What the Filk?: An Interview with Sally Childs-Helton (Part One)

This is the third in an ongoing series of interviews running across this year showcasing new and emerging work in fandom and fandom studies. I figured it was time to bring this blog back to its roots.

Sally and Barry Childs-Helton, filkers

In my 1992 book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, I wrote about three primarily modes of fan expression -- fan fiction, vidding, and filking. Of the three, the least research has been done to date, at least in fandom studies, about filking or for that matter, other genres of fan music such as Wizard Rock and Nerdcore. I gather that the concept of participatory culture is being taken up in various ways among researchers working on music education. I was thus surprised last year when I received an email from Sally Childs-Helton, one of the many filkers I corresponded with several decades ago when I was pulling together that chapter. She shared with me an article she had recently published about the contemporary filking scene for The Journal of Fandom Studies, and shared with me some reflections on how she was picking up her analysis where mine left off:

I used your chapter in Textual Poachers as my jumping-off point to see where filk has gone in the intervening years, and specifically to see what impact internet culture has had on the tradition.  I didn’t set out specifically to look at generational changes, but this came out strongly as a theme in my fieldwork and secondary research.  As one of your informants for the filk chapter, it also made sense for me to start there, and because there has been almost no work done on filk in 20+ years. Your chapter was published just as online culture was starting to take off.  I feel like my article documents filk at another transitional point, when Boomers are starting to age out of filk and Millennials are moving to other forms of geek and nerd music that do not value face-to-face interaction in the same way.  It was extremely useful for me personally and professionally to do this research because I deal with participatory media in higher education on a daily basis.  There are younger scholars doing excellent research on the relationships that Millennials have to geek and nerd and other fannish musics, and I look forward to reading their work.  It’s also spurred me on to do continued research about filk because the tradition offers a lot of insight into generational changes in preferences regarding how music is created and consumed, as well as the interplay of online and face-to-face communities.

Coming out of that correspondence, I wanted to share with my readers some of her insights about filk then and now and about why as someone who has been performing filk for most of her life she is just now integrating it into her professional life as an ethnomusicologist.

Filk is often described as the “folk music” of the fan community. In what ways is this an accurate or inaccurate description?

Filk, as it is now practiced, grew out of the simultaneous growth of the Folk Music Revival and science fiction and fantasy conventions (SF/F cons) in the 1950s and 1960s, though there was earlier informal singing done from song sheets (in the style of college song sing-alongs) at the earliest cons.  Science fiction fans who were also folk music fans began bringing their guitars to SF/F cons and sharing folk music with each other.  Soon folk tunes sprouted fannish lyrics, often parodic in nature.  As filk grew, people began writing original words and music, and filk began to spread beyond the original genre of folk music into all popular music genres.  So filk’s foundation is in the Folk Music Revival, though it has grown beyond the folk genre to include almost every popular music form and other genres as well.  Still, many filk songs are folk-based, or rely heavily on the structure of folk songs so they may be easily learned so everyone can participate. 

It is also a folk music in that it was traditionally shared (and still is today) in small, face-to-face groups.  Filkers most value the filk circle, in which everyone is welcome to perform, with the expectation that the main performer be joined (especially on choruses) by everyone in the room, while other people may add other instrumental parts, shtick (often choreographed hand or body movements), and even dancing.  Performers take turns leading songs, but the line between performer and audience is often eradicated, creating a communal music event.

Further, filk is a folk music in that it was traditionally spread by word-of-mouth or orally/aurally, with people learning songs from each other.  Early filkers also wrote down song texts in notebooks and recorded performances on cassette recorders to more easily learn songs.  Filk fanzines were created to spread filk lyrics, lyric books (often called filk hymnals) were printed and sold, and small press filk studios began releasing live recordings of music performed at cons in filk rooms, and later studio-produced recordings of individual filkers.  Now filkers share everything online using all forms of social media, but many still keep paper notebooks of songs, or have transferred them to tablet music software for ease of transport and access.  So filk began being shared, like all folk music, aurally and orally.  This is still happening, long after the advent of very inexpensive recording equipment, a cottage industry of filk recordings, and the many forms of sharing offered by the internet.

Early SF/F fandom was very much a folk activity in that it was face-to-face activity in small groups.  Cons were run by the fans themselves.  Filk still exists at almost exclusively fan-run cons, both general SF/F cons and filk cons.  As commercial cons developed around franchises (e.g. Star Trek, Dr. Who), there was no room for filk, though room was made for other fannish activities created during the earliest days of fandom, including costuming (now called cosplay), and in costume contests and hall costuming.  The role of music at these commercial cons has taken on a more commercial direction with the development of geek and nerd music (more on this later).  So filk is a folk activity in that it almost exclusively exists today at fan-run SF/F cons and is rarely found at commercial cons.

Can you describe the context(s) where filk music is most often performed? As scholars are more and more interested in what conditions may encourage cultural and social participation, what lessons might we take away from the structures that sustain the filk sing as a space of participatory music making?

As mentioned above, the traditional and most valued venue for filk music is in the filk room.  In the early days, this was often any empty hotel space a small group of proto-filkers could commandeer, including service hallways, stairwells, unlocked function rooms, and even service elevators.  Filkers began asking for their own programming space at cons, and the contemporary filk room was born.  Filkers often inhabit these rooms all night long, singing until breakfast.  When the group gets too large, or the music in the room takes a topical or mood turn some people don’t like, they simply leave and find another room or an empty hallway and continue singing.

As filk grew it began attracting more and more musicians, including professional and semi-professional players.  These people were soon asked to do concerts at general fan-run cons, and now most fan-run general and filk cons have programming tracks dedicated to filk concerts.  It is also common for filkers to provide the “half-time” entertainment during masquerade contests while the judges are out deliberating.  These concerts opened up the idea of filk to fans who have other fannish interests—gaming, costuming, literature, manga, anime, movie and TV shows, art, etc.—and even though these fans do not often enter a filk room, they provide enthusiastic audiences for filk performers.  Interestingly, many of the participatory behaviors found in the filk room carry over into the concert venue, and audience members are expected to sing along on choruses, engage in shtick, and dance.  There is more of a performer/audience divide, but still there is a participatory atmosphere.  Granted, audiences sing along and dance at rock concerts as well, providing a participatory element, but in the filk room the level of participation often crosses into real-time group co-creation.

Filking is also found at house filks in areas where there are enough filkers for people to gather occasionally to share music and community.  These have much in common with all forms of music house parties across many genres and around the world where people gather to share music, friendship, and food and drink.  We forget that until well into the 20th century all music was heard live because recorded music formats and radio and TV did not exist or were unaffordable by most.  There are places in the world yet today where this is the case.  There are also house concerts where someone will host a local or regional filker, or one passing through town.  Often admission is charged, or the hat is passed, to help pay the musician and to offset the costs of travel and hosting the musician.  House concerts are now common performance venues for indie musicians; for the cousins of filkers, geek and nerd musicians; and for other musicians with niche audiences.

As mentioned, filkers most value face-to-face venues for music making because it allows for full community participation that cannot yet be recreated online.  Yet filkers are also doing live concerts online and posting performances to YouTube.  There is still a strong market for small press filk recordings (CDs are still selling well), and more filkers are making their music available as downloads either for free or for sale.  While most filkers prefer their music live, these online and recorded media formats are considered better than not hearing filk music at all.

I have been pondering why cosplay, another form of fan creativity from the earliest days of SF/F fandom, has gone so mainstream that it is highly popular at fan-run and commercial cons; the SYFY channel even created the show Cosplay Mêlée.  Filk, on the other hand, will never see a TV show called Filk-Off.  The reason, I believe, is context.  While both costume and song creation can happen in private, both need audiences to appreciate the product.  Cosplayers can exhibit their creations by simply walking around the halls of a con, whereas filkers need dedicated space conducive to performing and auditing music.  Granted, I have seen mini-concerts set up near registration tables at cons to entertain people waiting in line.  But a crowded hotel hallway is no place for a lone filker to perform so that his or her music can be appreciated.  Thus the filk room and concert hall remain the idealized spaces and structures for participatory music making.           

Filk can be described as a subcultural practice, but some are arguing that many fannish and nerdish pursuits have become absolutely mainstream. Does fandom still need to define its identity as a community through developing distinctive forms of music and other creative expression?

Many scholars studying fandoms say everybody’s a fan of something (Go Cubs!).  With popular and social medias now so deeply entwined in people’s daily lives, I would agree that fannish and nerdish activities have become mainstream (witness the popularity of TV shows like Big Bang Theory, which celebrate nerd culture).  You can walk into any big box store and walk out with everything from t-shirts to guitars to duct tape to women’s underwear adorned with current popular media characters.  So in this way fannish culture has become totally normalized and commercialized.

But I believe this normalization has been an even greater motivation for people to continue creating their own distinctive and unique—not mass-produced—creative expressions based in the characters and stories they find most meaningful.  From the beginning of popular culture people have been finding ways to interact at a very personal level with fictional worlds, characters, and stories that resonate with them.  In the late 1800s people were writing music based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  Fans of early science fiction pulp magazines wrote fan fiction.  Grade school students remade the first Indiana Jones movie using consumer-grade video cameras.  So fans have been “poaching” for a very long time, and aren’t likely to stop.  There is a huge difference in the person who buys a cheap Darth Vader costume to wear to a Halloween party and the fan who spends his senior year of high school hand-building a costume and working an after-school job to afford the materials.

For me, this illustrates that there are distinct levels of fandom and commitment and engagement, as well as a need (or not) for creative expression.  Some fans are happy to attend a screening of Rogue One wearing a t-shirt they bought, while others have spent months creating a costume.  Some people will discuss the movie at the water cooler the next day, while others will write fan fiction or filk songs, or create paintings.  So some fans interact with a text mostly as consumers, while others interact at a very personal and creative level.  I’m not saying that the person who buys the t-shirt isn’t creative—she or he may be a master chef or woodworker—but that some fans will engage in deeply creative activities because a certain world or character or story is personally meaningful.  For some people, buying the t-shirt isn’t personally or creatively satisfying.  It’s the difference between a commercially produced and a self-made item.  It’s also the difference between the old fannish camps that still exist today and are labeled as the FIAWOLers (Fandom is a Way of Life) and the FIJAGDH faction (Fandom is Just a Goddamned Hobby).

