Operating Theater.

H. R. Coursen. Shakespeare: The Two Traditions. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1999. 23 pls. + 224 pp. $42.50. ISBN: 0-8386-3774-4.

John G. Demaray. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms. (Medieval and Renaissance Studies.) Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. xvi + 17 pls. + 174 pp. $48. ISBN: 0-8207-0284-6.

Janette Dillon. Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv + 272 pp. $59.95 ISBN: 0-521-59334-4.

C. Walter Hodges. Enter the Whole Army: A Pictorial Study of Shakespearean Staging 1576-1616. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xi + 60 pls. + 180 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-32355-X.

Matthew Steggle. Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson. (English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 75.) Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 1998. 2 pls. + 148 pp. $16. ISBN: 0-921604-57-9.

Greg Walker. The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 245 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-56331-3.

Martin White. Renaissance Drama in Action: An Introduction to Aspects of Theatre Practice and Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. xii + 7 pls. + 265 pp. $22.99. ISBN: 0-415-06739-1.

The new books on theater practice collected here provide a splendid example of the renewed and burgeoning interest in staging techniques, their history, and their future. This trend is amply demonstrated in the increased emphasis given to production history in the newer complete editions of Shakespeare. Indeed, interest in specifically Shakespearean production does provide a compelling insight into cultural appropriations of the Renaissance, but it is important to notice, as several of the works below indicate, that there are opportunities for equally pertinent new discoveries and re-evaluations which exist in the works of other medieval and Renaissance dramas and dramatists.

Professor Coursen's Shakespeare: The Two Traditions concentrates on reviewing nine theatrical productions and eight films, produced (with one exception) in the years 1994-1996. His introduction locates recent theatrical practice within the context of postmodern theoretical approaches, especially Terence Hawkes's and, not surprisingly, dismisses mere academic theorizing in favor of the pragmatic approaches necessitated by the exigencies of stage and film production. Arguing against a "transcendent original" which conveys one universal truth, Coursen does articulate a qualified postmodern approach, one distinctly limited by "coherence" or a controlling unity of symbol. His methodology is based upon his recognition of archetypes contained in each play: "Archetypes are not some immutable carving of 'truth,' but are dynamic and changing, reflecting different insights to different Zeitgeists" (27). Thus he assesses the success or failure of each director's ability to make the originating script "at once available to an early modern culture and to our own, waiting for the historical circumstances that will allow it to be re-illuminated in performance" (13). The value of his book lies in his consistent practice of placing each production or film in both its historical/political context and in the play's production and film history; in this latter goal, his extensive play-going experience allows him, for example, to recall authoritatively and exhaustively stage productions of Henry V from 1974 to 1995 simply as a basis for comparison. That they are almost exclusively productions done in Britain and the eastern North American coast is impressive for Shakespeare aficionados with a trans-Atlantic bent but the book cannot be seen as representative of international trends in late twentieth century Shakespearean productions.

Stage tradition occupies roughly the first half of the book. Chapters deal with productions of Henry V, Henry VI, The Tempest, Macbeth, and Hamlet, with the Hamlet materials divided into two chapters. Coursen's theatrical experience is amplified by his undoubted command of textual issues. Thus, he introduces his approach to the Hamlet productions (the Almeida Theatre Company, 1995, and the Shakespeare Repertory, 1996) by commenting upon the theatrical possibilities inherent in the textual crux of Fortinbras' last speech, "Take up the bodies" ("body," F), and makes an elegant transition into a meditation on the significance of the loss of transubstantiation for sixteenth-century English Protestants. He extends Greenblatt's "eucha-ristic anxiety" into a vision of "sacramental anxiety" (99) in the play to elucidate a Zeitgeist absent from most modern productions. Indeed, Coursen argues, the Almeida's production failed, despite a few isolated moments, to reach such teleological levels.

