Shakespeare: Staging the World takes its name from a major 2012 British Museum exhibition. Preeminent Shakespeare expert Jonathan Bate and Curator Dora Thornton accurately present the book as “both [a] catalogue to the exhibition … and the product of a substantial body of research in its own right” (10). Like the exhibition, it stages its 190-plus artefacts, creating a lively and accessible “dialogue between Shakespeare’s imaginary worlds and the material objects of the real world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries” (10). Beginning with London in the year 1612, the book’s ten chapters take the reader on a voyage of discovery through “a panoramic theatre of the world” (17) as Shakespeare knew and made it. Our portals to each location — Rome, Venice, Arden, Tudor England, Scotland, ancient Britain, and the brave new world of The Tempest are perhaps the most memorable — are the material objects of the London exhibition that Bate and Thornton skillfully bring to bear on Shakespeare’s theater.
At one level, this book is an exquisitely illustrated cultural biography and an impressive elaboration of Jonathan Bate’s book Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (2009). But the dynamic interplay it achieves among Shakespeare’s material, historical, and textual worlds makes this book new and rather unique.
Each chapter is a case study, its own discrete cabinet of curiosity in a larger Wunderkammer of Shakespeare’s world. A Horn-book from the late 1600s takes us to Verona, where the lovesick Valentine looks “like a schoolboy that had lost his ABC” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.1.20). We shift to imperial Britain, Cymbeline’s “world / By itself” (3.112–13) through James I’s coronation medal where he appears in the guise of a Roman emperor (216). And a silver reliquary ca. 1606 made to contain the right eye of Jesuit priest Edward Oldcorne (192) is a powerful reminder of that other popular theater of Shakespeare’s age, the scaffold. Plucked out by an opportunistic spectator at Oldcorne’s execution, the reliquary illuminates the violent politics of faith in early modern England, including contemporary attacks on Jesuit equivocation — “Faith, here’s an equivocator” (Macbeth 2.3.6). Here, it also offers a new perspective on the scene in which Cornwall sadistically plucks out Gloucester’s eyes — “Out, vile jelly!” — in King Lear.
Every chapter of this book is compelling, but the third, exploring the England of chronicle history, is especially noteworthy for its insightful exploration of conflicting cultural representations of Richard II as potential influences on Shakespeare’s dramatic characterization of the king. Likewise, the fifth chapter on “Venice Viewed from London” brings to life the mythic place of contemporary English drama. We enter the city through Odoardo Fialetti’s 1611 Bird’s-eye View of Venice, and a series of contemporary engravings and prints depicting elicit sexual encounters with courtesans in Venetian gondolas quickly set the scene. Eventually, we arrive in the cultural world of Othello, infected with uncertainty about female “honesty” (151). A curious interactive print by Pietro Bertelli, perhaps “an advertisement for the Venetian courtesan as tourist attraction” (155) and featuring a liftable skirt revealing male underwear, serves as a reminder that Venice is also a comic world of play in which feminine dishonesty can be paradoxically virtuous. By the time the reader encounters Shylock as a version of the Commedia dell’arte’s “antisocial miser” (167) Pantaloon, courtesy of a stunning Venetian enamelled glass goblet ca. 1600, Shakespeare’s Venice is alive with Carnival. But with a characteristically effective turn of pace, the authors plunge us into a darker world of “traffic” familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences. Shylock’s accusatory line — “You have among you many a purchased slave” (169) — takes us out of Venice and onto Africa and the Ottoman Empire of chapter 6.
Evolving out of recent scholarship concerned with the cultural geographies and cartographies of Shakespeare’s theater, this book’s colorful and often dramatic consideration of the textual fabric of Shakespeare’s world offers something fresh for general and academic readers of history and literature alike. A curiosity in the very best sense of the word, Shakespeare: Staging the World informs as it entertains, and catalogues as it delights.
