“I can absolutely settle to nothing.—No Chaos ever equalled my head at present, & I will venture to pronounce the heads of half the People in this great Town. This day the Duchess of Kingston is tried for Bigamy—the whole Town has talked of nothing else, for this week past” (Kinservik 2). The young Anna Porter (later wife to John Larpent, Examiner of Plays) was not alone in her preoccupation with the spectacular piece of popular theatre that was the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh, which proved to be the biggest public event of 1776. The authors of two recent books on the theatricality of late eighteenth-century British culture concur in assigning a great degree of significance to this affair, noting that press coverage of the trial, which reputedly cost over £10,000, eclipsed the news of the American War and fascinated not just fashionable Londoners but the whole nation. In Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England, Matthew J. Kinservik amasses a great deal of contemporary evidence as to how the trial was regarded, citing eyewitness accounts from the likes of Porter, Hannah More, Edward Pigott, James Boswell, and others, as well as newspaper reports, in order to paint a rich picture of the atmosphere of the event. Gillian Russell's Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London also offers a detailed discussion of the trial, elucidating the cultural context of the legal and social judgment of one of the ultimate women of fashion.

At the time, the duchess's bigamy was considered by some as evidence of Britain's moral decline, for which the loss of the American colonies was a divine punishment. A contemporary poem entitled The Court of Adultery blames aristocratic women for the pitiful condition of the nation, and Chudleigh (described as “The Queen of Lust, of Sin, of Bigamy”) is identified as a particularly nefarious influence: her crime is characterized “as a form of treason that sowed the seeds of rebellion in the far-flung empire” (Kinservik 158). The poem employs the same sexual double standard used by the House of Lords, whose conviction of the duchess for bigamy can be seen, according to Kinservik, as the scapegoating of an upper-class English woman by the male members of the aristocracy in order to draw attention away from their own sexual indiscretions, which were increasingly coming under attack from the populace. Ultimately, however, the Lords' strategy failed: rather than abating, the public's anger and disgust at the immorality of the nobility intensified as a result of the publicity accorded to the Chudleigh affair.

Both authors consider the trial “as an important aspect of the complex social, political and economic changes of which the [American] war was a part” (Russell 177). Whereas Kinservik sees the duchess as a scapegoat, Russell considers the possibility that the event may have been more positive for the other women present. The court offered ladies of the nobility an “opportunity of collective embodiment” and a “form of political representation” (165) not afforded to them in the House of Lords. Though the peeresses may have had limited influence over the outcome of the trial, they were certainly acknowledged in print at the time, even if their role in the proceedings ultimately remained ambiguous: were they judging the duchess or were they, like her, on trial?

Although Kinservik acknowledges the performative nature of Chudleigh's trial, Russell goes further in situating it as part of the theatrical scene of the 1770s, which is broadly construed throughout her study to include a large number of entertainments such as balls, masquerades, pleasure gardens, clubs, assemblies, and so on. Indeed, the book opens with a reference to the Duchess of Northumberland's identification of the 134 types of entertainment on offer to the public in the year 1773. Thus the purveyors of London's most popular entertainments, Teresa Cornelys and her masquerades at Carlisle House, the proprietors of the Pantheon, and even David Garrick as manager of Drury Lane theatre, offered events to capitalize on the presence of so many members of fashionable society in town to see judgment passed on the duchess and eager for diversion. In this light, the European Magazine's identification of the trial alongside Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 as one of two precedents for the Handel Commemoration held at Westminster Abbey in 1784 seems less surprising. One of the major achievements of Russell's book is to expand our understanding of what constituted eighteenth-century theatricality by widening the scope of inquiry to include forms of diversion that are now often overlooked but were an integral part of the rich fabric of entertainment culture in the eighteenth century.

Both Kinservik and Russell argue that Chudleigh's quarrel with Samuel Foote was important to the bigamy trial. Each explores the controversy over Foote's play A Trip to Calais, which satirized the duchess's excessive, and by implication disingenuous, displays of grief for her husband's death. As a result of the influence of Elizabeth's friends, the play was banned. Kinservik foregrounds the public exchange of letters that ensued between the two protagonists, in which Chudleigh came across as “a perfect example of aristocratic immorality and hauteur” (131). Russell cites the quarrel as an important example of theatre engaging with the newly prominent fashionable lady, part of its attempt to construct itself as a bastion of manly taste in the face of the effeminizing influence of women such as Chudleigh. Thus A Trip to Calais is Foote's trial of the duchess and all that she stood for. Kinservik is able to go into more detail about Foote, examining the relationship between his trial for attempted sodomy later in 1776 and the earlier feud with the duchess. While he perhaps overstates his case when he says that this was “a much bigger scandal” than the bigamy trial (158), his meticulous examination of the case proves that Chudleigh tried hard to bring Foote down by bankrolling his accuser, John Sansgter.

