Reference Reviews is written “by librarians for librarians” so we can use our personal expertise to educate each other. I spent ten years managing a polytechnic social sciences library and then 25 years running the Institute of Psychiatry library, during which time I picked up some rudimentary knowledge of the literature of the behavioural sciences. I am currently employed part‐time by the Maudsley Philosophy Group, and am still an assistant editor of the Journal of Mental Health. In the intervals I have travelled occasionally and have some contacts in the Near and Middle East. I have never, in my professional or educational life had anything to do with the theatre. My only connection is through going to it on odd occasions. In these circumstances it was perhaps wrong of me to snap this book up off the editor's shelf. I should really have left it for some librarian with expertise in the field to cast an eye over. I am glad I took it though, as it makes for interesting and occasionally entertaining reading.
Starting from a position of near ignorance; what plays were there in the long eighteenth century? I have a vague impression of it kicking off with cardboard characters called Sir Useless Foozle and Lady Chatterbox making inane and slightly salacious conversation … Johnson wrote a tragedy which even his favourite pupil could not put on successfully … Byron wrote a string of clearly totally un‐actable melodramas … Charles Lamb joined the audience in hissing his own play off the stage. There was Goldsmith of course, and Gay. And I forgot Sheridan. He was an extraordinary character – theatre manager, leading Member of Parliament playing a prominent role in the impeachment of Warren Hastings and notoriously drunken boon companion of the Prince of Wales. Did he write anything besides the School for Scandal? It appears that he did; quite a lot. Imagine Alan Ayckbourn or Michael Frayn managing the National Theatre plus being a member of the British cabinet plus going clubbing with Prince Harry too! For the average theatre‐goer (i.e. me) there are remarkably few oases in the long desert between The Duchess of Malfi and The Importance of Being Earnest. This book, if it did nothing else, sent me off on an orgy of play reading. But not play‐going, unfortunately. Perhaps significantly, none of the plays written during the period covered seemed to be being performed anywhere in London at the time.
I have to admit that my reading has not unearthed any hidden treasures. Avid Johnsonian though I may be, I had never before attempted Irene. Judging by the pristine condition of the copy in King's College library not many other people have either. In fact the library's copies of most of the plays written during the period seem remarkably un‐thumbed. Shaw apparently considered Fielding “the greatest practising dramatist between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century” (Rawson, 2007 pp. 30‐31 (reviewed in these columns (RR 2008/23))) (but I found his plays flat and monotonous by comparison with his prose works). It is curious that this was a period when the theatre was of great popular interest and when considerable developments in theatrical technique were made, and yet it is a period from which the players rather than the plays are memorable. Actors should strut their little hour, do their bit for the gaiety of nations, and then disappear into oblivion while the printed text remains with us. Instead it is Garrick, Kemble or Kean, Kitty Clive or Mrs Siddons who stick in the mind rather than George Lillo, Foote or the younger Colman. Or how about Mrs Jordan, who continued to be a leading figure on the London stage in the intervals of bearing the future King William IV 14 illegitimate children?
The one thing this book does bring out is the extraordinary popular interest in drama during the period. In the intervals between rum, sodomy and the lash, Nelson's sailors enthusiastically transformed their ship into a wooden O, putting on Hamlet as a break from blockade duty. Country house‐parties were full of it (I could never quite understand the heroine's objections to the theatricals in Mansfield Park. Everyone else seems to have been doing it). The London footmen rioted when Drury Lane tried to close the footmen's gallery. Far‐flung colonials establishing dominion over palm and pine seem to have started amateur dramatics, and even patronised travelling professionals practically as soon as they had unpacked their solar topees, and, by the end of the period, taverns with theatres attached were the precursors of the Victorian music‐halls – Dick Swiveller and his friends got through their dreary lives as petty clerks on a diet of cheap melodramatic performances in back‐street theatres. On a local note, writing up this review in the Institute of Psychiatry building in De Crespigny Park, Camberwell, I was interested to see that “… Mariana Starke had her first play, The Sword of Peace, staged at the private theatre of Lady Mary de Crespigny in Camberwell in 1789”. Perhaps under the very spot where, more recently, the Maudsley Hospital pantomimes have been rehearsed? (The play itself, I have to say, is no more worth reviving than most of the Maudsley pantomimes.) This book ends more or less at the point where gas lighting was coming in – enabling promoters to cater for larger audiences, but, at the same time, introducing a psychological barrier between performer and audience that has never quite been bridged since.
This book can be recommended as a good general and sociological introduction to British theatre history. There are one or two writing/editing errors: “… An Old Man Taught Wisdom first performed … with Kitty Clive in the title role”! There are some untouched topics I would have liked to have seen covered, notably the relationship (if any) between the British theatre and that of the rest of Europe. I know Britain was at war with France for much of the period, but that did not seem to stop other forms of cultural interchange – note the influence of Rousseau in England or the influence of Lawrence Sterne and Byron in France, for example. Was there no cross‐influence on the theatre? My only real criticism of the book however, is that it is occasionally over‐didactic. There is a world of difference between a companion and a crammer. I have always attributed my pleasure in literature to the fact that I have never had to “do” any of it. I was occasionally made aware, all through this book, that most of its contributors earn their livings by getting young people through examinations on the subject, not just by introducing them to the joys of it.
All academic libraries catering for courses in English literature or drama, or in eighteenth century social history, will want to acquire copies of this book. Public libraries should also consider it as a pleasant and useful introduction to a slightly neglected period in theatre history.
