Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Cheryl Wanko (review)

146 a timewhen pro patriadidnotmean‘‘love it or leave it.’’ Melvyn New University of Florida CHERYL WANKO. Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lubbock: Texas Tech, 2003. Pp. ix ⫹ 258. $37.50. Rendering human lives in textual form was an eighteenth-century passion: central in that it elevated forms like the journal , the letter, the biography, and the autobiography to prominence; and complicated in that it attests to and documents the era’s anxieties about power and representation . How can a human life be represented on a printed page? And whose lives are worth representing? In the case of the lives of actors, Ms. Wanko’scentral example, the problems of representation and power were acute. The essence of a performance—the performer’s gestures, voice, bearing, and body—do not translate well to the page. And the very act of taking on the role of another, imaginary person, of feigning to be something other than who you really are, undermines the sense of a settled, unified subject. Ms. Wanko’s book uses eighteenthcentury biographies of actors to chart the emergence of the concept of the celebrity, which she defines as a ‘‘new space in preexistent authority structures’’ such as rank, profession, and the literary, a space that was ‘‘born of the media, social uncertainty , and the paradoxes that actors and actresses represented for their society .’’ The mixture of categories here— space, structure, media, the social, and paradox as the figure that relates them to each other—points to Ms. Wanko’s ambition , her desire to do more than simply catalogue eighteenth-century actors’ biographies , and rather to describe how they express significant cultural issues. But it also points to one of the unresolved questions in this book: why actors and actresses—and not, say, authors, politicians , or aristocrats—would be the privileged examples of emergent celebrity. Part of the problem may be that the concept of ‘‘authority,’’ at least as Ms. Wanko deploysit,hassomeoftheprotean nature of the player. It seems to mean different things, call for different kinds of questions at various points. She uses the term to invoke a kind of power thatactors, a group with little status of their own, attempted to appropriate from other domains of the culture. Thus for example Gildon’s 1710 biography of Betterton draws on the prestige of class-based authority to equip its star with the trappings of gentility; as a gentleman, Betterton could plausibly lay claim to the techniques of classical rhetoric. Elsewhere, however, Ms. Wanko invokes very different modes of authority. In a chapter on biographies about Barton Booth, for example , she describes how Booth’s autopsy —an extraordinary description of which makes every other aspect of Benjamin Victor’s 1733 Life of Barton Booth almost recede into trivia—helps us understand conflicts within themedicalprofession about the propriety of autopsies and, particularly, the efficacy of mercury (astonishing amounts of which were found in Booth’s body). Later, Ms. Wanko addresses the ambiguities of the authority conferred by money. Here in effect, the ‘‘value’’of the acting profession, as revealed in biographies of prominent performers, depends not only on how much actors and actresses make, but what they do with it, as accounts of generosity on the one hand and profligacy on the other make it clear that actors’ status relied on more than simply their buying power. Both of these chap- 147 ters mine performers’ biographies for illuminating details, and in each case, the trope of ‘‘authority’’ adds texture to our understanding of the changing status of actors within eighteenth-century British society. But precisely how these sources of power might be related to each other seems underarticulated here. Are we to understand class, medicine, and economics as semiautonomous domains operating according to distinct logics of their own, or do they all express truths about a culture, the internal logic of which was fairly consistent? Moreover, the relationship between these particular instances and the larger implications of the emergence of ‘‘the celebrity’’could be fleshed out further; after opening gestures to theorists like Habermas, Foucault,andBourdieu , Ms. Wanko does not really articulate from what models of society she draws her own authority. Scholars can be...