Coursen's objections to the "incoherent mishmash" (16) and the Bakhtinian carnival elements in most postmodern productions find him sympathetic to but ultimately disappointed by both the 1995 American Repertory Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival productions of The Tempest in the same year. He is more impressed by the earlier Royal Shakespeare Company version, 1994, arguing that Alec McCowan's "decentered Prospero" (89), a departure from traditionally angry Prosperos upon which his critics seemed fixated, enabled the "fragility of theatre [to be] placed in the forefront" (88). The organization of this chapter was spoiled for me, however, by the addition of a review of a "minimalist" Macbeth, the ACTER production for spring 1996. The grafting of minimalist Macbeth on to a chapter about three postmodern Tempests struck me as incongruous enough. The disconnect was even more puzzling since no explanation of ACTER's unique status was included. There seems to be litde critical insight gained by comparing the political fashions of sophisticated, urban repertory theaters with the bare-bones, rake-Shakespeare-to-the-schools approach exemplified by ACTER'S bi-annual program, that sends five actors on weekly visits to colleges throughout the United States.

Coursen's final five chapters on films not only survey the large budget, star-vehicle Shakespeare films of the nineties: Loncraine/McKellan's Richard III, Branagh's Hamlet, Luhrmann/Di Caprio/Danes's Romeo + Juliet, Parker/ Fishburne's Othello, and Nunn's Twelfth Night. He also includes three lower-wattage films that could be designated as "off-shoots": Pacino's Looking for Richard, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, and Branagh's A Midwinter's Tale. His methodological objections in this section are based not upon an observation of the pitfalls of postmodernism but rather upon an understanding of the uses of the naturalistic and realistic resources unique to film. Coursen evaluates these films by their efficacy in harnessing film's ability to connect the audience feelingly to its own Zeitgeist; "What is common to each manifestation... is an archetype, that is, an energy in the script that can be configured in today's medium to make sense to today's audience" (30). Using this criterion, Course n reserves his harshest criticism for Richard Loncraine's film of Richard III. Based as it was upon McKellan's performance in Richard Eyre's National Theatre Production, in which Richard becomes an English Hitler, the film fails for Coursen precisely because, as a film, it so meticulously conjures up the physical reality of the period -- complete with a genuine De Havilland 89 Dragon Rapide airplane for the Duchess of York's escape. Loncraine's thus becomes a "film about the late 1930s, a subject that replaces whatever Richard III may be about" (148). Shakespeare's play competes with Loncraine's, unsuccessfully.

An example of a successful negotiation between the suspension of disbelief and the manipulation of appearance, is Trevor Nunn's 1996 film, Twelfth Night. Arguing that the archetype to be developed in Twelfth Night is "gender, its fusion and its confusion" (201), Coursen illustrates how Nunn focuses on the audience's awareness of Viola's disguise and the effort such a masquerade requires. "Instead of insisting that we suspend our disbelief, this Viola makes us believe that she can almost become a man, even against the increasing urgency of her womanhood" (203). In conclusion, Coursen suggests that Shakespeares, on film and in the theater, are inextricably entwined and that both traditions, whichever reveals its archetypes and whichever emerges as more dominant, will continue to allow audiences a future "that Shakespeare will see for us" (241).

Perusal of John G. Demaray's study of The Tempest in Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness, is recommended to those who eschew most modern theoretical approaches to Shakespeare, whether new historicist, feminist or post-colonial. The information on the book jacket is taken verbatim from his own preface and stresses the originality, innovation, and challenge to such recent critics which his study proposes. Specifically dismissing post-colonial critics, (Hawkes, Erlich, Skura), the author maintains that Prospero's island is definitely Mediterranean, not to be confused with the New World; this fact disposes of "reductionist political interpretation" which "insists" that "Caliban is the play's hero and central figure" (25). Instead, Demaray's thesis is that The Tempest represents a "unique transitional form of drama, with an original structure... written primarily for the special machines and conditions of the stage at Whitehall" (15). His premise rests on the fact that the first two recorded performances of the play were at court in 1611 and 1613, and was formulated after "close reviews of First Folio printings of The Tempest" and of other entertainments on record at the British Records Office [sic], the Cambridge, British, Huntington, and New York Public Libraries and the Bibliotheque Nationale. Further research was conducted by "onsite [sic] investigations of the English and European locations of early productions" (xv). Since much of his argument rests upon the physical properties of the Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, as it was in 1611-1613, one wonders how such on site investigations could occur. More explanation of these sources and the preparation of a works cited list would have been very helpful to this reader.

