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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, by William N. West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 293. Cloth $65.00.
Most readers will open this volume, I suspect, with some version of the question I brought to it: How much can theaters and encyclopedias possibly have in common, in the early modern period or at any time? The answer I arrived at after making my way through West's book is, alas, hedged: more than I would have thought but not nearly so much as its author claims. In his introduction, as West sets out to justify the pairing, we find the inevitable hybrid phrases--theaters as sites of "the performance of knowledge" (2), encyclopedias as "textual theaters" (2)--as well as some surprisingly bold claims, typified by this one: "[t]he encyclopedia and the theatre are conceptually identical--not merely similar, but in fact versions of the same idea. Together they present a controlled, organized expression of reality" (4). Even sympathetic readers will be able to think of books, paintings, sermons, even tapestries that handle reality according to these criteria; less generous readers may be tempted to conclude that the foundation of West's approach has little warrant. In chapter 2, however, the reader learns that these claims are based not on the theater of the period in its most familiar form--the stages or plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists--and not even on the morality and mystery plays that preceded them, but on the narrow, rather odd genre of "humanist theater" that, as it turns out, has quite a lot in common with the contemporaneous development of the encyclopedia. Also in evidence in the opening chapter are the virtues that make the book a worthwhile and interesting read:...
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