British architectural history has remained remarkably unchanged since its modern formation in the post–World War II period. But slowly, slowly the wheel is turning, and one of those who has contributed to new histories of the subject is Vaughan Hart. This volume on John Vanbrugh follows on from Hart's previous work, Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders, published by Yale in 2002. In writing about this duo, he is following in the distinguished footsteps of Kerry Downes, who made the study of English Baroque his life's work and wrote the foundational monographs on these two architects in the 1970s. As with Hart's earlier monograph on Hawksmoor, this volume represents a revision of Downes's approach. In it Hart sets out to establish that Vanbrugh was not the playwright turned dilettante of Swift's famous rebuke whose “genius, without thought or lecture/ Is hugely turned to architecture” (29). Rather, as Hart shows, Vanbrugh was well read and well traveled, in both Europe and India, where the cemetery at Surat was a formative influence. He was up-to-date with the new science, as well as with the revolutionary aesthetic ideas of Addison and others on associational beauty. Hart argues that it is because of, not despite, this unconventional background that Vanbrugh went on to become the architect of choice for the Whig elite.

However, this is not to say that Hart's areas of interest are that different from Downes's. Hart, like his predecessor, is primarily interested in the visual aspects of architecture, particularly impact and meaning. Hart presents the key to understanding these functions as being through the unlocking of the narrative strands in Vanbrugh's architecture. There have been a number of biographies of the playwright-architect, but Hart goes a step further in considering architecture as a form of biography in its own right, be it of architect, client, or nation. The work is subtitled “Storyteller in Stone,” and it is the narrative element of Vanbrugh's architecture that is the central theme of Hart's work. The subtitle derives from a letter concerning Blenheim Palace where Vanbrugh wrote that the building itself will allow the viewer to “read the Duke of Marlborough in story” (xvi).

Reading architecture, then, is the theme of this book, and the author brings together a number of key factors that, he argues, constituted Vanbrugh's fictional-architectonic mix. Hart's approach is the most convincing of a number of studies to date in drawing out the rhetorical similarities between his two worlds. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Caroline Van Eck, who has explored the transference of rhetorical models and tropes between literature and architecture, Hart shows how, for Vanbrugh, both media were stage sets, the one for temporary performance and the other for the ongoing performance of aristocratic life. Vanbrugh's architecture is presented here as the equivalent of Dryden's search for a new form of English classical heroic verse.

Vanbrugh was immersed in English history, and Hart places his famous letter on the preservation of Woodstock Manor, a conservationist statement avant la lettre, at the heart of his argument. Vanbrugh held high office in the College of Heralds and became a Knight of the Garter. For him, Windsor Castle, the Knight's home, came to represent the archetypical national symbol. Hart suggests that the encapsulation of the historical and the hierarchical in heraldric emblems found a parallel in Vanbrugh's morally and historically charged use of ornament and symbolism. This was particularly true in his domestic commissions for aristocratic country houses; as Hart reminds us, Vanbrugh became the leading architect of what was the preeminent building type of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is particularly good on reexamining the ornamentation of Vanbrugh's buildings and offering new insights into the visual variety and strangeness encompassed there. He offers, for example, interesting analyses of why the front and rear facades of so many of Vanbrugh's houses differ, reading this as a formal masculine frontage and a feminized private garden façade.

The military themes in Vanbrugh's work and his unusual penchant for medieval buildings form another key strand of Hart's argument. An extensive discussion is provided of the famous or infamous “castle air,” which is presented not as a deviation from Vanbrugh's true classical instincts but as integral to his nationalistic, romantic, and historical interests. Vanbrugh, like many Whigs, constructed his ideal present through an identification with a medieval English, as well as a republican Roman, past. Hart examines the interplay between these two tropes extremely productively. Vanbrugh Castle, for example, the house Vanbrugh built for his family in Greenwich, is often discussed as an eccentric, if prescient, “also ran” in the architect's oeuvre. Here, however, it is presented as the summation of Vanbrugh's approach. The castle was the center piece of a larger estate on which Vanbrugh built five other houses for members of his family. Hart presents this as a modern version of Vanbrugh's idealized vision of medieval society: the castle at its center surrounded by domestic dwellings of a range of scales and types distinguished by their occupier's position in the patrilineal social hierarchy.

Hart has provided us with a compelling new account of Vanbrugh that brings together the separate strands of his life and convincingly argues that they achieved a synthesis in his built works. It would have been useful to have had more coverage of landscape, given that the author acknowledges its centrality to Vanbrugh's social and architectural vision. However, as John Soane—another highly individualistic interpreter of the classical tradition—said of Vanbrugh, he is “the Shakespeare of British architects” (252). Like Shakespeare, Vanbrugh is too big a subject to be contained within one study, but this fascinating and revelatory account has opened up many fruitful new avenues for reflection and future research.