In recent decades, the sociology of spectatorship has provided historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera with a host of meaty questions: Who attended opera productions during those years? How did audience members behave once they entered the theater? And perhaps most important, what did they hear? One piece of this puzzle has long been certain: throughout much of the history of opera, spectatorship was a noisy business in which audience members amused themselves by talking to each other, rambling around the theater visiting friends, forging political alliances, gambling, eating—engaging, in other words, in a wide variety of activities that had nothing to do with sitting down and listening politely to the musical production at hand. This knowledge leads to one of the most engaging questions concerning the sociology of opera: when and why did spectators turn their attention away from one another and toward the stage?

This is the central issue occupying Jennifer Hall-Witt's Fashionable Acts. Following in the wake of similar studies of shifting audience behavior in Paris (James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995]) and in the United States (Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]), Hall-Witt focuses her attention on London's opera houses from the late Georgian period through the Victorian era. Whereas in Paris and the United States changes in audience behavior have been attributed to the increase of middle-class patrons who were determined to listen to the operatic music on display, Hall-Witt argues that distinct cultural forces were at work in Great Britain. “The transformation of audience behavior—from the chatty, performative spectatorship of the 1780s to the more quiet, polite listening of the 1870s—occurred in large part,” she argues, “because of changes in how the upper class conducted itself at the opera” (3). It was the “elites” (the fashionable members of the aristocracy), in other words, who were largely responsible for the “rise of silent listening” in London (6). What motivated them to quiet down?

Hall-Witt addresses this question in two “acts,” the first covering the late Georgian period (chaps. 1–3), the second focusing on the Victorian era (chaps. 4–6). During the earlier phase, opera productions in London were populated almost entirely by the country's highest-ranking and wealthiest families. Attending productions on a regular basis, members of this relatively small segment of society were intimately acquainted with one another, the opera house serving as an oversized living room in which social networks were continually constructed and negotiated. The real spectacle did not occur on the stage, in other words; it took place in the theater's pit and boxes. Some members of the elite, moreover, took a direct interest in the opera itself, funding productions and acting as patrons of the most promising singers and dancers. And aristocratic women who—according to long-standing custom—remained seated in their privately owned boxes exerted control over the theater's social geography by inviting some people to visit and, perhaps more significantly, not inviting others. The opera house, in other words, represented a microcosm of British society in which the politics of exclusivity dominated the atmosphere.

Effective for a time, this exclusivist ethos came under increasing attack by the press, novelists, satirists, and others, damaging the image of the aristocracy and gradually compelling them to reform their behavior, both inside and outside the opera house. It is these reforms that occupy the second half of Fashionable Acts. The Victorian era, Hall-Witt illustrates, was characterized by a conscious attempt among the elite to place a set of newly cultivated good manners on display. These years witnessed the publication of books on etiquette that established a new set of conventions concerning proper behavior at the opera. Moreover, the social and gendered landscape of the theaters underwent significant revision. Seating throughout the opera house became stratified according to class as opposed to gender. Queen Victoria and her entourage attended productions frequently and seated themselves prominently in the central box. The wealthiest and most powerful attempted to cluster as close to her as possible, rather than to scatter themselves throughout the house as had been the case during the Georgian era. Then, following Victoria's lead, they turned their attention toward the stage rather than toward each other. This behavior had a trickle-down effect, where the high aristocracy set an example for all others who attended operatic productions: silent attention became a desirable mark of high culture.

In Fashionable Acts, Hall-Witt covers an enormous amount of ground, investigating the behavior of London's opera audiences through the lenses of gender studies, political theory, theatrical history, and music history, and she draws on an equally large number of sources, gathering evidence from contemporary journalistic criticism; archival evidence such as subscription lists and accounts of ticket sales; memoirs, letters, and diaries of aristocrats who attended operatic productions on a regular basis; and a wide array of secondary sources. The book contains some flaws that might prove frustrating to readers. At times, for example, the author relies excessively on secondary literature, such that her prose is often overrun by sentences that begin with “As X has written,” or “As Y has observed.” This reliance on secondary literature is reflected in the book's copious footnotes, and while Hall-Witt grants full credit to all of her scholarly debts, the abbreviated style of her notes and the absence of a bibliography (no doubt dictated by the publisher's house style) render it difficult at times to identify the source. These complaints aside, however, Fashionable Acts represents an important contribution to the fields of opera history and the sociology of music, and it will serve as an invaluable resource for those interested in opera spectatorship throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.