Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Drama (review)
as Webster’s Vittoria and Shakespeare’s Juliet and Cleopatra hint at a connection between anxieties over gender and anxieties over pharmacy that becomes explicit in chapters 3 and 4, which handle debates about cosmetics and the related theatrical convention of the poisoned kiss, respectively. This is welcome work indeed, useful backstory for such dramatic commonplaces as the polluted and polluting woman, or for set-pieces railing about face-painting. Especially valuable here is Pollard’s reading of The Revenger’s Tragedy in the context of two other plays employing similar poison-kiss devices, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and The Duke of Milan. This cross-reading not only offers helpful context for Vindice’s ploy with Gloriana’s skull, but also allows Pollard to advance her argument about the narcotic power of spectacle through a gendered lens. In these plays, she argues, women are transformed literally into spectacle via the pharmacopoeia of the dressing table, and it is men as idolatrous spectators who suffer the consequences of an addiction to their dangerous theater. Pollard concludes with Hamlet — not surprising, given her focus on poison, remedy, and performance. But this chapter, like her others, offers a new take on an old tale: she focuses on the materiality of the ear and the tangibly poisonous functioning of language in the play — both framed, as usual, by a helpful medical context. This chapter, in fact, exemplifies what is strongest in Pollard’s work: she rethinks some of our most basic assumptions about early modern English theater by using the oft-noticed but rarely theorized lens of pharmacy. The result is a book that will be valuable reading both for historians and theater scholars of the period, as well as for performance theorists interested in learning more about the material contexts of early metatheater. KIM SOLGA University of Western Ontario