David Worrall's Theatric Revolution offers compelling new materials on the Georgian theater and its subcultures seen through the eyes of government regulation. As Worrall argues, “The stage was the only literary form to be subjected to statutory Government censorship” (1). Direct censorship was exercised on theaters that had a Royal Patent: Theatre Royal Covent Garden and Drury Lane in Westminster and Royal theaters outside London (Edinburgh, Norwich, and York). According to a monopoly that dated back to Charles II, only such theaters were entitled to perform tragedy. Worrall surveys government regulation in its various articulations. Chief among them is the archive of plays submitted to John Larpent during his tenure as examiner of plays between 1778 and 1824, now at the Henry Huntington library in San Marino, California, together with the diary of his wife Anna, which records their daily reading practices and her comments on the plays they read aloud in their living room as part of the censorship process. Unlike the text for performance, the printed text of plays did not fall under the remit of government censorship. Worrall's comparison between the Larpent manuscripts and the printed text of plays accepted or rejected by the examiner of plays reveals the instability of drama at the time. Through fascinating case studies Worrall explores the reasons why the Larpents censured apparently innocuous plays—such as Edmund Eyre's The Maid of Normandy; or, The Death of the Queen of France (1794), aristocrat Lady Mary Eglantine Wallace's The Whim A Comedy (1795), and loyalist playwright Thomas Dibdin's The Two Farmers (1800)—or failed to censure potentially inflammatory plays such as The Picture of Paris taken in July 1790.

The key question Worrall's book addresses is: “If only the Royal theatres were allowed to speak, what happened to the voices excluded from the Royal patent? Were the Royal theatres, like the unreformed Houses of Parliament, the privileged and notionally nominated agents of the English national drama, or were they merely components within a wider unrecognized franchise of emergent playhouses and their audiences?” (10). Worrall's question is followed up through a breathtaking journey through a wide range of different theatrical establishments outside the perimeters of the Royal theaters, such as the Royal Coburg, the Royalty Theatre, and the Surrey Theatre. These alternative theatrical venues are reconstructed through accounts preserved in the Public Record Office. It would be fascinating to compare such official records with accounts published in the newspapers and see how these performances were received in the public sphere.

Worrall's familiarity with radical and artisanal networks is a great asset to his reconstruction of the artisanal and plebeian public spheres of nonpatent theaters. By mining neglected types of historical evidence, Worrall takes us into the world of theatrical microcultures and local communities. For instance, the Freemason network and artisanal public sphere underlying Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's sets for A Christmas Carol (1773) exemplify how Worrall's analysis of a performance recuperates the “microhistories of personnel working for London's theatres” (29) and the “interchange of skills across different industries” (158), such as theatrical lighting and firework displays, color and alchemy, religious mysticism, and alternative medical regimens. Worrall is also keen to show the links between the center and the margins. Witness Queen Caroline's knowing use of theatrical allusions to contemporary politics. Sometime around the turn of the century she acted the part of Hermione unveiled in a private theatrical production of The Winter's Tale at Montague House. Later she went all the way to the minor theaters on London's Surrey-side to see performances of Giovanni in the Contry or the Rake Husband (1820) and Marguerite! or The Deserted Mother! (1821), whose evident pro-Queen bias reveal her appeal to artisanal and plebeian public spheres. Another trail explores the dissemination and melodramatic reinvention of Mary Ashford's death in a series of plays and pamphlets that show the strong links between theatrical productions and print culture but also “a cultural fascination with casuistry in a decidedly plebeian public sphere” (313), which adds a significant new area to James Chandler's study of the “case” in Shelley's The Cenci in his England in 1819 (Chicago, 1998).

Worrall's research participates in new historicist work that has expanded the remit of Romantic Studies beyond the cult of the “great six.” Well known for his work on the plebeian public sphere, Worrall targets studies of Romantic period theater that concentrate on the work of Southey, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley. His discovery of the variety of theatrical forms and microcultures flourishing outside and in spite of the hegemony of Covent Garden and Drury Lane leads him to conclude that “there seems only a residual amount of usefulness in examining Romantic period spoken tragedy, by far the minority mode of contemporary dramatic expression in the playhouses” (21). This does not mean that we should underestimate the influence of such a system of monopoly and censorship, for indeed the fact that only the Patent Theatres had the right to perform spoken drama meant that nonpatented playhouses had to rely on other forms of theatrical performance such as burlettas, pantomimes or harlequinades, comic operas, and three-act melodramas. The fact that nonspoken theatrical forms would escape censorship alerts us to the need for a truly interdisciplinary engagement with theater.