I believe that certain people in SF/F fandom (almost always FIAWOLers) need to define their personal identities through activities specifically in community with other like-minded people.  They may be costumers, filkers, LARPers, gamers, fan fiction writers, etc., and they most often form communities both face-to-face and online.  The strongest communities seem to have a large face-to-face component, though the online activities of the community are important binders between face-to-face events.  It is easier for practitioners of some forms of fannish creativity to form satisfying communities online, like fan fiction writers, who can easily share and receive feedback quickly and broadly.  Other fannish activities are easier to appreciate in person.  For example, cosplayers want to see a costume up close, feel the material, see how it was constructed, and watch it move on the wearer.  This is impossible to do online.  The aesthetics of filk make it another community that needs to come together in person from time to time.

For some people, the opportunities for having their creative output appreciated are strongest in a particular fandom.  For example, my singer/songwriter husband had been writing intricate songs with dense and highly literate lyrics for years before we found SF/F fandom and filking.  He had been performing in coffee houses and other singer/songwriter venues, and the lyrics were going right over almost everyone’s heads.  The first time he performed in a filk circle every person got it, and there were mutterings of “Who IS this guy?  Where did he come from?”  Clearly, he had found his audience, the people who immediately understood and appreciated his music, even when it was not overtly on science fiction themes.

I believe most people need to express themselves creatively in some way, be it playing music, creating art, writing, cooking, styling hair, writing code, doing surgery, restoring historic homes, or the myriad ways in which human beings are creative.  We all need to find a community that appreciates our creativity, and for some people it’s the SF/F community.  Fandom doesn’t need to express itself through distinctive forms of music and other creative expressions, but individual people DO need to express themselves, and various fannish subcultures provide them with an appreciative and supportive community.    

Filk is an expansive category both musically and in terms of its content, so who determines whether a particular song constitutes filk and is appropriate to sing at such a gathering?

On the whole, filkers are an incredibly democratic, open-minded, and kind group, so the most common definition of filk is “anything you hear in a filk room.”  Often the lyrics have to do with SF/F and technological topics, but there are just as many lyrics that do not.  I’ve heard songs on topics as dissimilar as having a miscarriage to the contents of the singer’s kitchen junk drawer.  The simple answer to what determines if it’s filk or not is context and intent.  My favorite example is David Bowie’s tune “Space Oddity.”  Bowie never wrote it with the intention of it being filk; I doubt the man ever heard the word.  When astronaut Chris Hadfield performed “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station in 2013, he was certainly not performing it as filk.  But when it’s performed by a filker in the filk room or in a filk concert, it’s filk of a particular sort—found filk.  Many tunes from the geek and nerd music genre are also performed in the filk room and are considered filk in that context. 

Some professional and semi-professional musicians who also filk will do the same tunes during bar or coffee house gigs that they do in the filk room.  For example, the filk standard “Black Davie’s Ride” (performed here at a filk convention) is often performed by filkers who also play Celtic and Renaissance fair venues, where audiences hear a classic highwayman song.  When it’s performed in a filk setting, the context is much richer because listeners know the songwriter, that she passed away much too young, and they remember her and her other filk songs.  The context and intent are totally different at a Celtic fair versus the filk room. 

You are a veteran filk performer and composer, yet you’ve only recently started incorporating this knowledge and experience into your scholarship. Why have you kept these two aspects of your life separate for so long and what’s changed now?

When I was doing my M.A. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and folklore in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the general thinking was that researchers should not study their own cultures or subcultures because it created a lack of objectivity; researchers could miss vital things because they took them for granted, even though it was acknowledged that it also gave a person greater access to deeper understanding.  We were encouraged to study instead cultures or subcultures that were different from our own to ensure greater objectivity.  So part of my reticence came from the professional philosophy that existed when I was doing my graduate work. 

The more personal reason boiled down to professional ethics and integrity.  My husband and I did not enter the filk community as researchers but as members and practitioners.  As we were embraced by the filk community, I didn’t want people to think that I was there with the purpose of doing research or using them in any way.  We were starting to meet and make good friends from all over the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, and I was not willing to taint these relationships with any misunderstanding about why I was participating in the community.  The filk community is a very special and supportive place where people can grow as musicians and people.  The filk circle, in particular, is for many filkers almost sacred space where you come with good intentions, to offer the best you have, to help make a high-quality creative environment for everyone, and to offer support. 

I came into filk already a full-blown musician and performer at a time when many filkers were beginning or intermediate-level players.  For people who are at the beginning of their musical journeys, the filk room must be a safe place.  I was not willing to create even a whiff of an appearance that I would be breaking the trust of the filk circle in any way.  Less experienced musicians take huge personal risks every time they perform; it takes a lot of courage, especially for people who have had a lifetime of being told they aren’t musical or they aren’t creative.  As we first entered the community, I was also doing a lot of accompanying in therapeutic environments, in particular accompanying a dance and movement therapy class.  I quickly recognized the therapeutic aspects of the filk room, though it is much more than that.  So my professional integrity stopped me from actively studying filk, thought I will admit it was impossible to turn off my ethnomusicologist’s brain that was analyzing what I was seeing and hearing.  You hear about social scientists who “go native;” I ended up doing the opposite, being a native who “went academic.”  In 2003 my husband and I were inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame.  We didn’t realize we were to give speeches, so we spoke extemporaneously.  The speeches were recorded and transcribed as "This is My Tribe," which documents our relationship with the filk community, and why I was so reticent to do anything to break the community’s trust.

What motivated me to start writing about filk was an invitation to submit a paper for a special issue on music for the Journal of Fandom Studies.  I had been reading in popular culture and fandom studies all along, and was aware that fandom studies considers it a strength to conduct research as an insider; indeed, the idea of the “acafan” has been around for quite some while.  I’ve been in the filk community for over 30 years now and people know me as a mentor and supporter who often does workshops on various aspects of musicianship at cons.  I’ve earned the community’s trust and it knows how much I value it.  Over the past years the larger filk community has had a continuing discussion about how to attract younger generations, Millennials in particular, and what to do about the graying of filkdom as Baby Boomers are starting to age out.  The time seemed right for me to contribute both to fandom studies and to the filk community by conducting research on filk almost 25 years after your documentation of filk in Textual Poachers (for which I was an informant).  I let the community know what I was doing through online forums and at cons, and filkers who responded to my questionnaire and who gave me interviews were eager to participate.  So far I have only received positive comments about my research, and I intend to continue it with the community’s support.  There is much more to be said about research from the insider’s and outsider’s point-of-view, but I felt I finally reached a point where using my academic skills to study filk would be useful to the community, and I could do it without breaking its trust.        

Sally Childs-Helton, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist, percussionist, and archivist; she holds the rank of Professor at Butler University.  Away from university duties, she is active as a musician and facilitator who conducts drumming and improvisation workshops; performs with her husband Barry, eclectic Celtic band Wild Mercy, and the Thin Air improvising quartet; and accompanies choruses, dance, and theater.  She has been active in the filk community since 1984, was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 2003, and has won several Pegasus Awards for Excellence in Filking.  Her current music research interests include musical fandoms, generational aspects of fandoms, and artistic sign language as musical expression.

How Young Activists Use Social Media for Social Change: A Transnational Perspective

I wrote this blog post for DML Central and it is being reposted here with their permission. 

Nabela Noor, a young American Muslim Youtube personality, was born of Bangladeshi parents and had developed a large following based on her make-up tutorials and fashion advice. Frustrated by what she saw as Islamaphobic discourse in American society, intensified by Donald Trump’s candidacy for president, she recorded and shared with her followers a powerful statement, “Dear America.”

Speaking directly to the camera, the 22 year old describes herself as “an American through and through” who is also a Muslim, shared the ways her schoolmates responded differently to her after 9/11, and discussed the chilling climate her family members faced as they went about their normal lives.

Sangita Shresthova, the research director for our USC-based Civic Paths group, encountered Noor’s story while writing an account of the political lives of American Muslim youths, who she suggests in our book, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, are always already soaked in politics in post-9/11 America. They can choose to speak up or remain silent, but political meanings are going to be made of their lives either way. In Noor’s case, she had developed her voice by participating in a community of practice. One might argue that her work was always political insofar as providing beauty tips for brown women calls into question what counts as beauty in our culture. She had a platform and an audience. But, with this video, she learned to turn her voice toward participation in a larger political movement. One can see the transformation occur within the video itself — she starts out a little hesitant but by the end, she speaks with conviction and the video’s circulation brought it to the attention of a diverse set of audiences, many of whom learned new ways of thinking by watching her tell her own story to the camera.

Nick Couldry has described voice as the process of giving an account of oneself, one’s experiences, one’s perspectives, for the purpose of changing the hearts and minds of others. More and more young people around the world are finding and deploying their voices online though often, they are not heard because adult leaders are looking in the wrong places, do not understand their language, and are not prepared to hear what they have to say.  This confessional video format has proven effective in increasing visibility across a range of recent American social movements, especially the DREAMer movement for undocumented youth, as our book recounts.

Noor’s first attempt to speak out brought her into more direct political engagement: she was invited to ask a question of the Republican presidential candidates during a 2016 debate, she provided critical commentary on Fusion, and she worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign. In the course of our research, we’ve found many such stories as young people have turned to video sharing and social media sites to circulate their own stories and in the process, learned to deploy their voices toward political ends. Not every young person gets heard when they turn the camera on themselves and share their political perspectives with the world, but our research suggests such acts make vital contributions to today’s social change movements — from the DREAMers to Occupy Wall Street, from #blacklivesmatter to the women’s march.

