Theatre Journal

It has nearly been a century since the publication of the inaugural text of ludology, Joseph Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938), and the first videogame versions of Shakespearean texts started appearing back in the 1990s. But so far very few studies of early modern theatre have used the critical framework of game theory in order to probe the ludic quality inherent in theatre, a critical approach that is doubly relevant to the Shakespearean stage that existed in such close geographical and cultural proximity to other non-theatrical gaming practices. Gina Bloom's Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater (2018) was one of the first book-length studies of the ludic roots of theatre and Renaissance plays as interactive games. The present volume, coedited by Bloom, Tom Bishop, and Erika T. Lin, takes this approach forward, framing theatre as not merely mimetic but interactive and ludic, with the audience, actors, and playwrights bound together into the magic circle of gameplay that is the stage. The essays in the collection draw attention not just to the representation of games in early modern drama, but the ludic texture of theatre itself and the centrality of the concept of "play" to both the gaming and dramatic practices of the Renaissance, and the translation of those practices in our own times. While drawing on the foundational work of Huizinga and Roger Caillois (Man, Play, and Games [1961]), the volume also simultaneously critiques Huizinga's exclusion of Renaissance theatre from his study of the "play element in civilization" and Caillois's understanding of theatre as mimicry, closer to free, unruly paidia than to the rule-bound, structured ludus.

The eleven essays in this volume are divided thematically into three groups. The first set of four [End Page 530] essays focuses on the semantic doubleness of "playing" and explores the ways in which the vocabulary of games suffuses the language of early modern drama. Stephen Purcell's "The Player's Game" analyzes the ways in which Renaissance drama's latent affinities to gameplay are revivified and resurrected in modern adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly those staged at the new Globe. Using interviews—of Mark Rylance (the director of the Globe), who repeatedly uses football metaphors to unravel the dynamics of performance; and of exponents of physical theatre like Marcello Magni, who sees theatre as a game and acting as play—Purcell demonstrates how the ludic temper of modern performances of Shakespeare can be used to supplement the rather insubstantial corpus of information about actual early modern performances without committing to vulgar anachronisms. In Purcell's analysis, the actors play "with" the audience, and not merely "to" the audience, and are compelled by the ludic structure of the text to compete with each other as well as the audience throughout the performance. This is followed by David Kathman's study of the rise and fall in the fortunes of "tenys" and the strictures on "playing" in early modern England. With page after page of data on the sales on tennis balls, the extraordinarily empirical approach of this essay borders on the absurd, but it draws attention to symmetry in the language deployed by the London authorities in their attempts to control theatrical playing as well as other "unlawful" games. Katherine Steele Brokaw uses the language of another kind of unlawful game—dice play—as the refrain that underpins early modern theatre, economics, and theology. Through her deft reading of three lesser-known early Tudor plays, Nice Wanton, Impatient Poverty, and Misogonus, Brokaw argues persuasively that sandwiched between the rise of capitalistic speculation on the one hand and the chanciness of salvation within the paradigm of Calvinistic double-predestination on the other, early modern drama participates in the vocabulary and partakes of the metaphors of "hazarding" and other forms of dice play. The first section ends with Heather Hirschfield's "The Games Afoote," which uses...