In recent years, multiple edited collections have grown out of a surge of scholarly interest in medieval and early modern game cultures. Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England joins such volumes as Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature (ed. Serina Patterson, 2015) and Playthings in Early Modernity: Party Games, Word Games, Mind Games (ed. Allison Levy, 2017), but with a focus on the stage that makes its insights and concerns distinctive. As coeditor Gina Bloom argued in her earlier monograph, Gaming the Stage (2018), early modern theatrical audiences would have perceived an intimate link between stage plays and gaming and experienced the theatre as a participatory space where they did not simply watch a play but engaged in mutual play with the performers.

In the first chapter of Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England, Stephen Purcell reminds us that both the Latin ludus and Middle English game carried a range of meanings that encompassed dramatic performance as well as games in the modern sense. Carefully teasing out the various meanings and connotations of “game” in this period, he suggests that many of them remained applicable to the stage even after it had ceased to be a direct synonym for “play.” Purcell pairs these observations with corroborative evidence from a surprising source: interviews with directors and actors from the early years of the modern-day Shakespeare's Globe. A running theme in these interviews is the idea that this archaeologically informed reconstruction of an early modern performance space lends itself to “gamelike performance [that] requires the active collaboration of audience members” (60).

Purcell's chapter introduces many of the themes his collaborators will explore, effectively setting up the first of the volume's three clusters of essays, which historicizes the connections between the stage and other forms of play, gaming, and sport from the late Middle Ages through the Caroline era. A second group of chapters offers a more in-depth exploration of the relationship between games and theatrical mimesis in specific plays, including Troilus and Cressida and The Merchant of Venice, while a third focuses primarily on digital gaming. This general plan accommodates widely varied topics and approaches, from David Kathman's meticulously researched analysis of attempts to regulate tennis and bowls in Tudor London (which, he argues, foreshadow later cultural anxieties about the stage), to Geoffrey Way's essay on appropriation and adaptation in modern-day video games inspired by Shakespeare's works. The contributors have taken pains to cite and respond to one another's work, which lends coherence to a volume that might otherwise seem overly eclectic.

Although there were a few cases where the connections between the playtext and the idea of “game”—or particular games—seemed tenuous, the best of these essays draw sophisticated connections between particular dramatic works and the history, nature, and uses of gaming. Katherine Steele Brokaw's analysis of dicing scenes in Tudor morality plays is a case in point, as she traces how these little-known texts reflect competing Catholic and Protestant concepts of salvation, as well as shifting social attitudes toward wealth and risk. Paul Menzer's essay on bowls is similarly detailed in its discussion of both text and context, though more playful in style. As both Brokaw and Menzer point out, actors whose characters play at dicing or bowls onstage are, in fact, playing at playing; “real” games of this type include a level of uncertainty that is incompatible with the scripted nature of a theatrical performance. Although it is simple enough to conceal the actual outcome of a die roll from the audience, staging a scene whose action depends on the visible and unpredictable motion of physical objects, and the real-life bowling skills of the actors, is far riskier. Nevertheless, a few plays from this period do take this risk, using bowls not merely as a metaphor but as a crucial plot element. Out of this tension “between the contingent and the determined” (167), Menzer spins a complex set of reflections on the nature of stage performance, time, and space.

Another standout essay from this collection, Rebecca Bushnell's “Videogames and Hamlet,” also takes gaming as a starting point to explore the relationships among chance, contingency, and choice. Whereas many of the essays in the digital gaming section have more to say about the ways game designers have appropriated and transformed Shakespeare than they do the text of the plays, Bushnell takes the opposite approach, considering what we might notice about Hamlet if we reread the play after being immersed in a video game, with its branching narrative paths. We might, Bushnell suggests, approach it with heightened attention to the role of uncertainty and mischance, to the ways that choices shape a character's identity, to whether tragic endings are inevitable or chosen. “While a traditional view of Hamlet focuses on the outcome as Hamlet's assenting to his destiny to avenge his father's death and accept his own,” she notes, “a focus on gaming . . . can make us look again at how Hamlet might be operating in a more open rather than closed world, defined by uncertainty rather than fatality” (236). Hamlet is, after all, a play whose most famous line turns on the word “or.”

One of the great advantages of viewing the early modern stage in gaming terms is the framework that it provides for thinking about metatheatricality. This engaging and provocative essay collection opens by attempting to answer the question “What is a game?” but, by the time they finish, readers are also left with a range of new and surprising answers to the question “What is a play?”