I look forward to telling Noor’s story with Esra’a al Shafei, the Bahraini civil rights activist, when we have a public conversation next week at this year’s Digital Media and Learning conference. When I corresponded with her about this event, she shared some of her own story with me:

“I founded Majal.org in Bahrain as a student twelve years ago under the name Mideast Youth. We focused on advancing the rights of marginalized populations in our region and were largely driven and directed by the perspectives of our youth. As young people working for local social change, it was only natural to adopt and depend on new media to amplify oppressed and underrepresented voices.  We undertook campaigns to free political prisoners, to create self-sustaining protected spaces for LGBTQ Arab youth, encouraged political discourse through music with a platform for regional artists (Mideast Tunes), and more. All of these projects were made possible through the ingenuity of our youth and the most cutting-edge technology available at the time — because we felt that was our only weapon against the injustices we were all experiencing to various degrees daily. The internet offered us with limitless opportunities to advocate for change in our societies, but it was not without its challenges. Censorship and surveillance were huge obstacles, and in the cases of many of our teammates, continue to present immediate hazards. Though our organizational focus has since moved beyond the MENA region and we have since rebranded as Majal, our ethos and methods have remained the same. Our campaigns have real world impact though they are digitally-based, and though we’re a bit older now, we make an effort to view the web with young eyes. We are always on the lookout for the next way to connect with audiences, constantly iterating our platforms and creating more engaging ways to present our work and further our mission.”

Like many Americans, I still have much to learn about the conditions she faces in doing activist work in her region and like many Americans, I have stereotypes to overcome if we are to really be able to share lessons learned by young activists working in these two very different contexts. I have been spending more times in recent years trying to better understand Muslims, visiting mosques in India, Lebanon, Indonesia, and the United States, speaking with educators, journalists, activists, and media makers from the Arab world. But I recognize the limits of my own knowledge.

I certainly know that the “Arab Spring” movements were misreported by western media, understood primarily in terms of Twitter and Facebook revolutions, a frame that ignored the real organizing taking place on the grounds and in the streets in these countries. Our romanticization of these digital freedom fighters makes it harder for us to make sense of the conflicting reports we receive about the long-term impact of these social change movements.

I have been working with an Annenberg Ph.D. student, Yomna Elsayed, whose dissertation project focuses on the various ways internet comedy and music keep alive the prospects of change in her home country, Egypt, encouraging young people to remain skeptical of entrenched power and ready to mobilize for revolutionary change when the moment is right.  Esra’a al Shafei has similarly deployed cultural tools in her own effort to promote equality and social justice in her country — a musician herself, she helped to launch MidEast Tunes, a website and app calling attention to politically-engaged musicians from across the Middle East and North Africa.

Around the world, we are finding young people are frustrated with the tools and language of traditional politics, seeking new ways of expressing their desires for change that speak to and for others of their generation. We are finding young people constructing new forms of the civic imagination, using the resources of popular culture to help them articulate what a better future might look like.

Writing for the Huffington Post earlier this year, Esra’a al Shafei offered a few perspectives as a human rights activist directed at those western companies that owned the platforms and tools she and her countryfolk use to challenge their governments:

“As new citizen media from protests and conflicts is uploaded and shared across the web, emerging and existing platforms must prove they are committed to hosting valuable citizen-generated content with attention to its safekeeping and integrity, careful archiving of media in a way that is searchable and accessible, and no monetary cost to promote visibility. Likewise, we as a global community must safeguard and support those who take risks by sharing this evidence, allowing for anonymity and employing enhanced digital security. Only continued innovation geared towards the needs of the communities generating this evidence will ensure citizen media’s full potential for bringing about awareness, action and justice.”

She described the needs for new technologies designed with the needs of global human rights activists at their center, citing her own CrowdVoice.Org, as an example of how crowd-sourcing and crowd-verifying tools can better serve the needs of social movements.

The first wave of excitement about digital politics has passed, maybe even the second wave has bit the dust, and there are many reasons for skepticism, if not cynicism, about whether social media platforms enables users to challenge entrenched authority and change the world. But, it would be a mistake if we denied the reality that social change is happening differently now as a consequence of the generation that has come of age with the web and has experimented with how its platforms and practices might be deployed in struggles for human rights and social justice. The internet may not have changed everything, but it has definitely changed many things about the way politics operates in the 21st century, and youth have been on the front lines of this process.

This is why a conversation like the one we will be having at this year’s DML conference seems so urgent: because we can learn much by looking at the process by which young people, working in different political and cultural contexts around the world, are being introduced into social movements through their cultural participation, the ways they are finding their voice and learning to spread their messages, the ways they are organizing and rallying for change. As young people across the United States are becoming more “woke” to the conditions impacting their lives, we need to consider what social movements around the world can learn from each other — what tools they share, what practices they deploy, what dangers they face, and what motivates their engagement and participation. I will be coming into this exchange with a lot of questions; I am hoping the DML community will bring questions of their own, since above all, we need to listen and learn.

Bringing Fan Fiction Into the Classroom: An Interview with Francesca Coppa (Part Three)

HJ: Often, the claim is made that the power of fan fiction lies in our ability to imagine many different versions of the same characters and situations. For the most part, you stick here with one story per fandom, though some stories do show multiple conceptions of the characters. How might educators help to communicate the importance of this diversity in the classroom?

FC:  Oh, you don’t know how it hurt to only pick one story per fandom!  Believe me, I’m fully aware that it’s wrong: as I say in the preface to the book, it’s like eating one Pringle, one Dorito, or one Oreo--and you can’t eat one potato chip unless you’re some kind of monster! It’s why I was biased toward “5 things” stories and others where a multiplicity of interpretation is built in. And then I caved and put together a unit of three Harry Potter stories, figuring that could be a model for teachers and students to emulate if they wanted to. But there’s no way that this book could be anything but the barest scratching of the surface of fic; I’ve tried to be super clear that it is in no way a canon. Ideally this book is seen, as Steph Burt described it in the New Yorker, as an “on-ramp” to fanfiction, not a final destination!

HJ:  Fan fiction, as you note, is embedded within the conversations of the fan community, and we often face the challenge as educators that most of our students do not know the source material well enough to really appreciate the transformative uses fans make of it. You provide rich notes in front of each story designed to partially address these concerns, but they remain limitations anytime we bring fan fiction into the classroom. Thoughts?

FC:  It’s true; I’ve had the most success teaching fanworks as part of general transmedia courses where I’m also teaching at least some of the source material. So for instance, in my course Sherlock, James, and Harry, my students consider fanworks after exposure to both the textual canon and to professional adaptations: movies, TV shows, video games, etc.  In courses where I don’t have time or it’s not appropriate to teach source texts, I’ve found it useful to take a poll and see what students are actually familiar with: I’m often surprised.  One year, the Sherlock Holmes adaptation that the greatest number of students was familiar with was House--so great, I showed House vids!  I’ve had classes where nobody could identify Severus Snape. This is why I went for the biggest ongoing franchises I could think of: Star Trek, James Bond, Doctor Who, Harry Potter. Game of Thrones is the biggest show in the world right now, but will undergrads know it in a year, or in three? (Keep in mind those students are fourteen now; they’re probably not even allowed to watch it.) But Star Wars is back and is likely to be around for some time!

HJ:  Much work on fan fiction has stressed that it provides a space for its mostly female readers and writers to think through issues of gender and sexuality together. There has been growing debate in recent years about how well fan fiction has operated as a space for thinking about race, ethnicity and cultural difference. What do you see as the strengths and limits of fan fiction’s response to the more diverse cast of a franchise like Star Wars, which you use as your concluding example in the book?

FC:  It’s great that we’re finally talking more about race and trying to deal with racism in Hollywood and in fandom internally. There are some exciting academic projects on the horizon too, including a special issue of TWC on Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color edited by Gail De Kosnik and andré carrington. I do think that it’s particularly hard to talk about race in fanfiction because, as as genre, fanfiction is so embodied and identificatory and personal, and so often explicitly sexual. Fandom knows that there’s power involved in writing fanfiction: that it’s about taking control of a character and changing them as well as identifying with them. But, as in the theatre, as in transmedia, it’s precisely by having lots of different people engage with and inhabit a character that the character becomes iconic and broadly meaningful. So we need to find a way through. In the case of The Force Awakens, not only did we have the first juggernaut slash pairing of color in Finn/Poe (also called stormpilot), but we also we saw female fans identifying with Finn as a revolutionary figure--as someone who has consciously defied power and resistedboth his own oppression (Finn is basically a slave) and his role as a cog in a machinery that oppresses others (Finn is also a stormtrooper). So Finn’s narrative really spoke to fans in terms of race and gender both and promoted a broad and multivalent fannish identification with him. We see this on display in LullabyKnell’s story, “The Story of Finn,” in which an entire community is radicalized by Finn’s actions: he is a figure of liberation, inspiring an elaborate folk culture (a fandom, really) as well as an underground railroad for other escaping stormtroopers. And finding unusual and delightful points of identification like this is what fandom does best.

Francesca Coppa is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College and a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit which built and runs the Archive of Our Own. She writes in the fields of dramatic literature, performance studies, and fan studies, and is currently writing a book about fan music video. She is a passionate advocate of fair use.

Bringing Fan Fiction Into the Classroom: An Interview with Francesca Coppa (Part Two)

HJ: Your book is organized around specific fandoms but also around distinctive genres of fan fiction writing which cut across fandoms. The status of genres in fan fiction always interest me, since some would argue that genres are commercial categories and sometimes depicted as constraints on the creative process. What insights do you get into how and why genres persist in fandom as a result of your process of mapping the territory to be covered in this book?

