It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018), edited by Carolyn Williams; The Drama of Celebrity (2019), by Sharon Marcus; and Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.

Perhaps the aspect of Victorian theater to gain the greatest purchase among nonspecialists is melodrama: the genre and mode at the center of the Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams. Thanks in part to crossover studies like Peter Brooks's The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Martin Meisel's Realizations (1984),Footnote ¹ melodrama has become a key word for understanding the cultural legacies of the Victorian period.Footnote ² The essays in the Cambridge collection make a strong case for why this is true. In four sections—“Histories of Melodrama,” “Melodramatic Technique,” “Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century English Culture,” and “Extensions of Melodrama”—the contributors not only chart melodrama's waves of subgeneric development and analyze its key techniques but also make claims for its centrality to cultural discourses of gender, class, empire, and race in the theater and beyond. What emerges is an argument for melodrama as reflexive, hybrid, and politically interested (though not necessarily progressive). Assimilating tools of the gothic (Michael Gamer), the national-imperial spectacle (Ankhi Mukherjee and Marty Gould), and various modes of domestic realism (Christine Gledhill and Carolyn Williams), melodrama made structures of feeling legible and shareable across a broad population.

The organization of the Cambridge Companion tends to taxonomize those strands, with separate essays for subgenres like “Domestic Melodrama” and intersections like “Melodrama and the Novel.” But threads also gather around signature elements of the genre, like codified physical gestures (George Taylor, Katherine Newey, and Peter Brooks), character types (Williams and Sarah Meer), the “scene” and the stage tableaux (Williams, Gould, Hayley Jane Bradley, and Jane M. Gaines), and music (Michael Pisani and Sharon Aronofsky Weltman). Of course, the broad time period covered by the essays makes melodrama a moving target, and contributors share some sense of the major developments that transformed the genre. Matthew Buckley's introductory essay, “Early English Melodrama,” provides a nineteenth-century overview, and references recur throughout the collection to the end of the patent monopoly; the introduction of gas and eventually electric lighting; the expansion of the British Empire; and the gradual realignment of West End theater with the middle (rather than the working) class. A mosaic vision of melodrama thus emerges across essays that remain excerptible for teaching or research. If the organization of the collection, as Williams suggests in the introduction, “forms a large part of its argument,”Footnote ³ then one of the central claims of the Companion is that melodrama must be carefully disaggregated before we can understand its durable qualities.

In The Drama of Celebrity, Sharon Marcus likewise creates a taxonomy that serves arguments about continuity. Marcus traces a long history of modern celebrity culture, which she triangulates in negotiations among stars, fans, and the media. The book is elegantly organized, with each chapter turning around a key “configuration” of celebrity culture—defiance, sensation, intimacy, multiplication, judgment, and merit—and a key celebrity, the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt is not exactly a progenitor in this account. The creation of celebrities as we know them (“people known during their lifetimes to more people than could possibly know one another”) became possible before her lifetime: in the eighteenth century, when increasing leisure time afforded more opportunities for consuming art, when rising literacy rates created more consumers for celebrity news, and when broadening democratic ideals encouraged more interest in individuality.Footnote ⁴ Marcus is thus interested in interrogating some of the structuring possibilities of celebrity and in examining some of the technologies (like the steamship and the newspaper) that enabled its growth. But like the authors in the Cambridge Companion, her argument is about continuous modes as much as it is about origins. Each configuration Marcus theorizes connects Bernhardt both to a timeline of other celebrities—from Lord Byron in “Defiance” to Kim Kardashian in “Judgment”—and also to a repertoire of transhistorical concepts—from the “exteriority effects” that she attributes to arresting bodily movements in “Sensation” to “the halo of the multiple” that she counterposes to Benjamin's singular halo in “Multiplication.” If the Cambridge Companion is a mosaic, The Drama of Celebrity is a kaleidoscope, with each configuration shifting the orientation of shared objects toward the refracting mirrors of stars, the media, and the public. While each chapter provides a new arrangement, they also feature recurring shapes and angles.

