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  • The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576–1642 by Julie Sanders
  • Matthew Steggle (bio)
The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576–1642. By Julie Sanders. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Illus. Pp. xviii + 264. $82.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

A short, accessible one-volume prolegomenon to its field, this book delivers on the promise of its title. It emerges from the world of current research—indeed, it could not have been written ten years ago. Dense with information and ideas, it also manages to wear its considerable learning lightly. Perhaps most impressive is that while achieving these goals it remains lively, personal, and at times almost polemical in its vision of what early modern drama can be and how we might engage with it.

Formally, the main book is divided into seven chapters, each considering a genre: chapter 1 discusses tragedy, chapter 2 revenge drama, and so on. Each chapter is separated from the others by one or more case studies, most of them four or five pages long and visually distinguished by a light grey background to the page. The visual effect is of a book divided into manageable chunks. There are frequent, and apposite, illustrations, including several thought-provoking performance photographs. [End Page 380]

This emphasis on accessibility is a keynote of the writing throughout. It is entirely appropriate that the introduction’s subtitle should consist not of abstract nouns but of concrete ones: “Brick, lime, sand, plaster over lath and ‘new oaken boards’” (1). Rather than starting with a survey of theoretical terminology, or problematizing the nature of theater, it begins with the physical structures where drama happened. Sanders writes vividly of the materiality of early modern theaters and of their precise locations within an equally material city. The introduction is interested in what Sanders calls the “eventness” of early modern drama—drama as a participatory cultural phenomenon rather than as a means for disseminating a poem that happens to be in dialogue form (16).

This sense of early modern drama is a timely one, relating to disciplines such as repertory studies and historicized performance studies, both of which feature extensively in this book. It also builds on cultural geography, a discipline by which Sanders has long been fascinated. The first case study applies cultural geography in a practical example, offering a rather brilliant meditation on how Richard III might be experienced at the Globe on a rainy afternoon. (It also has a punch line that completely wrong-footed this reader and that is perhaps best not spoiled).

Chapter 1, “Tragedy,” starts with Doctor Faustus and Macbeth, relating them back to earlier performance traditions and forward to modern productions and the production decisions they entail. The discussion weaves in tantalizing detail from several other “classic” Renaissance tragedies, such as The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling, while also appealing to more obscure plays, such as the lost Keep the Widow Waking, in the course of its argument that tragedy is a flexible, dynamic genre whose conventions and meanings are constantly mutating through early modern theater. Shakespeare is seen neither as an exception nor as the giant at the center of the picture, but as “one working playwright among others, as someone responding to changes in fashion and styles of writing, to the possibilities and even restrictions of new playing spaces” and to changing commercial imperatives (xii).

Chapter 2, “Revenge Drama,” offers a similar recipe, starting with The Spanish Tragedy and moving outward. We have some of the usual suspects—Bacon’s On Revenge is cited, that perennially useful text for newcomers to Renaissance tragedy—but again with a fresh twist. The book comes to Bacon not through top-down theology but through a discussion of the Inns of Court as themselves locations in London and sites for drama. Fresh too is the subsequent discussion in which The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Malcontent, and James Shirley’s Cardinal provide the leading examples. Indeed, one of the notable features of this book overall is to pay more attention than usual to the Caroline phase of the early modern theater. Plays by Ford, Brome, Shirley, Massinger, and Caroline-era Jonson...

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