Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London by Mark S. Dawson (review)

146 AARON HILL. The Works of the Late Aaron Hill, introd. Sandro Jung. 4 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005. Pp. xix ⫹ 351, 418, 416, 414. $790. Brean Hammond called Aaron Hill ‘‘the cultural glue that holds this literary period together.’’ Christine Gerard ended her excellent Oxford DNB account of Hill with this quotation, and Mr. Jung begins his brief informative Introduction with the same sentence. Still, even if we grant that Hill’s correspondence with Pope and Richardson is of interest, that his support of poets (Thomson, Mason, Mallet) and dramatists during his age was exemplary, and that his writings about the theater of the 1720s reveal a good deal about acting, managing, and stagecraft during the period (most of it available elsewhere, however), the price of these four volumes is outlandish, and all the more so because the volumes are available on-line (Eighteenth-Century Collection On-Line) and with far better reproduction. The first two volumes contain previously known letters relating to Pope and Richardson; the most interesting ones are those in which Hill reveals his ‘‘projector ’’ side, whether it is his plan to blockade ports and protect British shipping interests, or growing grapes in the Bermudas. The blatancy of his self-assurance is astonishing. Since Hill is not a stylist of any merit, however, the letters are usually expository and flat. When he comes to giving advice to playwrights and actors, or to justifying his own plays and trying to get them produced, the letters dwindle further and can only interest those looking to elucidate specific theatrical issues. Volumes 3 and 4 contain some of his poetry. As Mr. Jung notes, Hill was an early enthusiast for the aesthetic sublime , for natural description, and for emotionalism. However, he failed in all three. Mr. Jung adjudges one poem ‘‘beautiful,’’ ‘‘The Sun-Flower’’ (miscited as appearing in vol. 4; it is in vol. 3), but surely the opening stanza does not warrant that epithet: ‘‘A Week’s long absence had Liberia kept, / From those blest floors, which us’d her feet to kiss: / Returning, she, to view the garden, stept, / The garden, which was half Liberia ’s bliss.’’ Never have poetic feet stepped so clumsily into a garden, except perhaps in a later explanatory stanza , when a bee implicates Liberia in the death of the flower: ‘‘Some ten days since, when bolting from your door, / On this ill-fated spot you fixed your foot; / This ugly flow’r you cry’d, I can’t endure; / And, strait cold grief shot, tingling, to its root.’’ Volume 4 concludes with ‘‘Essay on the Art of Acting.’’ As with many pages throughout the four volumes, the reprint is very lightly inked, and many words are lost to illegibility. At times, however , one does not really mind not being able to read Hill’s thespian insights, such as the fact that love is shown by ‘‘muscles intense,—and a respectful attachment in the eye’’ while fear would have the ‘‘muscles and look both languid —with an alarm, in eye, and motion ,’’ and jealousy, ‘‘by muscles intense , and the look pensive; or the look intense, and muscles languid, interchangeably .’’ At times the century embarrasses even its staunchest defenders. MARK S. DAWSON. Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005. Pp. xvi ⫹ 300. $85. Mr. Dawson’s book challenges two 147 disciplines to recover ‘‘a cultural and political dynamic’’ that defines gentility, ‘‘a rhetorical disposition of power constantly in progress.’’ As a social historian , he argues that his field, which concentrates on ‘‘histories of the marginalized and subordinated,’’ needs to reexamine the give-and-take between these groups, those of middling status, and the elite, a continuous process that enabled English people to identify a gentleman or gentlewoman. To examine this dynamic, he focuses on the ‘‘vibrant ’’ comic stage (because of its representation of social experience and its abundant texts) and confronts its critical paradigms (the citizen cuckold, the fop, and the audience). While ‘‘Late Stuart’’ designates the years from 1660 to 1725, Mr. Dawson concentrates on plays after 1690, which he finds underserved by previous criticism. One central argument is that the meaning of gentility (‘‘to claim that one was...