Discoveries on the Early Modern Stage: Contexts and Conventions by Leslie Thomson (review)

Leslie Thomson’s new book on moments of discovery in early modern drama begins by laying out the definitions and limits of discovery, explaining her methodology, and outlining the different kinds and uses of discoveries on early modern stages. In so doing, Thomson sets out to reinvigorate our thinking on what constitutes an onstage discovery and how dramatists used them, and to lay the foundation for her readers to recognize that understanding discoveries ‘is fundamental to an appreciation of the degree to which the plays are artefacts of another era’ (5). She drives home what she sees as the two major kinds of discovery, ‘disguise-discoveries and discovery scenes’ as being driven by ‘the basic ideas that truth will be revealed in time and justice will prevail’ (9) but aims to recast this conversation outside the purview of whether or not the so-called ‘discovery space’ was a common feature of early modern playhouses. For evidence of moments of discovery, she pulls from an exhaustive list of more than 150 different early modern plays, situating her assertions in an unquestionable position of authority. Thomson’s thorough survey feeds productively into the discussion of what constitutes a moment of discovery and what characteristics these moments and scenes share across different years and different playwrights. Here, particularly, she focuses her thinking on the formal and generic uses of discoveries, noting that nearly half of all discoveries ‘occur in the final act’ of their plays (29). In sum, Thomson’s formative contextual work on stage discoveries is the base on which she rests her assertion that discoveries ‘are essential to the way a play dramatizes and explores such interrelated matters as deception, privacy, secrecy and truth; knowledge, justice and renewal’ (1).

After identifying what constitutes a discovery on the early modern stage, their different kinds and uses, and some fascinating statistics, Thomson turns her attention to discoveries’ driving forces of time and truth and then lays out secular and religious imagery that would have shaped how early modern audiences understood and responded to onstage discoveries. Highlighting Christianity’s saturation of early modern England, Thomson suggests ‘that the imagery and performance of discoveries in the drama of the period often echo the language and rituals associated with the revelations at the heart of Christianity’ (81). In this section, Thomson points to artistic representations of religious figures and moments, as well as the church service itself, noting particularly the similar use of curtains in drama and religion: ‘The overt artifice of the curtains makes viewers conscious of the act of revelation, of themselves as observers, and of what is being revealed. In this it functions much like the staging of discoveries in plays’ (90). From here, Thomson moves through the dramatic language of seeing and believing that echoes Christian teachings; considers the onstage places of discovery, including beds, chairs, tombs, caves, and shops; explores particularly inventive or complex discoveries; and ends with an appendix that asks, ‘Was There a Central Opening in the Tiring House Wall?’ (213).

A particular strength of the book is Thomson’s incredible number and quality of examples of discoveries. In her discussion of discoveries that rely on chairs, she lists no fewer than thirteen plays, from Henry IV, Part One (1597) to Davenant’s The Distresses (1639), noting, in turn, how chairs in discoveries signal seclusion, privacy, and occasionally location, but that ‘these discoveries are of figures who are somehow immobile — most are seated, sometimes asleep, sometimes dead’ (166). While this section lists rapid-fire the instances of chairs in discoveries, her treatment of beds in discoveries uses nearly as many examples but provides more analysis of each instance. After laying out some representative bed discoveries in The First Part of the Contention (1591) and Folio Henry VI, Part Two (1623), Peele’s Edward I (1591), and Tamburlaine, Part Two (1588), Thomson provides a particularly fulsome account of the bed discovery in...