As the subtitle of Reiko Oya's book indicates, the representing of Shakespearean tragedy follows the careers of the actors David Garrick (1717–79), the siblings John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) and Sarah Siddons (1755–1831), and Edmund Kean (1787–1833). But the book's “representing” encompasses literary criticism, playwriting, painting, and the whole cultural process of appropriating Shakespeare that stretches from the post-Restoration period to the Romantic Age. Resisting narrow critical ideology, Oya deftly weaves narratives drawn from theatrical anecdote, popular biography, letters, and various forms of criticism to trace an ongoing critical and cultural dialogue. With admirable economy, providing pertinent biographical detail where needed, she introduces a number of notable and some lesser known personalities who, in a variety of ways and in different venues, were representing Shakespeare and debating how Shakespeare should be represented on the stage or in the imagination of spectators and readers of the plays.

The book's introductory chapter, appropriately dedicated to a prologue, gives an accurate sense of the strength of Oya's method and style. The prologue, written for Garrick by “a struggling literary hack, one Samuel Johnson” (1), was to open Garrick's first season at the Drury Lane theater. Johnson's prologue traces the history of the London stage from Shakespeare to the present time when “The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live” (lines 53–54). Oya has much to say about the prologue, which Garrick never delivered, the personal relationship between the man of letters and the actor, and Johnson's somewhat pessimistic view of theater's decline from the original genius of Shakespeare to alternate extremes of adherence to rules—“From bard, to bard, the frigid caution crept, / Till declamation raor’d, while passion slept” (lines 31–32)—to the age of theatrical novelty: “Perhaps, where Lear has rav’d, and Hamlet dy’d, / On flying cars new sorcerers may ride” (lines 43–44). Johnson aside—and you can never put Johnson aside, and the book certainly does not—Oya uses the prologue to introduce some of the main voices in the dialogue that will continue into the next century, with Johnson joined by other important critics such as Burke, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, as well as the actors who represented and reinterpreted Shakespeare's major tragedies on the stage, and artists, like Sir Joshua Reynolds and William Blake, whose paintings or opinions on painting contributed to the debate.

Oya keeps each of her three main chapters focused on one of Shakespeare's tragedies (King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet), one major critical debate (madness, the sublime, the general, and the particular), and a dominant stage presence (Garrick, Kemble and Siddons, and Kean). Around that clear principle of organization, she can follow the ins and outs of the critical theory and theatrical anecdote. We see how Garrick's acting style served as a commentary on Shakespeare's text that generated a wide range of critical responses to and additional commentaries on both his performance and the question of madness in King Lear. Elizabeth Montagu plays on important role in the central debate between Shakespeare's truth to life and the strictures of neoclassicists like Johnson and the French classicist Voltaire (37).

Like Garrick playing the mad Lear, the siblings Kemble and Siddons took an innovative approach to the psychology of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth that set the blood and violence of the play in a new light. This middle chapter of the book uses paintings by Joshua Reynolds to explore the question of visible and invisible terror in Macbeth as it related to the emerging debate on the concept of the sublime that followed William Smith's translation of pseudo-Longinus's On the Sublime (1739) and Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757; 111–14).

The book follows a broadly chronological movement, occasionally underlining shifts in the historical and cultural perspective, as when the author uses William Blake's salvo against Reynolds for an appropriately dramatic shift to the spirit and style of the Romantic Age in the transition to chapter 3. This final chapter on Kean, Hamlet, Coleridge's play Osorio (1797), and Keats's Otho the Great (1819) returns to the ongoing debate on variety and uniformity in the representation of the tragic hero, a question of particular importance to the critic William Hazlitt. The process of composition of the admittedly minor plays of Coleridge and Keats serves to shed light on the genesis of Coleridge's concept of the willing suspension of disbelief and on Keats's equally important definition of negative capability.

Oya employs a symposium of critical views to assay a conclusion where none is really possible for a subject that continues to ebb and flow with the dynamic representation of Shakespeare on stage, canvas, and page. A return to Johnson's eminently quotable and prescient couplets might have served. The book is very readable, free of academic jargon, rich in historical detail, and thoughtful in its treatment of the important critical and aesthetic questions it raises. It spans and does justice to theater history, criticism, and the history of ideas; it is meticulously prepared and highly recommended.