Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.

ジョナサン・ウォーカーの「Site Unscene」は、ルネサンス演劇における舞台裏という不可視の領域に光を当てた、極めてスリリングな論考です。オフィーリアの最期やマクベスの凶行など、劇作家たちはあえて「見せない」ことで、観客の想像力の中に舞台の限界を超えた真実を構築しました。この空白の領域が、登場人物の主観や欲望をいかに鮮烈に描き出すかという考察は、古典を読む楽しみを根底から覆す鮮やかな衝撃をもたらします。 本書は、考古学や建築、修辞学を横断しながら、舞台上の可視的行動を裏から支配する見えないドラマの動的な力学を解き明かします。シェイクスピアやマーロウといった巨匠たちが仕掛けた、虚実の狭間に潜む魔術的な美学に触れるとき、読者はこれまでにない知的な興奮を味わうはずです。語られなかった空白が饒舌に物語り始める、その魔法のような瞬間に立ち会える珠玉の一冊といえるでしょう。