Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse ed. by Andrew Gurr, Farah Karim-Cooper, and: A Jacobean Company and Its Playhouse: The Queen’s Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c. 1605–1619) by Eva Griffith (review)

Both of these works concern the early modern London stage, Moving Shakespeare Indoors being a collection of articles on the Blackfriars theaters, and Griffith’s study dealing extensively with the fortunes of one company and its playhouses in the early Stuart period. The former volume has arranged its essays into three parts: (1) “The Context of Hard Evidence,” (2) “Materiality Indoors,” and (3) “The New Fashions for Indoors.” The “unique position” of the King’s Men “as owners of two extraordinarily popular playhouses,” the editors write in their introduction, lays a foundation for the chief aim of this collection: “to examine the motives and the conditions that provoked the move [that] theatre companies—namely the Shakespeare company—made indoors” (5).

Accordingly, the four essays in part 1, contributed by John H. Astington, Jon Greenfield and Peter McCurdy, Oliver Jones, and Mariko Ichikawa, assess “practical and documentary evidence for constructing a version of a Jacobean indoor playhouse now” (5). Part 2, with six contributions by Tiffany Stern, Martin White, Sarah Dustagheer, Penelope Woods, Paul Menzer, and Farah Karim-Cooper, examines the impact that the visual and acoustic effects of these indoor structures might have had on performance, audience response, and repertory. Finally, part 3, with essays by Andrew Gurr, Eleanor Collins, and Bart van Es, focuses especially on the influence that indoor theaters might have had on shaping repertory—especially Shakespeare’s late plays. A useful appendix by Sarah Dustagheer lists all plays known to have been performed at indoor playhouses, where they were performed, their playwrights, and their approximate dates.

Although space does not permit commentary on all the essays, one can call attention to several that seem especially provocative. In “Practical Evidence for a Reimagined Indoor Jacobean Theatre,” Greenfield (project architect for the 1986 Globe) and McCurdy (whose firm was responsible for the Globe reconstruction and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) present a long, careful, and copiously illustrated discussion of their general point. They argue that designs thought to have been generated by Inigo Jones for Worcester College in 1616 can no longer serve as reliable blueprints for a Blackfriars reconstruction since these designs must now be dated to the 1660s and attributed to Jones’s assistant John Webb. Therefore, the relevance of the Worcester College designs to theories of theater reconstruction—as well as to the assumption of Inigo Jones’s agency—requires some serious rethinking. The balance of the essay is a close discussion of alternative directions for future scholarship.

In part 2, White’s chapter on light and darkness in the indoor Jacobean theater offers some striking new perspectives on a familiar topic. Dealing with a wide scope of sources, White demonstrates how candlelight deployment was key in configuring the interior of the private playhouse in terms of not only the stage action but also the “glamorous clothes” worn by the actors (129)—clothes in colors that, in Bacon’s terms, “‘show best by candlelight’” (128). In an important essay in part 3, van Es argues that, contrary to much past and current commentary, the physical configuration of Blackfriars may not have been the decisive influence on Shakespeare’s change of style around 1608. The company probably did not move into the new space until 1610, and Shakespeare seems to have held himself at a distance from the exigencies of the private playhouse. His own late dramas “look less like indoor work than they ought to,” being full of spectacular effects that “have no counterpart in the earlier children’s repertory,” which established precedents...