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Reviewed by:
  • Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe
  • Michael Harrawood (bio)
Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. By William N. West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Illus. Pp. xvi + 293. $75.00 cloth.

As the title suggests, this book is concerned with two very large and seemingly disparate fields. What brings the fields together and guides the book is the way in which the author takes up and develops points of connection between them, such as the power the encyclopedias and theaters to contain and organize elements of the world by representing them, or the claim each makes in the name of teaching and ethics, or the way in which each succeeds or fails to fulfill to its promise of truthfulness: "What they share—at least what they were imagined to share—was a conception of knowledge as the ordered representation of everything" (1). This means that Theaters and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, while it is thoroughly interested in the history of the encyclopedia and the theater, does not really attempt to track a historical path of "influence" between these two large fields. Rather, the importance and the beauty of this book lies in its attempt to engage with the larger structures of thought that enabled both to develop at about the same time. These structures include the shared notions of space and time, of desire and curiosity, combinatory models and modes of category formation that allowed both the encyclopedia and the theater to present actions and things to a public as knowable, true, and worth knowing. The energy informing this study is thus heavily phenomenological: it is interested in the status of events and things, and in how the potential of printed texts and dramatic performances to reiterate (or mirror) "everything" creates problems that neither can fully accommodate.

In the introduction the author writes that the book "traces an old path from the ideal to the real, from theory to practice, on its way to a middle ground which it calls performance" (11). Accordingly, the book breaks down roughly into accounts of how encyclopedias and theaters held common claims and common assumptions about the nature of their own representational tactics, and accounts of how the development of the London playhouses began to erode and problematize those common claims and assumptions. The first chapter outlines the intellectual and theoretical origins of the encyclopedia from fifteenth-century mistranslations of enkuklios paideia from "general education' (literally: knowledge of "what is in circulation") to "circles of learning," which claimed for the encyclopedia and for Renaissance humanism a new sort of inclusive universalism. The effect of this mistranslation is to bind the space enclosed by the circle to the space claimed within the circle of the theater itself: both are places that hold [End Page 100] the world back in order to display its elements "free from risk" (28). Early modern encyclopedias presented the world as a sequence of objects of contemplation and wonder, but along with this presentation came the problem of limiting the nature and degree of the very curiositas to which encyclopedias made their appeal. The solution to this problem was found in what the author calls "the idea of the theatre" (43). The author shows how humanists such as Elyot thought of the theater first "as an emblem of the distance between ancient and modern Rome" (44) and, second, as an idealized place of seeing, of demonstration, and of pure learning. Thus the choice of the word "Theatre" for their playhouse allowed Burbage and Brayne to involve their entrepreneurial project in a complex set of associations and assumptions that lent it an air of cultural and historical authority. A lengthy consideration of theorizing about the theater—by Elyot, Jean Bodin, Theodor Zwinger, and others—shows how humanist writers tended to imagine the idea of the theater (as opposed to the practice of the drama) as a place circled off from the commotion of the world in order to put things on display for purposes of learning and ethical training. Chapter 3 considers the techniques of representation used in common by the encyclopedia and the theater, both of which operate by means of a combinatory system in which...

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