Introduction

Summary

In The Gull's Horn-Book (1609), a satirical advice-book for gallants, Thomas Dekker describes the playhouse as a

poets’ Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses, that are now turned to merchants, meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words - plaudities, and the breath of the great beast; which, like the threatenings of two cowards, vanish all into air. Players are their factors, who put away the stuff, and make the best of it they possibly can, as indeed ‘tis their parts so to do.

For Dekker and his contemporaries, as for modern scholars, the theatre is immersed in the marketplace of which it so often speaks. The scene here is not the garret of the romantic imagination, but the playhouse: ‘poets’ is immediately followed - and redefined - by the Royal Exchange on Threadneedle Street, the commercial heart of London; ‘Muses’ ‘are now turned to merchants’ - language is a ‘light commodity to ‘barter away’. Dekker's words bespeak a world of commerce and exchange, metaphor and simile displacing meaning - an apt conjuring of the economic imperative that governed the playhouse. The ‘poets'’ hope for ‘plaudities’ from ‘the great beast’ (the audience) is dependent on their ‘factors’, the actors whose ‘parts so to do’ are literally and metaphorically their role in this economy. There could hardly be a more appropriate way of capturing the material and theatrical realities of playmaking in early modern England.

That the stage was driven by money rather than muse is now a commonplace. Dekker's burlesque is typical of a genre that takes London as its subject, and for a playwright who spent as much of his adult life in debtors’ prison as in the theatre his complaint is no doubt sincere as much as satirical. If it chimes with a broader, economically carnivorous world beyond the liberties in which the outdoor playhouses flourished, however, it also registers the stage's internal economy, and in particular a long-neglected feature of playmaking. It is only a slight exaggeration to describe dramatists and actors as ‘merchants’ and ‘factors’ (though misleading in class terms), for the raw material of the play script was indeed purchased by players, who fashioned a play for performance before ‘the great beast’. This process was, in its linearity, a production line, but it was also a collaborative relationship.