By the commercial theater’s closure in 1642, frequent playgoers commanded a vast trove of knowledge regarding the devices, tropes, character types, and genres of the commercial theater. But those conventions were as exploitable as they were familiar, and Chapter 5 shows how theater practitioners managed to surprise those spectators with especially long horizons of dramatic expectation. The chapter examines the striking durability of revenge tragedy in the commercial theater by juxtaposing two plays that nearly bookend its heyday: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor. In revealing the ways that The Roman Actor exploits spectators’ knowledge of Kyd’s play, as well as the tropes of revenge tragedy more broadly, the chapter outlines the techniques by which Caroline theater practitioners made the eminently familiar newly strange.

By the Caroline era, London’s broader theatergoing public contained within it the smaller subset of a theatrical community – those playgoers collectively invested in the cultivation of their dramatic knowledge and interpretive acuity. Chapter 4 offers a phenomenological prehistory of this community, locating its activation in the moment of performance itself. The chapter traces the formation of this theatrical community alongside the dramatic trope of impersonation, which constructed the unknown depths and vicissitudes of individual identity as a function of the bifurcated structure of the playhouse. Through readings of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, the anonymous Look About You, John Fletcher’s Love’s Cure, and Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, this chapter argues that the formation of spatially relational identities in impersonation plots extended from the stage to the amphitheater: constituted as a series of mirror images only partially revealed, London’s theatrical community was produced by spectators’ mutual recognition of their uncertainty about one another.