Chapter 1 recapitulates sources and influences documented by most editors and source hunters of The Tempest, and particularly notes the prevalence of classical epic characters in selected earlier Italian, French, and contemporary English court entertainments. James's well-documented interest in witches is also indicated as a likely influence on the poet. Demaray then moves on to demonstrate the difficulties in classifying The Tempest, which have persisted from the play's inclusion in the 1623 Folio as the first "Comedie." As capstone of this chronological survey, Demaray takes exception to Frank Kermode's assertion, in his 1954 New Arden edition, that the play is an academic pastoral drama. Thus, Demaray has set the stage for a "new" investigation into the precise nature of the play's originality. After a catalogue of several French royal court balets between 1581 to 1617, he notes that they too mingled poetry, music, design, and spectacle, and suggests that "spectacles of strangeness" characteristic of bale ts were first incorporated into English court masques by Jonson, thereby influencing Shakespeare's construction of The Tempest. Prospero's magical displays are "hinges" (61) parallel to those in masque spectacles, and are helpfully enumerated in a chart on pages 61-63. Even Caliban's role finds a precursor in Jonsonian masques: "Caliban as a character springs from antimasque grotesque types" (53), characters opposed to the ultimately triumphal monarchical order which the masque celebrates, decidedly not intended to be sympathetic.

In perhaps the most compelling reasoning of his argument, Demaray cites the problematic stage direction, "Juno descends" (4.1.74). Underscoring the historical crux presented to editors by its apparently premature placement, Demaray is moved to make his sole concession to Stephen Orgel's authority (but specifically on Shakespeare's play, no mention of his work on masques): "As Orgel has correctly observed, 'editors have almost invariably assumed that the ... reference is misplaced and belongs at line 102'" (83). The seemingly mis-timed stage direction, because it has been debated throughout the play's editorial history, is tantamount to proof for Demaray that The Tempest must have been written specifically for Whitehall and its superior special effects machinery. Such a provocative argument ought to be juxtaposed against Jupiter's theophany: "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle; he throws a thunderbolt." (5.4.92) in Cymbeline, a play which is not recorded as having been played at Whitehall. It is an opportunity for some interesting speculation, sadly missed. He raises the stage direction crux only in regard to The Tempest, presumably as the stuff from which to embroider in his subsequent chapter on innovative masquing "hieroglyphics." And it brings Demaray to the assertion that Shakespeare started the trend away from purely classical iconography in masques: "Campion, possibly even holding a copy of The Tempest 'in hand,' argued that modern fictions needed to feature new imaginative figures of power" (104). Nevertheless, what cannot be disputed is, as Demaray reminds us, the immediate revival and continuing popularity of The Tempest following the Restoration. It might be useful to consider what perhaps might have sustained Jacobean and Caroline public theater in emulating masques by importing flying gods and goddesses into plays.

Janette Dillon tells us that she began her book by asking what seems to be a simple question: "Why are other languages so conspicuous in English plays of the sixteenth century?" The result of her interrogation, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England, a title as seemingly innocuous as her initial query, is an impressive survey of the persistence of Latin usage as symbolic of the authority of the medieval church throughout the development of English vernacular literatures from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century. A second and integral thread of her argument illustrates how rising English nationalism, after the English Reformation, influenced the usage of other vernacular languages in drama. In eight chapters, chronologically arranged, Dillon presents a wealth of historical material contrapuntally: first, introducing primary and secondary sources to demonstrate how pervasive religious developments and crises, which led to and stemmed from the Reformation, were represented in terms of anxieties over language-choice. The point about, for example, "The Controlling State" having been made, she then turns to major dramatic texts and constructs a reading frequently so compelling as to seem an obviously pertinent interpretation of the texts. Her bibliography includes more than 50 primary documents and over 250 secondary research materials; yet the introduction of all these documentary players is conducted so smoothly one simply appreciates the harmonious conclusions. It is a sign of her deft handling that the attempt to summarize her argument appears unwieldy.

