Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom (review)

Theatre historians have long debated questions about the audience's role in early modern English stage performances. How did these plays invite spectators—even those in the gallery seats—into the space and action of the stage? Did audience participation truly make a difference or was the sense of meaningful engagement illusory? In any case, can we really say what those audiences did or felt in the theatre so long ago? In her brilliant book, Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of the English Commercial Theater, Gina Bloom tackles such questions anew, arguing that the early modern commercial theatre did indeed create a powerful structure for participatory spectatorship based on an audience's knowledge and expectations of gaming. She tells a story of how the "pervasive gaming culture of early modern London eased the transition to a commercial theater, and in turn, how this history of commercial theater speaks back to pervasive gaming culture today" (3).

Bloom brings multiple perspectives to bear in making her case. Her chapter on the history of early modern "sitting games"—primarily cards, backgammon, and chess—is deeply informed by her research into contemporary accounts and historical artifacts of gaming (colorfully illustrated). At the same time, she acknowledges that the archive is thin and that we can only know so much from what remains. Thus, she argues we also need to turn to the performance of games now to understand their affordances in the past. Bloom writes of this approach as "knowing by feeling" (7), that is, using what "it feels like to me to play these games today" (9). At the same time, she draws extensively on contemporary game and performance studies, thus artfully shifting back and forth from past to present to forge critical links between gaming and theatre.

A set of case studies rooted in close readings of early modern English plays that feature staged game scenes constitutes the book's core: Gammer Gurton's Needle, A Woman Killed with Kindness, Arden of Faversham, Two Angry Women of Abington, The Tempest, and A Game of Chess. There she uses in-depth analyses of staged game-playing to argue that all early modern theatre constitutes a game of information offered and withheld, in which the spectators compete with the plays and players for dominance. While doing so, she also reminds us of the social and political issues at stake in this serious form of play; in particular, she follows how, in the plays she considers, "games offer a testing ground for characters' achievement of patriarchal masculinity" (15) in a contest for knowledge and power.

The chapter on the playfulness of Gammer Gurton's Needle and the card game of A Woman Killed with Kindness sets up card play, a game of "imperfect information," as a modality for the risky negotiation of male friendship. While cards are mentioned only briefly in Gammer Gurton's Needle, Bloom contends that there they "provide the perfect ironic backdrop" for the characters' schemes, undergirding the comic interplay of male relationships. In this academic drama, games construct a "phenomenology of theatergoing that rivals the classroom in its power to educate about the nature of male intimacy" (76). In the Woman Killed with Kindness card game, in turn, Bloom sees that cheating functions not only as a coded conversation about adultery and failed friendship but also as a challenge to the audience who cannot clearly "read" the characters and action when information is withheld. Bloom contends that this representation of theatrical card play undermines the audience's perception that they know what they see, thus troubling the delicate relationship between spectators and spectacle negotiated in the commercial theatre.

The incisive chapter on backgammon in Arden of Faversham and Two Angry Women of Abington turns to analyzing the spatial organization of the early theatre, where Bloom...