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'This was the theater of the future, where the more you paid the more privileged was your seating.' Thus Andrew Gurr (p. 22) on Burbage's Blackfriars theatre in his historicaloverview chapter for Paul Menzer's Inside Shakespeare, one of the most openly vexed, and therefore most fascinating and valuable, scholarly documents to come out of the recent and rapidly developing collaboration between theatre history and 'original practices' theatre. To my ear at least, Gurr's phrase theater of the future sounds like a positive thing. The suspicions of my ear are confirmed later in the chapter, where Gurr says that from 'roughly 1615 onward, the Blackfriars became the place to see Burbage play Shakespeare, while the new Globe for all its alleged splendor was the secondary venue' (p. 29). Coming from a scholar who has done so much to make the splendor of Shakespeare's Globe a central part of contemporary theatrical production and scholarship, the alleged in this sentence is remarkable. The future of the first sentence I quoted is, of course, now - the future where the hegemony of indoor theatre keeps spectators 'in the dark', pliantly facing the picture-frame stage, often paying exorbitant prices for privileged seating. This is the future from which a reconstructed theatre like Shakespeare's Globe was meant to rescue us. How do we reconcile Gurr's claim that Burbage's theatre of the future was 'the most radical and innovative playhouse that Shakespeare ever wrote for' (p. 30) with the hugely in£uential populist vision of the Globe he helped to create, where the cheapest seats are the most privileged and where being in a distracting outdoor environment is what makes actor^audience interaction so focused? Is this vision of the Globe as the apotheosis of Shakespeare's career simply a bill of goods we've been sold, as Menzer and Ralph Alan Cohen suggest in their introduction, by popular cultural texts such as Shakespeare in Love? Is it the case, as Walter Cannon suggests in his contribution to this collection (see, especially, pp. 171-2), that Shakespeare was to some extent an indoor playwright at heart, and that the theatrical magic of the late plays represents the culmination of a process begun in Globe plays like Twelfth Night? Can these late plays only truly succeed in what Ti¡any Stern calls the 'richer, grander' theatre (p. 50), which Shakespeare may have had 'primarily in mind' when he composed them? Would the indoor theatre have seemed to Shakespeare, as Alan Somerset and Elza C. Tiner suggest in their essays on provincial touring and playing spaces, like the most natural environment for theatrical activity, and would moving into the Blackfriars have seemed, in Somerset's phrase, 'like a homecoming, a return to familiar haunts' (p. 85)? Is Shakespeare our contemporary because the Globe was, for him as for us, a somewhat quaint playing space?

The manner in which I have presented this string of questions suggests, obviously, that one answer Inside Shakespeare provides to them is 'Yes', and that I am somewhat sceptical of this answer. The source of both the answer and my scepticism is the same: the collection, comprising essays that began as presentations at the First Blackfriars Conference in 2003, is quite overtly an advertisement for the Blackfriars Theatre, for the conferences and other academic events held in it, and for the M. Litt/MFA program at Mary Baldwin College that is closely connected to it (all of these things are mentioned in the ¢nal paragraph of the Introduction). It is also quite overtly a challenge to the authority of the new Globe as a site for theatrical and theatre-historical information: only when work at both the Globe and the Staunton Blackfriars is taken into account will we have a 'more fully integrated sense of the places of playing in which William Shakespeare's plays received first flesh' (p. 15, emphasis original). Insofar as Menzer and Cohen's Introduction governs and defines the scope of the collected essays, the official line is that in order to get inside Shakespeare we must think more carefully about Shakespeare inside, and all of the essays quoted in the preceding paragraph more or less follow this line.

