Sometimes a reviewer encounters a book with an argument so original that it seems at first unlikely to be true. Could it be possible that spectators in the Globe or Fortune looked at the wooden walls of the theater and the posts that held up the roof over the stage and saw trees? In Wooden Os: Shakespeare's Theatre and England's Trees, Vin Nardizzi argues that because London's public playhouses were constructed out of wood and often staged scenes with woodland settings, they functioned to “‘replant’ diminished woodlands.” He suggests that “England's trees—replanted as theater—were virtually brought back to life whenever a character entered the woods” (5). “Unlikely” I muttered to myself as I read the prologue, only to read on and become convinced of the link between theaters and trees by Nardizzi's fresh account of drama and theater history in early modern England. The book successfully works to “situate the study of the theatre's material fabric firmly within the ambit of early modern English environmental history” (95). If Nardizzi's claims are occasionally a bit more specific than the evidence fully supports, he nevertheless offers a rich contextualization of key scenes involving trees from four different plays performed in four different wooden theatres.

In the introduction Nardizzi helpfully explains the crucial importance of wood and timber in England in this period, when wood products served as the main source of energy for heat, cooking, and manufacturing, as well as the main material for building houses, ships, and theaters. He also notes the perception in the period that an increasingly dire shortage of wood products threatened England's material prosperity and national security. How, then, to justify using large amounts of wood to build something as frivolous as the public playhouses in London? Nardizzi's account of this early modern shortage of wood provides new insight into the reasons why the Globe theater was built from wood recycled from the Theatre. His argument that the wooden structure of public theaters reminded audiences of woodlands that were under threat becomes convincing in this context. By the end of the book, I was ready to believe that “in an era marked by perceived scarcity of wood and timber, the cultural imagination typecast playhouses as virtual woodlands where an array of eco-fantasies and nightmares about that shortage could be staged” (136).

The strongest chapter focuses on Shakespeare's The Tempest and makes sense of its weird obsession with logs. Nardizzi explains how Prospero's magical destruction of trees and imposition of log-carrying on Caliban and Ferdinand relate to arguments from the period that England's shortage of wood could be remedied by exploitation of the dense virgin forests found in Virginia. Another chapter shows how the early seventeenth-century revival of a rewritten Spanish Tragedy, staged at the Fortune, focuses on the arbor, trellis, or tree on which Horatio's body hangs to meditate on genealogy, ambition, and the destruction of private woodlands. A chapter on The Merry Wives of Windsor shows how the play subtly questions the crown's claim to ownership of forests and forest resources in places like Windsor. These three chapters show how contemporary discourse about forests and anxiety about scarcity of resources haunt the woodland scenes found in all three plays.

A chapter on Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay asks a single tree (a magically conjured mythological tree at that), present in the play for only eighty lines, to bear a lot of interpretive weight. In the course of the chapter, this tree comes to stand in for the wooden ships of the Spanish Armada, for the fear that Spain would destroy England's woodlands in order to prevent the English from building ships, for a fear that shipbuilding materials from the Baltic would no longer be available in England, and for the possibility that the New World might supply those shipbuilding needs. This is a lot for a single tree to support. However, Nardizzi's broad claim is convincing and helps us read the play in new ways, arguing that “both the assault on the tree prop and its vanishing constitute versions of an ecological disappearing act that could affect national security” (34).

Each chapter also links its play to the specific wooden theater in which it was performed. These sections are full of fascinating information about the ways in which wooden theaters were constructed and the extent to which their woodenness was a prominent feature. The Rose, the Theatre, the Fortune, and the Globe emerge as part of England's forest ecosystem, their cultural role shaped by their relation to wood from which they were constructed and the woodland scenes that they stage.