This book enters into the current theater-historiographical debates to cogent, sometimes brilliant, effect and moves forward the discussion of several difficult areas, such as the redefinition of “the popular” and its reading within more nuanced understandings of class. Declaring his approach to be a combination of Foucauldian concepts, especially that of “police,” with Habermas's understanding of the public sphere, John O’Brien suggests that we read theater history itself as stemming from the point in the 1660s where theater, now for the first time separated from the court on the one hand and the pastimes of the people on the other, became a “case” to be considered, an entity to be defined and historicized. Within this stream of historicization, he makes an argument for Harlequin, as he flourished in Britain in the 1720s, as an “event” in theater history through which we may understand the process whereby entertainment came to be conceived of not as an instrument of state power but as a commodity to be used in the modern political and cultural realms.

This approach yields various insights both particular to the early pantomime and more widely applicable to our understanding of the nature and uses of theater in society. O’Brien, drawing on Susan Stewart, suggests that we understand “entertainment” as one of the “crimes of [or, as he amends it, `against’] writing” (xvii)—that is, as one of the practices that are perceived as “inversions or negations of cultural rules” (xvii). Hence the vilification of entertainment by those who have wished to pursue theater as a literary medium, writers whose loyalties are to “a literary conception of culture” (xvii). The materiality of the stage fatally undermines this construction, which favors the spoken, textual drama. Embodied performances—dancing, singing, spectacle, and, in this case, pantomime—are perceived as “hijacking the cognitive apparatus and installing passion over reason as the dominant faculty in the spectator's minds” (xviii). To this O’Brien attributes some of the ferocity of the attacks upon John Rich for his commercially successful introduction of Harlequin to Britain; through this, O'Brien discusses the conception of theater itself and the long-running contest for possession of the stage. His third chapter, called “wit corporeal,” deploys these arguments around the concept of spectatorship and its political dimensions as he explores early eighteenth-century theories of polite society and humanity, as well as of acting. He ends the book with Garrick's management at Drury Lane, and especially his antipantomime Harlequin's Invasion, arguing that this move, emblematic of Garrick's personal success, represented the public sphere's assimilation of the bodily, the theater of action, to the legitimate theater of the word.

One of the major difficulties of the new theater history is to find ways of paying enough attention to what we now feel to be the neglected corporeality of our subject, and this book is no exception: there is only one, not entirely successful, chapter that attempts to evoke the actual experience of the new pantomimes on stage, and the author admits the impossibility of going further in the direct exploration of the nontextual theater of the past in the absence, precisely, of legible texts. The whole book suffers from some challenges of organization, perhaps because of this central absence of its avowed subject, and there are repetitions and overlaps between its various chapters as each of them attempts to approach the early British pantomime and its context from a slightly different—but still textual—direction. The faint mirroring of performance on the page, with a central chapter billed as an “entr’acte” and the first page of each chapter mimicking the playbill in a narrow column of variously sized type, may strike the reader as whimsical rather than germane to the project of the book. But the insights offered by the various chapters are richly worth the difficulties of threading one's way through to them. O’Brien's arguments about entertainment and its assimilation-rejection offer important modifications of Jane Moody's understanding of the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate in the theater of the later eighteenth century. He explains the modern Christmas pantomime, still a seasonal treat in Britain and sometimes now the only live, professional theater experience we offer to children, as a creation of Garrick, and a deliberate move in the public sphere to exert control by a nostalgic, self-conscious reinstitution of the pastimes of the poor; O'Brien offers thereby new light on the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the apprentice, who becomes the “mass subject,” the mob as consumer of theater.

O’Brien's placing of Harlequin's black mask into the context of early eighteenth-century understandings of race and class, where “in the absence of a critical language of class, [racial difference] provided a symbolic repertoire for describing the differences between elite and plebeian formations” that “could be appropriated by the lower orders themselves” (129) has great explanatory power throughout the symbolic realm in Britain. It also forms one of the pillars of his reading of Harlequin's Invasion, where it contributes to a rich understanding of that text as a marker of burgeoning national identity at a crucial time in the history of the nation-state. This final chapter is an exemplary display of the greatest strength of this book, which is O’Brien's ability to articulate theater with political and social history. The book is about how we read and understand theatrical events within the whole; Garrick, Harlequin, and Walpole are brought into particular conjunctions at specific moments, with explanatory power that could not be generated by treating theater as its own context and justification, nor by looking only to literary history for its analogues and explanations. Harlequin Britain is a good example of how to write cultural history today, a book that deploys wide cross-disciplinary reading to explicate a very particular, and at the same time highly symbolically resonant, set of phenomena.