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148 marrying the merchant’s daughters— offers a new direction for gentility. Examining the citizen cuckold, Mr. Dawson points out that ‘‘at least eighty of the 160-odd comedies known to have debuted’’ during the period had such plots. We have learned from the work of Robert D. Hume and Derek Hughes how important it is to consider large numbers of plays to get an accurate picture of theatrical diversity and generic patterns. However, in this instance, Mr. Dawson might have benefited from Shirley Strum Kenny’s concept of ‘‘perennial favorites’’—plays by Steele, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Cibber, and Farquhar (and I would include Centlivre)— frequently performed, certainly in part because they addressed key social questions ; audience interest in attending these comedies should be part of the history of the late Stuart stage. Some plays are more culturally significant than others. A history that featured The Beaux’ Stratagem (never mentioned in this book), instead of The Conscious Lovers, would lead to a different investigation of gentility. Farquhar’s play has a cuckolding plot involving a gentleman’s wife; it also disguises the status of two other gentlemen and invites comparison between them and house robbers. Perennial favorites and other new plays performed between 1690 and 1725 include gentlemen’s wives, daughters, and widows threatening their authority; in quite a few comedies disguised gentlemen trick characters of gentle or middle status. Works as different as Milhous and Hume’s Producible Interpretation: Eight English Plays, 1675–1707 (1985) and Lisa A. Freeman’s Character ’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (2002) offer a corrective in their attention to Farquhar’s masterpiece. (Centlivre ’s The Busybody, which this book also omits, would open another valuable line of inquiry about ‘‘fine gentlemen.’’) Mr. Dawson’s revisionist cultural history stirs debate about gentility and new historicist paradigms of theatrical representation . James E. Evans University of North Carolina Greensboro DON-JOHN DUGAS. Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740. Columbia: Missouri, 2006. Pp. xiv ⫹ 271. $42.50. Marketing the Bard focuses on the publication of Shakespeare’s plays as a cultural phenomenon from the Restoration to the years immediately following the Licensing Act of 1737. This project is much needed as most studies of Shakespeare during this period have tended to focus on the stage history of his plays, in particular the adaptations. While articles and occasional monographs have dealt with specific aspects of Shakespeare and the history of publishing , none has sought a broad narrative sweep. As Mr. Dugas explains, ‘‘a publisher ’s ability to update an author by repackaging his texts is, culturally speaking , similar to a playwright’s ability to adapt an old play.’’ He is interested in the economics of literary production, and his book deals specifically with issues of commerce and materiality rather than aesthetics or ideology, leading him to consider Shakespeare as a ‘‘textual commodity’’ as well as a ‘‘performance commodity.’’ Discussing Shakespeare as a ‘‘performance commodity,’’ Mr. Dugas tracks the dramatist’s popularity through 149 the record of performances, both altered and unaltered, from the restoration of Charles II through the first years of the eighteenth century. This opening chapter is the weakest, because Mr. Dugas simply restates what is already familiar. In this crowded field, he overstates his case that Shakespeare was basically unknown and that even by the mid 1680s, Shakespeare was of less interest to Restoration audiences than contemporary writers such as Ravenscroft, Crowne, Tate, and Durfey. He naively treats the Restoration audience as a single homogeneous entity that would have little if any familiarity with Shakespeare and his works. A significant number of playgoers were familiar with Shakespeare as a respected author, a fact demonstrated by evidence that Mr. Dugas himself cites. In one such example, the Prologue to Thomas Otway’s The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679) almost fulsomely exclaims ‘‘Our Shakespeare wrote too in an Age as blest, / The happiest Poet of his time and best.’’ This statement both expresses the sense that ‘‘our’’ Shakespeare belongs to the audience (who presumably would know who he was) and identifies him as the greatest pre-Restoration poet. Understandably , Mr. Dugas wants to set the stage for...

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