Empowering audiences to measure quality

This paper explores developments in the political representations of English theater audiences from the Elizabethan era to the 1809 OP riots, to demonstrate that audiences were long considered politically significant, not just ‘mere entertainment.’ Early commercial theater audiences were conceived by the Elizabethan state as crowds of subjects that threatened social order. Through the Civil War era, theaters became places of political discussion and dissent and of emerging publics of citizens. By the early nineteenth century theater owners began to reframe audiences as markets of consumers. Each representation continued to appear in later discursive fields, each was contested, and the disputes were couched in political terms.