Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and Their Reception by George Oppitz-Trotman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and Their Reception by George Oppitz-Trotman Matteo Pangallo Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and Their Reception. By George Oppitz-Trotman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 310. $90.00. Stages of Loss explores the English players who toured to German-speaking countries from the 1590s through the 1620s and "the circumstances that have shaped their reception within a larger history of European theatre" (9). The book is thus less a study of English players and their journeys and more a study of the cultural, political, and economic contexts of the countries through which they travelled, as well as a highly charged assessment of how theater history scholarship has engaged with those activities. As George Oppitz-Trotman puts it, the goal of his book is "to understand the role of these playing companies in the development of national theatres in Germany [and] their importance to a European theatre history" (10). The stories it relates, then, as well as the archives it opens and the scholarship it draws upon, are largely German. Given the substantial preexisting scholarship on English players who toured the Continent, it is surprising to encounter the assertion at the start of this book that "English theatre scholarship" on these troupes is so "meagre" that "the travelling players may as well have passed from life in passing across the Channel" (9). Scholars with whom Oppitz-Trotman disagrees are "culprits" (56), and their arguments (which are no less speculative than many advanced in Stages of Loss) dismissed as "vague" and "delicate" (66), "more than conjectural" (171), and "too eager" (201). Singled out for particular scorn is scholarship that delves into the archives to recover primary evidence—work Oppitz-Trotman characterizes as "always confusing" and that has "greatly distracted from more salient questions" by engaging in "largely fruitless quibbles" (14, 21). It is disconcerting to see such important work denigrated as "scrappy and knotty," merely "secondary stuff" to the "larger tapestry" that this book seeks to weave, or, in unconscionably dismissive terms, "exceptionally bad" (10–11, 76). As the fabric metaphor indicates, without such "stuff," no tapestry can be woven; it is not "secondary" but precedent, and thus essential, to the kind of broad conclusions this book wants to draw. Indeed, while Stages of Loss often declares that the traditional archival practices of theater history are useless and distracting, the book itself relies deeply on that scholarship and even at times engages in such work itself. As Oppitz-Trotman [End Page 523] admits, such research "has laid foundations without which my task would have been next to impossible," which makes it all the more peculiar to see it repeatedly denigrated (21). There is a fair amount to Stages of Loss that is of considerable value, not least because it contributes to our appreciation of the connections between the English stage and both Continental theater and broader cultural, political, and economic developments in Europe. Stages of Loss is a vivid reminder that early modern theater history should not be constrained by geopolitical borders. More specifically, it argues that players' itinerancy created the conditions "by which the value of the player's work could be preserved and maintained, since the interim between performances in a particular place contributed to popular demand for those performances in that place" (260). Essential to commercial success was the periodic absence produced by itinerancy. Oppitz-Trotman demonstrates that practices such as repertory management, the revision of play texts, and improvisation improved theatrical durability by providing "a ward against the devaluation of repetition" when players returned to places (261). He also draws attention to the challenge of determining the "cultural context" of these players: that is, "whether the English Comedians were representative of England and Englishness" or whether they should be "treat[ed] in terms of Germany and German culture" (261). In identifying this dilemma, Stages of Loss speaks to the enmeshments between theater in Shakespeare's England and theater on the Continent, and thus troubles the idea of theater histories tidily divided by national boundaries. One of the more frustrating aspects of Stages of Loss is the often awkward or vague prose—for example, the use of...