Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman (review)

Lisa A. Freeman's Antitheatricality and the Body Public has, in its short time since publication, become a go-to on my bookshelf, next to John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain and Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter. Like the former, Freeman's book is rigorous in its archival research and meticulous close reading. Like the latter, it offers a powerful theoretical framework for almost everything I teach and write about as a professor of theatre history and gender and performance studies. Freeman addresses five cases in the history of anti-theatricality: William Prynne's seventeenth-century diatribe against the theatre, Jeremy Collier's early eighteenth-century campaign against the "immorality" of the stage, the controversy over John Home's Douglas in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, reactions to the Richmond, Virginia theatre fire in the nineteenth century, and the NEA v. Finley court case in the late twentieth century. Freeman gives priority to the archive, including a previously undiscovered manuscript in the Prynne controversy. This book's rigorous historicism and meticulous close readings are impressive, but more importantly, they are foundational to its theoretical reach and power. Freeman's premise that anti-theatricality persistently calls on a "body public," a particular understanding of the ideal state that includes even as it excludes bodies, is a productive way to consider more than this book's five cases.

Freeman's focus on "the body" in its corporeal and tangible aspects is not so much an ontological claim for the primacy of flesh as a recognition that queer and feminist theory's reformulations of Jürgen Habermas's "public sphere" stop short of recognizing the historical evidence of "concrete, visible, and embodied forms" (5). In this respect, Freeman is drawing on what Diana Taylor has called the repertoire as well as the archive, evidence of bodies, as well as texts, making meaning. By bringing performance theory together with her meticulous historicism, Freeman counters an important effect of anti-theatricality that invades even feminist and queer writing and research: the suppression of historical evidence of embodied performances. As Freeman argues, much of the power of theatre depends on moments of experience in time and space in which bodies not only create meaning but also cause people to feel intensely. Much historical scholarship tends to overlook evidence of that power.

Freeman manages to make Prynne's massively repetitive Histrio-Mastix fun. She reads it as a printed play, showing how anti-theatrical writing persistently incorporates the theatrical. Her approach to the tricky relationship between print and performance is deceptively simple and smart. Instead of opposing them, Freeman theorizes (and historicizes) a mutually constitutive relationship, citing evidence, including Prynne's own words, for how the Carolinian period viewed print as part of a larger cultural performance that included bodies. Freeman gives a detailed reading of Prynne's book, with close attention to the ways in which readership is seduced into participation in the performance. She then turns to various versions of Prynne's trial to show how differently edited versions reach out to different political and religious constituencies, in effect, seeking to "make" those constituencies, to produce them as bodies public. As a feat of old-fashioned scholarship, this chapter will satisfy the most detail-driven student of the Prynne affair, but it also delivers a powerful methodological model for how to think about the cultural implications of texts and performances.

A chapter on Jeremy Collier's attack on the immorality of the English stage draws on many recent scholars' vision of the emergent public sphere of the late seventeenth century as turbulent factionalism rather than the serene exchange of ideas imagined by Habermas. Freeman illustrates Collier's fear of the playhouse as a site for a diversity of bodies and ideas that take the form of what Freeman calls "suppositiousness," the ability to imagine truth in variable, even inconsistent, ways.

The controversy over Douglas in the mid-eighteenth centuryties anti-theatricality...