The 1980s saw the publication of three monographs on the Meiningen Court Theatre. Since then access to material held in the State Archives in Meiningen and the German State Library in Berlin has become simpler, leading to publications on the whole range of Duke Georg's cultural activities, and the exhibition of visual material that is central to his achievement. Possibly because we still have difficulty in taking the nineteenth-century theatre's conventional systems on their own terms, this rich and varied material has not yet had the exposure that it merits at a time when the role of the director in the (re)interpretation of classical drama, and the adaptation of Shakespeare's plays, are frequently subjects of controversy.

Hoffmeier's book, the first to exploit the material extensively, does much more than fill in the details lacking from earlier, less privileged studies. He goes beyond more narrowly theatre-historical scholarship, firmly placing the company and its tours in their time and place: the simultaneously forward- and backward-looking Germany of the first unification. His approach permits him to see through the immediately obvious (the innovative management of crowd scenes) or the apparently irrelevant (the ostracism of Duke Georg's morganatic wife by the Prussian court) and show how such matters either bear the imprint of contemporary political attitudes or, by the reaction provoked, contribute indirectly to the development of a form of theatre that supplanted that of the court.

The book is divided into three sections, with significant overlap. Section 1 is focused on the emergence and development of the theatre in nineteenth-century Germany up to the point at which the duke saw his ‘cultural mission’ shifting to Europe at large. The survival of the eighteenth-century idea of a national theatre and the absence of a theatre capital at a time of rapid urban growth combined to create a need that Georg was quick to recognize, so that we have the paradox of a court theatre from a small duchy assuming (or having thrust upon it) the role of national theatre in the capital city; meanwhile the Berlin Court Theatre (and prominent figures like Devrient, Laube and Dingelstedt) failed to respond. Against this background Hoffmeier considers questions of repertoire, textual editing, the influence of the press, the function of the claque and the phenomenon of the peripatetic virtuoso actor.

The second section, preceded by forty pages of colour illustrations of scenery and costumes, is devoted to more broadly aesthetic matters. Some of the illustrations have previously been published, but the insight that is given here into one of the two best-known aspects of the Meiningen Company's achievement, and into the contribution of Max and Gotthold Brückner (the favourite scene designers of Richard Wagner), is quite unprecedented.

There follows an account of the rise of the director, and the special place of Duke Georg and his collaborator Ludwig Chronegk, and then a discussion of the second-most-celebrated feature of Meiningen productions, the crowd scenes. This also goes well beyond theatre aesthetics in its differentiation between the kinds of effect sought and their significance in the sociopolitical context. This section is completed by an examination of the Meiningen company's contribution to the establishment of Kleist as a canonical dramatist. Here the relative failure of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, with the twenty-year-old Josef Kainz in the title role, created another paradox, for among actors it was Kainz who became most closely associated with the discovery of Kleist.

The book ends with reconstructions of the three plays most frequently performed on tour: Julius Caesar, The Winter's Tale and Wilhelm Tell, generously illustrated with Duke Georg's sketches.

In all sections the author looks back to the origins of modern German theatre, leads up to the Meiningen tours, and concludes by looking forward to their subsequent impact up to Stanislavsky. Inevitably this gives the account a certain teleological character, but any sense that the material has been forced into a preconceived narrative is mitigated by the deployment of a wealth of concrete evidence. An alternative possibility might be to regard this as two books, a comprehensive account of German theatre in the nineteenth century, intercut with an assessment of a remarkable episode within it.