FC:  Genres are fascinating, I agree! In the case of fandom, I think that genres are a way of naming the things we like and giving new fanfiction writers a structure for reproducing them. So a fan says, I like slash, I like het, I like long, plotty gen; I like bodyswaps; this story is an mpreg crackfic. That naming also helps us sort through the huge wash of fanfiction that’s produced. That said, the AO3’s tagging system has really put all this labelling onto a new level, moving beyond fannish genres to a really granular listing of storytelling ingredients. I’ve talked about AO3’s curated folksonomy with professional librarians and archivists, and Casey Fiesler did a fantastic paper on the AO3as “A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design,” which describes how our tagging prioritizes inclusivity and user control. In this era of triggers and warnings, fandom is again ahead of the curve: fans don’t just categorize by genre but also create elaborate content labels for fic both as a way of both attracting the readers who’ll want what’s on offer and warning away the ones who don’t (and the AO3 also provides options to conceal this information from those whose first preference is to be surprised.) Most of the genres in the book are well established: crossovers and 5 Things and racebending and a very meta Mary Sue. That said, I had a definite bias toward stories that incorporated multiple interpretations within themselves, so a teacher could draw out that contrast. If I got to do a Fanfiction Reader: Volume II, I’d love to do two or three long stories that have a lot of elaborate worldbuilding: those kinds of stories are sadly absent from this book.

HJ:You define fan fiction, in part, as “fiction produced outside the literary marketplace.” How is this aspect of the definition changing as more and more fan fiction writing women are going pro or at least being courted as potential Pro writers following the success of 50 Shades of Grey? Does the commercial interest have implications long term for fan fiction regardless of whether any particular writer does or does not want to stay outside the marketplace?

FC: Well, fans have always gone pro, and some fans have always already been pro. What’s new is that more people are willing to admit writing in both worlds. And what we’ve seen is that many working writers also write fic precisely because they want to keep making things outside the marketplace - because it’s fun!  Another new thing is the publication of original work that shares some of fanfiction’s literary values and aims to produce a similar range of emotions: I’m thinking about, say, C.S. Pacat’s Captive Prince trilogy (which are much better books than the 50 Shades books, IMO!) While Kindle Worlds was a scam that fans were rightfully wary of, Amazon’s self-publishing arm has let some fans sell their queer science fiction or werewolf erotica. Literary agents (many themselves fans) are soliciting work from their favorite fan writers. I think that’s all great; I’m 100 percent down with fans also writing for the marketplace if they want to, though realistically most things aren’t going to sell because most things just don’t sell.  

That said, I am not in favor of commercializing fanwork itself, whether through Kickstarter or Patreon or whatever; that’s the edge I fear, to be honest. I’m not against it for legal reasons - I think transformative works can be sold in certain contexts; witness this book! - but just because I think it’s bad for fannish art and bad for our culture. Money changes things and people make different things for money. Fandom is a place where people work together for love--but it’s different if at the end one person is cashing a check. It can poison relationships. Just to say: it was important to me with The Fanfiction Reader that all the stories remain online as they’ve always been, free to read. The authors didn’t get paid other than a trib copy; I didn’t get paid, either, and I’m donating the book’s royalties to OTW. So it’s a labor of love all around.

HJ: The term, “transformative use,” has really taken roots in fandom over the last decade or so, thanks in part to your work at the Organization for Transformative Works. There are some differences between the legal, academic, and grassroots understanding of this concept. But, at a core level, there’s some interesting friction between long-standing traditions within fandom which measure the value of a story based on how firmly grounded it is in the source text and a newer definition that stress what it changes or transforms as evidence of its creative contribution. How are fan writers today working through these competing pulls on their work?

FC:  Well, some fidelity to canon is important because that’s why we care: we read fanfiction because we have a pre-existing relationship to a story and its characters. But transformation is important because that’s the intervention that makes a fanfiction story worth reading: that’s how you fix things in the universe: alter and tailor and extend the story for your needs and those of your readers. So if you don’t recognize the characters, then it’s what slash fans call an “any two guys” story (which is the worst insult!) There’s no investment in the characters. But if you don’t transform the characters and the story, then you’re not satisfying your readers’ needs. You might as well just watch the original movie again, or go read a tie-in novel that colors within clear lines. Remarkably little fic actually replicates the source in terms of style or genre: like, go check out some Sherlock. Almost none of it has Sherlock solving mysteries! Captain America almost never fights supervillains or alien invaders. If you want that, go read a comic book: there’s plenty of that story out there already. We want to see Cap talk to Kim Kardashian at a party. Or  fight for workers’ rights.

HJ:  I have struggled a bit with your suggestion that “fan fiction is speculative fiction about characters rather than about the world.” For me, characters are part of how we define worlds, and conversely, for many fan writers, characters are defined in part by how they were shaped by the worlds they inhabit. Sure, we can write AU stories which move characters into different worlds, but these are as often as not about how these character’s lives and personalities would take different forms under different circumstances. Reactions?

FC:  Yes, I see what you mean; in some ways it’s a false distinction, in that worlds produce characters and characters produce worlds. For me, though, it’s like what happens in theatre, how a character becomes richer for being embodied by many different actors in different productions. We see something analogous with transmedia characters like Sherlock Holmes, who has been played by so many different people in so many settings. He’s been in World War II, contemporary London, Brooklyn, Harlem, he’s a mouse, he’s in the 22nd century, he’s a Muppet, he’s House--and yet he must still be Sherlock Holmes. The different worlds are typically interesting only to the extent to which they showcase and complicate the character; they’re not typically interesting in themselves, or innovative the way that speculative fiction worlds so often are. Sometimes fandom does invent interesting worlds, which often become tropes: I’m thinking of something like the A/B/O (Alpha/Beta/Omega) stories which invented an entirely new system of gender.  But then the fun is putting your favorite characters into that world and seeing who they are: so if it’s a Supernatural story, who’s the alpha, who’s the beta, who’s the omega?  But the characterization in fanfiction is almost always innovative; say what you like, you typically don’t see fanfiction characters outside of fanfiction. They’re still too unusual for prime time: queer or ace or pregnant or elves or socialists or winged or telepathic or werewolves or into bondage or what have you, even though in life, of course, real people are--all right, fine, not telepathic or winged or werewolves (mostly), but a lot more than the mass media lets us see.  (Even if you want to say that fanfiction characters are feminized, girly - in some undefinable way like girls - well, half the damn world is girls, so I say: bring it. It’s not the same old thing anyway.) And in fanfiction, our characters get even more interesting as we get deeper inside them, which we do because it’s prose and not a more external medium like film, television or theatre. We’re interested not just in a character’s actions and dialogue, but in their innermost thoughts and desires. That’s different than traditional speculative fiction, which tends to focus on confronting the external rules of a world rather than the endless internal landscape of the self. But fans are interested in subtle shadings of character and also in suggesting multiplicities and possibilities within the self. So there’s more than one kind of transformative work going on here, I think!

HJ: Real Person Slash was once one of the major taboos within fandom. Many had asked me not to mention the genre in Textual Poachers and I kept that trust. But now, it has become widespread and you even include an example in your collection. How do we account for this change? Are there any remaining taboos amongst fan fiction writers?

FC:  Yeah, the boat on Real Person Fic has pretty much sailed, at least for overtly performative celebrities: those who seem to be obviously telling a story about themselves through the entertainment media. It’s still not done to show that kind of work to the celebrities in question, though, and fans resent it when non-fans do it on talk shows to have a bit of a laugh at the celebrity’s (or fandom’s) expense. Right now we’re also having a flare up about darkfic, rapefic, and other genres that depict behaviors that everyone agrees are wrong in real life. Some fans tend to feel that any representation of rape, violence, child abuse etc. is wrong; others feel that writing (and even enjoying) these “problematic” genres can be a way of working through personal traumas; still others feel like you shouldn’t have to profess a history of abuse before writing or enjoying what are clearly fantasy scenarios. I’m anti-censorship and pro caveat lector, but I lived through Tipper Gore and the ‘80s and I don’t think sane people do terrible things because of Judas Priest or the Hydra Trash Party. The AO3 provides tools that help responsible people avoid seeing content that disturbs them. That said, this is an argument that probably has to come up in feminist circles at least once every couple of years, and it’s not a bad thing to have it, I guess, just as a moment of community reflection about speech and art and power and responsibility.

Francesca Coppa is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College and a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit which built and runs the Archive of Our Own. She writes in the fields of dramatic literature, performance studies, and fan studies, and is currently writing a book about fan music video. She is a passionate advocate of fair use.

Bringing Fan Fiction into the Classroom: An Interview with Francesca Coppa (Part One)

Across the fall, I am sharing a number of different interviews showcasing the current state of fandom and fandom studies. Over the next year, a range of new books are going to transform the landscape of this particular corner of the academic universe, bringing new voices to the table, adding new approaches and issues to our research agenda, solidifying ground gained over the past few decades, and calling into question established wisdom. As I have in the past, I hope to use this blog to direct attention onto this scholarship and also illustrated how it is connected to a wider agenda of work on participatory culture, learning, and politics.

Today, I am welcoming Francesca Coppa, one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a long time fan and fandom scholar, and one of my favorite thinking partners on these topics. Through the years, she has served as an important advocate for fans in struggles over intellectual property and censorship; she's directed attention onto the historical roots of vidding as women's media practice; and now, she's helping to reshape what it might mean to bring fan fiction into the classroom. More and more academics are teaching about fan fiction, and more of our students come to college already having some experiences as writers as well as readers of fanfic. Yet, how do scholars, who may or may not themselves have roots in fandom, decide what fan works to put on their syllabuses and assign to their students? How do they give students, who may or may not have background in a particular source text, the preparation they need to read such stories thoughtfully and receptively? Given that fan stories emerge from the creative and critical conversations of the fan community, how do we help people to see the signs of that process at work if they are reading texts that have been isolated from that larger context?

