Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage by Sarah E. Chinn (review)

American theater historiography has always had a white male problem. This problem seems particularly obvious for those historiographers who work in the pre-1900 field, as the usual response to a statement that one works on early American theater is, "Oh, so you do Eugene O'Neill?" O'Neill's body of work, racially problematic in and of itself, bestrides the history of American theater before World War II like a colossus. Yet this focus on the supposed father of American drama (to paraphrase Faulkner, a great white father with a pen) belies a similar problem with the history of the American theater in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From its very beginnings with William Dunlap's 1832 History of the American Theatre through the work of later scholars such as George C. D. Odell, George O. Seilhamer, and William N. Ireland, the often astonishingly detailed chronicles that mark the first major achievements in American theater history focus almost exclusively on elite white male audiences and the star actors (again, almost always male) who entertained them. The development—beginning with Richard A. Moody—of a cottage industry in studies of Edwin Forrest, the burly celebrity idol of Jacksonian working-class audiences, expanded the aperture of the historiographical lens, but Moody and his successors (myself included) often failed to address the radical contingency of not only American national identity but also the racial, gender, and class identities that it encompassed. With recent work by, among others, the late Jeffrey H. Richards, Heather S. Nathans, Gay Gibson Cima, Jenna M. Gibbs, and Douglas M. Jones, Jr., however, a less publicized tradition of historiography that addresses the social construction of race, gender, and class on the early American stage has come to the forefront of early American theater studies.

Sarah Chinn's Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage represents a worthwhile addition to this trend. A newcomer to theater studies but a scholar well versed in the cultural history of race and immigration in the nineteenth century, Chinn deftly addresses sixty years of American theater history from the Revolution to the Jacksonian era as she seeks to map out the theatrical vicissitudes of the identity claimed by white men of the artisanal and working classes in theater audiences across the United States. For Chinn, as for any theater historian who has read Alexis de Tocqueville, the theater is the literary engine of democratic societies, never more so than during the rise (and fall) of the laboring classes in the early Republic: "workingman's culture, forged through political struggle, white supremacy, emerging class consciousness, male sociality, and labor disputes, demanded its own kind of entertainment and edification, which it found more often than not on the stage" (17). For Chinn, who acknowledges her debt to Sean Wilentz, the increased symbolic potency of these men and the granting of universal white manhood suffrage belie the triumph of industrial and financial capital in the nineteenth century. The theaters patronized by these audiences operated amid a defiant, if somewhat incoherent, class culture founded on racial supremacy and very specific understandings of masculinity. This collective improvisation could be messy, both on-and offstage, resulting in plays that were "awkward, sometimes poorly plotted, and even internally contradictory" for equally confused audiences, since "[s]o was the model of manhood they were attempting to limn; so was the nation they hoped to build" (30).

Chinn's study consists of five chapters covering a heterogeneous assortment of theatrical texts, some rarely studied and some familiar. Her first two chapters, covering paratheatrical materials such as acting manuals and actors' memoirs, are the most innovative and original. The first chapter considers a range of acting manuals from the eighteenth century, focusing in particular on the actor's potential role as a model of masculine and civic virtue for audience members. Chinn ably situates the discourse surrounding the "proper" method of enacting...