Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods (review)

This collection of a dozen essays organized in five sections looks at early modern stage directions from a variety of angles. In their introduction Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods say that the collection takes up the invitation in The Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 to provide 'additions, corrections and comments' (11); but the aim they describe is actually something much broader: to put stage directions 'at the centre of literary and dramatic analysis' and to 'start new conversations about how and why stage directions matter' by calling attention to their 'interpretive richness' (8, 12).

Section one, 'Taxonomy', begins with Tiffany Stern's 'Inventing Stage Directions; Demoting Dumb Shows', which actually deals with dumb shows first, then stage directions. The term 'stage directions', moreover, not stage directions themselves, and the differences between dumb show directions and others are actually the dual foci. Stern says that 'while the dialogue of a play could be distributed and learned in separate actors' parts, the dumb shows will have needed to be rehearsed ensemble from "group rehearsal" scripts', a potentially important idea that would seem to involve significant time for rehearsal (28). Stern also asks 'whether or not Shakespeare wrote non-dialogue paratext', answering that 'he certainly sometimes did, though evidence is inconclusive on the subject' (40). In fact, however, there is a lot of pretty clear evidence that Shakespeare (and other playwrights) did write most of the stage directions in their plays (as several of the other essays in this collection amply demonstrate). Next in this section is 'The Boundaries of Stage Directions' in which Laurie Maguire considers the 'perspectives taken by early modern stage directions', as in a Coriolanus direction featuring weighted words such as mutinous, mutiny, rabble, and faction (52). Other examples are directions that 'cross the boundary between actors' needs and readers' needs' when they describe character relationships (61). The third chapter, '"Peter falls into the hole": Nonce Stage Directions and the Idea of the Dictionary' by Paul Menzer and Jess Hamlet, is concerned with one-off or rare words or phrases that are not necessarily in The Dictionary of Stage Directions. Their premise is that such 'idiosyncratic stage directions can renovate our understanding of theatrical practice' and 'suggest that the early modern theatre industry was anything but standard' (73). After asking 'some conceptual questions about the way the idea of a dictionary shapes our understanding of the early modern stage', this chapter 'explores the way that the large print corpuses of a handful of playwrights, Shakespeare more than any, dominate our understanding of a "fluency" in a language they disproportionately "invented"'. The focus then turns to Heywood as a counter-example, 'since his work contributes a disproportionately large number of one-off stage directions' (73).

In section two, 'Text', the first chapter is Emma Smith's 'Reading Shakespeare's Stage Directions', in which she wants to 'reinstate stage directions in early Shakespeare texts as the property of readers, and as understood instances of a different mode of narration in printed playbooks' (97). Smith contends that stage directions 'function as snippets of narrative, and are susceptible to narratological analysis', and she applies that idea to some Shakespearean directions to illustrate how 'they do narrative work for the reader' (97, 111). In the second chapter of this section, 'Shakespeare's Literary Stage Directions', Douglas Bruster argues that 'The vocabulary of the stage directions in The Tempest is Shakespeare's, not Crane's' (129). He offers intriguing examples of directions that 'reveal a deeper set of verbal and imaginative links with surrounding text', thereby extending to stage directions the method of close reading developed by Stephen Booth in his studies of Shakespeare's dialogue and poetry (130). Curiously, in concluding, Bruster says 'As we have seen, it is hard to say with confidence which of the directions in [Shakespeare's] plays came originally from his pen' (137). But Bruster has not demonstrated this lack of confidence; in fact he...