In the chapter mentioned above, Dillon's thesis is the demonization, by English Reformers, of Latin as a symbol of the papist enemy. Introducing the conflict over production of an English Bible, she charts Tyndale's progress in translating the New Testament and his struggles against a church/state establishment that viewed unfettered access to Holy Writ in the vernacular as dangerous, however necessary a separation it made from Rome/Latin. This struggle was encoded in the contrast between the Puritans' distrust of linguistic erudition as popish and deceitful and their association of "plain English" with truth. Into this context, Dillon introduces John Bale who, as a cleric turned playwright, was recruited to harness the didactic power of drama and its impressive language to the conservative demands of Protestant propaganda. The background having been prepared, Bale's King Johan (a play which features considerable Latin in its dialogue) is the dramatic text replaying her linguistic theme. Dillon's conclusion explains how the use of Latin, when translated into English by virtuous characters like King Johan, is a compromise which, even as it "attacks Latin as a means of excluding, deluding and profiteering, ... retains some of its aura of authority. The audience, while clearly summoned to liberate itself from the exploitation and control that Latin represents, is still called upon to respond to its traditional appeal" (105).

By the end of chapter 6, she has established how the development of public secular drama has appropriated the Latin/English dichotomy in order to underscore moments of great emotional power, a "Latin-focus point" (160). A famous crux, Hieronomo's Latin lament in The Spanish Tragedy (2.5.67-80), should not be apologized for as editors have; rather Dillon argues that we should read his departure from English as the dramatic point. "The effective language is precisely Latin. ... The writing of these powerful moments in Latin points to a dramaturgy not yet remotely interested in naturalistic effects, but rather in highly wrought, extravagant fullness. ... The Spanish Tragedy ... aims to give pleasure by making truth deeply present through high artifice, not by rendering it indistinguishable from ordinary life" (161). No wonder the Puritans despised the theater; its very language had the force to reempower the Roman enemy.

Dillon's transition to chapter 7, then, effortlessly modulates her theme on the use of staged languages to a higher key. Staying with The Spanish Tragedy, Dillon develops her argument to include foreign vernaculars and to re-consider the notion of "Englishness" as it is constructed in contrast to alien languages. While she endorses David Bevington's illustrations of animosity toward foreigners in Tudor Drama, Dillon underscores "the central role that language plays in constructing anti-alien feeling. ..." (166). Her final chapter treats 2 Henry VI, where her definition of "alien" is further broadened to include not only foreigners but the forces of disorder within England, forces which are identified by their own "languages": criminal patois, occult appropriations of Latin, and rebels' incendiary rhetoric -- discourses Shakespeare includes to illustrate internal threats to England. Language and Stage is truly monumental in scope, and it is somewhat disingenuous to note that Dillon's conclusion is to chart th e work ahead. Acknowledging a cut-off date of 1600 as arbitrary, she concludes that the seventeenth century, under a "foreign" king who proposed to unite English with Scottish, invites further consideration. We should certainly accept. C. Walter Hodges has published accounts of his search for Shakespeare's Globe for almost half a century. Recently his collected drawings, first commissioned as illustrations in the several volumes of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, have appeared as Enter the Whole Army. The fifty drawings are beautifully reproduced and accompany Hodges's meticulous reconstructions of particular scenes from the plays. In his preface, he tells us that, while they were individually conceived to help a reader imagine the plays as they might have originally been staged, the collected illustrations as an oeuvre encouraged him to form "a comprehensive picture of the structure and management of the stage Shakespeare had worked with" (viii). Accordingly, Hodges has written this book to "unravel the worki ng methods of his stagecraft" (18) from the direct, indirect, or inferred hints of stage directions contained in Shakespeare's canon. The initial chapters trace the history of Elizabethan stage archeology from Edmund Malone's publication of An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage in 1780 through the establishment of a discipline of comparative theatrical history in the twentieth century. It is a splendid story of dogged sleuths, serendipitous discoveries and devoted imagination; Hodges's beautiful writing will intrigue both neophyte and experienced scholar alike.

