REVIEWS

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) In a book eminently suitable for students of performance studies as applied to the early modern theatre, Janette Dillon offers a number of insights into, and expresses interesting ideas about, the manner in which a theatre-goer in Shakespeare's time would both recognize and respond to such matters as scene settings; the symbolism of costume, props and stage furniture, soliloquies and asides; and the depiction of power, historical events and domestic spaces. For Dillon, 'stage directions and stage pictures' (p. 1) deserve close attention and while we often can only extrapolate from very limited evidence, she makes it clear that the construction and design of early playhouses must have had a profound effect on the manner of staging a play and she invites us to think of performance in the early modern theatre 'as a dialogue between two ways of using space . . . place and scaffold . . . or . . . locus and platea' (p. 3). In the opening chapters of a relatively short book (145 pages, including notes) Dillon looks at location and 'stage space' and describes how the pageant-like entrances and exits of kings and nobles, together with the grouping of characters onstage, reveal the social standing of the various members of the play's milieu and how such grouping is presented verbally and visually.