One of the most fascinating of these patterns emerges in Marcus's exploration of the intersections between celebrity culture and race. In the chapter on “Savagery,” for example, Marcus analyzes caricatures that used racist stereotypes to denigrate Bernhardt and her fans. Such cartoons employed a wide and sometimes incoherent range of tactics: they exaggerated Bernhardt's Jewishness; represented her as inducing fanaticism in Native Americans, black Americans, Indians, and Mormons; and displayed her as falling victim to the “barbarism” of those same fans. In these caricatures, a paradox of celebrity—wherein the star's power to attract is belittled even as her fans’ worship is weaponized—aligns with the structuring contradictions of racist imperialism—wherein “victims of state domination” are presented as “enemies of the state.”Footnote ⁵ The chapter on “Imitation” reframes these working pieces to consider how the ability to emulate celebrities has been seized as a racial privilege. Here again Marcus finds incoherence to be key to making racial meanings. An advertisement for “La Diaphane” face powder captures black women in a “Catch-22 typical of racism's double binds”: they are damned whether they succeed or fail in imitating Bernhardt's aspirational whiteness.Footnote ⁶ Marcus's readings of these images lead to a discussion of blackface minstrelsy, a practice that both set limits on racial imitation and celebrated the white men who broke them (and another candidate, along with melodrama, for a nineteenth-century performance genre with the most widespread and lingering effects on popular culture). As embedded contradictions emerge across these two chapters, it becomes clear not only that histories of racism are crucial for understanding nineteenth-century celebrity but also that the star system of the Victorian theater played a key role in forming racist ideologies.

While The Drama of Celebrity explores a Victorian theater with exceptional figures at the center, Michael Meeuwis's Everyone's Theater explicitly takes up the theatrical lives of lesser-known Victorians. This choice to steer clear of celebrity aligns with Meeuwis's interest in “emulative theatricality” as a normalized mode of the Victorian stage. Theater, in this account, enables a fantasy of social cohesion by modeling the everyday practices of Englishness that spectators could emulate. Meeuwis introduces the standardized and socially soothing function of popular theater as a counterpoint both to an Arnoldian model of culture that centers the self-selecting elite and to cultural studies approaches that privilege audience anxiety and critique. Unlike private novel reading, Meeuwis argues, public—and especially amateur—performance offered an ideal of shared, “exemplary normalcy.” Everyone's Theater stakes its claim for the importance of such “emulable theater” across a variety of scales. At the largest scale is the argument about mass culture, for which the breadth of Meeuwis's archival research is well suited. Chapter 2 examines a corpus of fifty-two Victorian plays, and chapter 5 draws from sixty different diaries. While the Cambridge contributors foreground expansion and distinction, Meeuwis thus emphasizes aggregation and standardization. Yet the book also provides detailed case studies. Chapter 4, for example, reconstructs the ideas and practices of a family engaged in one particular amateur performance: The Niece from India, written and performed by the Donaldson family.

As the title of this amateur play suggests, empire enters Everyone's Theater in explicit and less explicit ways. Meeuwis notes, for example, that the settler-colonial project driving the production of many Victorian archives creates some distorting absences: here, the lack of sources documenting theatrical activities by Indians in the “Anglo-Indian” performances the book discusses.Footnote ⁷ And his sixth chapter, “Umbrellas of State: Amateur Performance in the India Office Record,” particularly confronts some of the ways that mainstream Victorian theatricality provided comfort to colonists as it re-created norms by force and xenophobic fantasy. Yet the effects of imperial violence on Victorian performance perhaps run even deeper than that, as empire thrived on racist ideologies that, as Marcus's chapter on “Imitation” suggests, fundamentally shape the concept of the “emulable” itself. Meeuwis is attentive throughout his readings to structuring issues of class. I found myself wondering how an equally sustained attention to race (and especially to racism) might shift our understanding of the book's overall argument. If, as Meeuwis's analysis of the India Office Records suggests, the “Englishness” that Victorian theater offered to inhabitants of London and exported to settler-colonists in India was a fantasy of whiteness, then race played a fundamental role in forming what categories like “normal people” and the “day-to-day” meant for Victorians within England as well as beyond.Footnote ⁸

Taken together, these three studies demonstrate what increased attention to theater and performance can contribute to Victorian studies. The historical range of each book stretches beyond the Victorian period in one direction or another—a sign of some of the ways periodization might look different when viewed from the theater stalls. To varying degrees, each book also pushes back against the centralization of other media and genres. The authors argue that privileging favored objects (like Hollywood models of celebrity or Ibsenite approaches to realism) has distorted our view of nineteenth-century theatricality. One frequently recurring antagonist in these formulations is the novel. In her essay on “Melodrama and the Realist Novel,” Williams advocates for according to theater the status the novel has long enjoyed, as a major shaping force for the categories of modern social analysis.Footnote ⁹ Meeuwis takes the case one step further. The conclusion of Everyone's Theater pits Middlemarch against itself to suggest that Victorianists have attributed more centrality to the realist novel than it claimed for itself: “Eliot's novel holds open a possibility we do not consider very often, that of quotidian cultural needs that did not and do not involve the novel.”Footnote ¹⁰ Victorianists will likely have a range of views on how thoroughly the novel has dominated the field, but these studies collectively attest to a feeling that the drama, theater, and performance of the period have been relatively neglected—perhaps especially within English departments.

