In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger by Joanne Rochester
  • Nova Myhill (bio)
Joanne Rochester. Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger. Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2010. ix. 172. US $99.95

Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger is a significant and welcome addition to three understudied but growing areas of scholarship in early modern drama: the works of Philip Massinger, Caroline drama, and the study of spectatorship and audience response. While the book has ‘a deliberately tight focus [on] metadramatic insets in the work of one playwright,’ it is in other ways an ambitious project, particularly in its attention to three distinct types of inset spectacle: the play within, the masque, and the portrait. The precision with which Rochester analyses these as distinct genres of spectacle convincingly demonstrates that ‘masques, plays, and pieces of visual art have very different relations to their spectators, and the presuppositions of their spectators are dictated by the form of the insets themselves,’ and this serves as a vital corrective to the tendency of scholars of drama to collapse all spectacles indiscriminately into forms of ‘theater.’ Rochester focuses on what she terms ‘the spectatorial inset – an inset piece in which the interpretation of the show by its onstage audience is as significant as its staging,’ arguing that Massinger’s representation of the process of spectatorship and interpretation on stage is an important part of his effort ‘to draw [his own audience] to an awareness of their function in the theater of which they are a vital part.’

The book is divided into three chapters, with a concise introduction and a suggestive conclusion.

The first chapter focuses on responses to the inset plays in Massinger’s The Roman Actor, providing a compelling reading of the play as a defence of the independent professional theatre: ‘Massinger’s chosen instrument, the medium through which the play is presented and about which it is written.’ This specific focus on the professional theatre, which is debased and abused when co-opted by Domitian’s court, proposes a much more complex reading of the play than most criticism that has placed it in the context of either anti-theatrical or anti-absolutist debate. Rochester suggests that the play’s treatment of its inset spectacles asks the Blackfriars audience to recognize its position as judges of both the play and its characters and defines ‘drama as a dialogue [between play and audience], a process [the playwright] only partially controls.’ This vision of the dialogic nature of drama emphasizes the importance of the audience in [End Page 628] creating meaning and, more significantly, the complex ways in which Massinger ‘insists his audience take their work seriously.’

The second and third chapters focus on Massinger’s staging of spectatorial responses to the masque-within and visual art respectively. While both chapters include insightful readings of particular plays (The City Madam in the second chapter and The Picture in the third), their real subjects are the type of spectacle, not the individual play, and significant portions of each chapter are devoted to an overview of the particular form of spectacle in the culture, in the drama, and in Massinger’s other plays. As a researcher who focuses on drama but not visual arts, I found the third chapter revelatory in its discussion of the shift from emblematic to mimetic painting in the seventeenth century, which argues that ‘because the nature of painted images had changed so dramatically, viewers needed to develop a new vocabulary and set of aesthetic principles for their interpretation, and this would have raised their conscious awareness of the nature of their response.’ This idea of paintings as a site of self-conscious interpretation informs Rochester’s reading of The Picture and suggests a productive approach to onstage artworks in other dramas of the period.

The greatest strength of Staging Spectatorship is its insistence that self-reflexive drama evokes very specific issues of interpretation depending on the type of spectacle that it stages and the type of audience staged watching it. While the book focuses on a small number of plays, that focus allows for readings that, particularly in the case of The Roman Actor, demonstrate...

pdf

Share