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Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe, by William N. West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 293. Cloth $65.00. Most readers will open this volume, I suspect, with some version of question I brought it: How much can and encyclopedias possibly have in common, in early modern period or at any time? answer I arrived at after making my way through West's book is, alas, hedged: more than I would have thought but not nearly so much as its author claims. In his introduction, as West sets out justify pairing, we find inevitable hybrid phrases--theaters as sites of the performance of (2), encyclopedias as textual theaters (2)--as well as some surprisingly bold claims, typified by this one: [t]he encyclopedia and are conceptually identical--not merely similar, but in fact versions of same idea. Together they present a controlled, organized expression of (4). Even sympathetic readers will be able think of books, paintings, sermons, even tapestries that handle reality according these criteria; less generous readers may be tempted conclude that foundation of West's approach has little warrant. In chapter 2, however, reader learns that these claims are based not on of period in its most familiar form--the stages or plays of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists--and not even on morality and mystery plays that preceded them, but on narrow, rather odd genre of humanist theater that, as turns out, has quite a lot in with contemporaneous development of encyclopedia. Also in evidence in opening chapter are virtues that make book a worthwhile and interesting read: West's willingness wander from his narrow thesis include more and less relevant examples and reasoning (in thirteen pages of introduction, he moves from Pliny Thomas Elyot, Plato and his sixteenth-century translator Serranus Holocaust Museum and back Kepler) and his ultimately successful attempt sustain a comparison that few others have thought make. first chapter, The Space of Encyclopedia, traces history of encyclopedia from its first stirrings in late fifteenth-century Italy into English Renaissance, with sustained attention ambitious conceptual underpinnings of project. As he describes them, encyclopedias are reference works, compiled and organized reflect some reality which by definition they are secondary (14); they constitute a singular entity (14) that begins with almost utopian claims for comprehensiveness, compression, and speed of access (16); they are atemporal and antinarrative (17); they seek to re-present every thing that exists in a (more) manageable form for detached study and manipulation (19); they are meant to reproduce world without becoming involved in it (23); and impulse eventually demonstrated itself be a self-defeating project (41). There is much discussion in this chapter of what is at stake when knowledge is organized and presented and an attempt characterize such presentations as inherently theatrical. West also introduces readers late in chapter idea of encyclopedic desire (37), a condition which Renaissance humanists were particularly susceptible but which also manifested itself in some of their distant forebears. West cites Aristotle (We consider first, then, that wise man knows all things, so far as is possible, without having knowledge of every one of them individually [35]), Cicero, and Pliny Elder, who died when he came too close Pompeii investigate eruption of Vesuvius. The Idea of a Theatre is one of most interesting chapters in book, primarily for its unusual slant on history. West takes his reader back first recorded use of word theatre by a Wycliffite translator in 1382 and traces evolution of idea of a or common beholding place from ancient Greece and Rome through treatises of Continental and English humanists arrive finally at construction of first English theater, Theatre, in 1576. …
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