Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions by Darlene Farabee (review)

Darlene Farabee’s new study focuses on the “implicit elements of Shakespeare’s stagecraft,” including “location development, stage-illusion, position of the playgoers, entrances and exits, activities preceding character entrances, character control over stage space, and elements of stage space” (12), to examine how playgoer perception and staged spaces intersect. Working with these elements, Farabee claims to extend work begun by J. L. Styan in Shakespeare’s Stagecraft, even as she engages with works from more contemporary authors like Jeremy Lopez, Andrew Hiscock, and Tim Fitzpatrick (10). Farabee adds a level of granularity to these earlier works, arguing in each of her five chapters that Shakespeare’s “stagecraft, character experiences, and playgoers’ apprehension” (13) are means for the production of space. One of the core assumptions of Farabee’s book is that, through text-based methodologies, we can decode the spatial dynamics and perceptual expectations that operate in early modern drama more generally (14). Featuring these methodologies, her study proves provocative, but somewhat limited. Her close readings, while insightful and layered, succeed less in revealing playgoers’ perceptions than unpacking how stage space might be produced through language. This is enough to make it a worthy addition to discourses and literature on the concept of space that have become, according to Marvin Carlson, D. J. Hopkins, and Gay McAuley, among others, especially emergent in the field of theatre studies.

In chapter 1, Farabee focuses on what she calls “visual veracity” (18) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to explore how “characters’ sensory experiences” (15) shape playgoers’ understanding of the play. According to her, Shakespeare offers “more information” to playgoers than to the characters—characters whose misconceptions issue from a misplaced trust in what their eyes behold (37). In this way, playgoers have “all the strands of the plot” and can even connect aspects of the action disjointed by the sleeping and dreaming of the characters (27). Farabee claims and insightfully elaborates the emphasis on how ocular dependability pushes forward the plot while simultaneously assuring the playgoer a more comprehensive view of the play’s action, even as it questions the very instruments through which playgoers receive this action.

Moving beyond the reliability of vision for character and playgoer, chapter 2 astutely explores how spatial and verbal motifs, through references to “ground,” “land,” and “speech acts” (44–45), shape playgoers’ understanding in Richard II. Farabee’s two most notable and potent examples include Mowbray’s banishment and Richard’s relationship with his dominions. In the case of the former, she points to Shakespeare’s construction of the play’s space as an “internal speaking, staged England in contrast to the outside silenced elsewhere” (58). The association between stage space and England, Farabee claims, assists the playgoer by constructing a narrative based on the physical and geographic bounds of the stage; boundaries reinforced by Richard’s direct address of stage space as “dear earth” and “my earth” (47). Farabee’s unraveling of this conflation between stage and geographic space provides valuable insight on how languages and discourses of space might feed the field’s understanding of the potential and enormous flexibility of stage space.

In her analysis of Hamlet in chapter 3, the author claims that from the play’s opening scene, spatial indeterminacy operates as a primary method for creating playgoer perception and narrative momentum. She likens this momentum to the centrifugal force of both audience and events spiraling toward the stasis of the play’s conclusion (71). Unlike the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playgoers in Hamlet are encouraged to participate in the dislocation of the characters—especially the Ghost, as a roving and bodiless voice (74–75). Witnessing Hamlet’s struggle in “placing” (80) the Ghost in space, according to Farabee’s somewhat precarious argument, infects the playgoer with some of the perceptual dissonance that plagues the eponymous character and permeates the play’s action.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth also utilizes location and dislocation to unfold narrative movement and shape playgoer...