Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction by David Roberts (review)

Aimed at undergraduate and nonspecialist readers of Restoration drama, Mr. Roberts's book provides "thumbnail narratives of political and dramatic history . . . [and] reproduces and briefly examines key passages from two dozen or so of the most distinctive Restoration plays, in hopes of conveying something of their individual color and impact, as well as their relationship to contextual themes and critical controversies: a primer in the primary material so to speak."

The first of the book's two framing assertions argues that Restoration theater should be understood as "Regime change theatre"; it "sees events through the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the world rather than its Hamlets and Claudiuses . . . its most nuanced responses are often found in 'daily travails' or, more often, daily leisure." The second chapter asserts that plays should be understood in the context of a "'life cycle,' from writing to performance to print to revival." The rest of the book offers observations on that life cycle, addressing Playwrights, Companies, Actors, Playhouses, Audiences and critics, Texts and publishers, and Revivals and adaptations. In "Actors," Mr. Roberts considers "rival masculinities" (in the acting of Otway's Venice Preserved) and different actresses' work (in Behn's Rover and Lee's Rival Queens). The book's rapid-fire series of anecdotes and examples often invites fuller discussion, but Mr. Roberts's use of an extended quotation from a single scene to illuminate the implications of casting choices is effective even in this brief form. Similarly, the "Texts and publishers" chapter provides an excellent example of the implications of publishing politics and textual form in the 1696 quarto and 1710 folio editions of Congreve's Double Dealer.

The structure of the "case study" at times risks confusion. Those located in chapters on Companies, Playwrights, or Playhouses, for example, often do not illustrate particularly the specific focus of the chapter but rather appear to be interchangeable with other chapters. Discussion of Dryden's All for Love, for example, appears in "Companies," but is linked to that chapter only by a short opening paragraph noting that Dryden took this play to the Duke's Company after eleven plays with the King's. The rest of the five-page discussion is informative, but does not again reference companies until the last sentence.

Mr. Roberts's tone is introductory, and much of the book reads as an accessible formalization of undergraduate lectures, with short discussions of specific scenes intended to clarify larger social, political, or artistic issues. The innovative inclusion of long quotations offers a useful strategy. However, that the quoted scene frequently occupies up to half the length of these discussions limits space for argument of the example's significance.

Parallel examples from modern culture are used frequently to explain historical circumstances or implications; unfortunately, many of the references are obscure and others out-of-date. Some are to twentieth-century British television and popular media figures (opaque to many readers in Cambridge's worldwide market), and others to films that are (justly) unremembered, as in a one-sentence comparison among the Dryden and Howard Indian Queen, Southerne's Oroonoko, Mel Gibson's 2006 Apocalypto, and John Glen's 1992 Christopher Columbus. English stage actors of the last century raise a similar problem.

Mr. Roberts is clear that he makes "no attempt at . . . a comprehensive review of recent criticism," but his brief engagements with the scholarship can be problematic. In a discussion of actresses and scholarship on the male gaze, for example, feminist approaches are dismissed as misreading the plays "as though Bracegirdle and her colleagues were nothing but objects of desire in a room oozing testosterone"; Mr. Roberts opts instead to typify the actresses as "feisty."

This Introduction does many things well, but suffers from trying to do too much in its 252 pages, as Mr. Roberts raises big questions but has room only for brief answers. Asking of English versions of Molière and Racine, for example, "What did it mean to adapt these icons...