In a book eminently suitable for students of performance studies as applied to the early modern theatre, Janette Dillon offers a number of insights into, and expresses interesting ideas about, the manner in which a theatre-goer in Shakespeare's time would both recognize and respond to such matters as scene settings; the symbolism of costume, props and stage furniture, soliloquies and asides; and the depiction of power, historical events and domestic spaces. For Dillon, ‘stage directions and stage pictures’ (p. 1) deserve close attention and while we often can only extrapolate from very limited evidence, she makes it clear that the construction and design of early playhouses must have had a profound effect on the manner of staging a play and she invites us to think of performance in the early modern theatre ‘as a dialogue between two ways of using space . . . place and scaffold . . . or . . . locus and platea’ (p. 3).

Dillon deliberately, and I believe rightly, limits her examination of the staging of Shakespeare's histories to the clues that the texts themselves and the stage directions offer the spectator. In the opening chapters of a relatively short book (145 pages, including notes) Dillon looks at location and ‘stage space’ and describes how the pageant-like entrances and exits of kings and nobles, together with the grouping of characters onstage, reveal the social standing of the various members of the play's milieu and how such grouping is presented verbally and visually. In the next two chapters she examines the ‘stage picture’ and describes its significance, first on a horizontal, then on a vertical, axis – the opposing camps of Richard and Richmond before the battle of Bosworth being an example of the first, and the literal descent of Richard II to acknowledge Bolingbroke's powerful position an example of the second. She goes on to examine objects onstage (for example, the use of the ‘rose’ as both a visual and symbolic reference to the strife between the houses of Lancaster and York). She continues the discussion with a look at objects in scenes of a more domestic kind, making it clear that including such scenes helps to humanize historical persons who might otherwise appear as remote in personality as they are in time. After a chapter on soliloquies and asides, she uses her final chapter to examine the staging of power via a single object, in this case a chair, which she imagines as being onstage throughout the whole of Henry VIII. She notes that the continuous presence of the chair helps it at various times to fulfil the function of a throne or to be an emblem of state, or to act simply as a piece of domestic furniture. Even when the King is not onstage, Dillon argues persuasively, the chair represents his all-pervading authority and his continual (in)visible presence.

This book is a welcome addition to the fascinating topic-led series of books on various important Shakespearean themes published by Oxford University Press.