Shakespeare’s Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment. Richard van Oort. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. xvi + 256 pp. $65.
ments, ranging from the Chester Antichrist to Bale’s Johan Baptist’s Preaching, whose spatial arrangements are reconstructed in a highly imaginative and convincing manner. Many of them are read not so much as expressions of confidence in the religious and political doctrines of their day, but much rather as “organized to answer imagined doubts” (80). Playwrights and sponsors were working very hard to bring across a preferred ideological reading and it is one of the great merits of the book to present the richest source for audience responses to early theater: the very plays themselves. They can show us what kind of behavior was expected, which misunderstandings were feared, and which points were hammered home to avoid sending conflicting messages. Chapter 4 is perhaps the best in the book and deals with moments in which spectators had to consider the performance and their own looking. The revelatory dimension made audiences, particularly of biblical drama, aware of their complicity and voyeurism. An exciting, if not always stringently argued, chapter 5 was inspired by the two authors’ involvement in the 2013 production of David Lyndsay’s Trie Estatis. They use the performances of the play, of which they have a long-standing academic expertise, quite remarkably as substitute for anthropological field study. McGavin and Walker are under no illusion as to the feasibility of such scholarly time traveling, but very helpfully clarify what separates today’s from earlier audiences. The lively combination of theory-based curiosity, inquisitive vehemence, and imaginative readings of the plays, as well as their physical and ideological contexts, all contribute to making a truly inspiring and highly readable book for all students of early drama.