The Fan Fiction Reader addresses these pedagogical and methodological needs, offering a carefully curated selection of fan stories drawn from a range of different fictional universes and reflecting a diverse set of fan genres. Each story is given a critical context in terms of its relationship to its source texts, to other works in the same genre, and to critical conversations within the fan community. A rich introduction provides an overview of current understandings of what fan fiction is, why it matters, and what motivates its study. One could not ask for a better guide than Coppa, whose many years of active participation as a fan and her authority as an academic, work together here to enable her to make meaningful statements about what we are reading. 

Over the next few installments, I will be talking with her about the project, its goals, and the compromises which have to be made to make such a book possible in the first place. For a long time, both commercial and academic presses would allow scholarship on fan fiction but would not reproduce the stories themselves.  I admire Coppa and her publishers for the courage they showed in challenging those taboos.

Henry Jenkins:  You have edited the first anthology of fan fiction for use in the classroom. Can you share some of the factors that led you to believe that such a collection would be valuable or necessary? In particular, what are the limits or risks of faculty members sending their students to read fan fiction “in the wild”? What kinds of background would teachers and students need as they engage with fan fiction in the classroom?

Francesca Coppa:  The truth is, the first person who needed a fanfiction anthology was me!  While many students discover fandom on their own - some of my students already have AO3 accounts and are suitably impressed that I’m one of the founders - you can’t count on any group of students sharing a fandom even if they know what fandom is. I tried having students go off and find stories based on their interests, but--well, it takes some expertise to find a good piece of fanfiction if you’re new to it. And then, even if students find stories they like, they have no shared, common experience. So one of my reasons for doing the book was to put together a collection of accessible texts that we could all read together. I picked stories in mega-fandoms that were likely to be culturally relevant for some time. I was also looking for stories that showcased fannish tropes and that would teach well. I tested a lot of fic in my classes at Muhlenberg and also as the Visiting Professor of Television Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  One of the things that I learned was that if a story got too sexually explicit, then that was all the conversation would be about: we just couldn’t get past it. It was like, “I saw Harry Potter’s penis!”  Okay, yes, but what else was going on?  So while I was committed to putting sexually explicit fanfiction into the book (sex and sexual relationships are such important themes in fic) I also had to choose stories where the sex wouldn’t bring class to a grinding halt. 

HJ: The legal challenges of producing such a volume were considerable, given long-standing debates about the legal status of fan fiction in contemporary Intellectual Property law. Can you share some of the process that you went through and what insights this might have provided as to the current legal status of fanfic?

FC:  You and I had a conversation at the 2008 DIY Festival (actually captured on film) where I told you I’d learned that you could do quite a lot in fandom if you were willing to tolerate a little uncertainty. The Fanfiction Reader is the result of me being willing to tolerate that bit of uncertainty--well, me and my editor Mary Francis, and the wonderful University of Michigan Press, and all the fanfiction authors who were willing to trust me when I said that I wanted to put their stories into a book. I believed this book was needed: there are so many courses that want to talk about fanfiction: in fan studies, remix, media and transmedia, audience studies, film and television studies, adaptation. I also believe that fanfiction is a transformative fair use, and so legal to publish in certain contexts (and in this I’m backed up by the Stanford Fair Use Project, who reviewed the manuscript and committed to defending it in case of any legal challenge.)  But really, all kudos to the University of Michigan Press, because it’s institutions being willing to defend fair use - institutions and their lawyers - that makes the difference. There’s a chilling effect out there, a culture of fear. But as my colleague Rebecca Tushnet likes to say: fair use is a muscle that needs to be exercised. So I think this was worth doing on those grounds alone, and I hope other people will use this as a model of fair use in practice. You really can do a lot!

HJ: There are also political and ethical issues within fandom that shaped what stories to select and how to approach these authors. Share some of your thinking process about the best way to deal with these fan writers through this process.

FC:  I’m lucky that between my own years in fandom and my time on the board of the OTW I’ve come to know a lot of terrific fanfiction writers and I have some ground on which to approach those I don’t know personally-- I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I started by soliciting stories from writers who I knew would be on board ideologically with the project of publishing a curated, academic collection of fanfiction with a university press - writers who’d be willing to tolerate a bit of legal uncertainty with me. But after that, I just approached writers cold, because I’d read and liked their stories!  “Hi, you don’t know me, but…”  Incredible as it is to say, I didn’t have anyone turn me down. Actually, I drew a lot on the practical experience I gained when Laura Shapiro and I made the “What Is Vidding?”  documentaries with you and the MIT New Media Literacies lab a few years ago, so thank you for that. Dealing with pseudonyms and releases and all that was easy because I’d done it before; I’d thought through issues of fan privacy.

Francesca Coppa is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College and a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the nonprofit which built and runs the Archive of Our Own. She writes in the fields of dramatic literature, performance studies, and fan studies, and is currently writing a book about fan music video. She is a passionate advocate of fair use.

Participatory Audiences in Elizabethian Theater: An Interview with Matteo Pangallo (Part Three)

Today, we talk about “fan service” in somewhat ambivalent terms -- the ways that creators compromise their own visions in order to be more responsive to audience feedback. What evidence do we have that these theatrical companies were responsive to the feedback of their audiences?

The nature of playmakers’ response to feedback from the audience depended greatly upon the nature of the audience providing the feedback. Obviously, if an aristocratic patron or the monarch responded with feedback, the playmakers would likely seek to satisfy their demands, especially if those demands were censorial in nature. If a single regular paying spectator sought a particular experience at the playhouse, though, there was likely little chance of that coming to fruition except in the case of the few playgoers whose own plays did manage to make it to the boards.

At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, if large masses of paying spectators wanted to see something specific, they could have a great effect. And that was, in some ways, a new phenomenon for cultural producers: Shakespeare’s theater was the first mass-market commercialized culture industry in England.

This commercialization of the stage gave rise to a tension among playmakers. Some believed that, as “professional” artists, they were beholding to no person but themselves and thus they were the ones to tell audiences what they should want, rather than the other way around. “To judge of poets is only the faculty of poets,” ordained Ben Jonson, who would have certainly shared in the modern ambivalence about “fan service”.

Other playwrights, however, display a responsiveness to what the audience wanted and even may have thought of the audience, not as a force requiring them to compromise their art, but rather a collaborative artist in its own right; interestingly, many of these were dramatists who had learned to write for the stage through prior experience as actors, including Shakespeare.

Today, lines from Shakespeare’s plays are sprinkled throughout our everyday language, become taken for granted figures of speech. Is there any evidence whether contemporary playgoers adopted and performed catch phrases from the plays to each other or otherwise claimed them as resources beyond the theatrical setting?

Playgoers and play-readers frequently borrowed phrases from the plays that they saw and read, both by Shakespeare and by other writers. We know about this practice from commentary (usually negative) from satirists and even professional playwrights who mocked amateur poets, would-be lovers, socially pretentious courtiers, and other textual consumers for stealing language from plays. Playwrights in particular repeatedly mention (again, usually negatively) playgoers sitting in the audience with notebooks, jotting down lines that they liked.

Because plays were performed in repertory and because audience members usually frequented the same playhouses, it would not have been uncommon for spectators to memorize parts and even know some lines better than the actors, who were often being exchanged between troupes and had to memorize even more parts. Ben Jonson, the consummate professional playwright, complained of the “idol”-worshipping playgoer who, while waiting for the star actor to enter, “repeats…his part of speeches and confederate jests in passion to himself.”

In one induction scene (a kind of short skit performed before the play proper and which usually provided metatheatrical commentary on the performance, the players and playhouse, or the audience), John Webster presented a spectator character who “hath seen this play [so] often” that he could “give [the actors] intelligence for their action.”

Many years after the Puritans’ 1642 closure of the professional theaters, Edmund Gayton wrote wistfully of a time when playgoers and playmakers came together in taverns, where the actors would stage impromptu repeat-performances at the playgoers’ requests and the playgoers would then go home “as able actors [of the material] themselves.”

The best direct evidence we have of how theatrical consumers borrowed from professional plays comes from surviving commonplace books (personal diaries in which textual consumers wrote down short passages from works they read or saw, organized under subject headings). Laura Estill’s 2015 Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts is a fantastic study of how readers and spectators of plays copied down passages they liked and, at the same time, often altered the text in order to make it fit their own particular context or needs.

Today, the threat posed by audience discourse to the creative control of the author often gets reduced to concerns about “spoilers.” Were “spoilers” a concern in 17th century theater? If not, what other concerns did artists who increasingly saw themselves as professionals have about the public responses of audiences to their work?

The modern notion of “spoilers” did not seem to exist in the early modern period—probably because most plays were based upon already familiar narratives and sources, and because the repertory system ensured that most plays (at least the successful ones) dominated the performance schedule. In one play by Ben Jonson, two “audience members” from the induction scene return between each of the five acts to provide their own commentary on the play as it progresses; after the fourth act and before the fifth and final act, the more judgmental of the two suggests that the players end the play at that point because the plot is so predictable he knows already how it is going to end.

Perhaps the closest evidence to an early modern concern with the modern notion of “spoilers”, though, is in the prologue to The Roaring Girl, collaboratively written by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton. The play was based on the life of the celebrated contemporary cross-dressing pimp, fence, and thief Mary Frith (also known as “Moll Cutpurse” and “Tom Faconer”). Because of Frith’s fame, Dekker and Middleton express some worry in their prologue: “each [spectator] comes / And brings a play in his head with him: up he sums / What he would of a ‘roaring girl’ have writ; / If that he finds not here, he mews at it.”

Notwithstanding that example, most other concerns expressed by professionals focused, more prosaically, on audience members calling out or interrupting the performance (to the chagrin of many writers, King James was known to walk out of plays he did not like or even fall asleep during the performance).

More tellingly, some playwrights were also concerned about the “correct” interpretation of various conventions or devices. For example, when John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess failed, the playwright accused the audience of misunderstanding what the genre of “pastoral tragicomedy” was supposed to include: “the people,” Fletcher remarked sarcastically in the preface to the printed edition, “having ever had a singular gift in defining, concluded [that, as a tragicomedy, it would] be a play of country-hired shepherds in gray cloaks, with curtailed dogs on strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another, and, missing whitsun ales, cream, wassail, and morris-dances, began to be angry.”

