ABSTRACT
This study of early Scottish theatricality has necessarily emphasized spectatorship, since it is spectators before whom, and for whom, actions are displayed, and without whose presence (actual or notional) theatricality has no purpose. The final two chapters continue the process with two accounts by men who were themselves the spectators of shows rather than tellers of stories already partly formed by others. In this, the first, of these chapters, the eyewitness account is explicit about Early Modern public theatre, uses the terminology of drama, and recreates the theatrical experience intensely in a narrative context. It also illuminates the process of spectatorial perception. However, the theatricality which entered the written record was not that originally intended by those who were organizing the show. Instead the chronicler consigned the intended play to historical silence and chose to narrate the story of Skipper Lindsay, a reputed madman, who intruded his own display into the public space which a royal play was supposed to fill. Although the theatricality is overt and explicitly referred to by an eyewitness, this episode does still pose challenges for anyone who wishes to understand the nature of the narrative witness in which it appears, or to distinguish the original event from the later memorial and rhetorical forms in which it was left to posterity. The reason for this is that the recorder’s emotions were directly engaged by the show; his political and clerical ideals were deeply implicated in it, and his feelings of nostalgia for the past, dismay at the present and hopes for the future were themselves played out through his imaginative account of the show which he witnessed. In the end, the account became, in part, a record not of spectatorship but of vicarious actorship.
