Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees by Vin Nardizzi (review)

Abstract

Vin Nardizzi. Wooden Os: Shakespeare's Theatres and England's Trees. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. 224 pp. $42.00. Vin Nardizzi's fascinating book draws attention to a little-noted feature of early modern life: the extent to which economics, politics, and culture came together, in Shakespeare's time, in the form of a single commodity, timber. Commercial wood was, in effect, the early modern equivalent of oil in our own time: it underpinned the economy in a great variety of different ways, not just as a raw material for building and manufacturing but as a fuel to power smelting works and other forms of proto-industrial production. It was also the material that made imperial expansion possible, as whole forests were cut down to construct warships that enabled military might to be projected overseas, and, again like oil in modern era, it also prompted colonial fantasies: visions of limitless forests in the New World that could be exploited for the benefit of colonial powers. But as Nardizzi notes, timber also provided, literally, the very structure of a key and novel element of English Renaissance culture: the playhouses, those wooden os of the book's title (the phrase borrowed, of course, from the Chorus to Henry V). It was in this period that drama became commercialized, moving indoors, behind timber beams, where, doorkeeper in place, it could be monetized Nardizzi's book attends to these developments, both tracking the importance of timber to the early modern economy and also exploring the perceived crisis in the period, when available stocks of timber (and woodland resources) were thought to be insufficient to meet contemporary needs (again, the parallels with our own period are striking). All of this history is mapped out in the book in an engaging, convincing, and intelligent fashion. Moving on to the arena of theatre history, Nardizzi offers elegant arguments about the materiality of the playhouses themselves--in some measure palaces of environmental excess, as a resource thought of as being scarce was devoted to creating arenas for playing when it might have been put to better use (serving as material for the construction of another man-of-war, perhaps). But Nardizzi also notes that the playhouses served to bring the forest into the heart of the city, erecting, as he puts it, 'new woodlands' [in] the urban core, so that In London's theatres, consumers paid the price of admission to experience the pleasures and the frights of being inside virtual woods (20). …