Ever since From Mankind to Marlowe in 1962, David Bevington has been a mentor to researchers working on early modern English theater. After editing all of Shakespeare's plays for Bantam, he has latterly shared the results of a lifetime's scholarship and teaching through such books as How to Read a Shakespeare Play (Oxford, 2006) and Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen (New York, 2006). Meanwhile—and despite fierce ideological ground wars elsewhere in the Shakespearean Academy during the last few decades—the study of Shakespeare in performance has blossomed and branched off in many directions, including theatrical archaeology, the reconstruction of Renaissance practices, stage history, film criticism, and media studies; in This Wide and Universal Theater Bevington attempts to synthesize them all, accessibly.

After a twenty-six-page summary of the development of Elizabethan/Jacobean playhouses and companies, six chapters on single plays or groups (comedies, histories, late plays) investigate the relationship among Shakespeare's scripts, Shakespeare's stage, and subsequent performances from Garrick to Siddons and Beerbohm Tree to Kenneth Branagh. Bevington explicates texts, glosses difficult terms, sums up controversies without rancor, and effortlessly distills his knowledge. It's a benign book that will quickly find a place on college reading lists.

Its heart is a series of essays on metatheatrical motifs in the plays. Bevington is interested in characters whose self-consciousness about performance sets them on quests of self-discovery (Rosalind, Hamlet, Edgar) or who test the nature of control, like Prospero or Vincentio in Measure for Measure. Bevington reads those two Dukes-playing-God very positively, unlike Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial critics who, he says, “miss an essential point. The Duke is the embodiment of theatrical contriving. He does what the dramatist does.” He interprets Measure for Measure apolitically as a series of theatrical “unveilings” and argues that the so-called “problem plays,” apparently so sour and confrontational, are simply theatrical experiments, either restricting knowledge and agency to a single character (Measure for Measure) or excluding them completely (Troilus and Cressida). Yet Bevington's references to a range of modern productions do admit other possibilities. Perhaps his most revealing chapters, which precisely map the use of Elizabethan stage space, are the most historically grounded. Bevington brilliantly shows how Romeo and Juliet's locales dissolve and redefine themselves through “theatrical sleight of hand,” as interiors turn into exteriors or invisible walls swivel around in response to poetry and the imperatives of action. Best of all is his encyclopedic analysis of military choreography in the histories, which reveals Shakespeare's concentration on siege situations, where characters fight for possession of the theater building itself. All prospective directors ought to read it.

The short stage histories (two and a half pages on Macbeth) are rather repetitive because of their uncontentious thesis: “Post-Shakespearean productions, both onstage and on film, have often yielded to the temptation to show us viscerally what Shakespeare's theater invokes through suggestion,” and in every case Bevington describes Restoration adaptations, Victorian spectacle, and a thankful return to a stripped-down “presentational” staging after 1900. Inevitably, amid so much factual detail there are slips. For instance, Stalin did not imprison the director Gregori Kozintsev (although his film's Hamlet, Innokenti Smoktunovski, was in the Gulag). Peter Hall's Coriolanus of 1984 (not 1974), far from depicting the plebeians as “angry mine workers,” invited members of the audience to be the crowd, which became well fed, bourgeois, and sheepish. And we’re explicitly told that Ian McKellen's “brilliant” and “balanced” Coriolanus in Tyrone Guthrie's production was better than the Peter Hall version; actually, McKellen was Hall's Coriolanus and Guthrie's Aufidius. But such details don’t lessen the lucidity of Bevington's writing, nor his ability to suggest with one telling detail the vast range of possibilities Shakespeare's plays have demonstrated on modern stages.

Fascinated by characters who are aware of the illusion they inhabit, Bevington is predictably delightful on Falstaff (“bigger than life and seemingly of larger dimensions even than the play itself”), and he beautifully sketches Mark Rylance's ability at London's reconstructed Globe to fuse his own sense of performing with that of his characters: “Rylance's King Richard was a superb actor, unfailingly able to center attention on himself and to insist that the royal appurtenances of throne, canopy, regalia, troops of attendants, and the magnificently ornate building in which they were all housed, were about him.” Two of the many illustrations are especially well juxtaposed: a photo of the Coventry lists in John Barton's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Richard II demonstrates the symbolic possibilities of modern “presentational” design, whereas the same scene at the Globe (2003) reveals a startling flexible physicality. It's disappointing, in fact, that the new Globe isn’t discussed more; it might have helped tie the book's various arguments together, since the Globe too is an attempt to understand the relationship among the texts, Elizabethan staging, and the audiences of today.

In 2008 we need no ghost to come from the trapdoor to insist that Shakespeare understood his stage and saw human life as performance, yet all new readers need to learn in detail how this shaped the canon. Professor Bevington is a generous and welcoming guide.