UC Berkeley

Abstract

“Look how he looks!”: Queerness and Visual Pleasure in the Early Modern Theater

By

Mark Scott

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Jeffrey Knapp, Chair

“Look how he looks!”: Queerness and Visual Pleasure in the Early Modern Theater calls for a radical reassessment of visibility and visual pleasure in early modern theaters. Despite the recent flourishing of audience studies, accounts of theatergoing continue to rely (implicitly or explicitly) on a model of spectatorship derived from film and mass media theories: the singular gaze that surveys a framed and bounded visual field. This restrictive conception of spectatorship has obscured the multiplicity and instability of gazes that crisscross the playhouse during any given performance. Unlike the anonymous isolation experienced in a darkened cinema or a proscenium arch theater, shared-lighting amphitheaters with their thrust stages exposed spectators as well as actors to view. The visual hierarchy of the stage over the auditorium was destabilized by a competition for looks not only among actors vying for the attention of spectators, but also among spectators seeking the attention of other spectators, and even among spectators trying to catch the actors’ eyes: any supposed distinction between subject and object of the gaze was constantly shifting. Playwrights like Chrisopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare exploited the ways that such visual flux manifested ambiguities inherent in contemporary linguistic and scientific approaches to sight. In early modern English, words like “look,” “gaze,” and “eye” functioned as both verb and noun and troubled distinctions between active and passive, agent and patient. Early modern science generated similar confusions, offering two competing theories of vision: intromission (images penetrate the eye) and extromission (eyebeams penetrate the surrounding environment). This epistemological uncertainty fueled a preoccupation, amongst playwrights and antitheatricalists alike, with the dynamics of visibility. The questions went far beyond how an actor appeared to the audience. Playgoers too were urged to ask themselves, “How do I look?” “How does my being seen affect others, and myself?” “Should I be seen?” “Where should I look?” “Why is seeing and being seen so pleasurable?” These questions in turn helped shape how playwrights conceived of identity and selfhood. From Doctor Faustus to Richard II and Hamlet, the great “individuals” of the Elizabethan stage are overwhelmed by their awareness of being watched (“too much in the sun”) while they are also desperately competing with others for attention. The spectatorial self-consciousness of the period’s plays could only have been created with the eyes of early modern theatergoers in mind. In erasing binaries like looker and looked-at, penetrator and penetrated, male and female, and thus destabilizing traditionally gendered hierarchies of visual control and domination, playhouse gazing was a fundamentally queer pleasure – like playgoing itself. Studies of queerness in early modern drama often remain fixated on the stage and on the homoerotic spectacles enacted between boy players and adult actors. Yet the stage was by no means the playhouse’s only (or even primary) source of visual eroticism, which was instead dispersed throughout the theater in the dense webs of looks in which actors’ and spectators’ eyes were enmeshed during performances. Plays like Jonson’s Poetaster and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida explore how theaters functioned as cruising grounds for those looking for sodomitical sex (including, though not limited to, men seeking sex with men). I argue that theater became a site – and a sight – of sodomy because it facilitated a queer multiplicity of gazes and visual exchanges impossible in other early modern spaces. My project thereby contributes to the history of urban queer cruising, too often thought of exclusively in terms of the post-19th century male flaneur.