Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama by Monica Matei-Chesnoiu, and: Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions by Darlene Farabee, and: Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama by Laura L. Vidler (review)

Several recent titles from Palgrave Macmillan relate to the question of theatrical space, and together make for an interesting panoramic view of its intersections with early modern drama.

Taking a thematic approach, Monica Matei-Chesnoiu’s Geoparsing Early Modern Drama argues that space and theater experienced a concurrent “renaissance” between 1550 and 1630, and that these two related concepts exist in a symbiotic relationship. The task of her monograph is to tease out the implications of that symbiosis. In order to do so, she draws on the usual suspects—Michel Foucault’s heterotopias, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s deterritorialization, Michel de Certeau’s distinction between space and place—but she also introduces some theoreticians less familiar in an Anglophone context. She makes especially effective use of the spatial categories articulated by the French cultural geographer Joël Bonnemaison, whose evocative notions of “reticulated space,” “islandness,” and “geosymbol” are perhaps more congenial to literary and theatrical studies than Henri Lefebvre’s familiar classifications of “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” space or Robert Weimann’s dichotomy of locus and platea. While she is perhaps a little too ingenious in generating metaphors for her methodology, once she gets past comparing her approach to the geoparsing of computer science and the Moebius strip of mathematics her analysis is provocative.

This is a cosmopolitan study, drawing on multiple disciplines and languages with impressive erudition. Because of her wide-ranging sources, Matei-Chesnoiu is often required to introduce and contextualize unfamiliar materials, which makes this monograph a useful overview of cognate approaches with the potential to illuminate new facets of early modern spatiality. It also results in a dense text that moves through many layers of argument before its payoff in the analysis of the early modern drama promised in its title. When that analysis flourishes, the results are rich, thematic chapters organized around concepts including rivers (chapter 4), cosmopolitanism (5), and islands (6). This allows for a comparison of diverse texts that include such concepts, though the inevitable result is to illuminate the concepts more than the texts.

In contrast, Darlene Farabee’s Shakespeare’s Staged Spaces and Playgoers’ Perceptions is closely focused on textual analysis, more quickly mobilizing some of the approaches that Matei-Chesnoiu develops in her argument. For instance, Farabee notes that by 1598, the exchange between early modern geography and theater was so mutual that Robert Dallington’s A Method for Travell advises readers to imagine his travels in France using the same “conceit” that allows them to imagine Rome or Rhodes when they are watching a play (2). Where Matei-Chesnoiu is primarily interested in creating a dialogue between early modern spatialities and theatricalities, Farabee’s dialogue is between the Shakespearean text and playgoers to whom she repeatedly refers as “we,” as in “we are caught up in the emotions and anticipations of the characters. We forget ourselves” (3). There are some assumptions embedded in that all-encompassing “we” that at times undermine her otherwise cogent and sensitive readings of five plays—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. I am frankly surprised that a series as legitimate as Palgrave Shakespeare Studies would allow as thoroughly problematized a generalization as the homogenous spectatorial response implicit in this “we” to stand uncorrected. While she does articulate some ways in which individual experiences can vary, notably by difficulties seeing or hearing the action (9), Farabee’s sense of the spectator is very clearly an extrapolation of herself. It might have been more prudent to take the approach adopted by some scholars of contemporary practice, like Bridget Escolme...