Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama by Laurence Publicover (review)

When Brabantio hears that 'thieves' have stolen his daughter in Othello, he grumbles to Iago and Roderigo: 'What tell'st thou me of robbing? This is Venice: / My house is not a grange' (1.1.103–4). Brabantio, however, is wrong, and such 'theft' is entirely to be expected, Laurence Publicover argues in Dramatic Geography, precisely because the house is in Venice. The dialogue at this fraught moment is an example of 'intertheatrical geography', in which '[o]ne Mediterranean scenario, it appears, is being read through another' (15). That understanding illuminates the way in which Iago's needling of Brabantio seems designed to remind audiences of Shakespeare's previous Venetian father, Shylock. The lines ascribed to the actors echo Shylock's instruction to Jessica to 'Lock up my doors', and evoke memories of his later distress, when he is reported running about the streets of Venice crying 'O my ducats! O my daughter!' (2.5.29, 2.8.15). Behind that image looms Marlowe's Barabas in The Jew of Malta, another father whose daughter deserts him for an alien culture and faith. Collectively, they will resurface again subsequently in Tunis, with Robert Daborne's Jewish Benwash and his wife in A Christian Turn'd Turk.

'Intertheatricality', as Publicover explains, is a term his book borrows from Jacky Bratton, for whom it described 'the whole web of mutual understanding' that was shared by generations of audiences and players (89). Bratton distinguished her methodological approach from the more familiar concept of intertextuality. Insisting that intertheatrical readings 'go beyond the written', she made a case for considering not only performance factors such as scenery, lighting, and costume, but also 'genres, conventions, and very importantly, memory'.¹ Dramatic Geography aims at exploring a productive middle-ground between the two strategies. While it utilizes Bratton's term, it adapts her intertheatrical approach by consciously and deliberately returning the focus back onto the texts themselves. At the same time, the book is quick to point out that what emerges as a result is not an exercise in tracing exclusively intertextual connections among plays. While intertextuality tends to write out the author, Publicover is as interested in playwrights' memorial responses—deliberate and otherwise—to previous theatrical performances of geographical spaces, as he is in early modern playgoers' responses to such multi-layered dramatic locations.

His aim, therefore, is threefold: to show that 'the locations of early modern plays are haunted by other locations', particularly those explored in previous plays; to demonstrate that these locations were particularly attuned to specific modes and genres of writing; and to argue that early modern playgoers engaged actively with the locations of performance in order to 'create' the dramatic world inhabited by the plays in question (3). For Publicover, the space where this trifold thesis is particularly noticeable and open for inspection is the point of intersection between a specific place and a genre—the Mediterranean and romance. The Mediterranean 'is understood as a geographical location in its pooling of distinct yet overlapping cultures', he sums up in reviewing the argument put forward in the contextual part one of the book before proceeding to an illuminating second part that attends to individual plays. This predictable locus for romance 'is almost always concerned with movement between spaces, [and] therefore offered an appropriate generic frame through which to present it' (93).

Neither readers of romances nor of geographical and travel accounts would find either observation contentious, although Publicover's view of the Mediterranean as a site of cultural encounter and even 'universal brotherhood' is more benign than recent studies of the region generally argue (48). Throughout, he sees it as a space where religious, cultural, and political difference, rather than conflict, is visible. This enables him to illuminate the memorial echoes between Christian Brabantio and Jewish Shylock, for instance, but leaves the racial and cultural implications of that intertheatrical resonance open to conjecture. Some...