Matthew Hunter. The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage

Abstract

In this fine book, Matthew Hunter develops a nuanced and sophisticated set of arguments, most importantly by reversing some of the standard approaches to the topic of style. Rather than opposing style as an aesthetic category to performative speech acts and everyday interaction, Hunter makes a compelling case for considering ‘styles’ as forms of action, ways of ‘making things happen without saying so’ (25). Equal but opposite to classical speech acts, charismatic styles produced highly desired effects on the London stage, implicitly giving definition to the situations of their use as specific genres of successful social performance. Audience members, Hunter argues, could not but feel compelled to try to reproduce these performative effects in their own lives. Rather than thinking of plays as representing everyday social interaction forms, the book unveils a dynamic whereby the theatre’s more perfected interaction styles feed the aspirations and spur the imitation of playgoers seeking affirmation or even celebrity in their own lives.