In a similar vein, when Jonson’s Catiline was hissed off the stage, the playwright complained that the problem was that audience members recalled “some pieces” of Roman history from their schooldays and were upset when the play did not include those bits. Jonson also fought a life-long battle to control how spectators interpreted any of his characters who could have been read as allegorical representations of real-life people—something with very serious ramifications at a time when playwrights were forbidden from presenting current political topics or politically important individuals on stage.

Overall, in their epilogue to The Roaring Girl, Dekker and Middleton provide a good general metaphor for professional playwrights’ worries about how consumers might influence, and thus ruin, their work. They tell the story of a painter who made a portrait and hung it out for sale; as passersby viewed it, they “gave several verdicts on it”, and each time the painter quickly modified the painting to suit each person’s opinion, “in hope to please all.” In the end, though, the painting became “so vile, / So monstrous and so ugly, all men did smile / At the poor painter’s folly.” If the playwrights also succumbed to such consumer creativity, Dekker and Middleton explained, “we, with the painter, shall / In striving to please all, please none at all.”

Contemporary audiences have much access to behind the scenes information about the making of their favorite films or television series, not to mention box office returns and industry trends more generally, enough so that hardcore fans often consider themselves to be insiders. What kinds of access did audiences of this period have into the factors shaping how and which plays are performed as opposed to the dramatic fictions unfolding on stage?

The most direct and pervasive influence audiences had in the commercial theaters was exercised through consumer choice. From the record-book kept by Philip Henslowe, the financier behind Shakespeare’s rival troupe, the Lord Admiral’s Men, we know the daily box-office receipts for the company off and on from 1594 through 1609. In addition to telling us about which plays were staged when (including many lost plays), the record-book provides insight into how quickly the company adjusted their repertory in response to plays that were flops (if a play was unpopular at its premiere it might be tried one more time several weeks later, on a different weekday, but if it remained unpopular it was abandoned and often sold to a printer for a small amount of money) and plays that were popular (the play would be restaged at regular intervals every few weeks and would sometimes end up with sequels or prequels, resulting in serial performances over two or more days). Beyond this, though, there are anecdotal accounts of playgoer behavior directly shaping programming decisions in the playhouse.

In 1613, a Venetian visitor attending a play at the Curtain playhouse wrote an account of the experience, observing that after the play ended, “one of the actors…asked the people to the comedy for the following day and he named one. But the people desired another one, and began to shout ‘Friars, Friars’” (“Friars” was presumably Robert Greene’s highly popular 1594 comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay). In James Shirley’s 1632 play Changes, a character refers disdainfully to gentlemen in the audience calling out in the middle of a play for a jig to be danced at the play’s conclusion.

Perhaps most dramatically, Edmund Gayton—again, writing several years after the theaters had been closed—recollected: “I have known. . . where the players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bills to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to—sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurth, sometimes the Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these, and at last, none of the three taking, they were forced to undress and put [off] their tragic habits, and conclude the day with The Merry Milkmaids [a comedy]. Unless this were done and the popular humor satisfied . . . the benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally, and as there were mechanics of all professions, who fell every one to his own trade, and dissolved [the] house in an instant, and made a ruin of a stately fabric.”

Gayton’s account (which is probably a bit hyperbolic) suggests an early modern playmaking process that was both more of a fragmented pastiche than the unified narrative modern audiences and readers are accustomed to and highly responsive to the threat, sometimes violent, of consumer intervention.

We do also have one play written by a playgoer in which the consumer imagines a playgoer efficaciously changing the performance plans of a professional troupe. In the induction to his 1635 Adrasta, John Jones has a playgoer get up on stage and interrupt the actor delivering the prologue; when he learns that the players plan on staging a satire, the playgoer chastises them for choosing something that will displease the audience (“Do you hear, prologue? Your author is a fool. Is he desirous to buy fame at such a rate that he will smart for it?”) and he goes backstage to explain to the players the kind of play that they should (and, in Adrasta, do) stage.

In my approach to the plays written by playgoers like Jones, I think of them as real-world manifestations of this interrupting playgoer, crossing the border between the audience and the stage and entering into the space of the professionalizing playmakers in order to shape (or, in

Dr. Matteo Pangallo (mapangallo@vcu.edu) is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Previously he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and, before that, held teaching positions at Bates College, Mount Holyoke College, and Westfield State University. He received his M.A. in Shakespearean Studies from King’s College London and the Globe, and Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Dr. Pangallo’s first book, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), uses plays written by some of Shakespeare’s original playgoers as early modern “fan fiction” providing evidence of what those playgoers thought about the theater and how it worked. His current books projects are Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England and Strange Company: Foreign Performers in Medieval and Early Modern England. 

Beyond his academic work, Dr. Pangallo has worked as a theatrical director and dramaturg, including as the founding artistic director for the Salem Theatre Company, assistant director for the Rebel Shakespeare Company, and research assistant at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

some cases, re-shape) the kinds of dramatic content they were producing.

Participatory Audiences in Elizabethian Theater: An Interview with Matteo Pangallo (Part Two)

Scholars in the fandom studies tradition have noted the use of “fan” to refer negatively to women in the 19th century who went to see the players rather than the play, that is, who were obsessed with the actors. Here, you seem to suggest that playgoers were interested in the playwrights, in the techniques they used and the ways they constructed their stories. Can you tell us more about what drew these audience members towards such an avid fascination with theater during this period? To what degree might we call such participants fans?

To write a play while not a professional (that is, internal) member of the theater industry, one needed three things: time, literacy, and some interest in, if not understanding of, how theater worked. We have plenty examples of non-professional writers (many women and, again, mostly aristocratic) writing plays meant expressly for readers and not for performance. These so-called “closet dramas” usually conform to the model of classical drama, in both drawing their content from ancient Greece and Rome and following the style and structure of plays from that period.

The writers I work with, on the other, wrote very much in the tradition of the popular contemporary stage. They were not interested in obtaining a readership for their plays; they wanted a performance. They were also, however, atypical.

Most other dedicated playgoers of the popular theaters did not write their own plays. That alone sets them apart as “fanatics”. From their plays, as well as their paratextual commentary (in prologues and epilogues, dedicatory epistles, prefaces, and so forth), we often see them taking heightened interest in performance, both how plays were prepared for the stage and how they were enacted (and received).

So even if we accept the conventional wisdom that most playgoers merely went to the theater to experience some kind of emotional or mental escapism, these specific playgoers have left us evidence of their interest in emphatically not escaping the playhouse but, instead, seeing and understanding the artifice behind the art.

Each playwriting playgoer, of course, was unique in his own particular interests and motivations in writing a play, just as each individual playgoer was unique in his or her own particular interests in attending the plays. This, though, is one reason that I find their work so valuable.

As I mentioned, most earlier studies of the early modern audience rely on the aggregate view—either by looking at general demographics of who was in the audience or by taking a professional’s play (usually Shakespeare’s) and generalizing outward from what it contains in order to make broad assumptions about the audience. Each playwriting playgoer, however, provides a granular view, a single case study that recovers from the sea of cultural consumers the too-often overlooked individual.

In fandom studies, we often cite Shakespeare as the example of a literary figure who often borrowed plots and characters from other pre-existing works. How widespread was this form of dialogic or appropriative response to the plays of this period? Did your amateur writers build directly onto existing plays or did they tend to write within more broadly designed genres they thought belonged on the stage?

Professional playwrights, such as Shakespeare, routinely used existing works of history, prose, poetry, and drama, as well as, occasionally, real-life incidents for sources. The pressures on these dramatists to produce material that was both likely to be popular with audiences and relatively quick to write necessitated this kind of dependence on known sources (though some, including Shakespeare, did from time to time invent their own plots).

Occasionally, playing companies would even “appropriate” one of their own older plays by hiring a playwright to revise it substantively and update it for new audiences. Some playwriting playgoers also drew their plots from existing materials, though more of them came up with their own original narratives. In some instances, as with Walter Mountfort’s 1632 The Launching of the Mary and John Clavell’s 1629 The Soddered Citizen, the writer drew upon their own personal life experiences for incidents in their plays.

Most amateur playwrights closely followed specific generic, narrative, and even poetic conventions typical of the playhouses and playing companies that they patronized, though on occasion they would deviate from those conventions in potentially telling ways. For example, by the 1620s, the use of rhyme on stage was considered clumsy and old-fashioned; the professional playwrights who wrote for the elite, fashionable troupe known as Beeston’s Boys in the late 1630s not only avoided dramatic rhyme but actually mocked it in their plays.

But in 1639, the London lawyer and dedicated playgoer Alexander Brome wrote for the troupe a play called The Cunning Lovers, in which he filled the verse with innovative and often highly elaborate rhyming. Remarkably, Brome’s play was a great success, which suggests that sometimes the commercial writers were not always entirely in touch with what every member of their audiences wanted.

But as far as using professionals’ plays as sources for their own plays, there is little evidence of the practice in the period—which is perhaps the greatest difference between modern writers of fan fiction and early modern playwriting playgoers.

Sometime between 1622 and 1624, the antiquarian and politician Sir Edward Dering—famous as a lover of literature and the theater—adapted into a single play the two parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, evidently for one of the many private, amateur performances his family and servants staged at his home; the extant manuscript shows that he took a free hand in adapting the plays, cutting text, changing lines, and adding new lines. The extent of such appropriation and adaptation of professionals’ plays for amateur contexts, such as household entertainments or university performances, is not entirely known, though judging from the fact that Dering’s is the only surviving manuscript that records such a production, they were evidently rare.

