This essay collection continues a welcome recent shift in early theatre studies privileging the study of phenomena, objects, location, and material coincidences across traditional period boundaries. The volume also attempts to correct or balance other traditional biases: London over the provinces; purpose-built theatres over part-time theatres; literary history and formalist reading over interdisciplinary historicism. The introduction emphasizes the process of instating place and perception via performance in specific sites; the material and the psychic, the present and the past, the playful and the earnest, the here and the there, the improvised and the rehearsed, the delineated and the obscure are just some of the apparent dualistic relationships closely read and complicated.

In “Building Frameworks,” the first of four themed parts, Patricia Badir takes Jonathan Gil Harris's notion of “untimely matter” (18) to demonstrate “the palimpsest-like character of urban space” (31) and the way “the stuffness of our records” (30) emphasizes the dramatic roles played by objects. Perhaps we could call it the thingness of performative experience—a civic sword, an equivocal text, and a detailed pageant wagon invest multiple times and places within a single performing location. Elisabeth Dutton uses the semisuccessful 2009 experimental staging of Heywood's Play of the Weather at Hampton Court Palace to open up the ways in which performance in a nontheatrical location meant that the dramatic activity occurred in an equivocal “place” of specific and embedded activity (36) and in “a continually redefined ‘place’” (42). Kim Solga's architectural reading of The Changeling demonstrates a particularly fruitful imbrication of diegetic seeing moments in the play (the view of Beatrice Joanna in the garden with De Flores; the exploration by a woman of the man's closet) with the increasing and increasingly multiple interest in gendered and material occupation of specific sites/spaces by the gentle audience watching the play at the Phoenix theatre.

In Part II, “Travel and Topography,” the three essays discuss ways in which elite/private and common spaces are used simultaneously to define local statuses and instate localities within a wider concept of nationhood. Jim Ellis is interested in the way that Kenilworth co-opted locality in the service of national belonging as it hosted a romantic-empirical invention of England for Elizabeth I. Helen Ostovich's study of the Queen's Men manipulates the notion of “site-specificity” to emphasize the importance of repeatedly used traveling play locations (bare stages, university halls, etc.), showing how one aspect of the Queen's Men's established normalizing of the national Protestant ethic involved gendering the space of English historied meaning and creating a palimpsestic romantic national space with a consistency of what I might call female glue. Julie Sanders's study of Midlands drama continues her previous work on the cultural geography of the late Jacobean and Caroline periods. This chapter, too, adjusts a simple idea of site-specificity as concerned with single, hermetic, occasional sites to allow for multiple and hybrid performances and the sharing of performance ideas and assumptions across spaces. Drawing on M. J. Kidnie's work, Sanders shows that not only was there a symbiotic influential relationship between drama in London and the provinces, but major writers' scripts were also creating new “kinaesthetic” (123) space(s) at and across household boundaries.

“Psychic Spaces,” Part III, opens with Kevin Teo's observations of the imbrication of historical and contemporary space and place in performing the religious Middle East in the north of England's York biblical plays. Clare Wright's chapter offers a more nuanced opening gambit: What if we emphasize site-specificity as a kind of audience-specificity, taking as our modus operandi a structuralist order of cognitive science to assert some consistency to an “embodied aspect of site” (160) while allowing the cultural historian's imperative to historicize any specific occasion? She concludes that the Play of the Sacrament should be read as an East Anglian–specific performance to cater for a regional religious practice. Sarah Crover's essay on the “cognitive and affective spaces as well as physical, topographical ones” (195) in the entertainment at Elvetham suggests that, instead of creating (albeit romantic) ideas of nascent nationhood, this particular event created “a universal neverwhere” (185); in effacing actual locality, however, the performance permits the invisible but materially effective notion of nationhood to thrive, exchanging the pleasures of the country with the riches of the court.

The book's closing part, “Crossing Boundaries,” begins with Joseph Rodriguez's reconsideration of the power-play role of the giant in London civic welcomes. Rodriguez nicely assesses the equivocality of the giant's assertion of city power as it faces up to the boy king Henry VI, and he argues for a nuanced reading of Lydgate's balanced Christological–feudal representation of the royal–civic relationship. Amy Scott's piece on Cymbeline and mobility begins with a familiar reading of that play's concern with landscape space and the instantiation of Britain; as do several earlier essays in the collection, this piece tweaks “site-specificity”—in this case addressing “landscape” specificity (222). Scott's work moves into interesting territory when she rereads the “politics of mobility … [as] the poetics of mobility” (237), inserting the imagined (or actual, in the case of James I) observer of the play into political emplacement through aesthetic experience. The final boundary essay switches from the west to the north of Britain, as Vimala C. Pasupathi shifts from a long description of The Valiant Scot in its historical context to a briefer but precise study of its aptness as a marker of the marginalized yet also “easily (and repeatedly) traversed” (256) place of Atlantic Archipelagic borderlands.

Although this collection is a traditionally arranged set of academically argued literary-historical essays, its concentration on movement—various performance locations, acting bodies, psychological and social alterations—could make it useful to other humanities scholars and practitioners (teachers, directors, social historians). The book's relevance to those audiences might have been enhanced had it incorporated an essay or two from performance-based research or digital humanities scholars, particularly in light of the introduction's use of the notion of the “taskscape” (8) to privilege the processes of production, performance, and consistent rehearsals, rather than static, finished texts. Although not expanded upon, such perspectives are in keeping with the volume's important overall effort to challenge received ideas of performance, space, and materiality.