Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance. Edited by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday

The twelve essays in this edited collection focus on performance and audience: in other words, they ask how early modern theatrical events come to be and what they could do. The authors share a common “conviction,” as the editors write, “that the study of theatrical culture is crucial to the scholarly investigation of dramatic texts” (2).

The book uses three different sets of terms to name its objects of inquiry: “playing” and “playgoing” (the title); “actor,” “audience,” and “performance” (the subtitle); and “players,” “playgoers,” and “playhouses” (the book’s three parts). This pluralistic and additive approach treats early modern theater as a system with multiple entry points. Notably, one missing term is “author,” which gives a hint of what the book will not focus on. While nearly every chapter mentions a Shakespeare play and all of them discuss specific plays, the collection’s emphasis is decidedly on the theater culture of early modern England, of which authors such as Shakespeare are just one part.

This distinctive approach can be seen clearly in part 1, on “Players.” While one might expect such a section to discuss individual actors, these chapters instead seek to understand better what early modern English “playing” was and how it worked. Natasha Korda asks us to expand the typical scholarly emphasis on playgoing “as a contest between the ears and eyes” (19); her chapter focuses on the ways that playgoing involved attention to actors’ entire bodies in motion (especially feet), not just their hands and heads. Emma Whipday explores the paradox of “involuntary physical responses” like “blushing” and “blanching” that were in fact “narrated” onstage by other actors (40). Farah Karim-Cooper’s chapter rethinks what we know about meaningful actorly gestures to show how in Othello, “the racialised body shapes the network of kinetic exchanges between performer and audience” (58). Deanne Williams outlines a pre-public theater tradition of Virgin Mary plays to argue that “Shakespeare’s Juliet constitutes a recollection of a tradition of Marian performance” (90).

The essays in part 2, on “Playgoers,” proceed from the premise, in Smith and Whipday’s words, that “performers” do not primarily deliver a show to “audience members” but instead “share[] the playhouse space” with them (99). Because of the inherent challenges of understanding and describing what happens to and among playgoers during a performance, this is the book’s most conceptually ambitious section. Jeremy Lopez’s chapter productively questions a common tacit scholarly assumption: that early modern theater was an efficient “industry” that delivered “products” (i.e., plays) calibrated to the tastes and desires of its “consumers” (i.e., playgoers). Lopez instead argues that playwrights were not straightforwardly “responsive to audiences” because they produced plays that were both “more difficult” and “much better” than they “needed to be” (142). Lucy Munro compares the case of Richard Meighen, who as a rogue playgoing apprentice became involved in a Chancery suit, to that of the fictional rogue playgoing apprentice in Eastward Ho, Francis Quicksilver. Simon Smith revisits longstanding questions about audiences’ tendencies toward either judgment or pleasure and argues that both forms of response were constantly present and intermingled. Eoin Price builds upon the scholarship on first performance dates and repertory studies to consider “what it means to watch plays out of order” (161): when playgoers may have seen, for example, the plays that imitate Tamburlaine before they saw Tamburlaine itself.

The essays in part 3, on “Playhouses,” are the most varied of the book’s three parts. In her chapter, Tiffany Stern carefully outlines how the terms “theater,” “house,” and “play” were used in the period to understand “the priorities of early modern performance spaces” more clearly (186). In an innovative version of historical phenomenology, Jackie Watson carefully describes the many sensory experiences that an Innsman of Court would have had while walking through London’s Ram Alley on his way to a performance of Ram Alley at Whitefriars. Stephen Purcell’s chapter on a 2019 touring production of Othello incorporates conversations with actors and social media feedback from audience members to show how “a sense of playfulness and interactivity can augment the play’s drama” (223). Helen Hackett demonstrates how what she terms “imagine” choruses (Henry V’s is the most well-known example) contest largely negative ideas in the period about “imagination as deceptive, unruly, and harmful” (242).

I have two final points of praise. First, this is an unusually coherent collection of essays, in part because the editors have written brief introductions to each of the book’s three parts that clearly connect the essays to each other. Second, while each chapter discusses individual plays, not all offer a specifically new “reading” of a play. This approach is not just refreshingly humble. More importantly, it signals that the authors have taken the correct approach to the questions they seek to answer: if we want to understand “playing and playgoing,” then we should, like the authors in this collection, be clear that we are not necessarily always seeking to produce new interpretations of individual plays but instead a deeper understanding of the theatrical culture that those plays reflect, produce, and occasion.