The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment By Bess Rowen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; pp. x + 247, 1 illustration. $80 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book.

Abstract

play after being immersed in a video game, with its branching narrative paths. We might, Bushnell suggests, approach it with heightened attention to the role of uncertainty and mischance, to the ways that choices shape a character’s identity, to whether tragic endings are inevitable or chosen. “While a traditional view of Hamlet focuses on the outcome as Hamlet’s assenting to his destiny to avenge his father’s death and accept his own,” she notes, “a focus on gaming . . . can make us look again at how Hamlet might be operating in a more open rather than closed world, defined by uncertainty rather than fatality” (236). Hamlet is, after all, a play whose most famous line turns on the word “or.” One of the great advantages of viewing the early modern stage in gaming terms is the framework that it provides for thinking about metatheatricality. This engaging and provocative essay collection opens by attempting to answer the question “What is a game?” but, by the time they finish, readers are also left with a range of new and surprising answers to the question “What is a play?”