The essays in Drama, Performance and Debate, which derive from a 2008 conference on Dutch theater and public opinion, examine the role played by theatrical performance in the public sphere(s) of the early modern Netherlands and France. Rich in historical and archival detail, they focus on specific plays, authors, or institutions (such as colleges of rhetoric); the plays themselves took the form of a dramatized debate and were often open to the public. As a subgenre, the debate play is rich in archival and documentary evidence and thus provides a methodologically assured but generically limited object of study (with some notable exceptions).

“Drama is debate and debate is drama,” as Jelle Koopmans suggests — perhaps too broadly. Debate is dramatic, I would agree, but drama resists such a full equation with a form that is, after all, a subgenre — the debate play — of dramatic forms. More productively, drama might be said to be dialogical, sometimes didactic or polemical in nature but often more thought provoking, establishing a catalytic and dialectical relationship to its audience. Mardo Prandoni’s study of Vondel’s “non-confessional” play about the Dutch Revolt is a rewarding example of the latter. Frans-Willem Korsten, who provides a theoretical discussion of the functions of theater in early modern public society, balances the fruits of the archive and the performative possibilities of the culture quite well. He distinguishes between didactic, on the one hand, and “playful” forms of theater, on the other. Although the latter term will seem tautological to some — what is not a playful play? — the underlying distinction is a crucial one. By playful, Korsten means not only the interplay of illusions (acting creates a feigned world), but also a more dialectical interplay with audience and society that extends well beyond the stage (acting is a form of action, doing, enactment in the world).

Publicness is variously understood, defined, or more commonly taken for granted by individual authors. Methodologies and goals are also quite varied. There is an implicit and sometimes explicit debate among the authors, in other words, about the possibilities and shapes of historical research into public, performative cultures. Questions of authorial intentionality are the main focus of many essays; a significant minority, however, brackets intentionality to make forays into more interpretive, audience-oriented approaches and issues. The result of such differences is not a weakness but a real strength of the volume, considered as a whole. I came away from Drama, Performance and Debate with insights and questions that will, I suspect, be valuable for my own primary field of interest, popular Elizabethan amphitheater drama. The Dutch debate play was a significant public mode in the Netherlands and functioned quite differently from academic plays in England. In the Netherlands, they were often written and performed by colleges of rhetoricians, and, unlike English academic plays, they were performed in public and made accessible to a full range of literacies. The Dutch debate play was a kind of popular academic play, if you will.

Some of the essays will be of immediate interest to scholars in other fields of research and theory. Among these, I would single out the following: Arjan van Dixhoorn’s consideration of a “theater society” in Amsterdam in the 1530s; Ron J. Gruijters’s adept recasting of “contextual analysis” to include implicit evidence and unintended meanings; Peter G. F. Eversmann’s persuasive demonstration that images, specifically drawings of actual theaters, participated in public, theatrical discourse; Marco Prandoni’s study of Vondel’s Gysbreght van Aemstel, in which he argues that theater occupied a cultural and social space in between private and public spheres, thus providing a vantage point from which its audiences could think and feel beyond their own confessional or political alliances; and Frans-Willem Korsten’s excellent essay, in which he recognizes the virtual as well as the actual dimensions of publicness (an emphasis also articulated by Van Dixhoorn). Korsten suggests that the “theatrical society” described by Van Dixhorn coexisted with a “dramaturgical society” with more radical cultural dimensions. The former tended toward the institutional and often debated official dogmas of the res publica for teaching or didactic purposes. Revising Van Dixhorn, Korsten suggests the “theatrical society” occupied what he calls “architectures” of performance; “dramaturgical society,” less official and not always embodied in a play, took place in the virtual “architectonics” of the audience, especially in its private, internal, and heterogeneous theaters of the mind and the heart. His concept of this “collective stage” is especially intriguing.

Timely, engaging, and thought provoking, this selection of essays will be of interest even to those whose concerns lie far afield from early modern Dutch theater. I can only envy those who were in Amsterdam for the 2008 conference — I’m sure the talks sparked a lot of questions and public debates of their own.