The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions by Jenny Sager Callan Davies The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema: Robert Greene’s Theatre of Attractions. Jenny Sager. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. x + 208. $90 (hardback), $73.12 (e-book). In one of his Lord Mayor’s Pageants, Thomas Heywood complains of the “throng” who “carry their eares in their eyes” (Londini Emporia, London 1633, B3v-B4r). His contempt for fans of spectacle is ironic, considering that he is one of early modern England’s most spectacular dramatists, sitting firmly alongside Robert Greene, the subject of Jenny Sager’s exciting monograph. Though a preference for the ear over the eye has characterized criticism, past and present, of early modern drama, recent studies have sought to balance the scales. The Aesthetics of Spectacle is part of a growing body of criticism—one that combines literary analysis with performance and film studies—that seeks to see again the value of early modern visual effects. In so doing, it brings into focus one of the most influential and critically overlooked Elizabethan dramatists. Twenty-first-century film critics are less scornful of those who “carry their eares in their eyes”; reviews of the recent blockbuster Gravity suggest that its powerful visual effects are artistic and intellectual achievements. Variety’s Justin C. Chang praised it for restoring “a sense of wonder, terror and possibility to the bigscreen [sic] that should inspire awe among critics and audiences worldwide” (28 August 2013). If the visual qualities of a 2013 film can be intellectually appreciated, then why not the dumb-shows, brazen heads, squibs, and hell-mouths that are so prominent in the popular entertainment of the 1590s and 1600s? Sager’s study, then, remedies the “taint of Puritanism and anti-theatricalism” in literary criticism by using “modern cinema” as a comparative medium with analogous visual effects (1). It associates early modern theatrical practices with the twentieth- and twenty-first-century commercial film industry (a methodology also seen, for instance, in Emma Smith’s “Genres: Cinematic and Early Modern” in Shakespeare Bulletin 32.1). In order to suggest the usefulness of cinematic analogy, The Aesthetics of Spectacle begins and ends each chapter with a short consideration of a visually spectacular film, from Jaws to The Godfather to George Méliès’s The man with the rubber head. It is not, however, a comparative study. These cinematic correspondences bookend what are largely historical readings of Greene’s plays and their affect, effects, contexts, and popularity. Yet, while the comparisons are slight, they underline Sager’s aim of applying to early modern plays the more generous and sensitive approach to visual effects seen in film studies. The chapter on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus King of Aragon uses Méliès’s metatheatrical special effects as a means of appreciating the value and influence of Greene’s drama; like early film’s “cinema of attractions,” Greene’s plays “prioritise the act of display not the need to tell a story; they prioritise mimesis over diegesis” (106). [End Page 771] Indeed, the comparisons with modern cinema are part of the monograph’s theoretical framework—a framework outlined in the introduction and the opening chapter, drawing on a number of modern and early modern influences, from the Aristotelian conception of wonder to Brechtian theory. If the range of reference in these establishing chapters seems broad, it represents Sager’s interest in using cinema as a conceptual analogy while maintaining, in reading the plays themselves, a considered historical analysis. While Friar Bacon and Alphonsus can be seen to contain the hallmarks of a “theatre of attractions,” they are also deeply concerned with idolatry, iconoclasm, and religious representation. The reading of Orlando Furioso explores the association between madness and creativity through a comparison with Rob Reiner’s 1990 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. The chapter goes beyond theoretical discussion to argue concisely and persuasively for Greene’s interrogation in the play of intertextuality, classical imitation, and Marlovian drama. If one of the book’s aims is to establish “how spectacle, rather than being...