<i>A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England</i>. Amy J. Rodgers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 231.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewA Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England. Amy J. Rodgers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 231.Susan BennettSusan BennettUniversity of Calgary Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAmy Rodgers’s thought-provoking examination of the early modern spectator opens with a collection of seven epigraphs that range across history from Plato to the two high school students responsible for the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. Rodgers asks her reader to construct “a profile of the prototypical spectator” (2) from the epigraphs’ content—one she suggests we would find to be young, male, and dangerous. Of course, this is, as Rodgers herself says, a “ridiculous” exercise (3), but it is one that nevertheless alerts us to the risks involved in offering any general assertion of what spectators were like in the early modern or any other pre-twentieth-century theater. Her project, rather, is to explore an archive of texts written for and about the theater in order to construct what she calls the discursive spectator, “an entity that consists of multiple, sometimes contradictory narratives, some of which have long and relatively consistent half-lives and some of which emerge and disappear within a given era” (6).The introduction effectively lays out not only what Rodgers means by the discursive spectator but how her investigation both develops and challenges other scholarly writing on audiences in the early modern period. A brief survey of this field ends with an explicit statement of the book’s objective, to trace an alternative “history of how early modern English culture imagines, projects, represents, and circulates ideas about theater spectators and the dynamics of theatrical spectatorship” (15). She notes here, too, that earlier studies have relied chiefly on the period’s antitheatrical tracts but that her use of them will focus on discursivity rather than spectatorial practice or affect. (It is unfortunate that Lisa Freeman’s radical rethinking, Antitheatricality and the Body Public [2017], was too recent for Rodgers to have engaged it in her own work.) What makes Rodgers’s project particularly engaging is the author’s keen sense of key ideas in contemporary critical theory—ideas she productively leans on as she close reads her selection of early modern texts.The body of her book comprises four case-study chapters: the first, an analysis of the discursive spectator in the emergent period of London’s commercial stage, followed by substantial discussions of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (chap. 2), Shakespeare’s Pericles and Cymbeline—intended for the dramatic reader as well as the theater audience (chap. 3)—and the masque tradition at the court of James 1 (chap. 4). This chronologically organized trajectory allows Rodgers to carefully build the alternative history that she has promised, offering, in each case, nuanced and productive readings of her selected texts, individually and collectively. In chapter 1, for example, she focuses on writings on and for the theater in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign, texts that “grapple with the figure of the spectator and the ‘new’ experiences of looking that developed alongside the rise of the professional theater” (29). Rodgers points to an evolution in thinking about the spectator (a term that she notes has its first Anglophone use in Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia [1590]) as theatergoing becomes more established. Both anti- and pro-theater treatises find in the spectator a potential movement “between phenomenological (what one sees and hears) and associative (other sensory experiences seeing and hearing can evoke) modes of experience. In doing so, it exposes another space where theater’s detractors understood the spectator as particularly vulnerable” (46)—in other words, they expressed the fear that audiences would lose the capacity to distinguish representation from the “real.”In chapter 2, Rodgers turns her attention to The Knight of the Burning Pestle and the unusual evidence it provides: the citizen characters who provide critique within the play and the received knowledge that actual audiences did not much like Beaumont’s play. Rodgers ventures, however, that she is not concerned with why the play proved so unpopular; instead she wants to know “why Beaumont wrote a play that explicitly dramatizes audience resistance” (56). This requires her careful unpacking of the Citizen and his wife “as representational fields onto which certain spectatorial uncertainties, anxieties, and desires are projected and enacted” (57). Her third chapter recognizes that in the seventeenth century “it became more common for plays to have a double life on stage and page,” a development that prompted “a reconfiguration of the early modern spectator as something that alternates between a member of an interpretive community and an individual viewer” (82). Rodgers recognizes the often-contentious positions that oppose Shakespeare, on the one hand, as producer of literary texts, and, on the other, as a “man of the theater,” a debate she does not look to resolve but to see as a sign of increasingly blurring boundaries, “a moment when the largely asymptotic discourses of singular ‘spectator’ and holistic ‘audience’ collide” (85). Pericles and Cymbeline, she suggests, “render such oscillations in the discursive spectator particularly discernible,” as both plays demonstrate “a particular fascination with scenes of reading” (86). A final section in this chapter turns to The Winter’s Tale; through the character Leontes, Rodgers argues, Shakespeare recasts “attentive watching and active interpretation as dangerously procreant acts” (112).Her study of the Jonsonian masque traces “changes to the language used to describe and invoke the senses in court masque over a sixty-year period, offering an example of how epistemologies of sense perception can be created and circulated through discourse” (121). The rich illustrations in this chapter account for the multisensory effects of masque performance, particularly effective in Jonson’s preface to the print version of Hymenai (his masque for the wedding of the Earl of Essex and Frances Howard), where he addresses matters of sight, sound, touch, and taste: “Jonson calls on almost the entire sensorium to plume up his work” (136). What emerges from this discussion of the masque oeuvre is the ascendance of a language of looking—that spectators, by the 1630s, had come to expect “what we would now call special effects” (143).In an epilogue Rodgers not only brings together her various strands in parsing the discursive spectator, but she also challenges the reader to think from the anxieties around theatergoing in the seventeenth century to discussions of trigger warnings now, the recent term another example of “a linguistic response to cultural moments in which discourse about representation and those who engage with it becomes destabilized” (153). In other words, calibration of the “discursive spectator” is a task as important today as it clearly was in writing for and about early modern theaters. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711152 Views: 205 HistoryPublished online September 01, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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