Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage by David Worrall (review)

In recent years, scholarly interest in Georgian theatre has increased, as evidenced by the growing number of books, essays, and conferences devoted to the subject, including this special double issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Common to these studies is the understanding of the central position of the theatre in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain and the crucial role it played in reflecting, articulating, and shaping the social and political concerns of its time. David Worrall’s new book is an important contribution to this scholarly endeavour, providing a masterful analysis of theatre’s position as the “dominant culturally expressive form” (1) of the period.

Worrall’s subtitle, British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage, immediately calls attention to the innovative perspective that he brings to the field of theatre studies. The idea of “social assemblage,” originating in the work of philosopher Manuel De Landa, theorizes social structures and networks and the material forces and complexities that underpin them. Worrall adapts De Landa’s insights specifically to theatre with the proposition that “all physical spaces, locations and embodiments of performance are expressive and comprise population components within a connected social network or assemblage of production and reception” (1). Worrall examines various dimensions of the theatrical world, such as celebrity, political engagement, theatre architecture, audience populations, and the material conditions of the lives of actors and actresses, to illuminate, historically and quantifiably, our understanding of the “scale of [theatre’s] materialized presence and the complexity of its organization” (5). Through the use of De Landa’s specialized vocabulary, Worrall repeatedly demonstrates the validity of this theoretical model for his discussion of the Georgian theatre, and convincingly makes the case for the model’s appropriateness to his subject matter. Perhaps even more impressive is the thorough historical research that provides the hard, material evidence to support his claims for the interconnectedness of the many networks that make up the theatre assemblage.

Worrall’s deep mining of the archives yields new perspectives for our understanding of the complexities of the assemblage. His sources include newspapers, periodicals, tourist guides, diaries, and biographies of actors and interested contemporary observers, but also, most innovatively, the account books and related materials of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres. The precise information included in these sources definitively reveals the interlinking between the theatre and the social and political issues that defined Georgian society in its widest sense. For example, as Worrall shows in chapter 1, the practices of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund in its support of needy actors and actresses represented an enlightened, pioneering approach to social welfare practices and gender equity. At the same time, the account books also expose differentiated gradients of value and reveal the workings of the notion of celebrity. Through the material evidence for casting and payment decisions—from a performance of a now-forgotten troupe of actresses in a military-themed play at the Haymarket to the celebrity careers of David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and Edmund Kean—Worrall opens a window to the economics of the theatrical marketplace as a whole. As such, his interest is not in examining or re-narrating various well-known embodiments of celebrity culture, but rather, in showing how “celebrity is an absolute function of the prevailing reception environment” (73). Alongside his concern with celebrity and its economic implications, Worrall’s attention to reception and his ongoing focus on the reception environment ensures an equal place in his study to the recovery of once-prominent members of the theatrical assemblage whose stories had previously been lesser known or lost. His examination of benefit nights, as recoverable from the account books, highlights the success of actresses such as the well-known Elizabeth Pope as well as obscure provincial amateurs, exposing a more “mixed picture of celebrity distinctiveness” (118) than has previously been described.

In his later chapters, Worrall’s fully detailed historical contextualization of the theatrical assemblage emphasizes its prominent position in...