The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (review)

110ComparativeDrama Kerry Powell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004. Pp. xv + 288 + 14 illustrations. $65.00 casebound; $24.00 paperbound. Reviewing volumes in the Cambridge Companion series—or, perhaps, decoding these reviews in print—is often akin to the task of vetting letters of recommendation : Can this anthology or candidate for the position really be fhaf exceptional? Surely there must be some deficiency, some slight defect or blemish , to be identified and then endlessly scrutinized. Surelysome molehill can be turned into a mountain. Happily, from this somewhat jaundiced perspective, there are indeed some small, even microscopic, matters over which I shall make some ado later in these remarks about The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre stopping, I hope, at the brink of the exquisitely petty. But such minor issues in no way detract from what is, finally, an outstanding collection of fourteen essays and an introduction by Nina Auerbach. Once I glancedatthetableofcontents,itwasobviousthat TheCambridgeCompanion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre would be a "must read" volume, a book that any scholar or graduate student interested in the period and its drama should read. And it did not disappoint. For this collection, Kerry Powell has assembled a truly stellar roster of contributors and thoughtfully organized their essays into two principal parts: Performance and Context, and Text and Context. As these divisions suggest, the earlier section of six chapters treats such matters as Victorian acting technique, stagecraft, economics, music, and audience. The latter eight contributors address dramatic genres, comedy and melodrama for example, and discuss such topics as the music hall, working-class theater, drama of the 1890s and "fallen women" (often the same thing), the plays of lesser-known women playwrights of the period, and so on. And, while each contributor has a unique argument to unpack, a number of significant motifs, projects really, surface in their essays. One is clearly writing against the grain of standard or"orthodox"dieaterhistory. In"The ShowBusiness Economy,and Its Discontents," Tracy C. Davis complains, justly, that too often "theatre history focuses on the idiosyncratic rather than the typical in identifying 'success'" (37). Yet throughout the Victorian period there existed an appreciable demand for "mediocrities"—not the brilliance ofa Kean or Macready—and"it was plentifully answered" by scores ofnow forgotten manager-actors and entrepreneurs. Davis points toAugustus Harris (later dubbed"Druriolanus"),manager ofDrury Lane between 1880 and 1896 and purveyor ofspectacular melodrama based on historical subjects, and asks who remembers the long line of managers and Reviews111 lessees before him who "lost their fortunes.. .." Perhaps even more importantly, who remembers much about Harris?" (37). In raising such questions and then moving to the establishment of not-for-profit venues later in the century— subscription ventures like J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre, which could evade the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain's Reader of Plays and thus produce plays of higher aesthetic merit—Davis successfully argues that, finally, there could be no "non-commercial 'national theatre' showcasing the very highest of artists' aspirations" (48). As a consequence, the present state of British theater in which "considerable reciprocity" obtains between commercial and statesubsidized houses and theatrical experimentation is cultivated, is "an utterly unforeseen consequence" of the fin de siècle opposition between the popular drama and an emergent modernist theater dedicated to the "new," the challenging , even the iconoclastic. Like Davis, Mary Jean Corbett in "Performing identities: Actresses and Autobiography" challenges received historical notions, in this instance not narrow definitions ofhomo economicusadvanced by theater historians,but rather musty liberal-humanist ideas about acting and selfhood prevalent in the later Victorian period. A statement by actress-playwright Elizabeth Robins, who receives considerable attention in the volume from Corbett, Susan Carlson and Powell in "Reimagining the Theatre: Women Playwrights of the Victorian and Edwardian Theatre," and other essayists, provides Corbett with a perfect straw woman:"By contrast with Elizabeth Robins's view ofstage performance,'where yourbusiness is not tobeyourreal self,'the poststructuralist discourse on identity seems to contend there is no 'real self not to be" (109). From this point, Corbett excavates the ground between "real life" and "theatrical representation ," using Robins's memoirs as a primer to reading...