The editors of Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England have delivered a carefully curated volume that offers an evocative hermeneutical paradigm that challenges supposedly settled critical assumptions as well as an impressively wide range of conversations and materials that will benefit students and teachers at all levels of education. Foremost among the settled questions it reexamines is the very nature of dramatic performance, which has been reduced to mimesis for such a long time as to seem ineluctable. To counteract this problem, they propose instead to play the clown, as it were, by deploying a series of essays that depart from the traditional scripts of our field by uncovering the gamelike qualities of early modern drama.
True to the publisher's series Cultures of Play, 1300–1700, the volume investigates elusive forms of medieval and early modern play that have seemed untraceable according to longstanding disciplinary models. But Games and Theatre goes further, by examining game's relationship to theater both forward and backward—by which I mean not only how early modern game culture and professional dramatic performance were mutually influential but also how present-day game cultures can help to reevaluate our study of early and premodern performance. Its eleven essays (exclusive of its introduction and epilogue) are divided into three parts. Contributors in the volume's first section convincingly demonstrate how games provided the essential “conceptual and regulatory context” for early modern professional drama (23). Considering theater itself to be a game of games, essays in part 2 show how, in the words of Badir's keen analysis of Troilus & Cressida, early modern plays pursue ideas of truth beyond the ken of mimetic representation—in the rifts and interstices between what is spoken and unspoken, what is present and what is missing, and above all in the gamelike unfolding of the present from the past. Games and play, this analysis suggests, fundamentally oppose not only work (and by associative corollary, the literary work) but also history (153–55). Readers with interests in time studies will accordingly be pleased to note that the question of the relation of games and theater to time and history deeply informs most essays in the volume, whether they incorporate late medieval drama and the broad array of sixteenth-century dramatic activity (Purcell, Kathman, and Steele Brokaw), the continued intertwining of theater and game well into the period of the English Civil War (Hirschfeld), Restoration and Victorian productions (Greenberg), or movement outside temporality itself (Badir and Menzer).
Not being a gamer myself, I was challenged and inspired by the contributions in part 3 to rethink my tacit assumptions about digital games and their relation, whether historical or contemporary, to Shakespearean drama. Potential readers should know that these contributors, particularly Roberts-Smith and DeSouza-Coelho, are not unthinkingly in favor of video games as pedagogical tools for the study of theatrical performance. Bushnell's and Way's essays, furthermore, are excellent starting points for high school and college undergraduate teachers and students thinking about how to create board and video games based on Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays.
For all its scope and prescience, the collection would be incomplete without Natasha Korda's epilogue, in which she highlights a form of game—the board game—as well as a game-related form—the Wunderkammern (wonder cabinets)—both of which I think will require further consideration by these or other scholars. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, tabletop board games with substantial role-playing components were seeing a resurgence of interest. Contemporary Western culture has developed its own form of the Wunderkammer in the form of Lego designs that have in turn inspired film performances, games, and books like the Brick Shakespeare series, which offers construction guides on how to build famous scenes from Shakespeare's major plays. I'd like to close by emphasizing the word build, for it seems to me that Games and Theatre in Shakespeare's England has given us a lot of constructive material with which to work—and play. It includes three tables and one illustration.
