The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Al Coppola (review)

Francis Bacon tried to warn us. In his New Organon (1620), he argues (in a translation from the Latin by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne) that "All the philosophies that men have learned or devised are, in our opinion, so many plays produced and performed which have created false and fictitious worlds." Bacon is famously calling for a new philosophy based in reality rather than illusion. The empirical science that the Royal Society would institutionalize later in the seventeenth century seemed to fulfill Bacon's hopes by putting reality ahead of the "Idols of the Theater" and "fairytale theories" that had dominated natural philosophy since the ancient world. Or did it? Mr. Coppola's witty, engaging, and well-researched book, which takes the quotation from Bacon as its epigraph, demonstrates how fully the empiricist natural philosophy of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained indebted to the figure of the theater. He also demonstrates how routinely the theater of the period turned to science as a topic, staging, often satirically, the careers of virtuosi, virtuosa, and scientists of all sorts in plays like (among others) Shadwell's The Virtuoso (1676), D'Urfey's Madame Fickle (1677), Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687), the Gay, Arbuthnot, and Pope collaboration Three Hours After Marriage (1717), Centlivre's The Basset Table (1705) and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), and the Doctor Faustus pantomimes that premiered in both of the London patent houses in 1723. Setting the theater and the new science in dialogue with one another, Mr. Coppola makes intelligible how fully a new understanding of spectatorship itself, one that would become normative by the middle of the century, came to be shared by the worlds of science and the stage.

Mr. Coppola structures Theater of Experiment like a main piece performance from the theater of the period, with prologue, five chapters in the place of acts, and an epilogue. The book gives tribute on the page to its argument that the success of the modern empiricist science that emerged to answer Bacon's call constituted what Mr. Coppola calls a "culture of spectacle." Knowledge production depends on a new belief in seeing for one's self, a belief that drove transformational change in all modes of public performance, scientific and theatrical. In the book's prologue and epilogue, he frames these changes through efficient invocations of one of the period's most popular and characteristic theatrical subgenres, the rehearsal play. Inaugurated in the early 1670s with the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, the play became a durable framework for satire, resorted to by (among others) Behn's Emperor of the Moon and Fielding's Pasquin and The Historical Register for the Year 1736. While the play most obviously satirizes the theater itself, Mr. Coppola argues persuasively in his prologue that Rehearsal was also a way of ridiculing the culture's growing faith in the power of empiricism itself, what he calls the "Bayesification" of a culture in which the sheer accumulation of new facts is its own vehicle of persuasion. For Buckingham and his collaborators, the foolish playwright Bayes and the performances he orchestrated were less the central targets than a symptom of a generalized overinvestment in the power of things to convey truth that the theater and the new empirical science shared. The epilogue returns to the rehearsal frame via Fielding's two rehearsal pieces of the mid-1730s, a point at which "the thrall of reflexive empiricism" that Buckingham had focalized in the figure of the playwright had now thoroughly infected the spectators themselves.

The five central chapters offer case studies that typically attend to pairs or clusters of texts that exemplify an aspect of this culture of spectacle and identify problems. For example, Mr. Coppola pairs Shadwell's widely known Virtuoso with the much less familiar Madame Fickle by D'Urfey, which he argues persuasively is "a point-by...