Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern England (review)

In Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern England, Jeremy Lopez brilliantly reaffirms the old Wildean adage that nothing succeeds like excess. For Lopez, the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater is all about superabundance and its concomitant tensions; in play after play, authors and actors seek to "fill . . . each moment with as much stimulus as possible, to indulge and delight in complexity for its own sake" (37). The underlying assumption of this tendency, Lopez argues, is simple and obvious: "An audience that has a lot to respond to, and that enjoys responding, is a happy audience" (38). Hence the core argument of Lopez's book: that the drama of early modern England inherently seeks a condition of interpretive surplus, in which action and character challenge the very expectations that they themselves promote.

Lopez pursues this thesis through two complementary lines of analysis, each comprising half of his study. In the first, he examines a range of the dramatic conventions that render Renaissance drama distinctive; in the second, he explores the relationship between those conventions and the genres of comedy and tragedy. Section 1 thus largely addresses features of plot and dialogue: the ubiquitous puns and asides, the lengthy expository speeches, the echo scenes, the disguise scenes, the moments of self-conscious invisibility and dismemberment and incest that so typify and distinguish Renaissance drama. In each of these devices, Lopez encounters a mechanism for flooding the stage with excess meaning. Puns, for instance, interrupt the flow of action and development of character in order to "capitalize . . . on the audience's delight in seeing how far contextually appropriate language can be stretched in an inappropriate direction" (44) and, in the process, to "remove an audience to a level where the artificiality of language is self-contained and self-sufficient" (48). Asides force the audience to recognize a disparity between the world they inhabit and that of a play's characters, with the result that "the play virtually stands aside from itself, reveling in its cleverness" (66) and generating a "surfeit of . . . stimulus" (67). Otiose expository speeches actually confuse more than they clarify, thereby conveying "a definite sense that there is much more to the play than can be put on stage" (95), creating the impression that "the theatre seems veritably to be bursting with the plenitude of its own means of signifying" (81). Echo scenes utilize "a disembodied and utterly theatrical voice" that "makes too great demands, because of its starkly blatant significance, on the interpretive space it creates" (102). The staging of a character's invisibility "deliberately strain[s] the imaginative resources of the audience" (106). Scenes of dismemberment and the display of body parts onstage draw attention to the processes of theatrical simulation, as do disguise scenes, in a very different way. Moments of staged or potential incest foreground the instability of character and identity on the stage, presenting such matters as a transparent theatrical illusion. In each case, dramatic conventions seem to insist on generating a state of experience in which "everything is merely theatrical," in which "language, character, action become, rather than the subject of representation, sites for admiring the act of representation itself" (128).

The second half of Lopez's study then extends this argument to questions of dramatic genre. Here, dividing the dramatic literature into the two master genres of comedy and tragedy, Lopez contends that Renaissance playwrights invoked generic conventions first of all "to make an audience comfortable, even smug in its mastery of dramatic signals and information," only "to go to the most extreme lengths to shock it out of its complacency" (133). As representative tragic instances of this dynamic, Lopez discusses three relatively minor works: Kyd's Soliman and Perseda, Marston's Sophonisba, and Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy. Turning then to comedy, he performs the same analysis on three other relatively obscure plays: Beaumont and Fletcher's The...