ABSTRACT
This chapter details the activities of unruly audiences, focusing on playhouse riots. Riots, especially apprentice riots, were common in early modern London, and playwrights, playing companies and the London authorities took these riots very seriously. In fact, whenever a riot occurred near the theaters, the playhouses were shut down. In other words, the London authorities often punished the theaters for the actions of their audiences. This antitheatrical bias was exacerbated by humanist and Protestant theories of language and rhetoric which highlighted the causal relationship between the speaker or rhetor and the audience. For educated early moderns, it made sense to blame the plays for the actions of the playgoers since the purpose of plays was to produce action in the audience. But when those actions got the theaters closed, the livelihood of the companies was endangered. This led the playwrights to find ways of controlling their audiences through their plays. They used metadrama, or inset plays, to teach their audiences how to be less reactive in a bid to keep their playhouses open. The chapter concludes with a brief theoretical justification of the techniques of analysis by drawing on structural Marxists such as Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou.
