Early Modern Spectatorship: Interpreting English Culture, 1500–1780 ed. by Ronald Huebert and David McNeil (review)

The May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, recorded on a smart phone and other devices and then shared and viewed globally, demonstrates—among many things—the vast critical pertinence of spectatorship, its ongoing transformation and its influence on knowledge and understanding in the present. Early Modern Spectatorship's essays on literature, print culture, visual arts, and performance primarily offer insights on English culture between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the eighteenth. These strongly historicist studies of "the natural act of human observation, with all its diversity, and all that is implied therein" (5), consistently demonstrate the valuative, epistemological, and reflexive effects of modern spectatorship—effects far from "natural." The collection attends scantly to racial distinction, with no observation of whiteness, whose unspoken spectacle became integral to Englishness and British "civilization" during the span covered here. This oversight is less a problem specific to Early Modern Spectatorship and more a symptom of early modern and eighteenth century studies' faulty idealism and implicit racism, both of which merit ongoing calls for acknowledgement and change. Early modern visions continue to inform our experiences and studies of truth, as indicated by the perceptive essays in this volume as well as by its oversights.

In the chapter most directly engaged with empiricism and epistemology, Emily M. West dispels any misperception of Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon as mere ornamental amusement. In West's reading, the play asserts not only the epistemological function of theatrical spectacle but also its potential superiority to optical technologies championed by natural philosophers of the Royal Society. Although the Royal Society's relationship with performance and spectacle was more complex than the society's rhetoric and West may allow, West demonstrates Behn's substantive use of changeable scenery, particularly in the discovery scene, to reveal staged "experiences of spectacular materiality as sites of knowledge" (107). Doctor Baliardo's optical instruments are early on characterized as "trinkets," and the play's embedded farce The World in the Moon teaches Baliardo to see anew through the scenic revelation, particularly as it affects "mental machinery" (122).

The historical breadth of Early Modern Spectatorship grants space for work that usefully bridges period divides. Nova Myhill posits "theatrical spectatorship" as a phenomenon that develops in London during the 1560s, when the establishment of "purpose-built professional theatres" granted reliable access to performances (20). Myhill traces a conceptual shift between this starting point and the late seventeenth century: a move away from notions of theatrical spectacle as potentially treacherous imposition on the audience and towards theatre as reflection of its audience and their interests. To do so, she adeptly analyzes staged representations of theatrical audiences from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595/6) and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1608) to Thomas Shadwell's A True Widow (1678). The chapter shows the decline of "political authority" once integral to stage spectacle; in its place rises the "economic authority" of the audience (43). Editors Ronald Huebert and David McNeil collaborated on a study of public executions as theatrical events specifically from the spectators' point of view. In accomplished research and writing about the executions of Sir Thomas More, Anne Askew, Catherine Hayes, Charles I, and the Duke of Monmouth, Huebert and McNeil track a shift parallel to that of Myhill's argument: spectatorship of the earlier executions constitutes "witnessing matters in the grand scheme of things," one founded upon "absolute power," whereas, by the late seventeenth century, the import of public execution has become "more subjective … a recreational occasion (for some) or a business opportunity (for others)" (163).

Perhaps most startling in its span of period distinctions is Frans de Bruyn's chapter on "political spectatorship" as his essay gestures well beyond the early modern and into nineteenth century. De Bruyn begins with Burke's observing the French Revolution from...