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  • Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Jean I. Marsden
  • Glen McGillivray
THEATRES OF FEELING: AFFECT, PERFORMANCE, AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STAGE. By Jean I. Marsden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; pp. 234.

Jean Marsden's Theatres of Feeling provides a welcome addition to the literary study of eighteenth-century theatre and affect. Marsden's aim is to examine audiences' emotional responses to drama in performance; in particular, she considers sympathy and the eighteenth-century drama's ambition to provoke this morally virtuous emotion in its patrons. Spanning roughly fifty years from the mid-century to the late 1790s, Theatres of Feeling argues in its introduction that "emotional experience" was inextricably linked to the theatre of the time, that a play rose or fell according to an audience's felt response, and in turn that "audiences themselves were judged based on their ability to feel" (3–4). Marsden approaches her topic through what she evocatively terms a "methodology of traces" using diaries, biographies, letters, poems, and reviews (8). While she acknowledges the limitations of play texts as sources (ibid.), these remain a substantial focus for the volume, and three out of five chapters offer a close reading of five plays as distinct case studies demonstrating how authors sought to "arouse sympathy in their audiences" (15).

Sympathy was understood in the late eighteenth century as a sequence that begins with pity, which "initiates connection, which in turn creates communal virtue" (19). What is key here is that sympathy arises when one person observes and connects to the emotion of another (21). Marsden teases out these ideas through the works of novelist and playwright Samuel Jackson Pratt and moral philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Henry Holmes (Lord Kames), who used the theatre to illustrate their arguments. These authors advance the virtue of sympathy as an "affective standard" for judging art and as an effective riposte to the claims of anti-theatricalists (28): through sympathy, theatre's moral status is elevated, and a play's worth may be assessed by its capacity to evoke sympathy in audiences.

The book is organized into five chapters, with a brief introduction and afterword. Chapter 1 presents Marsden's general argument about theatrical sympathy. In the next chapter, her focus shifts to an examination of performances by actress Sarah Siddons (whom Marsden also touches on in other chapters) after her triumphant return season to Drury Lane during 1782–83. Each of the chapters that follows presents thematic case studies of eighteenth-century plays to demonstrate how their playwrights utilized sympathy in their dramaturgies. What is of particular benefit to eighteenth-century drama studies is Marsden's serious consideration of work by contemporary playwrights and how it was understood and appreciated (or not) by their audiences, even though these plays no longer appeal to modern tastes. Marsden examines the relationship between fathers and daughters in Arthur Murphy's The Grecian Daughter and David Garrick's adaptation of Nahum Tate's version of King Lear; slavery in Richard Cumberland's The West Indian and George Coleman's Inkle and Yarico; and anti-Semitism in Cumberland's The Jew. Plays such as these, writes Marsden, should not be seen as "lost gems to be revived and revered," but rather as "a nexus of social ideals, practical realities and the emotions generated by these experiences" (168).

Marsden's chapter on Siddons examines the actress's effect on audiences; it is the only chapter that focuses on how performance mediates emotion. Using two of Siddons's signature roles as examples—the titular characters in David Garrick's adaptation of Thomas Southerne's Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage and in Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore—the chapter surveys several audience accounts, in diaries and letters, of emotional responses to her, all of which demonstrate the extent to which late eighteenth-century theatre was a "theatre of feeling." Whereas Siddons's Isabella provoked fainting fits and outbursts of hysteria in her audiences, her portrayal of Jane Shore, the former mistress of Edward IV who dies of starvation throughout the final act, provoked tears and sighs and in some spectators moral disquiet. Siddons's powerful performance represented Jane...

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