The study of late Georgian theater and drama has been experiencing a boom period recently, but whether a bust is around the corner partly depends on how the field can negotiate both the possibilities and the constraints of the disciplinary contexts in which it has been situated, namely, literary studies, particularly romanticism, and theater history. The books under consideration illustrate the issues involved in a variety of ways.

Combining a cultural studies approach with literary analysis, Betsy Bolton's Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage broadly explores “the ways public women marked the contested border between theatre and politics” in the romantic period (p. 5). The “public women” concerned are Emma Hamilton, Mary Robinson, and, in their capacity as writers of generically “mixed drama,” Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald. Bolton classifies the theater as “an intermediate public sphere” that produced “political fictions and commentary in a mixed-gender, mixed-class setting,” articulating the links between “genre, gender and nation” (pp. 4, 5). In the wake of 1789, the importance of the theater as an analogy of the political nation was intensified, with women embodying both the sentimentalized “lovely” nation that must be protected from barbarism and the nation's “abjected materiality” (p. 71). Such an observation has been made before, particularly in Burke studies: what is original in Bolton's approach is her emphasis on genre as a framework for exploring the ambivalences of the feminization of the nation-state. Central to her argument is a conceptualization of romance as a cultural formation that, unlike the Habermasian public sphere defined by the newspaper or the novel, set in play the forces of fantasy, mobility, and transformation. “Romance,” as Bolton uses it here, encompasses chapbooks for a popular audience; the prose romance aimed at women and servants; the verse romances promoted by scholars such as Hurd, Percy, and Warton; and dramatic romance, exemplified by Garrick's Cymon (1767). The two female characters of that play exemplify how femininity can be used to represent, on the one hand, what is lovely or virtuous about the nation and, on the other, the corrupting force that must be purged from the body politic.

Bolton then applies this concept of romance nationalism in her analysis of Emma Hamilton and Mary Robinson. She argues that Hamilton's career “drew on the mobility, diversity and expansiveness associated with feminized prose romance, while Nelson's performance as national hero was received in light of the moral consistency and unified stance of the chapbook hero” (p. 74). While Bolton's generic framework is perhaps stretched too far—Nelson's identity as hero was much more multivalent—the chapter is an insightful account of Hamilton's and Nelson's complementary cultural performances that makes excellent use of Gillray's caricatures. Bolton's analysis of Mary Robinson similarly depicts her as the heroine of her own wayward prose romance to Words-worth's more manly chapbook version of romance in the Lyrical Ballads. Linking the romance of sexuality, theatricality, and urbanity, Robinson haunted Wordsworth's imagination as a source of inspiration but also as a necessary object of disavowal.

The second half of Bolton's book focuses on dramatic production, specifically the work of Cowley and Inchbald, in forms such as farce. Deploying the theories of mimicry in the work of Bhabha and Irigaray, Bolton analyses how Cowley and Inchbald used farce and “mixed” genres to subvert the tendency toward abstraction, dematerialization, and hypocrisy within sentimental drama and sensibility in general: “sentimental ideology itself becomes a farce, a hollow self-mockery” (p. 162). Cowley and Inchbald “used the mimicry and materiality of farce to denature sexual politics and thereby disrupt the sentimental basis of imperial policy” while at the same time upholding the “moral authority” that had been granted to women as embodiments of the nation-state (pp. 162–63). Bolton's account of Inchbald's A Mogul Tale and Cowley's A Day in Turkey complicates our understanding of romantic orientalism by highlighting the cultural, gender, and genre politics as work in these plays. Her book as a whole emulates the mobility and expansiveness of the romance heroine crossing as it does many of the disciplinary boundaries that influence the study of the drama and theatrical culture of this period. However, rather than rejecting those boundaries, Bolton, like Inchbald and Cowley, aims to work inside a disciplinary system by situating her study within romanticism. She suggests that paying more attention to the theatricality of romanticism exposes “a liminal space in which the boundaries between theater and politics, public and private, masculine and feminine Romanticisms becomes [sic] so permeable as to be in some cases barely distinguishable” (p. 238). Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage raises the question of just how far romanticism can go in incorporating the public women of late Georgian culture before romanticism itself becomes “barely distinguishable.”

