Various uses of the term theatricality might have provided a focus for this collection of twenty-nine essays: the device of the play within the play, where the stage becomes a simulacrum of itself and characters within the drama divide into performers and spectators; an exploration of conscious role-play (self-fashioning) in individuals or social groups; or the shading of this into self-reflexive, antirealistic excesses in styles of acting, design, or direction, which gravitate toward camp. Henry S. Turner, in devising this volume for the series Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature, has aimed at an interpretation that is wider and more profound in its range of reference, teasing out all the manifold elements that constitute the experience we call theater and devoting a lengthy essay to a minute dissection of the contribution each makes to this diverse art form, so elusive of generalization. Simon Palfrey, in his essay “Formaction,” offers a quotation that sums up the ambition underlying his colleagues’ shared agenda; it is from Florizel’s description of the effect on him of Perdita’s wavelike patterns in her dancing: “So singular, in each particular.” Given a particular aspect of drama in performance to examine, the contributors each relish the opportunity this offers to determine the precise singularity of their given subject within the intricate web of stimuli or the network of dependencies that determine the spectator’s perception and response to the event that is theater. The result marvelously attunes one’s awareness to the complex responsibilities that shape theatergoing as an art in its own right, though it is left to the individual reader of the book to reassemble the constituent parts into a meaningful whole.

No attempt is made to group the essays in sections, though one is given a sense of a carefully organized development as one reads. The focus steadily moves from the given spatial determinants (stage, offstage, interiority), through defining features of dramaturgy (scene, lines, sources, intertheatricality, dumb show), to discussions of the actors’ contributions in terms of playing (skill, games, ekphrasis) and the impact on theater of its meeting a sense of occasion. There is a marked preoccupation with issues of time and timing, immediacy and eventuality; with taste, decorum, and authenticity in theme and in styles and manners of acting (and their opposites); with the relation between form and action; with the use or abuse of the idea of theater and performance within other discourses, particularly philosophy; and with what determines spectatorship. A group of essays investigates thematic concerns that seem peculiarly suited to theatrical presentation and discussion: being foreign, poor, or honest. The final essay investigates the deployment of the stage as a vehicle for the display, interrogation, or honoring of passion. The argument here interrelates theme with dramaturgical issues respecting form and with aspects of acting, especially gesture, showing how they variously function as means to contain (even while expressing) anarchical urges — a project that lies at the historical roots of theater.

It is rare for all the contributions to a collection of this kind to maintain a high standard of achievement, but they do so here. It is a standard of expertise, however, that is directed at knowledgeable, widely experienced readers; it is a volume for other scholars, not for most undergraduates, general readers, or theatregoers (the style of several essays defies easy reading). One cavil limits a total enthusiasm. The title of the book defines the sphere of reference as embracing early modern theater. While there are a pleasing number of theatrical companies commented on, playwrights such as Field, Wilmot, Nabbes, Barry, or Settle referenced, and less-familiar plays by established writers (Jonson’s The Case Is Altered, Ford’s The Queen, or Brome’s The Queen and Concubine) discussed, the recurring focus is predictably Shakespeare, and then to a surprisingly limited number of plays in any extended way: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Winter’s Tale. Too frequently writers turn to obvious examples to support their arguments, when lesser-known dramatists might have been deployed to broaden readers’ awareness of the period. There are notable exceptions to this trend in the collection, but they are few. This is a sadly missed opportunity and an unfortunate limitation on an otherwise outstanding volume.