Shadow and Substance charts the way that theological debates about Christ's Eucharistic body reverberate on the English stage both before and after the Reformation(s). In doing so, Zysk challenges the too easy conclusion that post-Reformation theology and drama spiritualizes a medieval focus on flesh and embodiment. The book argues instead that in both the theological and theatrical arenas, the relationship between bodies and signs is repeatedly contested and renegotiated.

After a theologically dense first chapter traces the relationship between sign and body in Eucharistic controversy, the remaining five chapters pair plays from before and after the Reformation that stage an aspect of those debates. The trans-Reformational pairings prove fruitful and situate the book within larger efforts to challenge rigid periodization, such as the University of Notre Dame Press's ReFormations series, in which this book appears. A chapter on words and wounds pairs the York Crucifixion with Shakespeare's Coriolanus, beginning with arguments about the complex relationship to period that plays such as the York Crucifixion have. The dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the manuscript sources for many plays once considered medieval complicates their theological resonances and periodization. Zysk contrasts the way that crucifixion plays turn Christ's “wounds into words,” while Coriolanus actively resists such incorporation of his wounds into symbolic and civic signification (11).

Chapter 3 focuses on the concept of the corpus mysticum, Christ's mystical body, which establishes a connection between the church as the body of Christ united by the Eucharist, and political-theological concepts, such as the idea Ernst Kantorowicz described as the “king's two bodies” (87). Zysk maintains, contra Kantorowicz, that the political realm retains the spiritual significance of the corpus mysticum, beginning with his analysis of the similarities between two texts by John Lydgate, a civic pageant written for Henry VI's triumphal entry into London in 1432 and A Procession of Corpus Christi. He then turns to the Reformed sacramental political theology of John Bale's King Johan and to a reading of Macbeth as a revelation of the vulnerability of the concept of sacred kingship. Unlike Bale, Shakespeare does not advance a Reformed conclusion but rather reveals the chaos that results from Macbeth's severing of the ties between the sacred and the political. In chapter 4, Zysk turns to the concept of Eucharistic confection in Everyman and Doctor Faustus. Confection describes the specific power an ordained priest has to use language to “make God manifest in the world” at the moment of transubstantiation (119). While Everyman upholds the power of the clergy, Faustus seemingly mocks it. Zysk argues, however, that what Faustus exhibits is envy of the power over language and reality that an ordained priest possesses; in fact, his pact with the devil is a fruitless effort to obtain such power.

Next, Zysk analyzes the connection between Eucharist and varying attitudes toward saints’ relics in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling. In the Croxton play, a relic-like host converts unbelievers, while in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, artificial wax limbs fashioned to look like those of her husband and children fool the duchess into despair. Webster's relics suggest a Reformed fear of idolatry, but also prompt the duchess's martyr-like execution. In The Changeling, the politics of touch navigate the space between the spiritual and the sexual. The final chapter puts biblical Emmaus plays in dialogue with the Tudor comedy Jack Juggler and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Such a dialogue highlights their shared emphasis on tropes of recognition and naming. The biblical plays stage Christ's post-resurrection appearance in disguise to disciples on the road to Emmaus; the disciples do not recognize him until he breaks bread with them at a meal and, at that very moment, Christ disappears. The disciples are left to interpret the sacrament he leaves behind. Such recognition never takes place in the Tudor comedy Jack Juggler, which Zysk reads as an anti-Catholic satire. In the statue scene of The Winter's Tale, as in the Emmaus plays, Leontes must learn to recognize Hermione before her “real presence” can be received (221).

With over one hundred pages devoted to its notes and bibliography, Shadow and Substance is impressively researched, and Zysk deeply learned. That learning supports sharp readings of both very familiar and seldom studied plays. Shakespeareans, in particular, may glean much of value through Zysk's readings of earlier plays, although some individual readings are naturally less revelatory than others. The different aspects of Eucharistic theology, from corpus mysticum to confection to relic culture, that the book illuminates reveal how thoroughly Eucharistic controversy is infused in both pre- and post-Reformation culture. By traversing the medieval-Renaissance divide, Zysk's work synthesizes and extends important work on the Eucharist that limits itself to pre- or post-Reformation contexts.