The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate. By Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. x + 215. $54.95.

This extraordinarily interesting and important book is a collaborative effort. Dawson and Yachnin "locate the theatre within a number of different cultural domains in an effort to understand theatrical experience in historical terms," and in accounting for "the cultural conditions of theatrical pleasure" (p. 1), they are both careful to respect the relative autonomy "of specific theatrical practices, including characterization, acting techniques, scene and play construction, audience behavior, use of stage props, and so on" (p. 208). Within this shared space, however, they disagree fundamentally on how the theatre worked and how a historically inflected critical response to it should be framed, and these disagreements constitute the most original and provocative qualities of the book. Where collaboration typically incorporates differences into an integrated point of view (where is Beaumont? where is Gubar?), Yachnin and Dawson organize their discussion as a debate between individually signed chapters: "rather than submerging our disagreements . . . , we have foregrounded them" to highlight "the value of approaching a heterogeneous and complicated culture in an appropriately heterogeneous way" (pp. 1-2).

Edward Pechter
Concordia University and University of Victoria