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Reviewed by:
  • Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman
  • Catherine Ingrassia and Andrew Black
Lisa A. Freeman, Antitheatricality and the Body Public. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 376 pp.

A familiar chronological narrative of the Restoration stage begins with the reopening of the theaters in 1660 and continues with the tonal and moral shift prompted by Jeremy Collier's influential Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698. Accordingly, Collier's polemic was paradigmatic of an entrenched public opinion, which revoked the licentious excesses of those last forty years and led to the emergence of a new theatrical protocol through dramatists like William Congreve and Richard Steele. As Samuel Johnson opines in his canny valorization of Collier in "Life of Congreve," "Nothing now remained for the poets but to resist and fly" (222). In this alluringly teleological reading, the resulting sentimental comedies and dramatic tragedies are framed as a sort of ameliorative response to this effective anti-theatrical polemic or – as Johnson apparently stated – "Collier fought without a rival, and therefore could not claim the victory" (1287). In this framing of antagonistic forces as unities, the artistic "resistance" was countered by a militant public aroused by a moral authority. In an influential work on antitheatricality, Jonah Barish found this attitude a "permanent kernel of distrust waiting to be activated by the more superficial irritants" (2), an impulse that has largely dominated critical discussions of attacks on the theater: that it is something hard-wired within us that responds, as Plato did, to artifice and play with a corrective desire for epistemological and political stability.

One of the many virtues of Lisa A. Freeman's Antitheatricality and the Body Public is its critical exploration not merely of antitheatricality itself, but more fundamentally of the way anti-theatricality is marshalled to create, organize, and regulate audiences. Antitheatrical arguments and the discourses that produce and respond to them are "rich and interpretable culture performances" (2) found through the "particularity of antitheatrical incidents" (6). Far from a kind of transformative, transhistorical collective unconscious, Freeman brings to life conscious antitheatrical actors as they emerge from a specific [End Page 109] cultural moment and produce "body publics" that can promote and embody such intellectual and ideological activity.

Freeman's term "body public" is a fresh and practical way of interrogating of the familiar critical concept of the public sphere. In Jürgen Habermas' influential formulation, it is a fully democratic infrastructure from which a rational and polite "public" emerges. In Michael Warner's terms, "publics" are imaginary and textual, enabling and structuring a sense of reflexive belonging. For Freeman, the titular "body public" allows her to focus an inquiry not on abstract and theoretical relationships, but on the "concrete, visible, and embodied forms, beginning in particular with the bodies that inhabit theatricalized space" (5). For Freeman, the function of theatrical performance, then, is to bring together physical bodies in sites that not only represent scenes of contestation but also produce them and call a public into being. For scholars of the seventeenth-century stage, it is a valuable critical imperative that could provoke compelling work in bringing together, for instance, Robert D. Hume's studies of Restoration audience and class, Erin Keating's recent article (in this journal) on reception practices and "absorptive identification," and Diana Solomon's book about Restoration epilogues and prologues.

In Chapter One, Freeman begins at Candlemas night on 1634 with a dazzling procession that culminated in the production of James Shirley's masque The Triumph of Peace, commissioned by the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court. Incited by the upcoming trial of the Puritan anti-theater polemicist William Prynne for his incendiary Historio-Matrix, the spectacle anticipated the political theater of the courts that was to come. The masque was a "performative vehicle to engage their audience in collaborative acts of political critique" in which spectacle "managed … in such a way as to leverage the sovereignty of the common law against the sovereignty of prerogative rule" (22). And since it was sponsored by lawyers, Royalist power was subsumed under the enabling and legitimizing institutional power of common law, a theme that would also...

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