Historians of the eighteenth century have contended with varying configurations of the ‘public sphere’ since Jürgen Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. Its 1989 English edition has prompted historians of early America to revise Habermas's model, which claimed that the public sphere emerged out of the trade of commodities and the rise of print media. Women and non-Anglo-Saxons were often elided from that historiography, and Dillon's development of a ‘performative commons’ (p. 14) is an important and compelling addition to recent histories from below, focusing on counterpublics and ‘people out of doors’ (a phrase popularized by American historian Gordon S. Wood to connote those who had no access to institutions of power).

Dillon argues that eighteenth-century theatre was ‘a space at which the body of the people was, literally, materialized’ (p. 4). That concept is not new to eighteenth-century historiography, as theatre scholars have explored in depth the social stratifications of box, pit and gallery. Dillon's contribution is the way she expands the notion beyond the walls of the playhouse and into colonized lands; she argues that eighteenth-century drama was built on ‘a geographical relation that underpins capitalist modernity and that enables settler colonialist racialization to serve as the bedrock of an expropriative biopolitics from the late seventeenth century forward to today’ (p. 8). Because this ‘colonial relation’ (p. 8) emphasizes the eradication of indigenous peoples, the ‘performative commons’ augments the ‘public sphere’ to include the oppressed.

One of Dillon's many convincing readings concerns William D'Avenant's 1658 court masque The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru. D'Avenant's masque of the torture of Peruvians used spectacle to organize his audience by appealing to their sentiment. According to Dillon, in seeing and feeling the cruelty of the Spaniards, the audience (which consisted primarily of Royalists who looked forward to Charles II's restoration) became a people who saw themselves as the only proper imperial force: ‘it is not the discovery of the New World by the Spanish that is the basis for authority, but their inhumane behavior; and it is contrastingly the humane behavior of the English that legitimates their possession of the land’ (p. 81). English sympathy was centre stage, not the plight of real Peruvians: the masque was a ‘theatrics of erasure’ (p. 8) that invoked the people of Peru with the sole aim of making the English sovereign.

That dispossession occurs throughout the period and the places that Dillon explores, and the book's structure itself is an argument for a circumatlantic – and not merely transatlantic – view of the eighteenth century, as it begins in London and moves to Charleston, Kingston and New York. Dillon's reading of specific historical moments is impressive and elegant, yet her greatest contribution is her use of the performative commons as a methodology: ‘the new political commons of the people is largely construed in terms of representation and abstraction, theatricality and the specific space of the theatre foreground the inextricable nature of these two dimensions of the commons’ (p. 6). Dillon makes the case that theatre history should include those who are not (legitimately) represented onstage. Students of eighteenth-century theatre will find Dillon's scholarship to be of critical importance to their work, perhaps more so than Habermas's.