New Readings in Theatre History (review)

Thirty-five years ago, Peter Thomson claimed—rather optimistically as it turned out—that "[I]t is still fairly respectable to know nothing about nineteenth-century theatre, but it seems unlikely that it will be so for long" (Thomson and Kenneth Richards eds, Essays on Nineteenth Century British Theatre, [Manchester, 1971] vii). Although it may be no longer respectable to claim to know nothing about the Victorian theatre, it is not an area of Victorian studies that has a strong presence in the field. As Jacky Bratton argues in this lucid account of a fascinating period of British theatre, this is largely due to the historiographic tradition of British theatre history that conceived of the nineteenth-century theatre and the "English National Drama" as in decline and unworthy of serious attention by cultural critics or literary scholars. Ironically, as Bratton points out, this dominant narrative was constructed by a powerful faction within the theatre itself, in a self-fulfilling prophecy of abjection repeated over the last two hundred years. It is Bratton's aim in New Readings in Theatre History to destabilise this narrative and suggest new methodological strategies in theatre history.

Bratton's central topic is the narrative of British theatre history, which casts the public theatre in a state of inexorable decline from the early nineteenth century. This "debased" drama had insults thrown at it from every angle: it was popular, unliterary, and immoral; it mixed genres with profligacy; it valued spectacle over drama and the body over the mind; its playwrights were hacks, stealing wholesale from the French; its actors no longer learned their craft through long apprenticeship; and by the end of the nineteenth century, performances in music halls raised fundamental insecurities about what a play essentially was. Furthermore, young men and women of the new urban working classes mingled promiscuously in London theatres, seeking a good night out, rather than an elevating or cathartic experience. This "decline of the drama" was reversed only by the emergence of new dramatic writing: Tom Robertson's comedies of contemporary life in the 1860s, the "New Drama" of the 1890s by British playwrights such as Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones, and, for the more adventurous literati, the realists and naturalists of continental Europe.

In dismantling this narrative, Bratton focuses primarily on the 1820s and 1830s. In these decades, she argues, the "abjection" of the "theatre of pure diversion" (8–9) became a foundational assumption in narratives about the theatre, one which scholars have inherited and developed throughout the twentieth century. The idea of "decline" in public discourse about British theatre seems fundamental to its very existence. What is so significant about Bratton's work in New Readings is that she counters this dominant narrative not by reversing the binaries of popular and elite cultures or performance and text—as has been the case in theatre history inflected by the New Left since the 1960s—but by analysing the sources of those binary oppositions and suggesting alternative ways of researching, framing, and writing the histor ies of theatre practice. The book's historiographical innovations come in a series of case studies that demonstrate a sure control of a variety of critical approaches, underpinned by a strong commitment to the "other" of the abjected history of English theatre: the work of women, the non-literary, and the popular. Chapter 5 is a striking example, as it uses performance theory and ideas of collective memory to propose anecdote and mimicry as ways of thinking about the embodied history of the theatrical past. Relying on feminist theorisation of life narratives, chapter 7, "Claiming kin," studies the familial and domestic networks of the theatre industry, focusing on the particular ways the industry knitted together public and private lives and work. Bratton also demonstrates her deep knowledge of nineteenth-century theatrical practice in chapter 3 where she offers a new way of constructing a theatre history of 1832 through an understanding...