The farces of Inchbald and Cowley also feature in Mita Choudhury'sInterculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660–1800, the disciplinary context of which is not romanticism but eighteenth-century studies, specifically the new-historicist-inflected interest in race and empire consolidated by Brown and Nussbaum's The New Eighteenth Century (1987). Choudhury argues for the importance of the London theater as an “inter-cultural site,” a place of meeting of different cultures and ethnicities that “undercuts the native constructions of British culture and its ethnocentric claims of indigeneity, supremacy, and purity” (p. 20). The “resistance” of the title refers not to the response of the colonized to the colonizer but to the reaction of British imperial power to the potential “undercutting” of its own identity. “British theatrical culture,” Choudhury argues, “mimics the paradox of British political expansionism with an outward gaze that is full of curiosity and desire, tinctured with fear leading to resistance” (p. 20). Choudhury wants to complicate a view of the representation of empire in the British theater as a crudely orientalist exercise in the subjection of the other that grants the latter no agency or power of effect in the representation. But “resistance” is nonetheless problematic as a definition of how the impact of those intercultural encounters was absorbed and remediated at the imperial center because the term is so embedded in the politics of colonial relations. There is a conceptual difficulty, I would suggest, in ascribing to the powerful a capacity to “resist” the weak.

Issues of terminology aside, the case Choudhury makes for the interimplication of theater and the “outward gaze” of imperial expansionism is a compelling one. She begins by discussing the meeting between Italian opera and British culture as a threat to national integrity and normative hetero-masculinity. John Gay's “resistance” to this incursion in The Beggar's Opera used the Italian model as a pretext for a distinctively British theatrical genre, the ballad opera, the existence and success of which was “wholly reliant upon that which it seeks to destroy” (p. 56). Choudhury then analyses three different versions of the story of Mustapha, culminating in the Scottish-born David Mallet's 1739 tragedy. She claims that the “theatrical mythmaking” entailed by them exemplifies “an elaborate system of expropriation which forces both Mallet and Mustapha to become British subjects…at once intercultural and indigenous, simultaneously alien and native” (p. 83). The chapter that follows explores a performance of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal at the Calcutta Theatre in 1782 using the evidence of a promptbook prepared in London that suggests that the Indian production aimed to replicate the metropolitan model of the play. Choudhury argues that the themes of Sheridan's comedy, particularly its indebtedness in terms of both plot and ideology to colonial trade in the figure of Sir Oliver Surface, are only enhanced when regarded in the context of this “trade” between the London and Calcutta theaters. The School for Scandal was “an imperial theatrical event” (p. 108), creating a “bond” between London and Calcutta that erased “the spatial and cultural identity that was India” (p. 106). In what respect this constitutes “resistance” is not entirely clear though. Choudhury seems to suggest that the collaboration of the British colonizers of Calcutta with London was a highly effective example of old-fashioned dominance.

Perhaps a more wide-ranging account of British theatrical culture in India would have enabled Choudhury to explore the meanings of “resistance” here. The care taken to produce the simulacrum of the Drury Lane School for Scandal could be regarded not as a sign of the “erasure” of India but rather a defensive acknowledgment of the threat of India to a stable “British” identity. Nonetheless, Choudhury's discussion of The School for Scandal is the most exciting aspect of her study, offering a model for a cultural history of the British theater as a global enterprise. In subsequent chapters she addresses the farces of Inchbald and Cowley as varieties of “female orientalism,” arguing, like Bolton, that both writers explore the genre to conduct a playful critique of both British imperial policy and the subordination of women. Unlike Bolton, however, Choudhury stresses the complicity of these women writers in the “outward gaze” of imperialism, claiming that their “female orientalism” had a “Faustian cast” (p. 131). The rest of the book explores intercultural encounters in a range of texts, including Dryden's Aureng Zebe, Thomas Sheridan's little-known The Untutored Savage (1797), and the playbill of a 1782 production of Hamlet and Robinson Crusoe at Portsmouth. While the analyses are provocative and interesting, one longs, as in The School for Scandal chapter, for a sense of the bigger picture. How does the 1782 Robinson Crusoe relate to the 1785 Omai, for example? Interculturalism and Resistance makes a strong case for the interimplication of British theater and imperialism in the eighteenth century, but its impact is ultimately limited by its highly selective literary-critical methodology.