One remedy that both the Cambridge authors and Meeuwis provide for this neglect is to ignore the old truism that Victorian drama doesn't reward literary study. As Katherine Newey writes, “The non-literariness of the drama of the nineteenth century has often been cited as the chief reason for the Victorian theatre being overlooked in burgeoning English literary studies in the twentieth century.”Footnote ¹¹ I myself have invoked this explanation,Footnote ¹² but Meeuwis and the Cambridge contributors amply demonstrate its insufficiency. On a large scale, these studies offer new ways of understanding the linguistic patterns of Victorian drama as crucial to its political effects. Meeuwis, for example, takes a feature that might otherwise seem like evidence of melodrama's aesthetic clumsiness—the repetitive exclamation mark—and reveals this tendency as a tactic: the emotional intensity of exclamatory speech pulls actors and audiences into the shared project of making emotion legible. Authors in the Cambridge Companion also provide compelling readings of individual plays. In her chapter on “Nautical Melodrama,” for example, Ankhi Mukherjee opens with an analysis of Douglas Jerrold's Black Ey'd Susan that mines an ostensibly comic scene involving an enterprising British sailor, the death of a black baby, and a tobacco-ingesting shark named Billy in order to discover a compressed staging of the transatlantic commodity trade. These nuanced readings reveal that Victorian plays are not unfertile but rather undertapped resources for literary study.

Yet the studies also push us to think about ways of reading beyond the literary. The archives of all three texts include little-consulted materials: from the Cambridge essays’ fluency in now-obscure play texts to Marcus's detailed readings of scrapbooks and Meeuwis's excavation of working-class diaries and officer correspondence. Moving beyond well-cited criticism from figures like William Hazlitt or Charles Dickens, these authors scour abundant and assorted collections of manuscripts, office records, and ephemera to offer glimpses of an everyday theatergoing that often escapes us. A theater studies that opens up these less literary archives makes available not only new material but also new arguments about cultural behavior. Marcus's work on scrapbooks, for example, allows her to theorize the spectator practice of “resituation”: moving actor photos and press cuttings from one place to another without obvious acts of remediation, a process that “matters less as authorship or artistry in its own right than as a way of recording brief acts of attention.”Footnote ¹³ Evidence of attention (of how it was paid, by whom, to what, and with what aims in view) is one of the most enticing and elusive promises of studying spectatorship. By modeling ways for critics to attend to alternative materials, these studies also reveal historical habits of attention—from the resituation of “ephemera” to the sudden arrest of the tableau—that will shift our sense of how Victorians would have engaged with a broad range of media.

And perhaps such studies will shift our sense of how we engage media as well. Marcus, Meeuwis, and the Cambridge Companion authors all pivot toward the contemporary, as they follow Victorian theater's effect on the cultural everyday all the way to the present. This move is a logical extension of their claims for theater's impact on ideological formation, and it is one other scholars have taken up in recent years. Studies like Devin Griffiths's “Petrodrama: Melodrama and Energetic Modernity,” which joins melodrama to conversations about ecocide and the Anthropocene, or like Gregory Vargo's An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel, which engages theater in revising the history of Victorian social thought, demonstrate what attention to drama and performance can add to our view of the nineteenth century's long impact on modernity.

The turn may also tell us something about the pressures contemporary scholars often feel to make our sources speak, to find our insights ripe for the moment. This urge is by no means unique to scholars of Victorian theater, but I wonder whether the promises of performance—of the “twice-behaved behavior” that enables the “chronic return” of the event—might lead a past-in-the-present orientation to haunt our work in particular ways.Footnote ¹⁴ Whether by tracing a connection between Davy Crockett and Donald Trump (as Marcus does in her conclusion) or by comparing a livestreamed quarantine repertoire to Victorians’ social playgoing (as I do in this essay's introduction), scholars of Victorian theater offer methods of thinking theatrically in order to understand how past performances shape our current stage.