domains. The first is the failure of plays in their creation or performance, either in their inability to attract commercial support or aristocratic patronage or in lacking, to a contemporary witness, a minimum standard of conventional craftsmanship or artistic originality. These incidents include disrupted or halted performances, intruding or disengaged audiences, unfinished plays, plays rejected by companies, and plays that disappeared from repertories after one staging. The second domain is the troupe; the project’s interest here is in what brought about the end of the companies that dissolved, disbanded, or otherwise disappeared from the historical record. Why is it that in the few instances when an explanation was given for these events in the period, blame was placed not upon artistic choices but upon external factors such as plague closures, unfair business practices, royal pressure, or legal problems? The third domain involves the fortunes of theatrical materials; in this, the book considers how the failure of infrastructure, such as buildings and other venues, and of semiotic objects, such as costumes and props, resulted in technical innovations but also raised new questions about both the moral position and representational function of drama.

Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England proposes building a narrative of the history of early modern theater as an annal of its failures, charting when breakdown occurred in any of the three domains. In order to decode discourses of failure in the period, the book will develop new close readings of descriptions of theatrical failure that appear in paratexts –prefaces, dedicatory epistles, commendatory verses, prologues and epilogues, and so forth – as well as their representation in dramatic texts – including printed and manuscript plays, inductions, and masques. It will also analyze descriptions of failure in other early modern texts, such as theological tracts and sermons, science manuals, works of poetics, and political treatises, in order to understand how concepts of failure in the theater fit within the period’s broader paradigms of collapse, malfunction, and inadequacy. Finally, the book will draw upon archival research, such as contracts and legal records, financial records, diaries and journals, commonplace books and miscellanies, and other forms of documentary evidence, in order to excavate the actual causes of various theatrical failures and thus testing the claims made by commentators in the period.

Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England will provide a cohesive and comprehensive study of the history of failure in the early modern playhouse and make use of specific examples of failure in each domain to construct a new way of understanding the early modern stage in particular and early modern culture in general. If, as philosopher John Roberts argues, error and misjudgment are constructive, to what extent did early modern theatrical culture harness that potential, to what ends, and what can that teach us about early modern ideas about “failure” more broadly?[9] The goal of this project is to answer this question by taking up Yates’s idea of analyzing “those moments when the storied ‘environments’ of Renaissance England fail to make sense”;[10] however, while Yates turns to physical objects from daily life, Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England applies that methodology to the particular “storied ‘environment’” of the Shakespearean stage.

1 Lisa Le Feuvre, “Strive to Fail”, in Lisa Le Feuvre, ed., Failure (MIT Press, 2010), 15.
2 Sidney Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems (Ashgate, 2011).
3 Sara Jane Bailes, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (Routledge, 2011), 1.
4 Ellen Mackay, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford University Press, 2001). Julian Yates, Error Misuse Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (University of Delaware Press, 2003).

5 Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art (MIT Press, 2005), 63.
6 Bailes, 11.
7 Yates, xix.
8 Nicole Antebi, et al, Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2008), 12.

9 John Roberts, The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011).

10 Yates, 9.