The essays in Women in British Romantic Theatre build on the previous work of Ellen Donkin, Julie Carlson, and the editor, Catherine Burroughs. The volume could be more accurately described as Joanna Baillie and Elizabeth Inchbald in British Romantic Theatre as they are each the subject of four essays and are discussed in others, chiefly in regard to their work as playwrights, critics, and theorists of the drama. Burroughs claims that the collection circles “obsessively” around Sarah Siddons (p. 1), in addition to Baillie and Inchbald, but the former does not receive an essay in her own right and the collection as a whole offers differing perspectives on her. Jeffrey N. Cox claims that Siddons's performances conveyed a passive femininity, linked with political conservatism, while Jane Moody, in a tangential reference to the actress, suggests a more nuanced picture in relation to Siddons's mediation of the heroines of German drama in the 1790s. For a collection of this kind not to have an essay devoted to the leading female performer of the period, never mind Dorothy Jordan or Eliza O'Neill, seriously undermines its claims to represent women in romantic theater. A significant exception is “The Management of Laughter: Jane Scott's 'Camilla the Amazon' in 1998,” jointly authored by Jacky Bratton, Gilli Bush-Bailey, and students at Royal Holloway, London. Seeking to replicate the conditions of early nineteenth-century theater production in its own collaborative pedagogical and critical practices, the essay highlights the inadequacies of textfocused study of figures such as Scott.

This essay stands out in a collection that ultimately privileges the involvement of women in British theater of this period in terms of textual production—as writers and critics rather than as performers, producers, or entrepreneurs. Jeffrey Cox's essay argues that Baillie, Siddons, and Anna Maria Larpent, wife of the examiner for plays, worked to reinforce the political status quo rather than subvert it, while Greg Kucich examines the response of the male reviewing establishment to, primarily, the published work of Baillie and Inchbald, as a mode of regulation of the female authorial presence in the public sphere. Katherine Newey discusses the historical tragedies of Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Frances Burney, and Mary Ann Mitford, arguing that the genre enabled them “to claim the citizenship largely denied them through other political and social institutions” (p. 79). The chronological sweep of this essay is such that the specific historical circumstances influencing the production of these tragedies are not able to be fully addressed. Jeanne Moskal's recuperation of Marianne Starke's 1788 The Sword of Peace contextualizes the play in terms of the controversy over the role of the East India Company and the abolitionist movement, concluding that the complexity of the play's politics frustrates any pigeonholing of Starke as “radical,” “liberal,” or “conservative.” Like Cox, Moskal argues that our desire to interpret these women as protofeminists may be misleading. This kind of transhistorical perspective is becoming increasingly less useful and can actually obscure the importance of what Moskal has achieved in recuperating Starke in her historical context.

In her essay Marjean D. Purinton discusses Baillie's The Tryal as a “metatheatrics” that exposes “the fictionality of itself ” and the “conditions that affected late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century women's negotiations of private/public spaces and identities” (p. 150), while Baillie is also the focus of the chapter by Susan Bennett who wants to liberate her from the “closet” of romantic studies, arguing for her importance as the “champion” of an alternative theater tradition in Britain (p. 173). The comparable pioneering achievement of Elizabeth Inchbald as a dramatic critic is the subject of Marvin Carlson's essay on her prefaces for the 1808 British Theatre, also discussed in Thomas C. Crochunis's “Authorial Performances in the Criticism and Theory of Romantic Women Playwrights.” Crochunis argues that the interplay between stage and print offered Inchbald and Baillie “a complex space to navigate between the two venues of authorial performance” (p. 231). As critics, theorists, and writers for the stage and print, these women created multiple roles for themselves that challenge the traditional identification of romantic authorship with “imagination-and genius-based paradigms” (p. 247). Crochunis's agenda-setting essay argues for the need to investigate the work of such women in terms of the “social systems” in which their writing was produced (p. 246). His emphasis on “authorial performance” dovetails nicely with Jane Moody's discussion of the importance of translation in the work of Anne Plumptre and Elizabeth Inchbald. Her starting point is a stage direction in a 1799 comedy by Inchbald indicating that the female heroine is saved from suicide by drowning, a moment of “generic iconoclasm” (p. 257), which the dramatist excised from later versions of the play. Moody does not refer to a possible link between this scene and the attempted suicide by drowning of Mary Wollstonecraft, a context that only reinforces her interpretation of this unsettling scene as a metaphor for the acts of self-censorship and denial that authorship entailed for women writers in this period. Plumptre's mediation of the plays of Kotzebue serves as a counterexample of how translation could legitimate a female authorial identity, but it is Inchbald's more pathological self-disavowal that takes center stage.

