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

Paul Prescott makes an important contribution to the history of Shakespearean performance by examining the conditions of journalistic reception of the playwright’s work onstage in England since the mid-eighteenth century. In his introduction, Prescott identifies the discrepancy between the influence that reviews have had for two and a half centuries as the principal means of describing, assessing, and shaping opinion about performance, and the fact that his is the first monograph about journalistic critics and Shakespearean theater. While he suggests that this gap “perhaps indicates the low esteem in which scholars have held journalists and journalistic criticism” (6), he finds value in such criticism by following at length a line of argument about reception initiated by the likes of Barbara Hodgdon, Celia Daileader, Carol Chillington Rutter, Laurie Osborne, and Sarah Werner, all of whom he cites approvingly. Like these scholars, Prescott does not consider reviews as evidence of what occurred onstage but reads them “as guides to the ways in which audiences of the past have read performance” and the way they have attributed value to Shakespeare in the theater (22).

Prescott’s scrutiny of the professional reviewing audience revolves around several critical concerns. Specifically, he details the conditions of crisis and the limitations under which journalistic reviewers labor: they are constricted by word length, deadlines, and subject matter; lacking professional credentials, they experience anxiety about their cultural authority and status; and their literary liminality and the ephemerality of their writing have meant that they do not engender significant intellectual or aesthetic movements. The concern to which Prescott returns most often, however, is one adapted from Joseph Roach’s idea of performance-as-substitution, in which an actor is “auditioned” for a role that embodies a culture’s idealized self-image. In the case of “Shakespearean stage history . . . the role is defined as one of unassailable Shakespearean authority,” while “the cultural work of the successful candidate is to be the living substitute of the absent original” (28). By returning intermittently to reception of actors’ performances of Macbeth, Prescott examines how critics have determined who has the right to embody that Shakespearean authority. At the same time, he examines how journalists’ awareness that they are part of a critical tradition exerts “substitutional pressure” (28) to embody that tradition, to stand in for other reviewers who have successfully “auditioned” for the role of critic.

Prescott’s book follows a linear chronology, but instead of an exhaustive history of English reviewing he proceeds by way of case studies. He begins his second chapter with David Garrick’s Macbeth in the 1740s because it coincided with two turning points: the restoration of something like Shakespeare’s script and the rise of journalism about actual staging, which began only in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. To demonstrate how reviewers help “ossify” (32) performers’ reputations and performance conventions, Prescott delineates Garrick’s efforts to substitute the textual authority of Shakespeare (with a partially restored Macbeth script) for the traditional authority of Thomas Betterton’s performances of Macbeth. He argues that Garrick’s Macbeth became a benchmark for the role by the 1770s, not only because the actor’s idealized and refined heroism suited eighteenth-century sensibilities but also because Garrick published a pamphlet ahead of the production, successfully influencing the reception of his performance. Prescott then concisely sketches a series of subsequent “auditions” for the role that Garrick and reviewers had fashioned. Charles Macklin’s rivalry with Garrick blew up into a newspaper war over the former’s Macbeth, exemplifying the extreme factionalism of the era’s press and the impact of offstage circumstances on reviewing. After outlining the rivalry between the successful John Philip Kemble, whose physical stature and heroic Macbeth ensured a positive reception, and the unsuccessful Edmund Kean, who failed as a substitute for the idealized role, Prescott considers two Macbeths by Sir Henry Irving, who stole a...