But as with almost any edited collection, the Introduction does not govern and define the scope of the collected essays, and that is one reason why the scholarly conversation recorded in this volume is so interesting and worth reading. Consider the Introduction and the first three essays in the collection: Menzer and Cohen lead o¡ with an agile and entertaining advocation of the indoor space of their Blackfriars over the outdoor space of the London Globe, never once betraying the fact that Ralph Cohen's American Shakespeare Center is in the process of raising money to build an outdoor theatre - Globe II. Andrew Gurr and Ti¡any Stern follow with, respectively, a magnificently efficient history of the Blackfriars theatre and a magnificently detailed evocation of what it might have been like to see a play there. Stern's essay at one point quotes Andrew Gurr's introduction to his 1969 edition of Philaster, in which he argued against 'the urge to attribute the change in Shakespeare's poetic style purely to place rather than to fashion' (p. 44). Stern goes on to say that, nevertheless, Shakespeare's late plays 'feel like Blackfriars plays' (p. 44).Then, almost unexpectedly, we come upon Roslyn Knutson's essay, a typically understated demolition of the idea that the Blackfriars held any particularly privileged place in the King's Men's playing practice: 'an eagerness to promote the Blackfriars as the ''premier'' playhouse of the King's men has kept us from recognizing the ways in which the two playhouses balanced one another economically for the King'sMen. A feature of that balance was a repertory that could be successful on both stages' (p. 59). Consider, as well, the progression from Menzer and Cohen's introductory essay, to Virginia Mason Vaughan's advocation of the new Blackfriars as a space for 'investigating how black makeup worked at the original Blackfriars playhouse' (p. 130), to the book's Afterword in which Menzer eloquently complicates the entire original-practices enterprise:

. . . the gap between then and now is too wide, the static of four hundred years too loud, to treat today's plays and players upon these new/old stages as indicative of early modern theatrical practice. (p. 228)

Menzer goes on to say that

in time, as performances come and go at the [new] Globe and Blackfriars, theatre historians and performance scholars can learn from those plays, can observe specific practice and extrapolate trends. Watching the impress of a reconstructed Globe or Blackfriars upon modern actors should reveal fascinating details about the way theater architecture governs theatrical convention and the way physical space dictates decorum. (p. 228)

It turns out that the Blackfriars playhouse is the playhouse of the future, but only because it is a creation of the future.

One ostensible purpose of the collection is to represent the kind of work that can be generated in and by an 'original practices' playhouse; but, as Menzer indicates in his epilogue, the parameters of an original-practices methodology have yet to be adequately defined and perhaps never will be.What is on display in this collection is not a new set of reliable methods for understanding what is really going on inside Shakespeare; nor does the collection simply represent the way in which Blackfriars propaganda works at cross purposes to theatre-historical scholarship just as Globe propaganda might. What is on display in this collection is, rather, an extraordinarily variegated scholarly landscape where an eclectic range of conflicted (often self- confliicted) critical voices are given the opportunity to speak to and alongside each other by Ralph Cohen's beautiful and incongruous indoor space in the Virginia mountains. Thus, some of the most interesting and useful pieces in the collection are not precisely connected to the collection's topic: Alan Armstrong's speculation on doubled roles in Richard II; John R. Ford's dazzling analysis of the relationship between bear-baiting and Puritans in Twelfth Night; William Proctor Williams and A. R. Braunmuller on editorial and staging issues in Titus and in Hamlet; Stephen Booth on the dense part-related wordplay in Dream. I learned a great deal from this collection of essays, just as I learned a great deal at the Blackfriars conference I attended in 2005; the chaotic interplay of the parts is more productive than any coherent whole to which they might add up. As with Burbage's Blackfriars, the imaginative and communal work that is produced by Cohen's Blackfriars certainly could be, and in some cases has been, produced in other venues. We can acknowledge the particular pleasures of this venueçwhat it is like to sit in the space, the energy involved in seeing and being seen there, the tangible resonances between subject matter and locale - without worrying too much over questions of necessity or primacy. Fortunately, the editors of and contributors to this collection seem to feel the same way, and they have produced a supple scholarly resource that will reward careful reading.

Jeremy lopez, University of Toronto. Advance Access published on 4 October 2007 <Top>

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