Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present by Paul Prescott (review)

It is difficult, in reviewing Paul Prescott’s Reviewing Shakespeare, not to be self-conscious of participating in the self-aggrandizing historical practices outlined in this fascinating monograph. In the first serious scholarly overview of three centuries of Shakespeare reviewing, Prescott reveals a cultural history of men positioning themselves in relation to the popular theater of their time. George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, James Agate, Kenneth Tynan, Michael Billington: these are the figures who established the period’s response to Shakespeare, while also using Shakespeare to establish the period’s perception of their own personalities and work. To undertake a task as mundane as mine here—to overview and appraise the contents of a work—is rather to undersell the project established by a critical heritage that subordinated the work to the politics, rhetoric, and personal standing of the reviewer.

That this is a story about men is explicitly admitted by Prescott in his opening chapter: “If one accepts that rivalry, competition and violence are traditionally ‘masculine’ traits, there is something inherently masculine and homosocial about the conditions of performance and reception” (28-29). Prescott’s project makes no attempt to redress the power imbalances of this field and pursues consciously a narrative that focuses on London (and occasionally Stratford) performance as seen by a succession of educated white men. The significance of this is in tying the genealogy of the critic to that of the Shakespearean actor; Prescott persuasively shows that a tradition of continuous inheritance in the acting world was mirrored by a similar inheritance in the burgeoning journalism that accompanied it. Prescott thus does the important work of exposing and articulating the contingencies that formed the spine of modern criticism, which should inform future studies of reviewing countercultures.

Prescott’s work focuses solely on journalistic reviewing, acknowledging the negative, parasitic connotations that inform perceptions of the critic and drove the early debates within the nascent Critics Circle as it tried to determine whether it were an elite academy or a trade union, a profession or a platform (wittily, Prescott notes that “the critic who merely wrote on whim with no connection to recent performance would be either sacked or promoted to columnist” 18). Fascinatingly, it is a story in which Shakespeare’s works often themselves appear incidental next to the profession’s attempts to define and consolidate its public role.

Macbeth is Prescott’s major case study, dominating his selection of criticism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout this period the reviewer continued by convention to be generally anonymous, the chief “personality” of the review instead being the star actor assaying a notoriously difficult role. For the critical tradition, the performance of Macbeth’s masculinity—in a play that speaks at length about the character’s fortitude yet presents few opportunities for the actor to demonstrate it—defines an actor’s relative success in the role, and Prescott trawls through the primary evidence to show how David Garrick manipulated the press in order to consolidate the success of his own performance in the role at the expense of Charles Macklin’s attempts. John Philip Kemble, with his tall physique, triumphed over the “little man” Edmund Kean in the eyes of the critics, and even the more nuanced, textually alert performances of Charles Macready and Henry Irving still had to battle against a critical tradition that expected and demanded masculinity. As Henry James noted, Irving’s execution “grappling in a deliberate and conscientious manner with a series of great tragic points […] hardly gives an impression of strength, of authority” (52). Even before the self-promoting critic had asserted himself, journalism was already driving the priorities of the Shakespearean actor.

The two central chapters rewrite the history of the development of the New Journalism and the professional theater critic. While these chapters deal with relatively well-trodden territory, Prescott’s innovation is partly to establish a genealogy...