The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century by Allardyce Nicoll (review)

Reviews 275 But I don’t want to end with a reader’s small quibble. Suzman’s essay is exciting both as an imaginative response to a challenging literary text and as a professional’s account of the making of a great role. And no other essay in the volume as fully fits its collective title. OTTO REINERT University of Washington Allardyce Nicoll. The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Sybil Rosenfeld. Athens: University of Georgia Press; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Pp. viii + 184; 138 illustrations. $25.00. I find myself at a loss how to review this book. It looks like a product of the coffee-table trade and reads that way part of the time, especially in the early chapters. But the tone varies all the way from that of raconteur and freshman survey teacher to scholar debating other author­ ities in the field. While almost entirely free of anecdotes, the text is heavily derivative and in some ways oversimplified. Nicoll does raise some interesting questions about the uses and limitations of iconographic evidence in theatre history, though whether they would interest the general reader at whom most of the book is aimed seems questionable. Moreover, Nicoll reaches no conclusions about the issues he raises. Two introductory chapters, “The age of David Garrick” and “The idea of the mid-eighteenth century theatre,” assert that Garrick is the central figure, the man with the informing vision, the personality who must be encountered—but then Garrick fades away except as a point of reference. The book is really a more general account of the theatre in this period, if we judge by the adoption of the “imaginary tour” narrative device, which seems unlikely to engage scholars. Yet already on page 2 occurs the refrain, “All these facts are so well-known as hardly to require or even to bear repetition.” Given this attitude, I can only deduce that Nicoll found the book a chore to write. The further he goes into any subject and the more specific the subject, the less care is taken to guide the non-scholarly reader and explain the significance of the topics discussed. The coverage given English theatre architecture, for example, is generally sound. But then Nicoll attempts to condense the history of that architecture into two pages and to con­ trast English design with continental design on a very abstract plane. In France and elsewhere in Europe, the ‘idea’ of the theatre was based on a bi-partite model; the proscemum arch was designed fundamentally to frame a stage picture which was separate and distinct from the auditorium. When, therefore, in some structures [on the continent] provision was made for a forward extension of the stage, quite properly this extension may be thought of as an ‘apron’. . . . [The forestage of the Teatro Regio, Turin] becomes almost part of the setting while the boxes are deliberately arranged so that they do not carry on tne lines of the side boxes in the auditorium. . . . In contradistinction, the English tradition tends to emphasise the extension of the ‘house’ onto the platform, while at the same time that 276 Comparative Drama platform is deliberately kept distinct from the setting. . . . The ‘house’, the ‘platform’ and the ‘scene’ have to be held distinct in our minds. (pp. 32-34) Much of this passage is disputable; but among other defects it suffers from lack of context. And even if we accept it, Nicoll never explains what difference he thinks it made in the placement of performers, the use of scenery, or the style of performances, either to spectators in stage boxes or to those in the auditorium proper. The chauvinistic bias diminishes in later chapters, which concentrate on England. Chapter 3, “The playhouses,” reviews what paintings, en­ gravings, and floor plans tell us about theatres in London and supple­ ments this information with pictures and photographs of provincial theatres designed in imitation of Drury Lane. Unfortunately, Leacroft’s important The Development of the English Playhouse (1973) is not taken into account. Chapter 4, “Mixing with the audience,” promises to continue the “imaginative tour” with Garrick’s first Shakespeare pro­ duction in his first season as...