The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate (review)

The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England is an unusual book. Its two authors, Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, set out to depict the relation between early modern theatergoing and the broad cultural and social contexts in which it flourished. But each approaches the question from a markedly different perspective. Dawson understands playgoing in the context of early modern theatrical and religious practices; Yachnin, a neo-Marxist critic, locates Elizabethan drama in the framework of an "entertainment marketplace" (209) and insists that these earlier practices can be understood only within the longue durée of Western cultural history. Both positions are of interest to anyone seeking to understand the cultural place of the stage in early modern England.

The authors are interested throughout in theatrical pleasure: why is it, they ask, that Elizabethan playgoers went to the theater at all? Since the demise of New Criticism, pleasure has been something of a dirty word in literary critical circles, and this book's restoration of the principle is a welcome one. For Dawson, theatrical pleasure is indelibly linked to a communal, affective response to the aesthetically staged event; for Yachnin, it is far more a matter of individualistic and competitive engagement within an entertainment marketplace. Dawson sees playgoing as akin to religious "participation" (11 and passim). Audiences respond to the bodies and objects onstage with an awareness of both the represented persons and stories and the act of representing or impersonation—and this awareness, he writes, has affinities with the "incarnational aesthetic" (21) of the Eucharistic ritual. Yachnin, in stark contrast, believes that theatrical pleasure is centered in the desire for elite cultural goods and social capital: in this view, "games of social masquerade and a limited mastery of the system of rank itself were chief among the pleasures of playgoing" (3). People went to the theater—situated, in this view, somewhere between the court and the marketplace—in order to cultivate the vicarious pleasure of participating in "an experience of virtual courtliness" (53), a kind of game of social prestige, wherein one learned things about how aristocratic culture functioned and could then model oneself along these lines. He terms this consumerist form of entertainment "'the populuxe theatre'" (3).

Yachnin's playgoers, then, are first and foremost consumers who went to the theater to learn how to take on the aura of individuality, a notion that, Yachnin implies, began with the privileged classes and only gradually became the prerogative of the lower classes. Dawson's playgoers, on the contrary, watched plays primarily in a way that subsumed their individuality in a collective emotive experience: for him, early modern theater was not so much a purveyor of court gossip as a custodian of social memory; not so much a quasi-marketplace of socially desirable goods as a realm where objects could take on a heightened significance—an evocative, quasi-iconic status (in the face of the pressures of the iconoclastic controversy); less a space where the audience learned about the pleasures of unseen selfhood than a space of collective scopic engrossment, a social-aesthetic event.

The two authors take turns putting their case. Part One, "Participation vs. populuxe: two theories of early modern theatre," is for me the book's strongest section. Dawson and Yachnin clearly set out their particular genealogies of theatrical pleasure. In the remaining chapters, the two apply their theories to various aspects of the early modern stage: Part Two, "Theatrical pleasure and the contest of vision," addresses issues of visual management and the nature of theatrical looking, Renaissance optics, and interiority; Part Three, "Objects of wonder and desire," is about the material conditions of staging, taking on the question of stage props and images and their relation to controversies about idolatry, iconoclasm, and religious and economic fetishization; in Part Four, "National pastimes," the...