The professional theatre of early modern England employed performance practices and interpretive paradigms irreconcilable with current standards of verisimilitude. But what exactly were these? Through an investigation of ‘the materiality of performance’ in plays by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, Erika Lin theorizes early modern audiences’ understandings of theatre. Materiality, here, is concerned with ‘a process of reiterative citation’ through which ‘the codes of intelligibility imbricated … all aspects of social life’, including the theatre (p. 8). Lin's formulation of materiality emerges from French feminism (Judith Butler's performativity) and ‘book history’ (conventions of printing that influenced reception).

The works featured here are not the most significant examples of the ways that performance constructed meaning and instructed interpretation on Shakespeare's stage. Yet Lin's analyses and theorization are ‘applicable across early modern drama’ (p. 10).

Lin begins by revising Robert Weimann's concepts of locus and platea in Shakespearean performance. Weimann argues that Shakespeare's plays reveal divisions between characters who occupied an elite, removed site upstage and those distributed around the site and thereby occupying inferior positions. Lin deconstructs this theory through a reassessment of sight- and sound-lines in early modern amphitheatres and suggests, instead, that early modern drama negotiated the dynamic interplay between representational and presentational conventions. From this intervention, Lin goes on to address how audiences understood seeing, hearing, dancing, dreaming and sporting in these often overlapping modes of representation and presentation.

Rather than viewing the strange spectacles of invisibility, dance and dismemberment that appear in early modern plays as puzzles to be solved in relation to Aristotelian narrative cohesion, Lin aims to see them – and hear them – through early modern interpretive practices. Her revelations challenge critical practices found in current scholarship, classrooms and rehearsal spaces. An examination of writings on allegory and dreams demonstrates that metatheatre was not, in fact, meant to hold up a mirror to the world; on the contrary, The Spanish Tragedy and other works show that the world outside representation cannot be trusted. Furthermore, an investigation into moral hierarchies and Eucharistic gazing reveals invisibility to be produced through performative utterances and/or physical manifestations. Remarkably, Lin suggests that early modern theatre utilized large nets to signify visual absence, a contribution to theatre history that will likely influence future research. Although Lin examines an impressive range of documents to construct historically situated interpretive paradigms, most astute are her analyses of episodes that critics have either ignored or explained through ‘elaborate conjectures’, such as the witches’ dance in Macbeth and the irreverent stage play of bodily mutilation in Titus Andronicus (p. 157). Lin's work intervenes in the study of early modern drama and culture and shifts the conversation toward a focus on those who populated the offstage world of the play. These interpreters might well have considered Hamlet as the show with the exciting ‘swordfight in the final act’ and understood Doctor Faustus as a play that ‘sports with severed limbs’ (p. 164), and so, perhaps, should we.