In October of 1666, the two most powerful men in Ireland—Robert Boyle, the Earl of Orrery, and the James Butler, the Duke of Ormond—exchanged a series of alarmed letters about a play that had been staged in a Jesuit boys’ school in Charleville, County Cork. It was Orrery who first became aware of the play, writing to Ormond that not only was this a poor play but it effectively constituted a threat to the state: “the argument was bad, the plot worse, and the contempt of authority worst of all” (14). Ormond replied as soon as he opened the letter, agreeing that the performance was an outrage, and authorizing Orrery to close the school and imprison the schoolmaster.

Patrick Tuite opens Theatre of Crisis with this little incident, by asking why a schoolboy play should have taken up so much of the time of Ireland’s leaders at a time when they certainly had weightier issues to concern them. His answer weaves its way through print culture, Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre, sermons, public ceremonials, and firework displays, arguing that in the period after 1662 there was a conscious effort to stage the exercise of authority in a very disunited kingdom. As such, Tuite’s book is a much-needed addition to the literature on performance in Irish culture, and for many of us it will take its place on the bookshelf as a companion to Alan J. Fletcher’s much-admired Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Toronto, 2000).

Having said this, Tuite’s argument is not without its problems. In his desire to locate theater within a wider set of cultural practices, his opening chapter proposes a theoretical model premised on a categorical confusion between media and cultural practices. “Whether through a theatrical production, a sermon delivered at a religious service, or a state-sponsored spectacle,” he writes, “such media required people to embody or, at the very least, provide a voice for the characters, actions, and abstract concepts found in the narratives that each medium supplied to its patrons” (19). It appears that Tuite seems to consider anything that signifies to be a “medium,” including theatrical performances and sermons. This is not, in fact, the case. There is, of course, a body of medium theory (to which no reference is made), in which a minimal definition would hold that a medium is a communications technology whose content is defined by its physical form (a radio is aural regardless of culture or history, print is visual, and so on). A sermon, on the other hand, is a cultural practice, defined by codes (or, indeed, explicit laws) that determine its content. Without certain culturally or theologically defined elements, a sermon is simply not a sermon. It may form the content of differing media (print, manuscript, broadcast), but it is not a medium per se. One way to think about this is to imagine an anthropologist unfamiliar with the codes of a given culture, who may well mistake a religious ceremony for a play (a comparison that Tuite points out was often made in seventeenth-century Ireland), but not even the most culturally disoriented observer would mistake a book for a radio.

Fortunately, however, having set up this misconstrued conceptual framework, Tuite proceeds to ignore it for most of the rest of the book. Where there is a theoretical underpinning, it is a much more useful (for this book’s purposes) anthropological understanding of performance (more Victor Turner than Judith Butler). However, for the most part, Theatre of Crisis is a densely detailed historical narrative—and is the better for it. Tuite has a knack for picking out key figures and using biographical sketches of their careers to open out the institutions of late seventeenth-century Ireland. So, for instance, his chapter on print culture provides a lively account of the Crook family, who dominated the Irish print industry of the time, adding to the pioneering work in the field of Robert Munter and Mary Pollard (the latter, although referenced, is inexplicably absent from the bibliography). Likewise, the chapter on Smock Alley Theatre will introduce many readers to its influential (and long-serving) manager, Joseph Ashbury, while the chapter on public ceremonials is a rare source of scholarship on one of the most fascinating figures of the period, John Ogilby: theater manager, mapmaker, and stage manager of Charles II’s coronation. Finally, the closing chapter, on sermons and religious culture, adds to the scholarship on the religious controversialist William King and hints at work to be done on a fascinating group of Jesuits (the same Jesuits who drew the attention of Orrery and Ormond), including a Fr. Gelosse (we are never quite on a first-name basis with the gentleman), whose disguises while living undercover allegedly included a fagot dealer, servant, thatcher, beggar, milkman, and dealer in rabbit skins.

In fact, if Tuite’s work has a methodological home, it is with the kind of classic New Historicist work that critics such as Stephen Greenblatt have been producing since the early 1990s, in which carefully excavated historical detail produces unexpected textual readings. For instance, writing of a 1692 production of Othello in Smock Alley, performed largely by members of the garrison in Dublin Castle, Tuite argues that an audience habituated to allegorical interpretation by public ceremonials and displays would have read Othello as a political allegory—a speculative allegory that Tuite then proceeds to unfold. As a reading of the play, this is both unexpected and convincing. His skill at providing this kind of succinct analysis is particularly welcome when he turns his attention to playwrights on whom there is a dearth of scholarship, such as John Dancer or Richard Head. Admittedly, sometimes one might quibble that in focusing on the lesser-known figures, Tuite sometimes misses bigger targets. For instance, he uses the actor Robert Wilks to make a convincing case that alumni of Dublin’s Smock Alley were to be extremely influential on the London stage in the first decade of the eighteenth century; however, in doing so he fails to even mention George Farquhar, who began as an actor in Smock Alley in the mid-1690s, whose success as a writer was inextricably linked to roles he wrote for Wilks, and whose work shows all the signs of the political and cultural tensions of life in late seventeenth-century Ireland that Tuite traces so ably throughout the rest of Theatre of Crisis.