The Oxford Handbook of The Georgian Theatre 1737–1832 ed. by Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor (review)

The stage is a center, in which Every Line meets its Opposite: The World is to see itself, in That Glass of Observation.

—Aaron Hill, The Prompter (Tuesday, 9 December 1735), in Aaron Hill and William Popple, eds., The Prompter (London, 1734–36), The Burney Collection, The British Library

During the Georgian era, the trope of the theatre as a mirror of the world gained major traction as a way to explain the relationship between stage and audience—namely that, in the process of reflecting contemporary behaviours and norms, the drama facilitates spectator self-recognition and introspection. In the above epigraph, however, Aaron Hill complicates the standard articulation of this mimetic concept by observing that the theatre acts not only as a mirror of the world but also as an observational “glass” in and through which one might view a culture at a crossroads. The stage, he asserts, is a place where “every line meets its opposite” and, as such, operates as a realm of simultaneous connection and conflict, resolution and resistance. Hill thus transforms the stage from a passive reflector of the world as it exists somewhere beyond the proscenium arch, into a vibrant (and potentially volatile) nexus of human activity and engagement. In this way, he reconfigures aesthetic sightlines, focusing attention on the stage itself as a crucial arena of socio-cultural mediation and expression.

It is through this lens that the illuminating new collection The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737–1832 examines the eighteenth-century stage. Edited by David Francis Taylor and the late Julia Swindells, the volume features forty original articles authored by leading scholars in the field, which, taken together, imagine the Georgian theatre as the locus of a complex and interactive network, one that actively fostered exchange between civic, domestic, and artistic realms. Rather than regard the theatre as a mere register of various discursive practices, the collection conceives of it as the very site upon and through which such practices were enacted. As Taylor observes in his introduction to the Handbook, “our work has come to understand the Georgian theatre as an affective and ideological engine of, and not simply a mirror for, the period’s structures of feeling” (5). His use of “our work” refers to scholarship produced within the past twenty-five years and its role in moving forward our understanding of the theatre’s impact on contemporary life and culture. It also points to the edition itself as a key marker of this progression. With articles on a range of topics from diverse perspectives, the compendious volume offers broad access to understanding the dynamic and interconnected nature of Georgian theatre. While it is extensive in both form and content, it is not open ended, for the edition also calls on readers—much like Hill’s quotation above—to observe the stage from a refined viewpoint. Central to the project, then, is a conception of the theatre at once substantive and dialogic, actively involved in knowledge formation, and a recalibration of critical approaches to eighteenth-century theatre with respect to periodization, the canon, and matters of performance.

The most striking feature of The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737–1832 is the editors’ decision to term eighteenth-century theatre “Georgian” and to frame the period by two parliamentary events: the 1737 Stage Licensing Act and the 1832 Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature. The former, documented by David Thomas (chapter 5), Julia Swindells (chapter 6), and Matthew Kinservik (chapter 7), was an act of censorship, requiring that spokenword drama be limited to London’s patent theatres and that the plays staged in them be preapproved by the Lord Chamberlain, who had the power to reject plays deemed distasteful or politically subversive. The latter 1832 Select Committee Report, which Katherine Newey carefully details (chapter 8), sought, in part, to break the Drury...