In her short but engaging book, Amy J. Rodgers offers an assessment of the shifting discursive constructions of the theatrical spectator in late Elizabethan and early Stuart London. The book is not at all another study of Elizabethan audience composition, nor of audience response, nor indeed of any aspect of the actual Elizabethan audience. Rather, Rodgers works from Jean-Christophe Agnew's idea of the “artificial persons” projected by the Elizabethan theater (Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 [1986], xi). She examines images of spectating and their informing contexts in an intriguingly wide variety of texts. For Rodgers, such texts are driven by a range of imperatives to “find new ways to describe the sort of looking that playgoing both catered to and fostered” (4). Among the most valuable of Rodgers's strategies is her insistence on reading antitheatrical texts without apology; for her, their repetitiousness and obsessive reliance on ancient perspectives reveal not their evidentiary untrustworthiness, but rather the grip of the idea of the vulnerable spectator in early modern discourse.

Rodgers opens with an introduction that explains her reliance on aspects of arguments from Agnew, Jeremy Lopez, Barbara Freedman, Carla Mazzio, and Douglas Trevor, among others. From these, Rodgers strives to create an analytical framework independent of the phenomenal reality of the early modern audience but attuned to differences in discursive formulation often arising from changing visions of spectatorial sense perception. Rodgers then moves through four major chapters, the first seeking to identify elements of a theory of discursive spectatorship. Among the key components of this chapter is a persuasive critique of Andrew Gurr's bifurcation of early modern and modern audiences as, respectively, auditory listeners and spectators. Rodgers emphasizes that the term spectator was used in the Elizabethan period and within a conceptual framework more complex than Gurr acknowledges. Other binaries also fail in their application to the early modern discursive spectator, which is constructed through imaginative blends of sacred and secular, as well as communal and individual participation. Similarly, both pro- and antitheatrical discourses imagine spectating through multisensory or broadly synesthetic metaphors that in turn reflect the theater as a space of challenging boundary erosions.

The next chapter examines the consistent association of spectating with violence, and the modification of this discourse as the theater became increasingly responsive to commercial pressure. For the Elizabethan antitheatricalists, psychic violence was all too easily done to the spectator. By the Jacobean period, however—and reflected most extensively in Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607)—the theater begins to imagine the violence spectators in a mass market might do to theatrical production. For Rodgers, Beaumont's play imagines its represented audience as entitled consumers, and then purposefully alienates its real audience from those potential models. The chapter makes a fascinating if speculative move linking the patriarchal thematics of Knight of the Burning Pestle’s 1613 dedicatory epistle to the play's representation of Nell as an ungovernable spectator engaged in violence by “word of mouth” against the play's artistic coherence. Rodgers concludes with a glance at Coriolanus, which allows her to note that the Jacobean theater's concerns were not only with a collective audience but also with increasingly individualized spectators.

Monster’s third chapter investigates the idea of the spectator as reader. Here Rodgers attends to scenes of individualized reading, interpretation, and “understanding” in Pericles and Cymbeline. While for Gurr the early modern audience was always a crowd, Rodgers finds that seventeenth-century discourses about audiences as readers emphasize individualized spectation. In an argument reminiscent of that of Huston Diehl in Reforming the Stage, Staging Reform: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (1997), which goes uncited, Rodgers finds that scenes of reading in these plays work to distance the audience from unselfconscious pleasure in spectacle, and so help to construct ideal spectators. The chapter concludes with a turn to The Winter's Tale, which revisits the discourse of the dangerous spectator in its representation of Leontes. Why exactly Rodgers finds a spectator of any sort in Leontes is never made entirely clear, however.

The final full chapter presents a necessary but innovative turn to Ben Jonson, whose relationship with his real audiences was notoriously conflicted. The chapter attends primarily to Elizabethan and Stuart court entertainments, including analyses of the 1575 Kenilworth entertainments and Jonson's and Inigo Jones's Masque of Blackness (1605), Oberon (1616), and The Vision of Delight (1617). Rodgers argues for a transition from Elizabethan discourses of synesthetic spectating, which reflected the ability of spectators to experience the entertainment through multiple senses, to a more clearly taxonomized discourse of spectation which distinguished sight from sound, looking from listening. Jonson became a primary force in the development of this taxonomizing discourse as he sought to mark off his own contributions to the increasingly spectacular masques. Ironically, Jonson's taxonomizing strategy ultimately forced him to acknowledge the significance of spectatorial vision, suggesting the surprisingly strong influence of Jones’ stagecraft on Jonson's perspective. By the end of the Jacobean period, the discursive spectator had become primarily a viewer of spectacular effects.

Rodgers concludes with an epilogue in which a surprising turn from mid-seventeenth-century concerns about passive spectating to a discussion of trigger warnings provides an occasion to acknowledge the Foucauldian principles underlying her work. She argues that the discursive production of spectator as subject should be understood as a displacement mechanism through which producers try “to influence those forces over which they have little control” (157). Such “forces” are, perhaps, only intermittently visible throughout the book, which is more formal and theoretical than historical in its interests. Even so, Monster with a Thousand Faces functions well as an analysis of a discursive epiphenomenon of an increasingly market-driven theater. The book is especially interesting as a study of the likenesses of pro- and antitheatrical discourses and of early modern, modern, and contemporary discourses about vulnerable individuals viewing mass entertainment.