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Review of Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams, eds. Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England

which changed the way playgoers experienced theater” (62). In chapters 3 and 4, Walker directs his inquiry of the offstage to the material environs of the period’s amphitheaters and of plays in print. The depth and breadth of Walker’s scholarship in chapter 3 alone is remarkable, drawing diversely on archaeology, acoustics, and geometry to inform its rhetoric of playhouse spaces. The material offstage, Walker argues, compels a rethinking of playgoing in terms of distraction, and of a competitive dynamic between the space of the stage and of much that was notstage. Such a tension also obtains on the printed pages of plays, Walker argues in chapter 4, the book’s demanding final chapter. Drawing on narratology and semiotics as part of scrutinizing the precise rhetoric of “didascalia” (144)—printed stage directions and speech headings in plays—Walker argues that we must see didascalia not as transparently superfluous, but as a textual formation of the offstage whose relationship to dramatic lines is mutually constitutive: “onstage and offstage spaces interpenetrate and summon one another into existence” (145). This is an astute and thrillingly interdisciplinary study, drawing on woodcuts and engravings; geometry; poststructuralist, narrative, and textual history and theory; and incisive, original close readings of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Middleton, and Ford. Walker develops a provocative reassessment of the sites of critical interest in Renaissance drama, and he is deeply invested in this drama’s interpretive challenge to its audiences—a challenge that originates in the visual, generic, interpretive, and epistemological perspective created by the offstage.