Early Modern Actors and Shakespeare's Theatre: Thinking with the Body by Evelyn Tribble (review)

Evelyn Tribble is one of the foremost scholars of early modern acting working today. Building upon her groundbreaking Cognition in the Globe (2011), this detailed study of the physical and cognitive demands of the early modern playhouse sheds new light on the skills possessed by the first performers of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Situating early modern actors in a "distributed cognitive ecology" markedly different from that inhabited by actors today, Tribble offers sensitive and well-historicized considerations of, on the one hand, the physical skills required of players and remarked upon by playgoers (gesture, movement, dance, swordplay) and, on the other, "the skills behind the skills": qualities such as wit and variety which, while not visible or tangible, were paramount to successful and memorable performance. In doing so, she provides inventive—and often brilliant—re-readings of early modern plays from the ultra-canonical to the most neglected. A masterful bridging of texts and disciplines, the work is important—even essential—reading for any early modern performance scholar.

Tribble makes important contributions to discussions, still relatively recent, which have moved away from author-centric accounts of early modern drama to attend more carefully to those who first performed it, building on works including Laurence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean's Lord Strange's Men and their Plays (2014), Scott McMillin and MacLean's The Queen's Men and their Plays (1998), and Lucy Munro's Children of the Queen's Revels (2005). She also responds to recent work on theatricality, games, gesture, and clowning which "has greatly enriched our understanding of theatre as a fundamentally material practice, much of which takes place in the interstices of language" (12). Through this, she reconstructs, imaginatively and successfully, the skill sets of early modern actors in ways which revitalize both them and the plays they performed. Through deft handling of seemingly disparate methodologies (cognitive studies, neuroanthropology, historicism, performance studies), Tribble demonstrates the complex unity of mind, body, and outside world that characterized the skillful early modern player. She thus offers important correctives to less nuanced accounts of early modern acting, significantly expanding current understandings of theatricality in the period.

Beginning with an imaginative reconstruction of the box containing "all my playing things" bequeathed by Queen's Men actor Simon Jewell to his fellow player Robert Nicholls in 1592, the book's wide-ranging yet concise introduction acquaints readers with a means of understanding the expertise displayed by early modern actors in now long-vanished performances through attending to their skillful, active bodies. Making the important observation that the "bodily turn" in early modern studies towards the end of the last century neglects skill as an evaluative category (5–6), Tribble offers a sensitive critique of social theorists such as Bourdieu and Foucault, arguing that the body is just as much a trained, skillful, and active subject as a product or object of cultural ideology and social structures. Far from being "more or less successful functionaries of playwrights," Tribble suggests, "early modern actors who cultivated the seeming miscellany of mental and physical skills ascribed to them built a form of kinesic intelligence that undergirded their entire practice" (10–12).

The concept of kinesic intelligence is one among several presented in this chapter likely to be unfamiliar to scholars of early modern drama (others include "neuroanthropology" and "distributed cognitive ecologies"), and it is possible that the introduction is somewhat methodologically crowded. However, the introduction of these concepts, kept robustly in play throughout the book, is handled in such a way that their relevance to early modern drama is never far from view. Tribble's adroit bridging of five centuries' worth of studies of skill, swiftly moving with consistent precision from Roger Ascham's Toxiphilus via Christina Grasseni's twenty-first-century observations of Tuscan cattle farmers to Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (16–19), successfully demonstrates the applicability of "skill," so infinite in its variety, to discussions of early...