‘Audiences to this Act’

In 1579, just three years after London's first commercial theatre opened, the erstwhile playwright Stephen Gosson attacked his fellow dramatists for penning lines that ‘by the priuie entries of the eare, slip downe into the heart, & … gaule the minde’. Decades later, in a prologue most likely written in collaboration with John Ford, the actor Theophilus Bird complained that few plays were ‘understood by all who hear to see’. Writing from opposite ends of the roughly 60-year history of early modern English drama, Gosson and Bird occupy different cultural moments and, of course, hold contrary agendas. The dramatist-turned-antitheatricalist Gosson's attack on the theatre aims to persuade would be playgoers to stay away, while Bird's complaint, which introduces Ford's The Lady's Trial, is more of an advertisement for the play that follows. Yet there is much in their perspectives that is shared. For both men, early modern theatre is primarily aural. Whether its language slips into the ‘priuie entries of the eare’ to corrupt the listener from within or fires the imaginations of those who ‘hear to see’, drama is consumed by the ear, and its power or impotence is determined by its aural efficacy. Gosson imagines these effects as inevitable and deep. Sound slips inside the body whether the listener wishes it to or not, transforming the hearer fundamentally and absolutely.