Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre ed. by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek (review)

Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre is one of the rare edited collections of essays that offers more than the sum of its parts. Severally, its chapters address a range of performance traditions in early modern Europe, some infrequently studied. Collectively, they demonstrate the variety of early modern performances and the lively interchange among traditions that made them possible. Most significantly, as brilliantly introduced and organized by M. A. Katritzky and Pavel Drábek, Transnational Connections articulates a sustained orientation towards performance in the early modern period and a powerful theory of a distinctive early modern strain of performance, native to no single place, inherently mobile, growing up as it passed among the nodal points of multiple communities—cities, regions, and contact zones; shared and diverging languages, identities, and creeds; as local as individual objects or events and as broad as continents and centuries. The result is a new and "explicit methodological approach" (7) to early modern performances that maps changes and differences across expanses of time, space, and culture.

Transnational Connections plots early modern performance's decisive transgressiveness, in the literal sense of stepping across boundaries. The transnationality the title promises is not merely circulatory, moving from one fixed point to another—Italian performance styles in the Spanish peninsula, or English ones in German-speaking central Europe—but supranational. These diverse kinds of performances were born on the road. By being at home nowhere, or, in the case of performance styles that emphasized their foreignness, simply elsewhere, they seemed able to find a welcome everywhere.

While the central concern of Transnational Connections is performances that developed outside other forms of community, its individual chapters show that any attempt to map this category must begin from the seemingly disparate particulars of performances, themselves only visible now in material remains—letters, scripts, implied gestures, in one memorable instance a shoe—that require effort and imagination to revive. Many chapters explore what Louise Clubb calls theatergrams, recurring scenes, situations, characters, gestures, and even gags, that appear across a spectrum of performances in early modern Europe, crossing every generic, linguistic, and class barrier.

In the first chapter, "If the shoe fits, or the truth in pinking," for instance, Natasha Korda takes a shoe found in the excavation of The Rose Playhouse as "a point of convergence where the material, textual, theoretical and theatrical worlds meet" (29), then models how this quotidian object made precious by its time and place summons an inclusive past that runs through the representations of plays, the realities of continental traffic in goods and persons, and the peculiar substantial intimacy of the foot. This contextualization, Korda argues, "need not take the form of a utilitarian pairing" (37) in which details are reduced to expressions of the contexts within which they are nested. Korda's framing of the shoe suggests the methodological commitment to detail that all the chapters share. Further chapters of Transnational Connections reveal more supervenient qualities of performance arts over their materiality: what they are is enlivened by how they have entered into different worlds and what they uniquely carry with them.

Performance may be particular among cultural productions for its insistence on showing off its borrowings, as Katritzky and Drábek argue: "Theatrum mundi is here understood not only as metaphor but even more as literal display" (7). They propose that we learn to reposition this aspect of early modern performance as a "cultural type" (17), a social, aesthetic category rather than a temporal one. Although they do not develop this suggestion, it might distinguish this kind of early modern inter-theatre from more rooted, local forms like civic pageants and festive performances staged by a community for itself rather than by one, perhaps fleeting and temporary, perhaps more permanent but mobile, community for another.

Drábek's chapter, "'Why, sir, are there other heauens in other countries?': The English Comedy as a transnational style," considers what was called "English comedy...