This new book, as its polysemic title signals, is about sites and sights unseen and unstaged: “the offstage space of the English Renaissance theater, a vast, manipulable, and ultimately unmappable region that spectators never actually see” (xv). This region also has been undertreated, and Jonathan Walker argues that we must expand prior critical understandings of the offstage as not only moments of unseen, reported action and staged narrative within plays, but also as an essential dilemma of premodern dramatic theory, as part of the physical and rhetorical environments of Renaissance playhouses, and as an essential signifier in the textual spaces of dramatic works in print in the period. Such an ambitious scope is a key component of Walker’s deeply rhetorical, new theory of Renaissance drama that sees the offstage, in its manifold iterations, in essential tension and interplay with what happens onstage. “When it comes into view,” he argues, “this substratum of non-dramatic elements [i.e., the offstage] splits the audience’s perspective and challenges them to interpret and reconcile the disparity” (13). The book’s theorizing of the offstage complicates the phenomenon of Renaissance drama and the precise innovations of its playwrights, whose exploitation of the rhetorical possibilities of offstage-onstage “created the possibility for more complex, more nuanced, and more contested dramatic meaning than earlier theater had tolerated” (16).

The project treats a diverse set of offstage sites and an impressive range of historical and critical traditions connected to them. In an introductory chapter, Walker first locates the offstage as a significant narrative and dramatic problem and opportunity in order to establish the rhetorical analysis that will ground his approach, as well as the broad dimensions of his argument that Renaissance drama’s significance and innovations are rooted in its use of the offstage and its dilatory, demystifying potential. This introduction is also where Walker makes an initial survey of the existing criticism and theory of the offstage before moving into four chapters to first consider pre-Renaissance treatment of the offstage and then to explore in detail three dimensions of the offstage that the author argues are unique, and uniquely utilized, by the drama of the period.

Chapter 1 surveys premodern dramatic theory to establish a history of discomfort with the offstage as a rhetorical and formal problem. From Aristotle to Sidney, Walker scrutinizes early theorists’ dismissal of the offstage as the source of a narrative mode in direct competition with direct dramatic action. This chapter is a springboard for chapter 2’s argument about the early modern theater’s innovative embrace of the offstage and playwrights’ different deployments of the offstage. Chapter 2 combines expert close readings of offstage moments in a range of plays with analysis of the theoretical implications of narrative, not only dramaturgically but also epistemologically, and Walker asserts the significance of this drama precisely in terms of the offstage: “by multiplying and dislocating the time and space of the stage through narrative … playwrights harness diverse rhetorical energies to depict new kinds of conflicts within the drama, which changed the way playgoers experienced theater” (62).

In chapters 3 and 4, Walker directs his inquiry of the offstage to the material environs of the period’s amphitheaters and of plays in print. The depth and breadth of Walker’s scholarship in chapter 3 alone is remarkable, drawing diversely on archaeology, acoustics, and geometry to inform its rhetoric of playhouse spaces. The material offstage, Walker argues, compels a rethinking of playgoing in terms of distraction, and of a competitive dynamic between the space of the stage and of much that was not-stage. Such a tension also obtains on the printed pages of plays, Walker argues in chapter 4, the book’s demanding final chapter. Drawing on narratology and semiotics as part of scrutinizing the precise rhetoric of “didascalia” (144)—printed stage directions and speech headings in plays—Walker argues that we must see didascalia not as transparently superfluous, but as a textual formation of the offstage whose relationship to dramatic lines is mutually constitutive: “onstage and offstage spaces interpenetrate and summon one another into existence” (145).

This is an astute and thrillingly interdisciplinary study, drawing on woodcuts and engravings; geometry; poststructuralist, narrative, and textual history and theory; and incisive, original close readings of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Middleton, and Ford. Walker develops a provocative reassessment of the sites of critical interest in Renaissance drama, and he is deeply invested in this drama’s interpretive challenge to its audiences—a challenge that originates in the visual, generic, interpretive, and epistemological perspective created by the offstage.