Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama.(Book Review)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, by Jeremy Lopez. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 239. Cloth $60.00.

This book has many virtues. Jeremy Lopez is a shrewd reader of plays with a keen eye for details and connections along with a director's feel for onstage effects. He also writes clearly and forcefully. Although (inevitably) I did not agree with every claim or argument, I came away enriched by having been taken through a well-conceived, carefully constructed, and clear presentation.

After an introductory chapter, the book is divided into two parts, with chapters 2 through 5 devoted to specific devices (e.g., puns and wordplay, asides, expository speeches, echo scenes, disguise) and chapters 6 and 7 to the larger structures into which they fit (tragedy and comedy). Lopez notes differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean concerns but argues that "because the actual physical nature of the stage does not really change, the fundamental theatrical sensibility remains constant." He describes that sensibility as "the drive to make an audience comfortable, even smug in its mastery of dramatic signals and information, and then casually to go to the most extreme lengths to shock it out of its complacency; it is the equal willingness to embrace, to insist upon the importance of, and to utterly discard, the incongruous" (133).

In part 1 Lopez begins with puns, noting that they, along with "the apparently unquenchable desire to make them," suggest a desire to fill "each moment with as much stimulus as possible, to indulge and delight in complexity for its own sake," so that "Puns beget more puns, and when this is successful, the more puns an audience hears, the more it wants" (37-38). Similarly, he notes the "surfeit of information" provided by the "potentially disruptive" aside wherein an audience is asked "to focus its attention on several points at once," an effect that "can be more distracting than illuminating"; "the desired effect seems to be to make you aware of what everyone else is missing, and to make you...

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