Perhaps the closest early modern equivalent to the appropriative practices of modern fan fiction might be found in the “drolls” of the Interregnum period. When the theaters were closed by the Puritans, from 1642 to 1660, out-of-work actors would often stage short skits based on the old plays of the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. These typically took characters and scenarios out of the plays and incorporated them into new, usually comic, sketches. The authorship of these skits is generally a mystery, but some were evidently written by people who had no formal, professional attachment to the old commercial theaters. For example, most of the twenty-seven drolls in the 1662 The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport (the frontispiece of which is the dust-jacket art for Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater), are traditionally attributed to the publisher and bookseller Francis Kirkman.

How did literary observers of this period write about and think about the role of the audience in the theatrical performance? Did they adopt metaphors of orchestration and absorption that imply a passive spectator or was there a more participatory model available to them? To what degree were they defensive about the audience’s interventions and to what degree did they embrace spectators as collaborators?

Just as today critics divide between views of audience experience as one of either passive consumption or active engagement, of either leaning back or leaning forward, in the early modern period playwrights, other writers, and even play consumers themselves had differing opinions about what the experience of playgoing involved, or should involve.

Some accounts of playgoing gentlemen emphasized their passivity and idleness in the playhouse, with playgoing as a mere pastime or even waste of time. In Sir Humphrey Mildmay’s diary, for example, he repeatedly refers to his attendance at playhouses as one of “loitering” and “losing a whole day”.

Antitheatricalists—commentators, usually Puritans, who opposed theaters in general—often emphasize the, as they saw it, dangerous tendency for audiences to succumb docilely to the experiences witnessed on stage, as if audiences were incapable of recognizing the fiction of the performance. One of these commentators, Stephen Gosson, who had once been a playwright and actor himself, wrote contemptuously of the raptly attentive audience falling into a kind of hypnotic stupor and being literally orchestrated by the events on stage as if they were mere puppets: when one of the actors in the play shouted, “the beholders began to shout”, when another actor rose up, “the beholders rose up…on tip toe”, when one swore, “the company [audience] swore”, and when two characters departed to bed together “the company presently was set on fire” to sleep with whomever they could find. (A more humorous, probably fictional, account related by Edmund Gayton describes a butcher at a play becoming so absorbed by the action of a play about the Trojan War that he climbed up on the stage, drew his club, and started beating the actors playing the Greeks.)

Some professional playwrights, too, argued that the “proper” mode of consuming a play was one of passive acceptance; Ben Jonson and Richard Brome, for example, frequently admonished their audiences to avoid any attempts to interpret or otherwise actively impose spectatorial control upon the plays that had been written for them. This was a kind of bid for occupational closure, a way to ensure that the field of playmaking, and playwriting in particular, became professionalized.

One of the most common ways of expressing this idea was in the form of the banquet metaphor: playgoers were likened to people attending a feast, each bringing their own different and often conflicting desires and tastes; because it would be impossible to satisfy each individually, the cook (the playwright) is invested with sole authority for preparing the meal and the consumers are required simply to accept what has been prepared for them.

For other playwrights and commentators, however, there were occasions when inviting collaboration from the audience was seen as advantageous. Some of these instances may have simply been deference to the paying consumers, such as publisher Richard Hawkins’s insistence that the actors of a play were only the “miners” of the material and the consumers (in this case, readers) were the “skillful triers and refiners” of that raw material. Dramatist Henry Glapthorne referred to his audience, not his actors, as the “skillful pilots” who were to “steer” the “untried vessel” of his play.

Just as the advocates for audience passivity employed the banquet metaphor, those who argued for audience engagement turned to a figurative image of their own, the “bee and spider” metaphor used by commentators on scriptural reading: according to these commentators, while both the bee and the spider drink from the same flower, the former makes from it sweet honey while the latter makes deadly poison. Similarly, it is not the playmaker who produces meaning for the playgoer, as theatrical apologist Sir Richard Baker put it, but the playgoer who produces meaning, just as “it is not so much the juice of the herb that makes the honey or poison, as [it is] the bee or spider that sucks the juice.”

Frequently used to refute charges from antitheatricalists that plays taught or instilled immorality, the “bee and spider” metaphor (though, of course, entomologically incorrect) essentially posited that it was playgoers themselves, not the play or its makers, who were responsible for what they took out of the content of the plays.

Another common metaphor used by those who believed in an actively engaged audience was the theatrum mundi commonplace, which, to quote its most famous usage, in Shakespeare’s ca. 1599–1600 As You Like It, stated, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” The playwright and fierce defender of the stage Thomas Heywood expanded on this in his 1612 treatise An Apology for Actors, arguing that “God and nature” are the playwrights who fill the “Theater” of the world with actors; crucially, though, God also “doth as spectator sit”, effectively creating what the critic Anne Barton described as “the double position of dramatist and audience”—in the theatrum mundi metaphor, the playgoer is also the playmaker.

But perhaps the best known expression of the idea that the audience has a crucial role to play in the active creation of dramatic meaning in the playhouse is found in the choral speeches that appealed directly to playgoers’, as Shakespeare put it in his ca. 1599 Henry V, “imaginary forces” in order to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.” Throughout the 1590s and early 1600s, there were a number of plays, including Shakespeare’s later Pericles, in which choral figures addressed the audience and, acknowledging that the limited materials of the playhouse were inadequate for representing scenes such as overseas travel or tremendous battles, requested that each playgoer individually use his or her capacity to imagine what could not be physically presented on stage.

Importantly, most of these appeals appeared in plays written by actors who had become playwrights; as the new generation of playwrights trained by apprenticeship took over in the 1610s and after—that is, as the field of playwriting became even more professionalized—these invitations to the audience to participate in the making of dramatic meaning vanished.

Dr. Matteo Pangallo (mapangallo@vcu.edu) is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Previously he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and, before that, held teaching positions at Bates College, Mount Holyoke College, and Westfield State University. He received his M.A. in Shakespearean Studies from King’s College London and the Globe, and Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Dr. Pangallo’s first book, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), uses plays written by some of Shakespeare’s original playgoers as early modern “fan fiction” providing evidence of what those playgoers thought about the theater and how it worked. His current books projects are Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England and Strange Company: Foreign Performers in Medieval and Early Modern England. 

Beyond his academic work, Dr. Pangallo has worked as a theatrical director and dramaturg, including as the founding artistic director for the Salem Theatre Company, assistant director for the Rebel Shakespeare Company, and research assistant at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

Participatory Audiences in Elizabethian England?: An Interview with Matteo Pangallo (Part One)

Thanks to several decades of research on the audiences for contemporary popular media, we now know much about various forms of fan engagement and participation. Yet, I am always hungry for more historical work that explores these same questions, if for no other reason, so we have a context for understanding what is distinctive about the current moment and what have been recurring issues around media audiences across a broader time span. I was, thus, very excited to learn of a new book, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater, which provides deep insights into the forms of participation desired and achieved by theatergoers in Elizabethian England. Its author, Matteo A. Pangallo, has uncovered a range of original scripts written by amateur playwrights with fantasies (in many cases) that they might join the repertoire of the various theater troops of the era. Through careful readings of this archival material, Pangallo gains deep insight into the forms audience engagement and participation took during this formative moment in Western popular theater.

Given a chance to interview Pangallo, who contacted me because he was interested in the parallels and differences with contemporary fan culture, we were able to explore the historical roots (or lack thereof) of contemporary phenomenon, such as fan fiction, spoiling, catch phrases, and fan service. I appreciate his willingness to engage with my questions, since this interview offers a productive bridge between historians and cultural studies researchers writing about audiences. We both try hard not to get too anachronistic in describing these practices as an early form of fandom, a word and concept not in use during this period, but we can certainly see playgoers as forming intense relations with plays, characters, and performers, which encouraged them to return for multiple viewings, to share their insights with each other and the producers, and to create their own works in the same genres of the plays they admired.

This is the first of a number of interviews I plan to run through the fall, exploring the current state of fandom and fan studies. Keep reading.

You write about “an audience-stage relationship that was intensely dialogic, participatory and creative.” In what ways? What forms did audience participation take and what did the professional theater troops do to recognize this grassroots creativity?

Most fundamentally, as a commercial enterprise—indeed, England’s first regular, cultural commercial enterprise—Shakespeare’s theater empowered its audience with the ability to shape through consumer demand the kinds of content produced by the playmakers. If a particular genre, style of writing, or type of narrative were to fall from favor, attendance at those plays would fall off and the playmakers would have to shift the repertory away from that kind of material or risk losing paying customers to a rival playhouse or troupe.

This power of the purse created a dynamic in which playgoers came to understand themselves as collaborative participants in shaping the plays that they were watching and the repertory of the companies. And many of the playmakers acknowledged as much; often epilogues delivered at the end of a play would invite playgoers to identify what parts of a play they did not like, implying that the play could be revised and revived to align more fully with their desires (whether or not playmakers actually followed through on such promises is unclear). Playmakers frequently drew attention (some positively and some negatively) to the fact that each audience member individually had the capacity to imagine and interpret the fiction that they were watching.

But even beyond that kind of internalized participation, we have ample evidence of playgoers participating in an externalized fashion, making comments, both favorable and unfavorable, on plays in the midst of performance. These responses included shouting out their own ideas for lines, bantering with the clown, mocking bad actors, throwing objects, hissing villains, cheering heroes, calling for popular bits to be done again and again, asking for particular jigs or songs, and so forth.

In some instances, playgoers’ externalized responses during performance evidently prompted the actors to change or even abandon their original intentions (that is, the playwright’s script), though in other instances they likely ignored the outburst. Even when the outburst was ignored, however, in the context of a live performance, an unscripted response from any one playgoer necessarily informed for the rest of the audience their experiences and understanding of the play, with potentially radical results. There are a few accounts of a single spectator laughing at a tragedy or weeping at a comedy and, by virtue of their generically inappropriate conduct, changing how other playgoers thought about the play, subverting the playwright’s and actors’ generic intentions for the play and, in effect, undermining the supposed “authority” of the mainstream cultural producers.

