Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance ed. by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (review)

This reads well not only as a collection of essays, which is how many will probably encounter it, focusing on select chapters of specific interest, but also as a book, which is how I encountered it as a reviewer. Several of the contributors reference each other’s essays in a way that gives a unified feel to this diverse collection. The only fault I find with reading it as a book is the way that it slams shut after the final essay. The editors could have asked Andrew Gurr to provide an afterword instead of a preface, but I can understand the desire to front-load the benediction of such an important scholar. The collection consists of eleven essays divided into three sections. Much of the “cross-talk” that occurs in the volume happens across sections, which should give a sense of how well this group of essays hangs together.

The first section is comprised of three essays on “The Fabric of Early Modern Theatres.” Tiffany Stern leads off by investigating how Shakespeare uses the theater itself as a kind of prop. Her argument is that Shakespeare sees the physical environs of the theater not as something to be transcended but rather as something to be knowingly and enthusiastically incorporated into the experience of the work. Names of physical spaces in the theater refer not only to the immediate physical object but also to that object’s wider symbolic meaning in the culture at large. Heaven and Hell are the names of supernatural locations as well as of specific sites in the theater, and a reference to one site (say, Heaven: supernatural) will conjure up the associations of the other (Heaven: theater). For example, the posts that support this theatrical Heaven are not just an architectural feature—they also connect with the audience’s extratheatrical experience of public punishments. Stern reminds us that for early modern audiences the Heavens are the heavens, a post is a post, the tiring-house is a house, the balcony is a balcony. These references are accretive, not substitutive in nature. It is a new way of reading early modern metatheater, and a strong opening to a strong collection of essays. Next, Gwilym Jones walks us through storm scenes in Julius Caesar and The Tempest, showing how the language of these scenes interacts with and reinforces sound and lighting effects in the very different environments of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters. In the final essay of the section, Nathalie Rivere de Carles canvases the many semantic properties of the curtains deployed throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters, from framing effects to their role in discovery. A highlight of the essay is her reading of the arras in Hamlet, a prop that undergoes a metamorphosis from static curtain to a surrogate for the player’s body. The arras “performs” Polonius’s transformation “into an object in a vanitas painting, a lesson about the transience of life learned and to be learned” (69).

The second section is devoted to four essays on “Technologies of the Body,” led by Lucy Munro’s survey of the use of stage blood and other body parts from the 1560s to the 1640s. Although stage blood could be quite realistic, Munro finds overall that the effect was often a mixture of the sensational and the intellectual or symbolic, as in Julius Caesar’s assassination scene and in the dumbshows of Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. The same goes for the severed heads, hands, and other body parts that appear with such remarkable frequency in the drama of the period. Andrea Stevens considers the effects created by the varieties of paints and other cosmetics that were applied directly onto players’ bodies. Such materials often served “to materialise a range of bodily states not always thought of as similarly constituted: bloodiness against health, beauty against deformity, blackness...