Peering through the lens of feminist theory, this study asks readers to give Catherine II, the often maligned empress–playwright, her due as an innovative force in the history of Russian theatre. Contemporaneous critical response is scarce and hardly disinterested; the license to punish, or favour, accrued even to the most enlightened autocrat. How, then, could Catherine's supporters profess anything less than admiration for her plays and operas? And how are twenty-first-century readers to evaluate their intellectual and aesthetic merits? Despite these obstacles, O'Malley ventures boldly into the maelstrom of Catherinian theatre and politics, offering articulate, informed and largely persuasive arguments about the merits of the empress's dramatic oeuvre, some of which was splendidly produced both privately and publicly. She wrote moral comedies in the neoclassical mode, dramatic proverbs, operas and comic operas, and even experimented with Shakespearean themes and form well before nineteenth-century Romantics took up the bard's cause.

The chief merits of this study lie in elegant close readings, careful scholarship and persuasive claims for the complexity, literary style, innovation and inherent playability of Catherine's works for the stage. Even sceptics may be persuaded that historians of eighteenth-century Russian theatre have overlooked one of the era's most important playwrights. The weaknesses are slight and lie primarily in O'Malley's claims for Catherine's progressive views on national identity and support for native dramaturgy and the embryonic professional Russian theatre. The formation of Russian national identity at the time is a complex topic, and Catherine, like other autocrats, endeavoured to control the process from the top. Paradoxically, Catherine – the German princess – seemed not to know pioneering philosophers of German Romanticism, especially Johann Herder, whose work in the 1770s influenced the next generation of Russian nationalists. Thus her understanding of the ‘people’ (narod) remained paternalistic and her appreciation of Shakespeare was more in the spirit of Voltaire and Aleksandr Sumarokov than of Herder and Nikolai Polevoi, whose translation of Hamlet in the 1830s broke decisively with neoclassical regularization.

Catherine's progressive tendencies must be seen in context – not just of what came before, but also of what came after. Her support for native dramaturgy and the newly formed Russian national theatre was much more equivocal than suggested here. Catherine promoted her own work with lavish productions at the Hermitage and ‘stone’ theatres, but she was considerably less generous to playwrights like Sumarokov. Paradoxically – especially in view of mounting tensions between Russia and France – she subsidized the French theatre in St Petersburg at twice the amount given to the Russian national theatre. Her actions were, however, consistent with autocratic views on national identity formation, which renders the authority to delimit identity exclusively to the autocrat. These are, nonetheless, small quibbles with an otherwise excellent study of Catherine's dramatic works, which should be required reading for theatre historians.