Chapter 2 examines Nice Wanton, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, Like Will to Like, and Enough is as Good as a Feast, moral interludes that replace an omniscient God with neighborhood surveillance. Both comic subversion and compassionate beholding cast theatrical engagement as a form of resistance against tyranny. While the York audience is beckoned into playful defiance of these tyrants, these minor characters also offer opportunities for the audience to behold their distress with empathy. Chapter 1 tracks minor characters in the York Corpus Christi plays who offer modes of quiet resistance to tyrants such as Herod and Pilate.

Each chapter focuses on a form of engagement- beholding, witnessing, voyeurism, investment- and its corresponding affect in performances of different genres. As audiences are called to be participants in, proxies for, or mirrors to these onstage communities, their response is imbued with a sense of ethical or social responsibility. These plays therefore often represent or reimagine crime in contemporary terms, creating a sense of asynchrony that heightens the stakes of engagement by removing historical, allegorical, or geographical difference. These crimes require the renegotiation of community structure and norms, a process that is often explored through audience engagement. Spanning late fifteenth-century biblical drama to early seventeenth-century playhouse prologues, this project focuses on onstage communities that react to the threat or presence of crime by working to surveil, solve, redefine, or avoid it. Crime, Community and Audience Engagement in Late Medieval and Early Modern Theater addresses forms of audience engagement that are revealed especially by early English dramatic performance of narratives of crime.

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