He then introduces his working drawings, based upon the copy of De Witt's drawing of the Swan, the dimensions of the Fortune discovered by Malone in the Dulwich manuscripts, and his own combination of meticulous draftsmanship and creative imagination. It would be easy for the uninitiated to overlook the extraordinary accuracy of Hodges's conjectures, several of which were laid down in drawings before 1989. His diffidence might disguise the fact that the discovery of the foundations of the Rose theater in that year confirmed many of his prior theories. Thus, he is able to include the drawings from 1984-1989 and to comment upon how the archeological facts have slightly altered his later conceptions.

After these two introductory chapters, Hodges offers eight examples of specific staging situations, each of which applies to scenes in several plays. Chapter 7, for instance, focuses on the use of the stage bed, "discovered" or "thrust forward" in Othello, 2 Henry VI, 1 and 2 Henry IV (Juliet's bed and tomb are considered in a previous chapter). Hodges includes at least one drawing of a probable staging for each play's relevant scene, each of which is advanced after minute attention has been paid to the information conveyed by title pages and formal stage directions (where available), as well as to the direct commands and staging hints implied within the dialogue. Later chapters ring changes upon projections of other outdoor theaters and give us intimations of how the plays might have been staged on tour, in the Black-friars theater, and after the reconstruction of the Globe in the seventeenth century. It is a fascinating group of imaginative projections but one cannot help but wonder if they have been actua lly tried in a consistent performance. Certainly, however, every visitor to the new Globe in London sees at least some aspect of the decades of painstaking work by a handful of dedicated theater historians, like Hodges, that enables us to see feelingly a theater close to that of Shakespeare's lifetime.

Matthew Steggle's monograph, The Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson, places satiric comedies by his contemporary professional dramatists squarely in the context of "struggles about the nature, status, and future of professional drama.. which have conditioned critical paradigms of drama ever since" (126). Adopting Richard Helgerson's identification of 1599 as a watershed year in English drama, Steggle traces the emergence of the practice of personation of living people on the professional stage, in comedies from Every Man Out of his Humour through Brome's The Court Beggar in 1640. Reiterating the unique phenomenon which the Wars of the Theaters represented, Steggle maintains that these plays are "the only case where the victims of stage satire respond in kind, with plays of their own, which challenge the assumptions of their rivals' plays" (22). Ultimately at stake in this the "first" war is the nature of comedy itself.

In revisiting the poetic dialogue which Jonson's Every Man Out, Cynthia's Revels, and Poetaster engage in with his principal opponents, Marston and Dekker, Steggle distances his position from the biographical criticism which was spawned by nineteenth-century interest in personation. Instead, his argument is that the sentiments represented by personated characters are associated with issues pertinent to their contemporary professional theater. Steggle's observation that Jonson is vitally concerned with "presenting comic drama as worthy of serious literary attention" certainly is a well-known one but Steggle takes aim at Northrop Frye and maintains that the importance of Greek Old Comedy to the Renaissance was principally an appreciation of Aristophanes' use of satiric personation.

Thus while Steggle reiterates that Jonson fashions his argument about the privileged nature of classically inspired satiric comedy and presents personations of Marston and Dekker as bad writers living their lives as bad plays, "seedy poet-playwrights, immoral and what's worse, inept" (35), his argument becomes compelling in his reading of the "elegant and cogent" arguments Jonson's opponents offer in What You Will and Satiromastix. If Marston authorizes the "good, fantastic drama" which is justified by the pleasure it gives its spectators and which is "to some extent parodic of the classics-based, text privileging stance of Jonson's comical satires" (48), Dekker offers a third model of the comic genre. Satiromastix, Steggle argues, fulfills and parodies Jonson's concept of a vulgar or debased drama dependant on mere players: "It is not merely that Dekker is denying Jonson a quasi-hieratic position as arbiter of morals: he is denying anyone that position" (55). As does Marston, Dekker contends that the ultimate value of a comedy is predicated upon its audience's reaction. Thus in his readings of Marston and Dekker, Steggle highlights the historical importance specific representations of living persons give to their plays and in doing so counters well-established, thematic critics like Philip Finkelpearl.

Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate respectively the continuing uses of personation after the first war by Dekker, Middleton, and the author of Swetnam the Woman-hater, and by Jonson in his later plays. Jonson continues to use, and to be abused by, the technique of personation in further sallies on the nature of professional drama. Chapter 5 is particularly interesting in its demarcation of the class warfare represented by the popularization of courtier dramatists and the continuing developments of the professional theaters in the 1630s. Centering his observations around Richard Brome's The Court Beggar, Steggle advances the proposition that wealthy, courtier poet-playwrights, especially Davenant and Suckling, pose a serious threat to the theater by their attempts to monopolize commercial venues. Steggle's progression from the early opposition of Jonson to Dekker during the first War of the Theaters to their new unity as professionals facing a threat by theatrical "amateurs," makes a splendid final chapter, inviting as he does a reconsideration of the nature of Davenant's ultimate success refashioning Restoration theater in his own way.

Greg Walker raises an important point in his preface to The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama, when he enumerates the terminological difficulties which confront the scholar of Tudor Interludes. As they were composed and performed before the invention of an English purpose-built theater building and its concomitant vocabulary, the very inappropriateness of using stage terminology underscores the essential uniqueness of the Interludes. As Walker puts it, "Their drama lived in the spaces in which the real events which they allegorized also took place" (I). Without the fictive framing of a stage-play world, the didactic relationship between performed fictions and the realities of great houses are obviously to be taken more seriously. Walker's thesis, then, is grounded in this practical fact of theatrical history: Interlude drama was "in its original contexts in the courts and great households of Renaissance Britain...an intensely and inevitably politicised form" (5). In the aftermath of new histo ricism, this is hardly innovative; one feature worth mentioning about this book, however, is the circumlocutory manner in which Walker marshalls his proof.

The substantive literary and political criticism occurs in chapters 3 through 6, in which Walker analyses the political circumstances surrounding performances of Heywood's Interludes for audiences of Henry VIII's court; Lindsay's Any Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (which exists in two states: one performed before King James V and the later version before the regent, Mary of Guise); Udall's Respublica, performed during the Christmas festivities of Mary Tudor's first year as Queen; and Norton and Sackville's Gorboduc, played for Queen Elizabeth in December, 1561.

As is implied by the chronological and literary development, the case of the royal Gorboduc performance is the climax of Walker's argument. Walker duly rehearses the play's importance in the history of Renaissance theater as the earliest Senecan tragedy in blank verse, which also utilized dumbshows. He links Norton and Sackville, as Inns of Court men, to Dudley with his "ins" at the courts. The piece de resistance of Walker's argument is "proof," offered by an eyewitness, that Gorboduc's second dumbshow differed from the printed text of the play by specifically inviting the royal audience to prefer marriage to Dudley over the suit of his rival, the King of Sweden. This theory is based upon a "recently discovered" (5) eyewitness account of the royal performance and enables Walker to conclude: "Gorboduc was read by its first audience as a direct commentary upon, and intervention in, contemporary political debates: not just in general terms, but in the specific context of the Swedish suit for Elizabeth's hand" (217).

The Gorboduc material may well validate Walker's assertions about the specific and local importance of Great Hall performances and, if so, is a scholarly find worthy of celebration. Athough it is perhaps nice to quibble, I do wonder why a reader has to hunt for the sequence of events which led to the discovery of this pivotal documentation: the teasing introduction of "a recently discovered" fact on page 5, a reference to G.W. Bernard's suggestion of a mysterious "British Library Additional MS. 48023" in the footnote to the beginning of chapter 6; another tease about "the same contemporary witness" several pages later. When we finally get to the Q.E.D. of the argument, the transcription of the diary entry, Walker's citation refers to "The Beale MS," not MS.48023. Certainly, a good detective likes to produce the proof in a staged event, but the purpose of scholarly documentation, surely, is to provide straightforward and accurate information to the scholars to come. A feminist scholar might also propose that the observed differences between Lindsay's Thrie Estaitis for a ruling king and that for a female regent, the characterization of the poor widow in Udall's Respublica, and the overt attempt at manipulating Elizabeth's marriage prospects in Gorboduc might all be worth an extended interrogation. Having quibbled, one notes that Walker's introductory chapter on the printing practices of early Tudor drama and his two appendices, one on censorship and the other categorizing printed plays, 1510-1580, are admirably organized and very useful indeed.