We shouldn’t forget that Shakespeare’s playhouse, with its shared light and three-quarters seating (sometimes with patrons even sitting on the stage or on the balcony behind the stage), was a venue in which audience members were as much on display as the play they had come to watch. It was an environment that encouraged consumers to connect with the producers and even intervene in the act of production, rather than, as in the modern proscenium-arch theater, obediently disappear from view and observe silently.

You have stumbled onto such a rich mine of materials here that offer us perspectives on what audiences of Shakespeare’s time thought about the theater. Why are people just now writing about such practices?

Shakespeare’s audience has long been the subject of interest for scholars, though earlier audience studies—such as Alfred Harbage’s 1941 Shakespeare’s Audience, Ann Jennalie Cook’s 1981 The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, and Andrew Gurr’s 1989 Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London—focused less on audience experience and more on resolving the fundamental questions of who comprised those audiences, their demographics, playgoing habits, and preferred venues.

A separate branch of audience studies took an interest in audience desire and experience, but addressed themselves to recovering evidence of that desire and experience through the critical study of plays written by professional playwrights. These studies—such as Arthur Colby Sprague’s 1935 Shakespeare and the Audience, Ernst Hongimann’s 1976 Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies, The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response, Jean Howard’s 1984 Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration, Ralph Berry’s 1985 Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, and Jeremy Lopez’s 2003 Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama—center upon the reasonable premise that successful commercial playwrights (such as Shakespeare) were successful because they understood what their audiences wanted; furthermore, truly effective playwrights (like, again, Shakespeare) could even control, or orchestrate, audience experience and desire.

This approach, of course, does not actually study the audience itself; rather, it studies the playwright’s understanding of, and assumptions about, his audience—that is, it’s really a study about the playwright, which is naturally going to be of interest when the playwright you are talking about is Shakespeare. And, in the end, neither approach was really able to address the question of audience understanding of the theater and how it worked.

While all of this was happening in the world of early modern studies, a different approach to the theatrical audience was taking shape in the parallel world of modern performance studies, in works such as Keir Elam’s 1980 The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Patrice Pavis’s 1982 Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre, Daphna Ben Chaim’s 1984 Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response, Susan Bennett’s 1990 Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, J. L. Styan’s 1995 Drama, Stage, and Audience, and the 2003 essay collection Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, edited by Susan Kattwinkel. These scholars emphasized the idea of the playgoer as a collaborative playmaker, participating in the production of dramatic meaning and even the “play” itself (taking the “play” to be, not the script, but the performance of the script).

Within the past two decades, early modern audience studies has begun to catch up with this approach and a third way of thinking about the Shakespearean audience has emerged that is neither the old demographic approach nor the “orchestration” model. This new approach operates from the premise that early modern playgoers were participatory and engaged in the creation of dramatic meaning, both within their individual imaginative capacities and within the material ecosystem of playhouse culture. In this model, playgoers cannot be properly understood merely as just one part of a larger demographic group or as passive consumers simplistically “orchestrated” in their responses or desires.

One of the earliest works to employ what I refer to as the “new audience studies” was Cynthia Marshall’s 2002 The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts, but I think that the first to truly make the approach its central methodological framework was Charles Whitney’s 2006 Early Responses to Renaissance Drama. Since then the approach has been adopted by many of the essays in the 2011 collection Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, edited by Jennifer Low and Nova Myhill, as well as in studies such as Allison Hobgood’s 2014 Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England and Richard Preiss’s 2014 Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre, as well as in studies dedicated to subjects beyond the audience itself, such as David McInnis’s 2013 Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England.

The novelty of the contribution made to new audience studies by Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater lies in its emphasis upon the original creative work of playmaking playgoers; rather than looking only to how audience members responded to professionals’ plays, my interest is in their own authorial urges and how their agency (or, at times, perception of agency) within the playhouse ecosystem led them to both replicate and deviate from what they assumed to be the systems and conventions of professional playmaking.

Scholars have long known about the plays that I discuss, though they have yet to think about them as a group sharing a common point of origin (in the audience) and they have been hesitant to make much use of them, either for literary criticism (few are what a judicious reader might consider quality writing) or theatrical history, since, as works by amateurs, they are usually assumed to be “naïve” or simply “ignorant” about the mainstream industry and its operations.

While I wouldn’t presume to make an argument about the literary value of most of these plays, I do want to recover their value for theater history. Their position outside of the mainstream industry is, in fact, precisely why they have value. Like a work of modern fan fiction, each of the playgoers’ plays provides evidence of a particular, dedicated consumer’s perspective on the cultural industry that he patronized.

What has been the relationship so far between what you are calling the “new audience studies” in literature and the way cultural studies scholars have approached the audiences and fans of contemporary popular media? What might the two fields learn from each other?

I think there has long been a tendency in early modern audience studies to valorize the authority of the playwright—that is, the cultural producer—because that playwright was, for most scholars, Shakespeare. That valorization, though, usually came at the expense of the audience, which is so often imagined to have been dutifully compliant to the dramatic experience shaped for it by such a “genius”.

Cultural studies of modern audiences of popular media have much to teach historians of the early modern audience, as well as critics of early modern drama, because Shakespeare’s theater was definitively also one of “popular media”. How we typically consume Shakespeare in a theatrical context today—in a rarefied venue, with darkened house lights, surrounded by an obediently silent audience—is not how Shakespeare was consumed in his own day, nor was it the kind of audience for which Shakespeare wrote. There has been, in my view, too little engagement between early modern audience studies and studies of audiences of contemporary popular media.

In part, this disconnect is a product of the scholarly fear of anachronism; at the same time, however, the early modern audience was the first modern audience, just as Shakespeare’s mass-market profit-based theater was the first modern form of commercial cultural production. Scholars of the early modern audience could thus better contextualize the slender amount of evidence we have about actual playgoer experience by turning to the work done by modern popular culture audience studies. In particular, it would be helpful for early modern audience scholars to recognize the degree to which modern audience studies have established the extent to which the consumer of popular culture should be taken seriously as someone who could be highly engaged with, informed about, and participatory with mainstream, commercial cultural production.

Again, there is this notion—mistaken, in my view—that Shakespeare’s audience was reverentially and transfixedly passive in its consumption of theatrical entertainment. If we know anything about modern audiences of popular culture, it’s that they rarely sit still silently and just watch. The same was true, I maintain, for the dedicated members of Shakespeare’s original audiences.

What counts as amateur in an age when the status of professional playwrights has not yet been fully secured? As you ask at one point, in what ways do amateurs and novice professionals differ?

No definite line between professional and amateur existed in the period; at the time, the term “profession” referred to spiritual conviction and the term “amateur” did not exist at all (the word “avocation” did, but it, too, had religious connotations). Nonetheless, by the 1590s, a functional theater “industry” certainly came to exist: it had dedicated venues, regular materials, relationships with patrons and the government censor, staging conventions and manuscript conventions, standard business practices and models, repeat customers, investors, profits and losses, and both formal and informal methods for entering and working within it. This final category is perhaps the most important.

A profession is formally defined as a field of labor in which those who are currently practitioners exercise control over who may enter it and how they may work within it—what is often referred to as “occupational closure”. In Shakespeare’s theater, occupational closure over playwriting took three routes: some dramatists learned how to write plays while they were students at university (these writers were most active in the 1580s and 1590s), some learned to write plays by being actors themselves (including Shakespeare), and some learned to write by being apprenticed to an established professional and working collaboratively with him for a time (Shakespeare’s rivals, the Lord Admiral’s Men, did this often, but shortly before he retired Shakespeare did it too, collaborating with his successor, the young John Fletcher).

For the established playwrights, this last system was the preferred method for entering the profession. In Ben Jonson’s 1629 poem of praise for the play The Northern Lass, written by his former apprentice Richard Brome, he lauded:

I had you for a servant, once, Dick Brome,

And you performed a servant’s faithful parts.

Now you are got into a nearer room,

Of fellowship, professing my old arts;

And you do do them well, with good applause,

Which you have justly gained from the stage,

By observation of those comic laws

Which I, your master, first did teach the age.

You learned it well, and for it, served your time

Apprenticeship—which few do nowadays.

There were some playwrights, however, who did not follow these systems. As Jonson goes on to complain in his poem, “Both learned and unlearned, all write plays.” Best known are the aristocratic dilettantes of the 1630s and early 1640s who wrote a play or two for the professional actors to stage before the royal family or for elite audiences at one of the indoor theaters. These amateurs had no interest in entering the socially disrespectful profession of the theater; they wrote merely to secure attention, and some sense of influence or importance, at court.

My book looks at a group of playwrights who were neither aristocrats nor participants in any of the informal mechanisms for professionalization. Indeed, many of the playwriting playgoers explicitly stated that their intention was not to enter the profession. I define these amateurs, then, by both their socioeconomic status (because they were not courtiers, they did not have the same political motivations for writing as the aristocratic amateurs) and by their distance from the established producers’ understanding of playmaking. Importantly, however, and one of the findings that I emphasize, that lack of distance did not correlate to ignorance; rather, when we look at evidence in the plays, such as the categories that I cover in the book (stage directions, revising practices, and stage poetry), these amateurs repeatedly demonstrate diligent attention to (if sometimes incomplete understanding of) the way plays were made into performances.

Dr. Matteo Pangallo is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Previously he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and, before that, held teaching positions at Bates College, Mount Holyoke College, and Westfield State University. He received his M.A. in Shakespearean Studies from King’s College London and the Globe, and Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Dr. Pangallo’s first book, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), uses plays written by some of Shakespeare’s original playgoers as early modern “fan fiction” providing evidence of what those playgoers thought about the theater and how it worked. His current books projects are Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England and Strange Company: Foreign Performers in Medieval and Early Modern England. 

Beyond his academic work, Dr. Pangallo has worked as a theatrical director and dramaturg, including as the founding artistic director for the Salem Theatre Company, assistant director for the Rebel Shakespeare Company, and research assistant at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.