Description:
Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama demonstrates that Renaissance playwrights pioneered a hybrid form of representation by shifting pivotal dramatic scenes into imaginary, offstage spaces and replacing them with stories told by characters onstage.
Review Quotes: "Walker's book makes an important contribution to the study of space in early modern English drama. Other scholars have focused on the material conditions of performance, on questions of form, or on the construction of dramatic space, but Walker endeavors to show how these elements interacted with one another to produce the complex spatiality of early modern English drama. Indeed, part of the power of his argument is to demonstrate the divergence between the theory and the practice of drama--a useful corrective to those critics who assume that early modern arguments about what drama should do can function simultaneously as accounts of what drama in fact does." --Andrew Bozio, Theatre Survey
"Both the theoretical and the practical are operating at once and the interplay of the two is what we need to better understand the early modern dramatic scene. Walker's achievement is to open up that gap between the two and remind the reader that this is the space for interpretation." --Emily Ruth Isaacson, Early Theatre