Moody's essay has much to say that is of relevance to romantic cultural studies as a whole, as does Julie Carlson's brilliant concluding chapter that begins with the unusual move of apologizing for her neglect of women dramatists in In the Theatre of Romanticism. She goes on to define the achievement of Baillie and Inchbald as a “remaking” of love to create a middle way between the Burkean chivalric ideal of passive womanhood and Enlightenment radicalism's suspicion of the illusory nature of both love and theater. The most provocative aspect of the essay, however, is how it moves beyond the context of romantic theater “to interrogate confidence in theatre as a means of cultural change” (p. 301). The lesson of late-Georgian theater for a possible valorization of theater and theatricality as inherently emancipatory cultural formations and practices is that change is “bound by constraints” (p. 302). Theater teaches us “the illusions in reason, the comforts of banalities, the uneven pace of change” (p. 303), necessary lessons if we are to learn to “live in a meantime without needing to make either the meantime or the living a tragedy” (p. 304). Carlson's finely nuanced piece, to which it is difficult to do justice here, confirms her status as one of our foremost thinkers and writers on British romantic culture. It is a fitting conclusion to a collection that, while limited by its definition of “romantic theater” in terms of predominantly literary modes of authorship, nonetheless confirms the crucial importance of women in the drama and theater of the period.

Tracy Davis's The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 and Jane Moody's Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 differ from the previous books under consideration in that they are situated within the disciplinary context of the “new theater history,” that is, a theater history less antiquarian in its emphases and more open to interdisciplinary dialogue, particularly with cultural studies, gender studies, and the new cultural history. In contrast to Carlson's romantic theater of dreams, Davis's view of the theater can be summarized in terms of the Clintonera mantra—“it's the economy, stupid.” Davis argues that current arguments about the proper role of the state in the promotion of the arts, and the role of the arts in local, national, and global economies can be traced back to the nineteenth-century theater. In an extension of the laissez-faire-ism behind the repeal of the corn laws, the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 removed the monopoly of the two London patent houses, establishing the principle of free trade in drama and making the theater “irrefutably commercial” (p. 74). At the same time, however, the extension of the lord chamberlain's censoring powers to the country as a whole reinforced state control over the theater. The 1843 Act, therefore, had the effect of confirming the status of theater as an “implicit part of the state machinery” while at the same time making it “free” like other industries (p. 40). Davis explores how the potentially contradictory aspects of the status of theater post-1843 were negotiated in the spheres of industrial regulation and safety—her account of the problems of fire and hygiene in the Victorian theater is fascinating—and in changing attitudes toward the regulation of the repertoire. The increased toleration of the display of women's bodies on stage signified a change in economic theory recognizing that such display has a value in its satisfaction of consumer desire. Questions of “artistic merit” or moral and social utility were subordinated to the satisfaction of what audiences wanted as consumers (p. 156). Other considerations—political, social, and moral— took second place.

It is in this context that Davis discusses the economic organization of the theater, the evolution of a pattern of ownership from family firms, to partnerships and limited-liability and publicly traded companies, to the trend to mergers in the late nineteenth century. The history of the not-for-profit sector is discussed, beginning with the proposal for a metropolitan private theater in 1811 and culminating in the Granville-Barker plan for a national theater in 1904. Davis shows that the long struggle for a British national theater was not only a matter of government will or public initiative but also a question of commercial viability, a factor that continues to dog the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Royal National Theatre of today. The book also explores the extent to which changing business structures allowed a space for women. Davis argues that the management careers of Eliza Vestris and Marie Wilton suggest that female involvement within the artistic marketplace as producers was acknowledged, in a comparable way to the recognition of the market value of the half-naked female performer, but she also shows that such participation was limited by the difficulty of acquiring capital and by lack of access to the forms of gentlemanly association that underpinned Victorian business culture.

In the course of the century, the theater faced two significant challenges in the form of the music hall and later cinema. By 1900 the industry had made important adaptations, cutting costs through outsourcing, developing the long run as a means of maximizing profit, and exporting its profit overseas in the form of tours that established the West End, and musical theater in particular, as an asset of empire. Nonetheless, theater could not compete with cinema that had distinct commercial advantages. It was not so much the novelty of cinema that was the cause of its success, Davis argues, but the superior manufacturing, distribution, and retailing of its product. The one element that theater had in its favor was the very dimension that made it difficult for its commodity value to be maximized through reproduction and storage—its status as an unrepeatable live performance—and it is this “liveness” that, according to Davis, represents theater's “new economic frontier” in the twenty-first century (p. 362).