The subtitle to Martin White's Renaissance Drama in Action: an introduction to aspects of theatre practice and performance is too modest. While he certainly succeeds in his aim of presenting Renaissance plays to students as performance texts -- the book is usefully divided into chapters which progressively guide one through practical steps of production -- in the process, White reproduces a impressively comprehensive collection of contemporary references to the practices and effects of dramaturgy by Renaissance writers themselves. Drawing upon more than eighty-five original plays, letters, and prose treatises, White positions the excerpts from those Renaissance documents in the context of similar recollections and recommendations of modern critics, actors, and directors. He has produced a splendidly authoritative manual on historical play production, one which literally speaks with the voices of centuries of theater professionals.

After the first chapter, "Approaching the Play," a cautionary illustration of linguistic exigencies and the difficulties which a modern English speaker faces in encountering the "spoken" play, White's subsequent six chapters approach play production from the points of view of actors and, significantly, directors. The issue of each chapter is thrown into relief by its accompanying case study. Chapter 2, for example, addresses the challenges of staging the play. He summarizes what we know of Renaissance practices in scheduling, casting, rehearsing, rewriting and preserving the performance; the case study attached to this is a revealing interview with Matthew Warchus about his direction of Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1994.

Similarly, two chapters on indoor theaters and outdoor playing spaces discuss what we now know of Elizabethan theaters and their furnishings; each case study illustrates how specific sequences from The Spanish Tragedy and Tis Pity She's a Whore (known to have been produced in outdoor and indoor theaters, respectively), can thus be read to provide specifically choreographed directions on the staging.

It is refreshing to find a champion for Shakespeare's contemporaries; the dearth of affordable editions, much less stage production and critical commentary when compared to the sometimes intolerable deal of Shakespeare books, is lamentable. White's final chapters provide perhaps the most valuable service to those interested in the survival of non-Shakespearean Renaissance drama. "Comic (Ir)resolutions" tackles the uneasy, incongruous, and grotesque moods of less popular plays. White cuts (if you'll pardon the expression) straight to the heart of the problem: the depiction of physical horrors, which frequently have provoked scene-destroying giggles, are traced historically. The case study on Titus Andronicus is particularly revealing here, as White illustrates how Deborah Warner's "definitive" 1987 production was definitive precisely because she refrained from cutting the text, which juxtaposes a broad comic scene starkly against the repulsion audiences experience at Lavinia's rape. This is a juxtaposition wh ich Julie Taymor apparently decided against in her recent film. Coupled with his final chapter, which traces the theatrical history of non-Shakespearean drama 1642-1997, White's assessment of the adaptations and negotiations which have characterized such revivals is particularly helpful in breaking down resistance to seldom-produced plays. His final exhortation to those producing agencies who can afford to experiment, universities and subsidized theaters, is well worth hearing.

The task of the reviewer causes one to look a bit more carefully at the apparatus of a specific book. Consulting the bibliographies and lists of works cited in the books reviewed herein, I've been struck by the continuity of consulting, crediting, and building upon the work that has gone before; the acknowledgement of one's contact with tradition is one of the most telling Imprimaturs of the scholar. Let me conclude with a bow to E.K. Chambers; after more than three-quarters of a century, The Elizabethan Stage is still the foundation for those seeking to broaden the fields of discovery in Renaissance Drama. The omnivorous and rigorous interest in theatrum mundi, especially as it was practiced in the Renaissance, continues to engage.