For historians of drama, as for those of the European novel, the early 1740s have traditionally been regarded as the “dawn of an era” (1) as Norman S. Poser puts it in his lively but old-fashioned and sometimes unreliable overview of theatrical culture in mid-Georgian England and Ireland. Only months after Samuel Richardson permanently transformed novelistic characterization with the breathless epistolary style of his best-selling Pamela (1740), the craft of acting, so the story goes, was similarly revolutionized on London stages by two up-and-coming Shakespearean interpreters, Charles Macklin and David Garrick, whose turns as Shylock and Richard III, respectively, stunned audiences with their verisimilitude and attention to behavioral detail. As Poser enthuses, “Garrick, Macklin, and their contemporaries were pioneers: they jettisoned the artificial acting style of the previous era,” with its “catalog of ‘paint-by-numbers’ emotions,” in favor of a “new natural style, which had long-lasting consequences reaching into the twenty-first century” (xiv). One can almost hear the creaking of this familiar paradigm shift, which has been a mainstay of theatrical histories since the eighteenth century itself, and which no doubt derives in part from what Poser elsewhere documents as Macklin and Garrick's own indefatigable efforts at self-promotion. As with Richardson, whose reputation as the father of the English novel he was only too happy to endorse, Macklin and especially Garrick's own estimation of their talents and historical significance have been accepted with a surprising degree of credulity by modern scholars, who have often relied on crude (“paint-by-numbers,” even) characterizations of earlier acting techniques to distinguish them from the putative innovations of the 1740s. A major exception to this tendency is provided by the work of Joseph Roach, whose rigorously historicized study of histrionic theory from Quintilian to Stanislavski, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1993), structured around a brilliantly insightful discussion of Garrick, marked an overdue and influential departure from the mere collation of anecdotes and archival information that had typified much earlier writing about Georgian stagecraft.

Poser includes Roach in his bibliography, as well as other important scholars on eighteenth-century drama to have followed Roach's lead, such as Elizabeth A. Freeman, but their arguments do not seem to have informed Poser's approach, which is mostly to string together twice-told tales, some of them salacious and many of them patently apocryphal, about the key theatrical players from the 1740s to the 1770s (Macklin and Garrick but also Samuel Foote and Peg Woffington), usually with little in the way of analysis. The inclusion of a page-and-a-half excerpt from a verse attack on Garrick, for instance, is justified only by Poser's blandly admiring description of the lampoon as “apt—and hilarious” (121). Even if one accepts that Poser does not intend to write a thesis-driven monograph of the sort that one might expect from Routledge, but rather a work of narrative history, it is difficult to see what he adds to the already-crowded field of Garrick biography, or to the many other introductions to Georgian culture addressed to a popular audience, several of which Poser relies heavily upon. Poser's study is also preceded by another with a similar title, Jean Benedetti's David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre (2001), which he cites only in passing.

There are, moreover, numerous aspects of Poser's scholarly method that ought to give his reader pause. He can, for example, be alarmingly insouciant about the unreliability of his sources, as when he introduces a long gossip-mongering report of Garrick and Woffington's offstage romance (an endnote does not identify the provenance of this account) with a bluff assurance, provided without elaboration, that “it is probably a fair portrayal of his attraction to her, and her flirtatious charms” (16, emphasis added). (Here and elsewhere, Poser risks sounding patronizing or worse in his account of female actors, as when he pays them the dubious tribute of calling them “feisty” [172].) Poser also occasionally perpetuates canards that have been debunked or questioned by earlier scholars: the first two Georges were hardly, according to their recent biographers, “surly German kings who could not speak English,” nor, as any Boswellian could tell you, did Samuel Johnson lament to Garrick that “the silk stockings and white bosoms” conspicuous in the green room at Drury Lane “excite my amorous propensities,” or at least not in those words (84, 103). (The original quip, bowdlerized in The Life of Johnson (1791) but preserved in Boswell's private papers, is more clinical but less quotable.)

Even more discouraging is Poser's lack of enthusiasm for the original drama of his period, most of which he dismisses en masse as having “no lasting merit,” a blanket assessment that naturally makes one wonder how familiar he is with the individual plays in question (24). The reader's confidence is hardly bolstered by the high frequency with which Poser cites other scholar's quotations of those plays rather than the works themselves, or by his characterization of Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane, which premiered in 1701, as a “Restoration Age tragedy” (4). Academics who routinely assign the comedies of Susanna Centlivre, or who have edited them for reissue, for instance in the superb Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama (2017), will likewise protest against Poser's description of her as “forgotten today” (166). Poser also misspells Centlivre's Christian name, in only one of many small errors of fact and style across the book: I suspect, for instance, that one would search the membership roster of the Garrick Club in vain for “Alex Guinness” (172). Yet, whatever its limitations as a work of scholarship, The Birth of Modern Theatre is frequently an engaging read, as one would expect from a compendium of juicy thespian lore, including the flooding of Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee and the amputation of Foote's foot: these, truly, are anecdotes not of an age, but for all time.