The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater by Katherine West Scheil (review)

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 most grateful for the new textsand personsthatMs.Wankohas introduced. She has enlarged the cast of characters beyond the usual Cibber and Garrick (although they have chapters) to include figures such as Matthew Coppinger , an actor-rogue whose biography offers a chronicle of his on- and off-stage ‘‘jests’’—crimes and pranks that led to his execution for stealing a watch and£7. Coppinger’sstory,Ms.Wankoargues, serves as the inverse image to Betterton’s player-gentleman, establishing the poles between which most male actors had to position themselves. Or consider Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly of The Beggar’s Opera, who earned the first full-scalebiographyofanactress, one that, however, accused her of being essentially coextensive with Polly herself , an amorous prostitute whose sexual availability was the most salient feature of her character on and off stage. Thelack ofdistancebetweentheperformerandher part underscores the force of the stereotypical roles in which women were cast in eighteenth-century society, as well as the ability for what Ms. Wanko calls a ‘‘media image’’—here the role of Polly —to gain a life of its own in the public sphere. Coppinger, Fenton, and the dozens of other performers who cross the stage in Roles of Authority do not fully illuminate the problem of celebrity in the way that Ms. Wanko would like, but they frequently teach us something new about eighteenth-century players, their theater, and their culture. John O’Brien University of Virginia KATHERINE WEST SCHEIL. The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2003. Pp. 333. $55. Ms. Scheil usefully rejects the overarching ideological explanations that have been advanced to explain ‘‘why’’ playwrights of this period adaptedShakespeare ’s plays the ways they did—the desire to ‘‘improve’’ them, the critical imperative of making them conform to neoclassical principles, the compulsion to appropriate them for political purposes , and so on—that have too often forced very disparate plays onto the same procrustean bed. If there is a principle unifying these adaptations, it is a pragmatic one: their adaptors typically focused on enhancing the performative aspects of Shakespeare’s plays—actors, singers, music, slapstick—to suit contemporary tastes. Because Shakespeare’s name had little value in the Restoration, music, dance, popular actors, contemporary plots, and other forms of innovation were added to plays such as Cox’s(?) droll Bottom the Weaver (1661), Davenant’s The Law 148 Against Lovers (1673), and Lacy’s Sauny the Scott (1698) to make them viable on the stage. Commercial pressures— particularly the need to flesh out Shakespeare ’s plots with music and fancy staging—increased as the seventeenth century drew to a close. The DavenantDryden Tempest (1670), the operatic adaptation (probably by Shadwell) of it (1671), the anonymous opera The FairyQueen (1692), and Duffet’s The MockTempest (1675) reflect these demands,either by acceding to them or (in the case of Duffet’s play) by burlesquing them. While Shakespeare’s name becomes more prominent in prefatory material at the turn of the century, his reputation as a comic playwright was still commercially negligible. Adaptations written between 1700 and 1703, such as Gildon’s Measure for Measure (1700), Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701), Dennis’s The Comical Gallant (1702), and Burnaby’s Love Betray’d (1703), incorporated additional elements (such as music and dance) the deployment of which had now become standard practice, but only Granville ’s was...