Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1788 ed. by David Thomas and Arnold Hare (review)

76Comparative Drama stands, like Elizabeth, at the mythic core of the kingdom, the focus of metaphor linking stage and world to express royal power" (p 210). In Davies' Henry VIII, it is "the woman who has held Elizabeth throughout the christening" who speaks the Epilogue: "Her presence figures the 'chosen truth' of this Henry VIII not simply as the difference between one history and another but as that between one powerful male ruler and another, who has the voice and body of a woman" (p. 232). Shakespeare's Jacobean history, like his Elizabethan histories, insists in its close, as Hodgdon puts it, "on opening onto future history" (p. 235). So too, she concludes, does her project: "In gathering an archive of readings that offer a constellation and collision of intellectual and artistic practices, that project attempts to position critical and theatrical discourse in relation to various other cultural texts at work in a given historical moment in order to show how plays and their variant critical and theatrical re-formations participate in the ideological work of managing reality" (p. 235). Hodgdon celebrates in Michael Bogdanov's Wars of the Roses that director's success at implicating the audience in his complex awareness of the ideological work that Shakespeare's history did and continues to do. Hodgdon's book, with its blend of careful attention to both literary and theatrical textuality, pushes its audience towards a special awareness not only of how Shakespeare's histories end but also of how drama works. It is a major contribution to dramatic theory as well as an intriguing, kaleidoscopic vision of new beginnings in history's ends. MATTHEW H. WIKANDER University of Toledo David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds. Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1788. Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xxx + 460. £60.00. This is a generous and painstakingly gathered selection of documentary and pictorial sources, selected and annotated so as to give a wideranging and coherent view of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater history. Its scope is comprehensive, including records of scenery and theatrical design, political and managerial control, audience composition and conduct, and the talents and styles of actors. Inevitably, the material grows richer as the period proceeds, with the proliferation of provincial theaters and the increasingly detailed and elaborate descriptions of actors' styles and interpretations: the descriptions of Hart and Betterton are painfully scanty in comparison with those of Garrick and his contemporaries . The editorial commentaries are necessarily brief but manage to distill a great deal of recent scholarship and to elucidate clear principles of selection, which ensure that the anthology, for all its diversity, constitutes a coherent documentary history. For example, the documents of control illustrate Sir Henry Herbert's early efforts to re-establish the pre-Restoration authority of the Master of the Revels, the bringing of the theater under direct royal authority, and the gradual movement from regal to party control, and the contractual and company documents Reviews77 illustrate the initial resurrection of the shareholding system of the 1 630's, the ruthless managerial style of Christopher Rich and its consequences, and the emergence of the actor-manager structure. The state of knowledge about theater design is summed up with admirable concision and clarity and with some persuasive adjudications of controversy. Unavoidably, some significant material has had to be omitted: the litigation over the scenery for Tyrannick Love is one casualty, as is the famous picture of Antony Leigh in the part of Father Dominic. Individual omissions of this kind are inevitable, but I do regret the general absence from the 1660-1737 section of testimony from the dramatists themselves. This is a pity, for they are often the most vivid (and at times forcefully discontented) of contemporary witnesses. The most regrettable absentee is the Dedication of Settle's Fatal Love (1680), which pays tribute to Hart on his retirement and makes the interesting observation that audiences had become more discriminating in the twenty years since the Restoration—an observation which runs counter to some of the editorial assumptions about a decline in audience sophistication. Other candidates for inclusion would be George Powell describing the slump in new plays after...