In Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939, Matthew Franks expands the understanding of a form of theatrical organization that emerged as an alternative to the commercialized popular drama of the Victorian era. Most often associated with the rise of a self-consciously intellectual theater aimed at small coterie audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private subscription offered organizations such as J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre Society a way to circumvent both formal censorship and the economic imperative to produce lavish, long-running plays. Yet, as Franks convincingly demonstrates, this view of subscription theaters and their audiences represents only one facet of a complex, wide-ranging, and often contradictory phenomenon that evolved through the first half of the twentieth century and continues today. Although Franks begins with private subscription and intellectual theater of the 1880s and 1890s in London, in subsequent chapters he explores divergent manifestations of subscription as a practice—from public subscription outside the metropolis (in Dublin, Glasgow, and Liverpool), to representations of subscription on stage, subscription's role in the amateur theater movement, and subscription as virtual theater in E. Gordon Craig's periodical The Mask. Holding these diverse manifestations of subscription theater together is Franks's interest in the ways that this form allowed theater enthusiasts to participate in democratically shaping theatrical repertoire in Britain and Ireland.

In developing his argument, Franks incorporates a wide range of textual primary sources to great effect. In addition to using traditional print sources such as contemporary periodicals and newspapers, archives, and play texts, he also draws extensively on theatrical ephemera and employs a digital humanities approach to engage in quantitative analysis of the more than 23,000 productions recorded in J. P. Wearing's The London Stage, 1890–1959: Accumulated Indexes (2014). The study of ephemera has recently become a major focus of Victorian scholarship, and in Subscription Theater Franks's engagement with play programs and tickets, subscription lists, prospectuses, and annual reports complicates the traditional view—derived largely from the perspective of contemporary London theater critics—that class affiliation shaped distinct taste-based audiences for mass commercial and coterie highbrow forms of drama. Engaging in analysis of both lists of subscribers and the ways individuals participated in public discourse across a range of organizations and locations, Franks illustrates the ways subscription took in diverse individuals from many locations and walks of life. By examining broad trends in theater organization alongside individual contributions, including the economic activity of participating in subscription theaters and contributing to public discourse, Franks very effectively suggests the complex ways audiences negotiated and engaged with different forms of theater at the time.

One real strength of this volume is Franks's quantitative analysis of production trends using a database constructed from Wearing's The London Stage. This analysis allows Franks to demonstrate the impact of small subscription theaters on modern repertoire by contrasting the popular long-run plays often singled out as exemplars of contemporary tastes (many of which were produced only a few times) with the short-run plays that were produced repeatedly in different subscription theaters. This is an excellent use of a digital humanities methodology that suggests exciting new directions for the historical research of theater and drama. Yet, this important contribution to scholarship is surprisingly underplayed; indeed, it feels like a missed opportunity that discussion of the database is limited to a single footnote. This aspect of Subscription Theater got me very curious: I would have liked to know more about how Franks and his collaborators developed this resource and if they intend to make it available to other scholars at some point.

Throughout, Franks's innovative use of diverse primary sources represents a significant and exciting contribution both to theater history and to the understanding of the formation of modern dramatic repertoire. Most significantly, his focus on audiences’ participation in subscription theaters challenges the distinction often made between popular and intellectual audiences for drama that has underpinned perceptions of a commercial/coterie dichotomy in theatrical organization since the nineteenth century. In place of Arnoldian, top-down characterizations of distinct, class-based audiences that predominated through the last decades of the nineteenth century, Franks offers a more heterogeneous, context-specific, and bottom-up sense of the ways that culture was negotiated rather than imposed. Consideration of how broad and diverse forms of audience engagement shaped theatrical culture in unanticipated ways is the primary focus of Franks's engagement, in this volume, with democracy, and there are interesting counterpoints throughout—including a fascinating examination of the unsettling effect of audience participation in Craig's self-consciously elite periodical, The Mask.

Throughout this volume, Franks develops aspects of this focus on democratic participation in culture ambitiously and well, but he nonetheless struggles at times to do more than touch on the many fascinating questions he raises. He offers, for example, discussion of the ways subscription appeared within specific plays, but it would be fascinating had he paused over individual examples and examined more closely the ways a particular prop or plot point inflected the larger meaning of the plays in which it appears. Similarly, Franks deals in a somewhat cursory way with questions about the broad social and cultural contexts of democracy in relation to representative theater, though he certainly lays the groundwork for further study. How, for example, did subscription theater sit alongside the movement for a national theater that aspired to national participation in a different way? Were the class and gender politics examined here inflected by the extension of political democracy? Did questions about political independence in Ireland result in different manifestations of cultural democratization? It is not therefore a criticism of Subscription Theater to suggest that Franks's ambitious engagement with diverse locations and theatrical cultures, a sixty-year timeline, and multiple versions of subscription raise more questions about theater and democratization than he can answer in the scope of one volume. Indeed, both thematically and methodologically, Subscription Theater is not only an important contribution to the study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theater, but it is also a catalyst for further scholarship.