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  • The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History
  • Alan Fischler (bio)
The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland; pp. xiv + 271. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, £58.00, $74.95.

The Performing Century delivers more than it promises. According to Peter Holland, general editor of the Redefining British Theatre History series, this volume shares with its four predecessors the aim of filling a void: "there has been remarkably little investigation of the methodological bases on which the shelves of accumulated scholarship have been based or the theoretical bases on which Theatre History has been or might be constructed" (xiii). The focus, then, is on historiography as much as, if not more than, history itself. In their introduction to this new collection of essays, Holland and co-editor Tracy C. Davis survey pre-1990 trends in nineteenth-century theatre history and explain that the contributors to this volume will be querying what were once the prevailing assumptions. The "more valenced" view of this new generation of scholars, they say, is that performance in this era "was neither contained by neat taxonomies . . . nor strictly populist"; rather, the writers will show that "as different evidence is accorded credibility, some analytical polarities are reversed, new ideas draw focus, different interests accord importance to neglected phenomena and a unique version of comprehensiveness finds expression" (7).

Now, one might suppose that a volume of essays by theatre historians whose endnotes frequently cite one another's work (as well as their own) and whose primary subject is the work of older and other theatre historians would prove to be an exercise in [End Page 534] solipsism—and so this book, in places, is. But, while each of the thirteen contributors dutifully fulfills the editors' declared agenda of theorizing about historiography, most mercifully go past this point and foreground nineteenth-century performances themselves.

That which renders their essays revisionist also renders the whole of this volume rich. While scholars bred up in literary studies have tended to write as if the play were the only important reality of the playhouse, these essays examine the theatrical experience in a variety of aspects and from untraditional angles. In "Boxing Day," Jim Davis's chief concern is not with the pantomimes presented but rather their working-class audiences and the pictures painted of these audiences by a threatened and/or condescending press. Thomas Postlewait studies the impact on musical comedy of artistic director and entrepreneur George Edwardes, while Gilli Bush-Bailey focuses on a particular season (1813– 14) at a particular "minor" theatre (the Sans-Pareil). Even those who analyze texts venture into rarely studied repertoires, as Heidi J. Holder does in her excellent treatment of the depiction of Jews in Victorian plays; others take unexpected positions on better-known works, as Jane Moody does in clarifying and expanding G. B. Shaw's contention that dramas depicting capitalists as villains were actually inimical to the advance of socialism. And some push clear beyond the physical walls of the theatres, as in Emily Allen's analysis of public rituals and ceremonials (especially the 1871 wedding of Princess Louise) as performances, Catherine Burroughs's consideration of closet dramas, and Jacky Bratton's discussion of the blurring of boundaries between playacting and circus performances. Only in one respect is diversity lacking: while the essays on London travel well beyond the mainstream West End theatres to venues in the eastern and southern reaches of the capital, just one—on Irish (mostly Belfast) theatre—makes more than casual reference to the rest of the British Isles.

The volume features twenty-nine illustrations from contemporary sources—not just as decoration but as incisively analyzed evidence for some of the authors' arguments. Not all those arguments are, however, as well supported as one could wish. Jeffrey N. Cox, for instance, wants to prove that Romantic drama "can only be understood in relation to the melodrama, not because it is melodrama but because it developed its own tactics as a response to the melodrama" (178), but most of the attention that the essay accords to Romantic drama is packed into a one-and-a-half-page...

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