Jonathan Walker's contribution to the study of English Renaissance drama is to gather and consolidate four separate sites of inquiry into a single theoretical framework he terms the offstage. Comprehensive in research and deft in exposition, his book corrals theoretical distinctions between drama and narrative, onstage storytelling, theatre architecture and non-dialogic text in printed drama in order to trace the symbiotic opposition of onstage and offstage elements in the production of Renaissance drama.
In the first chapter, Walker shows that theorists from Aristotle to Philip Sidney make room for a theory of the offstage by categorically excluding drama from narrative; their theories, by defining pure drama as witnessed action and narrative as dubiously reported words, are predisposed to a formal consideration of the offstage because the imposition requires a justification of the frequent use of narrative in either classical or Renaissance plays. Premodern critics often cite a practical or seemly motive for such narrative transgressions: either the stage technology cannot adequately depict the drama of an event (e.g. Cadmus taking on the appearance of a lion) or it would be indecorous to submit an audience to a live representation of an event (e.g. Medea murdering her children). But this purifying move in those theories, Walker argues, misses an opportunity to mobilize the inevitable hierarchy as mutually defining; despite the critical efforts to eliminate, or at least contain, the use of narrative in drama, the Renaissance theatre regularly expected its spectators to weigh the expressive values of each against the other, eliciting from the audience a complex interpretive participation in the work of the play.
After setting up the theoretical foundation for the function of the offstage, in the second chapter Walker looks at instances of onstage storytelling in several Renaissance plays, offering close readings of these narrative intrusions in order to demonstrate their purpose within the aesthetic purview of the dramatic. Walker does well here to shift from a question of Renaissance stage technology to questions of aesthetics and dramatic function. Whereas critics following Aristotle and Sidney have suggested that onstage storytelling compensates for the dramatic limitations of time and space, Walker follows the work of Richard Meek, Walter Gruber and Andrew Sofer, who respectively consider the dramatic productivity of ekphrasis, narrative and the unknowable offstage. Rather than filling in the gaps for a limited stage, Walker argues, the onstage narrative of offstage events drives the audience to stretch their interpretive muscles. Walker shows how characters onstage tell stories about offstage events in order to control the perceptions of others, how the onstage ingress of these offstage referents casts into relief the hierarchy of witness and report, and how this staged conflict of credibility brings theatre to life.
Walker moves to address the physical dynamics of theatre space and printed drama in the second part of the work, showing again how the offstage delimits the onstage even as it strains the supposed suspension of disbelief. Incorporating a detailed analysis of Renaissance theatre architecture in the third chapter, Walker examines both the geometry of spectacle and the cultural atmosphere surrounding a performance. This spatial instance of the offstage reinforces the drama by marking its borders, but a more realistic view of the Renaissance theatre, Walker insists, must begin with an awareness of overlap and disruption from the sights and sounds that came from the crowds, the wooden stage and the open air. Unlike modern theatre experiences, the Renaissance stage required a more visible and audible contract between play-goer and actor, all within a physical space that invited eyes and ears to turn away from distraction and towards performance.
Walker completes his anatomy of the offstage with a consideration of para-dialogic text in printed drama. Chapter 4 peruses play scripts for stage directions and other didascalia, showing that these too substantialize live theatre, operating like other aspects of the offstage–onstage dichotomy and inviting the reader to synthesize meaning from two distinct forms of discourse.
Walker's work confines its scope to English Renaissance drama, but his simple premise, that the offstage inscribes the onstage, deploys effectively for wider theatre inquiry. Indeed, the implied distinction of Renaissance drama here is the least convincing aspect of the book, the merit of the author's offstage analysis being its almost universal applicability.
