Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres: Stage and Audience ed. by Roger D. Sell, Anthony W. Johnson, and Helen Wilcox (review)

Three decades ago, I doubt a collection like this would have been written. At that time, the scholarly consensus was that English theatres of the early modern period were inimical to community formation and the inculcation of the shared values necessary to sustain them. Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage (Chicago, 1988) is the most well-known, but hardly the only, work to argue that theatres, actors, audiences, plays, and even the neighbourhoods where playhouses were located were staunchly opposed to the norms that civic leaders were so eager to promote within London and its environs. In an effort to make the theatre subversive, this generation of scholars tended to denigrate the drama's important contributions to community formation in all its varied forms. This scholarship produced extraordinarily sensitive readings of early modern plays in their historical context and fruitfully alerted us to the drama's rich interactions with the political, religious, and social institutions from which it emerged; but it probably magnified the negative entailments of the theatre's interactions with its constituent communities.

More recent scholarship has begun to question this view, noting the important complementary relationships that developed between the theatres and the overlapping communities that surrounded them and allowed them to flourish. More recent studies stress how theatres could benefit local commerce and charitable endeavors, provide a convivial gathering place where current social and political issues could be sifted, help to define and articulate the shared values of its audiences, and generally enhance the cohesiveness of English (and particularly, London) communities.¹ Community-Making in Early Stuart Theatres contributes to this vein of scholarship in two ways. First, it offers a compendium of fascinating essays by leading theatre historians and literary critics who turn their attention in remarkably diverse ways to the issue of community. Second, it enlarges our understanding of what constitutes a community, and thus how the theatre could interact within them. A community need not be a physical location or a set of shared values, but might consist of networks between playwrights, government officials, audiences, schools, or churches, or even a linguistic web interlinking hundreds of plays.

This collection, therefore, casts its net broadly. The editors are interested in 'the relationship of early modern plays and performances to the multiple communities on which they have some kind of bearing' (1). They understand that community making is a complex subject, and it is clear that the contributors are not focused on a cohesive set of issues, but are instead often working with different definitions of this key term. Not surprisingly, these essays traverse a rich ensemble of the multiple interactions between the theatre and its various communities. The multiple interpretations of what might constitute a community are matched by the methodological diversity of its contributions—from mining the archives in village libraries to complex digital analyses.

The first half of the book examines various institutions in and around the theatres to show how they could assist community building among players, playwrights, and audiences. Richard Dutton, for instance, notes how the regime of censorship designed to prevent the performance of scurrilous plays, rather than constraining playwrights, actually enlisted the drama in a wide-scale project of community making. Because all plays were subject to licensing by the Master of the Revels, it was in the interest of all parties to ensure that this relationship remained more cooperative than confrontational. In a similar vein, Stephen Orgel and Andrew Gurr re-examine audiences and notice some important collaborations between theatrical companies and their constituent communities. To achieve success, dramatic troupes in essence recruited audiences, developing distinct repertories that appealed to different playgoers. Different audiences did not attend plays randomly, but frequented the playhouses that catered to their specific interests and tastes—a fact underscored by some spectacular onstage failures.

If the commercial playhouses helped to galvanize more...