ABSTRACT
In addressing these questions, it is important to consider the fact that the plays were designed for performance in a public, commercial theater. Peter Womack has argued that as an urban and commercial institution, London theater helped to make the playgoers themselves members of a new kind of imagined community (Womack 1992:91-145). In traditional guild theater, which was performed in, by, and for specific local communities, actors and audience were known to one another. On religious holidays a series of plays based on stories from the Old and New Testaments was performed sequentially at various stations or places within a medieval town. Rather than formal theaters, the place of performance was often a pageant wagon. Numerous members of the community were involved in these productions, each of which was sponsored by one of the town guilds. Those who were not actors in the performance helped with preparation or participated as audience members watching the enactment of the timeless truths of biblical history. The London commercial theater, however, operated on different principles. The actors were professionals; the scripts were usually secular in content and were produced as commercial entertainments; novelty was as important as familiarity in making these scripts commercially successful; members of the audience were not necessarily known to one another or to the actors. In such conditions, the practice of playgoing helped to establish community in conditions of anonymity. This imagined community was not so much based on personal acquaintance and familiarity, shared history, and prior relationships, as on the shared conditions of theatrical spectatorship in a commercializing culture and the shared temporality of theatrical enactment.
