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  • Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees by Vin Nardizzi
  • Julie Sanders (bio)
Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. By Vin Nardizzi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Illus. Pp. xii + 206. $60.00 cloth.

As a postgraduate student working in Warwickshire in the UK in the 1990s, I was fortunate enough to attend a teaching session run by a team of architects and craftspeople reflecting both on the building of the Swan Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon and the work on the reconstruction of the Globe that was emerging on London’s Bankside. One of the fascinating details that stayed with me was how the green oak timbers used for the superstructure of the building were forested and allowed to season in situ as part of the building process. The craft and labor behind the making of theater as both place and practice became wonderfully visible in this positive exercise in knowledge exchange. [End Page 104]

Vin Nardizzi’s thought-provoking monograph returned me once again to that tangible sense of the materiality of early modern theater. Wooden Os is as a study fascinated by the fact that the outdoor commercial playhouses of early modern London were “fashioned almost entirely from wood products” (4), and it returns us as readers, through some striking case study examples, to the link between a theater’s material fabric and environmental history. Nardizzi provides an account of the perception of woodlands as an increasingly scarce or threatened resource in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, citing contemporaneous tracts by John Manwood, Arthur Standish, and others, and in turn asks us to consider the kind of “cultural reafforestation” (5) that took place on the wooden boards of London’s theater stages as forests were remade as a conscious part of what Nardizzi regards as a genuine and significant contribution to “resource history” (5).1

Alongside discussions of surging timber prices and deforestation that many social historians will recognize, Nardizzi tells one particularly memorable woodland narrative, recounting how “under the supervision of Richard Burbage, the son of a joiner, and Peter Street, a prominent London carpenter, a crew of workmen uprooted a ‘whole wood’ in late December 1598” (15). This is the story of the wholesale dismantling of The Theatre in Southwark in 1598 and the storage of the playhouse’s timbers until weather permitted the nighttime barging of the wooden planks on the Thames to the Bankside liberty where the Globe Theatre would then emerge fully “replanted” in 1599 (15). It is a forceful example of the centrality of wood as a resource both for doing and thinking in the history of theater.

I will confess from the outset some serious reservations about the ways in which this book seeks to push forward an ecocritical agenda. I was never fully persuaded that writers like Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, or indeed Shakespeare were anything like as environmentally (or even politically) aware as Nardizzi seems to wish to argue when they introduced a portable tree property onto the stage for plays such as The Spanish Tragedy or Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Nevertheless, in asking us to pay attention to woodland as resource in the early modern cultural imaginary, Nardizzi undoubtedly unlocks some fresh readings of scenes in these plays and indeed perhaps most cogently in the properties they deploy.

This book is admirably engaged with issues of staging. It explores how woodlands—in their broadest understanding as forests, gardens, orchards, parks, and woods—were persistently remade in the interiors of the open-air amphitheaters, not least in plays by the Warwickshire playwright himself from the Forest of Arden in As You Like It to the Athenian woodland of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Quoting from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“‘This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring house’” [21]), Nardizzi notices how in this instance “[Peter] Quince transforms the playhouse’s structural features, back into the vegetable matter that they were, or may have been” (22). Recording the ways in which gesture and deictic language combine in this particular act of place- and trace-making, Nardizzi...

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