Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance ed. by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday (review)
- Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance ed. by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday
THIS VOLUME is a fundamental contribution to the study of early modern theater. The double focus on playing (with attention to actors and issues of performance) and playgoing (with a focus on audiences) opens a wide lens onto the vibrant theatrical culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The volume is divided into three main sections—Players, Playgoers, and Playhouses—each inviting readers to evaluate and reassess various aspects of the theatrical culture of the early modern period, such as the significance of the embodied and kinesthetic skills of actors, audience engagement, and the culture of playhouses.
The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, addressing debates and concerns raised by the well-established fields of theater history and performance studies. Following current tendencies in early modern scholarly research, theatrical-historical questions are examined, taking into account new approaches to the study of early modern drama, including sensory approaches, practice-as-research, the spatial turn, and new theoretical models of performance and spectatorship. Thus, the volume offers broad critical engagement with past and new debates that have shaped early modern scholarship, with such points of deliberation analyzed through the lens of emerging methodologies in the field. The result is a comprehensive and holistic understanding of actors, audience, and performance in early modern England.
Each section of the volume is divided into four chapters. Part 1, "Players," provides new perspectives on the actors' craft, drawing on new methodologies borrowed from fields such as repertory studies. Special attention is devoted to the analysis of the embodied and kinaesthetic skills of the player, in line with the new sensory turn in theater history, with its emphasis on the actors' ability to transmit embodied emotion. In chapter 1, "Shakespeare's Motists," Natasha Korda examines the significance of motion in theater. Rejecting the traditional focus on the eye–ear matrix, Korda analyzes theatrical gesture, drawing on new work on early modern embodiment, kinetic Shakespeare, and kinesthesis. Her focus lies on what she terms "kin-aesthetics," the aesthetic significance [End Page 459] of motion and action in the arts, arguing that the actor's body-in-motion has the power to move playgoers. In chapter 2, Emma Whipday focuses on the narration and performance of blanching and blushing (involuntary physical responses). She demonstrates how the onstage narration of blushing and blanching often intersects with early modern discourses on chastity, desire, shame, class conflicts, and racist stereotypes. Her analysis offers insight into early modern hierarchies of gender, class, family, and race.
In chapter 3, "Emotions, Gesture, and Race in the Early Modern Playhouse," Farah Karim-Cooper discusses the staging of racial identity in Othello (1604). Stressing the importance of critical race thinking, she explores how the racialized body shapes the network of kinetic exchanges (gestural dialogism) between the actor and the audience (affective responses). In so doing, her study demonstrates how the performance of Othello's racial identity is strongly influenced by his kinetics—not only his military stoicism and heightened passion, but also racist pantomimic gestures. In chapter 4, "The Girl Player, the Virgin Mary, and Romeo and Juliet," Deanne Williams provides an insightful historical account of the girl player in relation to the performance of virginity and the Virgin Mary. This theatrical tradition dates back to the Middle Ages, and it is exemplified by Shakespeare's Juliet, who performs her own identity as both girl and virgin.
Part 2, "Playgoers," shifts attention to early modern audiences. The contributors adopt new methodological approaches, borrowing tools from sensory studies and the history of emotions. In chapter 5, Lucy Munro analyzes apprentices' playgoing in the Jacobean period. Comparing two cases of bad apprenticeship, the fictional Quicksilver (from 1605 George Chapman's Eastward Ho!) and the real Richard Meighen (involved in a complex legal suit), Munro juxtaposes two figures who neglected their professional duties, but also obtained profit from their interest in theater. It is worth highlighting that the chapter includes unpublished research by Hulda Berggren Wallace...
