In this highly informative and readable volume, six authors introduce the history of theatre censorship in nineteenth-century Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Italy and the Habsburg monarchy. Each contextualizes the subject in relation to changing rulers and systems of belief, identifying principles and detailing political, moral and religious examples from across the century, and considering both the impact of the decisions and how they were sometimes resisted or negotiated. As editor, Robert Goldstein provides an overview, but the structure also allows the reader to identify similarities and differences across and within societies. It is the former which are most immediately striking, as authorities unconsciously replicate each other's concerns and claims, and justify the necessity for a control often applied uniquely to live performance. Meanwhile, day-to-day practices often prove inconsistent even within the same regime: as one commentator puts it, theatre censorship was ‘Abundant, diverse and contradictory’ (p. 163).

There are risks in compressing a hundred years (or more) of a nation's cultural history into a single chapter, and just occasionally this feels too much like a catalogue. However, each chapter offers its own insights and bizarre revelations: King Lear limited under the republic of Napoleon III to ‘an elite public’ because of its ‘degradation of royalty’ (p. 78); an author told that his text could be staged for Russian audiences but not in his native Ukraine since it was ‘not desirable that people see plays in the language which they understand’ (p. 150). Often, the unease and sensitivity of authorities may suggest an absurd level of paranoia – but as Goldstein points out, the theatre was the only place other than the church where different social classes gathered together in significant numbers and were exposed to ideas which they might otherwise not encounter. Equally revealing is the recurrent and contrasting belief that theatre itself performed the role of censor, distracting the dissatisfied from more dangerous associations and keeping them conveniently under direct surveillance.

Not everyone agreed on how effective control was. ‘No trace of us will remain,’ lamented one French newspaper (p. 88), but evidence from other times and places suggests the censor's decisions may have barely impinged. Thus in provincial Russia it seems ‘actors never adhered to the censors’ deletions and always performed the full text of the play’ (p. 153), while one French writer claimed to have presented his banned play hundreds of times ‘without interference’ (p. 109). Even when actors kept to the approved text, they could use voice and gesture to endow it with a meaning which the censors would not have approved, and there are also fascinating accounts here of audiences taking the lead in imposing perhaps unintended allusions on a text by their voluble and physical responses within a performance. This is an important book which gathers new research about the theatre that did exist in nineteenth-century Europe, and the theatre that did not. Importantly, it also reminds us that archives documenting overt suppression only ever tell one part of the story, and that self-censorship was equally significant. As one Spanish writer memorably, and ironically, put it, ‘If I don't write it, they can't ban it’ (p. 171).