The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate. .

Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. x + 215 pp. index. $54.95.

ISBN: 0-521-80016-1.

This fascinating study of cultural practices in early modern England and of the ways in which those practices impinged on audience response to the drama of the period is at once traditional and postmodern, pragmatic and theoretical. Like the work of many Canadian scholars who have taken a leading position in learning more about the material conditions of Renaissance theatrical practice (Herbert Berry; John Astington, G. B. Shand, Brian Parker, Anne Lancashire, Jill Levinson, Alexandra Johnson, Alan Somerset), it explores pragmatic issues like stage properties, the personalities of actors, and the consequences of the burning of the Globe Theatre in 1613. At the same time this book positively revels in the indeterminacy of historical recovery. The two authors concur on a set of topics and then launch into their differing analyses as to what the historical evidence can tell us. Unconvinced by "totalizing accounts" of "the cultural conditions of theatrical pleasure," they agree to disagree.

Their differences are thus calculated as a way of demonstrating how there can be no "single thesis about what going to plays might have meant" (1). Indeed, their very subject, the pleasure of watching theatrical performance, is manifestly heterogeneous, unpredictable, and subjective. To this inherent instability the authors bring their own varied background and training, Dawson as theater historian and practitioner, Yachnin as neo-Marxist theorist attracted to theater as an early modern luxury market oriented in good part toward the providing of elite entertainment to a popular audience.

Their debate centers around four main topics, of which the first can offer an illustrative model of how this contest of critical interpretations proceeds. The topic is the nature of persons represented in Shakespeare's theater. To Dawson, Shakespeare's fictional creations are of course constructed fictionalized characters on display for our pleasure, but they also embody an irreducible element of personhood that links them to theological concepts of a mediated eucharistic presence. Plays as unlike as Twelfth Night and Tamburlaine can share this "curious reliance on the language of Eucharistic 'participation' as a way of conveying the intensity of bodily-spiritual connection" (11-12). Desdemona moved an early modern audience (at Oxford) to tears in her death scene because she was perceived to be there in a double sense, as a manifestation for the audience of the double nature of theatrical personhood. The audience response is accordingly communal. To Yachnin, conversely (though we should nor overemphasize the differences), these characters are fundamentally ersatz; they are playful fantasies in masquerade, inviting the audience to participate imaginatively in dreams of social prestige and rank. The development of a character like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is deeply embedded in what Yachnin calls "the theatrical commodification of social prestige" (58). Audiences pay for their pleasure in an essentially commercial transaction.

The resulting disparate vision is what the authors accurately call it: two theories of early modern culture. In the second round of their intellectual fisticuffs, the authors direct their attention to theatrical looking. Yachnin stresses qualities of the internal and invisible, inviting the audience to respond largely as private individuals, while Dawson emphasizes collective and unified response; one critic emphasizes the splitting of body from self and self from role, whereas the other discovers the power of theater in a communal enchantment effect. The third pairing looks at magical properties such as Desdemona's handkerchief, which to Yachnin develop out of material and marketplace conditions of performance; Dawson chooses instead to find the appeal of such stage devices (the chain in The Comedy of Errors, for instance) as best understood in the context of early modern debates about idolatry and iconoclasm. The last pairing has to do with cultural memory and nationhood: here Dawson sees the theater as an invaluable repository of such cultural ideas enabling audiences to celebrate communally their sense of belonging to a nation, whereas Yachnin is more interested in commercial trading in theatrical news.

One comes away from these encounters (I do at least) refreshed and delighted by friendly and unsparing intellectual difference. I feel no inclination to choose between the two visions of culture delineated in this study. They both make sense and are able to draw on detailed and persuasive analyses of dramatic materials. We are the richer, as critics and as audiences, for the range of these interpretive possibilities. Vive la difference!