The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580-1630 (review)

Most of us who work in the arts and humanities are used to imagining science as an alien, often hostile, mode of organizing the world. Of course, times are changing, and there have been a number of excellent studies that have shown how readers in the early modern period were as eager to discover what was new in mathematics, husbandry, and astronomy as they were keen to catch up with the latest literary and historical works. The English Renaissance Stage is another important contribution to our understanding of reading habits and the organization of knowledge in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, examining the relationship between drama and mathematics, technology, and early scientific thought.

The book is divided into two long sections: the first outlines the ways in which geometry and practical knowledge were related to literary theory, and the second studies the relationship between drama and theories of space. Building on the work of Walter J. Ong and others, Turner shows how writers organized their ways of thinking in terms of diagrammatic spatial models. He argues that we have neglected for far too long the relationship between such modes of thought and the production of literature. The term "plot," a literary concept that was assuming central importance in this period, was borrowed from geometry and shows how fertile such study was for artists and thinkers (21). George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, to take an obvious example, is saturated with diagrams and conceptual images of verse forms and types, so much so that debates over orthography and prosody "can be regarded as an extension of contemporary complaints among mathematical practitioners that the quantitative units of spatial or artisanal measure need to be standardized and correct measuring procedures disseminated more widely" (122). In probably the best chapter in the book, Turner shows how heavily indebted Sidney was to geometry and theories of space in his Defence of Poesy. Sidney tries to show that poetry provides real knowledge about the world that can be read alongside the work of practical scientists. There is an especially adept analysis of Sidney's work emerging out of the same intellectual culture that nurtured Sir Francis Bacon's thought, both relying on the portmanteau concept of "'maker's knowledge'" (105). Turner shows how Sidney's circle at court encouraged such links and, for all Sidney's ostensible denigration of history in the Defence, "he has in fact simply transposed to the domain of poesy the same techniques he used in reading history with [Gabriel] Harvey" (101). Harvey's pivotal role further indicates how ubiquitous such thought was and how many people were likely to have made the same connections between disciplines. An analysis of Thomas Dekker's Magnificent Entertainment (1603) for the entry of King James shows how clearly writers made use of the exciting new developments in adjacent arts and sciences, as Dekker seeks "to generate a total system out of many individual iconic semantic elements" (149).

Part 2 looks more carefully at a series of writers and plays, attempting to track the enormous changes that took place in the early modern theater. As Turner points out, the appearance of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) recalls the "boisterous entrance of the guild players onto the platea of the mystery plays" (158), an event now subsumed into a much wider sense of theatricality in everyday life. Just as Sidney saw the poetic image as a mode of transferring knowledge, so did both practitioners and theorists of the stage see the play and the space in which it was performed as a "practical mode of knowledge through representation" (185).

The English Renaissance Stage is an impressive book with a huge battery of scholarly resources marshaled to support every point and turn in the argument. But in places, the argument that plays were thought to produce...