New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (review)

One of the strongest features of Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s award-winning 2014 study New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 is her knack for seizing on seemingly small incidents or details—such as the banning of a particular play in 1790s Charleston, South Carolina, or the appearance of a particular costume in Kingston, Jamaica—and using those moments to illuminate her larger discussion of the development of a new kind of audience in an emerging American polity.

Dillon’s study surveys terrain familiar to scholars of early American theater history, including the strategic politicization of playhouse crowds; the judicious script edits implemented by theater managers anxious to avoid controversy; and the diverse ways that London and Anglo-American audiences engaged with a familiar repertoire increasingly unintelligible to a “New World” populace. In her six-chapter study, she limns the Atlantic circuit traveled by early British acting companies—a circuit that would pave the way for the establishment of post-Revolutionary theater culture, and that would also help to highlight the differences between British and American responses to explosive issues of race and slavery.

As she notes in her introduction, Dillon turns to the theater to help redefine New World notions of representation, arguing, “I would contend that representation must be rethought in far broader and more complex terms than it often is within contemporary understandings of the political” (9). For Dillon, theater offers a more expansive way to conceive of the public sphere as a “performative commons” where the “right of access” was not predicated on literacy (13). As Diana Taylor has observed, the tension between the archive and the repertoire often hinges on the tendency to privilege the written record versus ephemeral performance. By zeroing in on certain key moments and key cities, Dillon attempts to conjure back the repertoire of political behaviors enacted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American theatergoers.

Odai Johnson has written movingly of the agonizing absences that plague theater historians—such as the vanished bodies of the crowds that once laughed at The Beggar’s Opera (1728) or wept at Oroonoko (1688) (two of the key dramas in Dillon’s study). Peter Reed, Jason Shaffer, Marvin McAllister, Jeffrey H. Richards, Bruce McConachie, Rosemarie Bank, Shane White, W. T. Lhammon, and others have examined the complex genealogies of race, class, and national identity that lie behind the development not only of American drama but of American audiences as well.

Dillon seeks to extend the work of these scholars in probing the limits and potential of a performative commons. Chapter 1 outlines the parameters of her study, situating the geography of the emerging Atlantic commons alongside the geography of the eighteenth century playhouse. As theater scholars have noted, the layout of the typical eighteenth-century British and American playhouses explicitly encoded rigid hierarchies of class (and often race), but spectators frequently transgressed these boundaries either vocally or physically. Thus efforts to “enclose” British and Anglo-American audiences were often thwarted by traditions of “riot and debate” that reached well back into the sixteenth century (51). In chapter 1 and in chapter 4, Dillon examines what she terms “the colonial relation,” particularly in the context of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko and Thomas Southerne’s dramatization of the novel, which held the stage well into the nineteenth century. For audiences in London living beyond the daily experience of chattel slavery, the play (which tells the tragic story of an enslaved African prince who leads a failed rebellion against his white oppressors before being tortured to death) held a different resonance than for those who found themselves increasingly outnumbered by captured African bodies. To see a heroic slave character “bodied forth” on the stage seemed incompatible with Americans’ emerging rhetoric about racial difference. It defied the efforts of the “plantocratic authority,” which “sought to blacken New World Africans and to deprive them of...