Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger

Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger, by Anne Rochester. Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2010. Pp. 172. Hardback $99.95Reviewer: Charles PastoorMetadramatic performances provide a unique and valuable window into the world of early modern drama. In a period when discussions regarding the purpose and value of drama and its probable effect on its audience were narrowly circumscribed by questions regarding its moral function, the actual onstage depiction of audiences and dramatic performances gives us a much clearer sense of how the playwrights themselves viewed that relationship. And of all the playwrights whose work features such dramatic insets, Philip Massinger is perhaps the one who most explicitly deals with the relationship between the stage, its critics, and its audience in one of the period's most metatheatrical plays, The Roman Actor. While considerable attention has been given, especially as of late, to this play, Joanne Rochester's Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger, the seventh published work in Ashgate's "Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama" series, is the only book-length study of on-stage spectatorship in Massinger's work.The Roman Actor begins with a spirited though thoroughly conventional defense of the theater through its main character, the actor Paris. Much of the scholarship devoted to The Roman Actor addresses the question of whether the subsequent inset plays featured in the play support this defense or undermine it, with more recent critics tending towards the conclusion that it does the latter. This failure is frequently ascribed to the manner in which the Emperor Domitian co-opts the stage to serve his own ends, with fairly obvious parallels to the political use of the theater during the Stuart regime. Rochester acknowledges the political dimension but places it within what she calls the "interlocking set of [the play's] interpretive gazes" (18). The result is an analysis that is both trenchant and thoughtful and that addresses Massinger's interest in the precise relationship that drama bears to its audience. Massinger, Rochester points out, is offering the audience a kind of "experiential lesson" in the role it plays in creating drama, and in contrast to the angry and pessimistic playwright seen by other critics, she discovers in Massinger one who is "realistic," "practical,] and practiced" and who "insists his audience take their work seriously" (50).In the second chapter, Rochester turns to the masques within four of Massinger's other plays: The Picture, The Duke of Milan, The Guardian, and The City Madam. She begins by summarizing the various forms of masques (Jonsonian court masques, masques performed at the Inns of Court, and country-house masques), and then proceeds to lay out the various dramatic and dramaturgical functions of masques-within (dramatic triggers, emblematic illustrations of themes or concepts, structural dramaturgical elements, and allegorical satiric mirrors), before turning to the masques within Massin- ger's plays. In these she finds a balanced representation of the masque: whereas the masque within the tragicomic The Duke of Milan illustrates "the court's pleasure in morally dubious outward show," Massinger's comedy The Guardian features masques-within that are both satirical and celebratory.Most of the second chapter, however, is given over to analysis of the masques within The City Madam, Massinger's most metadramatic play after The Roman Actor. …