'A worde or two beside the play': Metatheatricality and the development of early modern theater culture

English plays after 1598 show a proliferation of metatheatrical representations and references. Plays began---in ways they had not done before---to represent living actors and playwrights, to allude to other plays, to describe audiences at various playhouses, and to debate questions of theatrical practice. Such heightened attention to the real-world constituents of the contemporary theater became an integral and dynamic feature in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, Dekker, Chapman, Middleton, and their contemporaries. These metatheatrical references usually promoted a playing company's immediate commercial interests. Plays offered playgoers new sorts of pleasure, such as the in-the-know thrill of catching allusions to plays and playwrights or the self-affirming satisfaction of attending a playhouse distinguished from the others by its reputation. Looked at within a single play, metatheatrical references seem primarily motivated by commercial concerns of audience appeal, but considered collectively, they appear to arise from and to promote a shift in the nature of the theater-going experience: the emergence of a theater culture. The producers and consumers of English drama began to manifest the hallmarks of a culture: shared history, language, practices, and values. They developed a body of shared knowledge about theater history and news, a fluency with a lexicon of familiar references derived from that knowledge, and an ability to situate various performance and reception practices within a system of theatrical values. In the context of this emerging theater culture, the theater as an institution began to generate cachet for those who demonstrated their mastery of theatrical knowledge and behavior. Such mastery could signify (variously) one's wit, good-fellowship, imaginative dexterity, lack of pretension, or aristocratic sophistication. By presenting a playgoer's theatrical competence as a reflection of virtues that were analogous to those valued in the broader culture, the theater marketed itself as an arena in which playgoers could establish and display their social merit. These strategies, in turn, contributed to the theater's growing respectability within the broader culture.