Kinservik's book is structured around the events of Chudleigh's life (and to a lesser extent Foote's) and so provides a biography of the duchess. But it also constitutes a biography of the age, outlining a cultural history of scandal, celebrity, and even notoriety in the period. Thus, his description of eighteenth-century attitudes toward marriage in Chapter 2 is fleshed out with examples such as the story of Thomas Onslow, duped into marriage by an unscrupulous woman who encouraged him to recite the words of the Church of England marriage ceremony as part of a game and subsequently claimed a financial settlement from him. Similarly, Chudleigh's separation from her first husband, Augustus Hervey, is contrasted with the scandalous circumstances of the divorce of the prime minister, the Duke of Grafton. Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity is scrupulously researched and contains a wealth of information about eighteenth-century society, but it is also written for a more general audience. Some of the details provided may prove superfluous to readers immersed in eighteenth-century studies, but the story Kinservik tells is a compelling one and the narrative is gripping.

Russell's book perhaps has more to offer the scholarly reader in its detailed and persuasive analysis of the importance of the woman of fashion in public culture. Tightly focused on the 1760s and 1770s, the book is closely attuned (as is Kinservik's study) to the political, economic, and cultural events of the period and their impact on theatrical culture. This historicist method is teamed with close attention to several other important theoretical concepts, including Tracy Davis's definition of theatricality, Dror Wahrman's identification of “gender panic” in the late eighteenth century, and Peter Clark's concept of “fashionable sociability,” in order to examine the tension between a culture based on male homosociality and developments in fashionable entertainment linked to female sociability.

Russell's sweeping consideration of eighteenth-century theatricality yields fascinating results. She begins by exploring how the “meetings” held by Teresa Cornelys at Soho House bridged the gap between public and private culture, bringing elements of “domiciliary sociability” (11) to public entertainments held in a feminized space. The following chapter on the Cornelisian masquerade builds on Terry Castle's landmark study, but rather than seeing it as an escapist form Russell pays close attention to the historical context that shaped such entertainments. Further chapters consider the Ladies Coterie, founded in 1770, which presented a challenge to the male homosociality of coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs, and reconfigured the gender balance of the public sphere; and the Pantheon, London's “Palace of Pleasure” (88) which opened in 1772 and was subsequently identified in print culture as a venue for female obtrusiveness, excess, and display.

Through a detailed analysis of the sociable revolution instigated by Cornelys and continued in other forms of entertainment, Russell identifies an important context for eighteenth-century theatre that has not previously been explored. She examines the ways in which the plays of the period represent this feminized fashionable sociability and engage with the newly prominent woman of fashion. This engagement is particularly noticeable in theatrical paratexts: Russell is able to shed light on Garrick's epilogue to The Clandestine Marriage (1766), which enacts the competition between theatre and the new forms of entertainment. Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 and the 1774 play The Maid of the Oaks were attempts by theatre to emulate the theatrics of fashionable sociability. Russell persuasively argues that the Jubilee was Garrick's attempt to mobilize Shakespeare against Cornelys, not by invoking the cultural authority of the Bard but by staging the types of entertainment (masquerades, balls, and assemblies) that Cornelys had popularized.

Consideration of the public culture of the 1760s and 1770s leads to new readings of three other relatively well-known plays. Garrick's afterpiece Bon Ton; or, High Life above Stairs (1775) attempts to construct the theatre as an alternative to the masquerade, but the fashionable female character Miss Tittup problematizes this opposition, since her association with the masquerade highlights the fact that both practices depend on being something one is not, on “the thrill of performative indeterminacy” (201). Sheridan's now canonical School for Scandal (1777) pits two different modes of sociability against each other: the feminized gossiping of Lady Sneerwell and the masculine camaraderie of Charles Surface, in an attempt to render the woman of fashion (Lady Teazle and all that she represents) invisible and quash her influence on public culture. Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (1780) is a direct response to Sheridan, celebrating rather than satirizing the woman of fashion and constructing performativity as a positive facet of her identity.

Present through much of Russell's persuasive study is the figure of the actress Frances Abington, who specialized in fine lady roles (notably in many of the plays discussed in the book) and who offstage was considered a prime example of the woman of fashion. Abington is perhaps most famous for the cap that she popularized, which was widely copied by women of all classes, but Russell explores depictions of her wearing the high-headed wig fashions of the period. The cultural phenomenon of high headdress, at its peak in the period 1776–8, was widely mocked in satirical prints and became a symbol of the woman of fashion's obtrusiveness in public culture, a sure sign of the cultural anxiety and “gender panic” that she was beginning to provoke. It was also a theatrical phenomenon in that such ostentatious hair fashions depended on an audience for their display. Russell's examination of the female high hair of the 1770s as a “discursive formation” (following Marcia Pointon) yields fascinating new insights into the theatricality and the feminization of eighteenth-century culture. This is a book that links cultural history, theatre history, and gender to expand our understanding of each and to shed new light on the period as a whole.