Imperial history and theatre history have become key allies in eighteenth-century studies. Scholars ranging from the late Jeffrey Richards to the author of this review on the American side, and Gillian Russell to Kathleen Wilson and Daniel O'Quinn on the British, have laid bare the importance to British colonialism of word theatre's applicability to activities both dramatic and martial. In particular, the turmoil caused by the rebellion of the North American colonies unleashed a wealth of new performances, theatrical and otherwise, on the British Empire. Such treatments have, however, generally examined the impact of these performances in colonial locations. Less attention has been paid to whether or not these texts returned to the metropolis via the circulation of mercantile and cultural capital in the circum-Atlantic world. O'Quinn, whose previous work focused chiefly on the Indian theatre of operations, has here shifted his attention to destabilizing effects of the American crisis on the print and theatre cultures of Great Britain. O'Quinn deserves high praise not only for turning the lens of genealogical history onto the popular entertainments of the London theatre, but also for drawing together theatrical and journalistic sources from what he calls the ‘transient and ephemeral archive’ that documents such short-lived topical diversions (p. 4). The result is a powerful examination of British national identity and its possible futures at key moments of crisis and defeat.

If Julie Stone Peters made it clear that the European theatre and the printed play evolved together, O'Quinn does the same for the theatre and the newspapers that chronicled the doings of its performers, impresarios and, sometimes, patrons. In examining a series of entertainments, often highly topical in nature, that occur at moments of political or military danger to the empire and incorporating the wealth of responses to them in metropolitan newspapers and periodicals, O'Quinn illustrates a nation confronting the possibility that the rhetoric of republican virtue and freedom that had previously defined its nationhood was no longer applicable to it. O'Quinn focuses on entertainments that reasserted the importance of patrician homosocial bonds as the key to maintaining national order and prosperity. Most notably, he examines in depth the theatre maven General John Burgoyne's 1774 Fête Champêtre, an allegorical entertainment that toasted both the wedding of Burgoyne's nephew and British imperium, and The Mischianza, an elaborate 1778 spectacle in Philadelphia designed to celebrate (and recuperate) the departing Lord William Howe, recalled to the metropole after disastrous losses at the hands of the American insurgency. Balancing out such conservative performances, O'Quinn offers detailed readings of texts by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Hannah Cowley that acknowledge the war's threat to British nationhood (and manhood) and envision the possible contours of a future patriotism, a resurrected imperial identity springing from the ashes of American defeat. O'Quinn wishes to ‘give a sense of a moment when it was unclear what Britain and Britons would become’ (p. 36), and he succeeds masterfully.