What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520–1620 by Callan Davies

Abstract

Reviewed by: What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520–1620 by Callan Davies Elizabeth E. Tavares What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520–1620. By Callan Davies. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. Pp. xii + 230. Hardcover $160.00. Paperback $44.95. Ebook $40.45. The final act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet features a swordfight that must do more than accompany dialogue. Laertes and Hamlet must swap a poisoned blade, and both characters must be struck by it at some point in the choreography. The stage directions for fencing in the quarto and folio versions of Hamlet take the diegetic form “they play” (5.2.258, 266, 283). Hamlet captures one way in which Renaissance theater, according to Callan Davies’s What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520–1620, “encompassed and necessitated other forms of expertise and relied on an audience’s ability to ‘read’ other play forms” (83). The central claim of this necessary book is that “play” described a range of interrelated activities affiliated with commercial leisure spaces across England. Davies emphasizes the fluidity of the notion of “playhouse,” the multifunctionality and co-dependence of these venues on other recreational institutions. Playhouses come in a range of types situated within what Davies calls an entertainment complex or district rather than constituting a destination unto themselves, changing the way critics might conceive not only of these spaces, but also of the ways in which playwrights might have written for them. Davies substantially rethinks the early modern playhouse and offers a new critical vocabulary with which to describe its “family” of architectural features (2). He focuses on all the elements that early modern contemporaries could have identified as part of a playhouse rather than on what was not, such as the long-contested “discovery space.” Adeptly toggling between archaeological findings and archival witnesses, Davies builds an impressive family tree of venues which traces their development in the context of wider architectural shifts, arguing that “theatre-ness” became a byword for sumptuousness (29). Untangling the modern scholarly platitude of permanence, Davies demonstrates that these venues were designed to be convertible and impermanent, and their “inherent fluidity and flexibility” is attested by the fact that “forms, seats, and benches could be recast anew as suited the play medium at hand” (35). Establishing the plasticity of this architecture early in the book makes it possible for Davies then to take account of [End Page 575] the many branches on the playhouse family line, showing links between pageant houses, game houses, and alehouses; guild, moot, and leet halls; arenas; bowling; fencing; the use of bears, dogs, and cocks; and little considered spaces such as The Almonry, a London boy company venue. In this landscape, it becomes clear that the circular amphitheater is an outlier, an exception rather than the rule. Most evocative in this new vocabulary is Davies’s phrase “amphitheatrically accented structures” (36). Not necessarily requiring roundness, these venues combined Greek and Roman traditions with “English developments in house-building, interior decorating and existing environmental features” (36). This new terminology establishes a scaffold upon which further terminology sensitive to the modular and the mobile might be constructed. The book often aligns playhouse development with broader cultural trends, making these venues seem more a part of a shared mental furniture than I had previously appreciated. In addition to amphitheatricality’s emphasis on Classical art, math, and forms, playhouses reflected the practice of “upcycling” in early modern England, as deforestation and the new availability of buildings emptied by the Protestant Reformation provided both new spaces and a need to recycle materials already in use. Rather than standing alone or apart, these venues were more often at the intersections of “leisure precincts” across England (125). In identifying multiple kinds of playhouses existing simultaneously as opposed to crafting an evolution of a single thing called “playhouse,” Davies provides a series of regionally specific microhistories that capture something of the phenomenology of these leisure enclaves and anticipate the rise of the flâneur. For example, the early modern council-run sports complex in Congleton, Cheshire, chimes with my personal experiences of more recent urban planning, such as wandering downtown Cleveland, Ohio, on a busy night...