In Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama, Jonathan Walker proposes the offstage as an important spatial category within early modern English drama, a complement to Robert Weimann's influential concepts of locus and platea that, like those categories, functions most powerfully through interplay with an opposing term. Because the offstage “is governed by narrative principles” and typically invoked through a diegesis that sharply contrasts with the mimesis of the onstage world, one might imagine that such a sphere could be studied exclusively through literary analysis (xv). As Walker powerfully demonstrates, however, the offstage can be understood only through a methodology that blends theatre studies, with its attention to the material conditions of performance, and textual criticism. With such a hybrid methodology, Walker aims to show that, although the offstage often remains phenomenologically inaccessible in performance, it also functions as the constitutive limit of drama.

Drawing our attention to the offstage as a way of establishing what he calls drama's “bifocal” nature—that is, its constitutive split between onstage and offstage perspectives—Walker advances three arguments over the course of the book (13). First, he suggests that early modern dramatists were exceptional in their engagement with the offstage, working to “transform this once peripheral space into a highly adaptable and far-flung location for events, conversations, and realities as dramatically intricate and vital as any produced in full view of theater audiences” (7). Second, the repeated juxtaposition of onstage action with narratives of an unseen offstage created an epistemological uncertainty, thereby inviting “playgoers to become more discerning, skeptical, and analytical in their engagement with the drama” (8). The third argument is perhaps the most provocative. Walker notes the etymological relationship between the terms theatre and theory that links them as ways of seeing and knowing. Against the visibility of the onstage world, he contends, the offstage “occupies abjected, nonvisible, disregarded, or transparent spaces to which audiences gain access only through mediated or oblique means” (6). To draw upon such a space in the way that early modern dramatists did is thus to interrogate the very notion of what theatre is. As Walker puts it, “the offstage both enables and threatens drama's distinctive, genre-defining power to represent unmediated and fully visible fictions” (8).

To establish these claims, the book moves across four registers that, for Walker, “collectively represent the field of ‘Renaissance drama’”: premodern dramatic theory, individual plays, the architecture of early modern amphitheatres, and printed texts (5). In the first chapter, Walker offers a compelling survey of premodern theories of drama, including the writings of Horace, Aristotle, and Sir Philip Sidney. He concludes that the offstage functions within such theories as the second term of a binary opposition: the offstage is abased as a repository for the unrepresentable and yet is constitutive of the onstage—the very thing to which it is opposed. It helps to establish what distinguishes drama from narrative and epic by underscoring the importance of what occurs onstage. This chapter provides a strong foundation for the next one, in which Walker traces the way that the offstage is invoked or utilized within early modern drama. Through astute and intriguing comparative readings of The Spanish Tragedy and Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing and Perkin Warbeck, and finally Tamburlaine, Part 1 and Women Beware Women, Walker shows how the interpretive issues of the offstage shape the social fabric of early modern drama. As Walker puts it, the “narrative dilations and interventions” occasioned by the offstage “function in plays to dramatize social cohesion through shared stories and a sense of communal experience, on the one hand, and to portray divisions between individuals and groups whose personal investments or master narratives are too dissimilar or incompatible to cohere, on the other hand” (54).

The third and fourth chapters shift our attention from theory and text to the way that the offstage operates in early modern amphitheatres and printed plays, respectively. After arguing that early modern amphitheatres “are fundamentally rhetorical in design” (105), Walker proceeds to analyze the nature of that rhetoric, concluding that the “centripetal pressures that turn playgoers’ bodies toward the stage produce corresponding centrifugal forces that can redirect their attentions into the offstage circuit of the auditorium” (139). The suggestion that early modern audiences were often distracted, with their attention redirected from the performance to the offstage of the amphitheatre itself, is perhaps somewhat familiar. But Walker's emphasis on what he calls the “microcultures” of playgoing—the “particular material practices within the auditorium, which will help differentiate and diversify not just early modern playgoers and their many sensibilities but specifically the varied activities in which they engaged”—productively reminds us that early modern audiences were always heterogenous, and that we should resist the temptation to speak of such audiences in monolithic terms (104). The fourth chapter traces the construction of “didascalic space” (143), the elsewhere of printed speech headings and stage directions that helps to furnish dramatic speech with its immediacy. For Walker, didascalia and direct speech mediate one another in ways that resemble the interplay of offstage and onstage in dramatic theory, individual plays, and the architecture of early modern amphitheatres, thereby establishing a powerful throughline across the project.

Walker's book makes an important contribution to the study of space in early modern English drama. Other scholars have focused on the material conditions of performance, on questions of form, or on the construction of dramatic space, but Walker endeavors to show how these elements interacted with one another to produce the complex spatiality of early modern English drama. Indeed, part of the power of his argument is to demonstrate the divergence between the theory and the practice of drama—a useful corrective to those critics who assume that early modern arguments about what drama should do can function simultaneously as accounts of what drama in fact does. Perhaps most generatively, Walker's study invites us to rethink the presence of early modern drama in terms of what is absent.