Davis is adamant that her book is “not about drama, or even repertoire, not about acting, or even actors, not even particularly concerned with representation” (p. 13). Her claim that it is about “what underlies all these things”—that is, the money—suggests a marxian perspective, distinguishing the operations of culture from what “underlies” or structures it (p. 13). Acknowledging this, Davis claims that she is not so much interested in class and power as they relate to “resistance” and what lies “outside the hegemonic” (p. 12). Her focus is instead “on the locus of power” in the operations of theater as a business: “Until the mechanisms of capitalism are understood in this milieu, how else can historians discuss the agency to resist?” (p. 12). However, the overwhelming lesson of The Economics of the British Stage is that resistance is futile: market forces rule. Moreover, Davis's insistence on the “irrefutably commercial” status of theater after 1843 gives the impression that centuries-old debates about the religious, political, and moral status of theater no longer featured in the cultural landscape. While her book is immensely valuable as a work of archival scholarship, its implications for the history of the nineteenth-century theater and for the future direction of theater history will surely inspire debate.

The model of theater history at work in Jane Moody's Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 is much more pluralistic than Davis's. However, it shares with Economics of the British Stage a fascination with the quotidian life of the theater, its sights, sounds, and smells. Engagingly written, Moody's book is a much-needed cultural history of the late Georgian theater that interprets the category of illegitimacy not only in terms of the regulation of dramatic performances as defined by the 1737 Licensing Act but as a more general mode of “political, moral and indeed generic transgression” (p. 2). Such a framework allows Moody to avoid some of the problems of romantic-studies influenced accounts of the drama such as the Burroughs's collection, which tend to privilege literary production, as well as challenging the critical perspectives of romanticism itself. Moody reveals that the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate drama, however strictly defined and policed by law, had always been highly permeable. The managers of the patent theaters of Covent Garden and Drury Lane struggled fiercely to resist the threat of numerous challenges that began seriously in 1787 with Palmer's Royalty Theatre in the East End, but their own cultural hegemony was undermined by an increased reliance on “illegitimate” genres such as spectacle and by a radical political discourse in the regency that identified the patent houses' zealous protection of their monopoly with the spurious claims to “legitimacy” of Old Corruption. An important “cultural weapon” in the struggle between the major and minor theaters was Shakespeare whose appropriation by John Philip Kemble as “the quintessential defence of monarchical legitimacy” (p. 122) was counterblasted by Robert Elliston's dumb show and music version of Macbeth at the Royal Circus in 1809. Edmund Kean's appearance as Coriolanus at Drury Lane in 1820, the subject of Hazlitt's celebrated essay on the relationship between politics and art, represents an encounter between legitimacy and illegitimacy at the very heart of the London theater establishment. Moody's discussion of Kean, in conjunction with Joseph Grimaldi, as “illegitimate celebrities,” brings both performers out of the shadows of an antiquarian theater history to establish them as central figures in romantic culture as a whole.

Moody characterizes illegitimate theater in terms of an emphasis on “pasticchio effects” (p. 82), a subordination of the spoken word to the expressive powers of the body, and a preoccupation with marginal or exotic figures such as mute or the wild man. Melodrama, the quintessential illegitimate genre, exceeded sentimental drama in its capacity to “encode” contradictions, as well as to dramatize issues of censorship, particularly of speech (p. 91). But illegitimate theatrical culture encompassed more than genres and performances, Moody argues. It was expressive of a rapidly developing metropolis, the energies of which it both mediated and defined, like the Coburg's mirror curtain that spectacularized the audience to itself.

Illegitimate Theatre in London is important, not least for how it situates theater at the center of late Georgian culture, but it has its limitations in relation to conveying the complex history of the legal struggle between the majors and the minors—readers will still have to go elsewhere for that—and also in its analysis of the political issues involved. The relevance of theater politics to issues of governance, specifically the relationship between competing spheres of monarchical, parliamentary, and local authority is not explored, nor does Moody deal to any great extent with the significance of flare-ups in the controversy at times of major crises, in 1816 and again during the reform bill crisis. A sense of the developing context is moreover impeded by an erratic structuring of the argument in terms of chronology, for example, in the Shakespeare chapter. At the far end of the spectrum of illegitimacy was Richard Carlile's Rotunda theater that Moody claims “offers us a glimpse of a radical, uncensored theatre” (p. 103), but apart from a brief discussion of Robert Taylor's Swing, which was staged there, she does not engage with this incendiary theater, which surely represented the nightmare of unrestrained political expression that conditioned debates about theater politics in general. The presence of the Rotunda at the very margins of this study suggests why, though a much-needed cultural history of the theater of the period, it cannot be regarded as a definitive account of its “illegitimacy.”