This is a collection of new essays that grew out of a workshop in Munich in 2010 centered on one of the master tropes of European culture; the essays are in English, though mostly by German scholars. (Their transit into English is at times incomplete: “With the former the actor comes into the world und with the latter he leaves it again” [86].) The topic has not wanted for critical attention, and most of that attention has been specifically on the early modern period, when the international proliferation of what proved to be a lasting theatrical tradition, with permanent structures serving only that purpose, gave the inherited classical metaphor fresh concreteness. Quiring’s introduction provides an invigorated overview from Democritus and Pythagoras to the present, with emphasis on the trope’s deployment by some particularly commanding figures (Benjamin, Foucault, Blumenberg, even Derrida). For the gathering that follows, “its aim is to interrogate, mainly on the basis of early modern literary texts, the social and epistemological dimension of this [Blumenberg’s term] absolute metaphor” (14).

The literary texts include familiar ones (Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo and La vida es sueño, and Beckett’s Endgame to contrasting effect at the modernist end of things), but also less usual suspects (some of the still largely unread Trauerspiele that interested Benjamin, notably Gryphius’s Catharina von Georgien, Greville’s neo-Senecan Mustapha and Alaham). The analyses, often quite intricate, lead variously into theology, politics, and philosophy; sometimes they seem to get lost there. The most panoramic essay is Anselm Haverkamp’s, tracing an arc from Plato to Beckett, within which “the theater and its descendants were not more deceived than their scientific others with whom they had, and still have to keep up, up to now” (148). That’s the curtain line, not much clearer in context than taken out of it; the essay’s ambitions throughout are badly served by exhaustingly mannered argumentation, heavily encumbered with name-dropping: “Isabelle Stengers teaches us to take the mythic inclination of Whitehead for what it primarily was, a new — but how new is it? — setting for ‘productivity’; we may ‘have never been modern’ according to her friend Bruno Latour’s suspicion” (138). There is relatively little mention of the theatrum mundi. The most important literary text being considered is not a drama but Paradise Lost, the interpretation of which is seen to hinge on Milton’s very brief reference to Galileo; the metaphor — or “para-metaphorical device” (147) — that anchors the last section of the essay is the telescope.

Other essays present some of the same problems in less acute form. Julia Reinhard Lupton engages with Hannah Arendt for a densely theorized concept of hospitality, and applies this to Macbeth. Aside from the obvious theatricality of entertaining guests, the prompt for framing this as an essay about theatrum mundi is the unforgettable reference to a poor player strutting and fretting upon the stage. But the fit is awkward; the part of the speech that engages Lupton is not the invocation of the theater but the brief candle that immediately precedes it. On candles and early modern housekeeping she has fresh and incisive things to say; slipping in references to “the domestic theatrum mundi” (52) doesn’t dispel the impression that a more satisfying essay has been imperfectly retrofitted for the present rubric. For most readers, I suspect, the takeaway from the volume as a whole is likely to be excellent parts not strongly tied to that rubric: e.g., Andreas Höfele’s absorbing commentary on Bruegel’s Christ Carrying the Cross, and Nigel Smith’s close-grained exploration of the personal and political contexts within which the Continental playwrights Vondel and Gryphius dramatized events that the London theater dared not approach, the executions of Mary Stuart and Charles I.

Some of the essays have been very inattentively edited, with an embarrassing incidence of mangled text and formatting errors; one paragraph inadvertently runs on for five pages (185–90). These problems don’t themselves compromise the utility of the volume, but the absence of an index does.