Felicity Nussbaum's Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater explains how star actresses in the long eighteenth century leveraged public fascination with their roles and lives in order to achieve financial independence and upward mobility. Nussbaum's focus makes a persuasive case for a continuity between celebrity actresses 300 years ago and those commanding public attention today, especially as their bodies and personalities are used to frame discussions of femininity, nationality, and commercialism. Using case studies of Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, Catherine Clive, Margaret (Peg) Woffington, Frances Abington, and George Anne Bellamy, Nussbaum analyzes “the ways that the eighteenth-century stage reflected, shaped, and performed British womanhood on the porous boundary between the theater and the larger society to which it was central” (9). Though the project is a carefully researched, academically nuanced discussion of particular actresses, plays, and audiences, it might also be understood as an archaeology of “celebrity,” particularly female celebrity. Casting current academic arguments about stardom and celebrity into the theatrical past, Nussbaum's work stands with Joseph Roach's It and Marvin Carlson's The Haunted Stage as an important contribution to historical studies of the actor.

Nussbaum's research attempts to sidestep narratives of the actresses as prostitute, though she notes that most actresses were subjected to intense sexual scrutiny, and that “many … were mistresses to wealthy patrons and others led unorthodox lives” (25). Instead, Nussbaum defines them as rivals: with each other, for roles, money, and fame; with male managers and actors for economic and social parity; and with aristocratic and middle-class women for “cultural cachet and … virtue” (26). In the later chapters, she uses particular actresses to untangle these rivalries, defining and redefining key concepts in performance history and narratives of acting. In the first chapter, she focuses on celebrity, explaining how actresses were trained, acquired roles, and negotiated salaries and benefit performances. The chapter provides an overview of the working conditions for actresses in the long eighteenth century. In Chapter 2, Nussbaum traces the performance history of Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens, one of the period's most popular tragedies. Roxana and Statira, its heroines, were played by several pairs of actresses whom audiences were encouraged to understand as rivals. “The peculiar propensity” of the play, writes Nussbaum, “to produce lurid tidbits throughout the century arose because the acting paralleled the real-life situations of the actresses” (78). The actress–heroine conflation thus produced an “interiority effect” (25) that blended the actresses' personalities with the characters' emotions, realigning theatrical audience reception with the practices of novel reading already thoroughly explored by eighteenth-century scholars. The third chapter focuses on actresses' memoirs, and here Nussbaum's research is especially impressive. Many of these texts are rare, and “often exploitative and notoriously unreliable” (94); but Nussbaum considers a wide variety of autobiographical texts (from Lavinia Fenton's almost certainly ghostwritten memoirs to Kitty Clive's written protests against unscrupulous managers and unfair audiences) in order to demonstrate how celebrity actresses developed narratives of femininity that downplayed virtue as the most important quality a woman might possess.

In Chapter 4, Nussbaum focuses on the active exchange between actresses and audiences, especially female audiences, demonstrating the ways in which patronage continued to influence the theatrical repertoire and thus representations of femininity. Relationships between celebrity actresses and their female fans, Nussbaum argues, engendered a commercial theatre “in which women onstage and off actively engaged in negotiating a theatrical contract regarding the public representations of modern female subjectivity” (150). In the fifth chapter, Nussbaum uses Catherine (Kitty) Clive to explain how actresses became “performative property” (28), using their popularity to improve their working conditions, raise their salaries, and own their talents. She turns next to Margaret (Peg) Woffington, another actress who leveraged herself as performative property, teasing out how Woffington negotiated travesty roles, Irish vs. British patriotism, and unconventional sexuality through her public persona. Nussbaum's last case study considers Frances Abington, who parlayed her elegant stage representations into a second career as an arbiter of fashion and a consultant to aristocratic ladies. Like celebrity designers today, Abington “turned fashion into a religion … and the magic of capital into an aesthetic” (227). At the same time, she demonstrated how commodity fetishism might be understood as an indicator of women's social, economic, and political independence. Nussbaum's thorough history concludes at the end of the century by briefly considering the increased publication of plays, many written or edited by women, juxtaposing their success with that of Sarah Siddons. Siddons, she argues, is not as exceptional as traditional histories of actresses and acting often depict her to be, but rather a continuation of celebrity performance in the long eighteenth century.

The case studies are thorough, offering nuanced histories of much-neglected actresses and audiences. Nussbaum works through theoretically complicated models of performance, borrowing some ideas (such as Joseph Roach's concept of public intimacy) as well as developing her own (such as that of performative property). Obviously, the strengths of Rival Queens are many. At the same time, there are gaps and elisions in Nussbaum's argument. The most difficult to overlook is her too easy elision of actresses' experiences at the end of the seventeenth century with those in the middle of the eighteenth. Throughout the book, Nussbaum slips between generations without acknowledging how much public attitudes toward femininity, class, nationalism, and the theatre might have changed. The second criticism, though perhaps not entirely Nussbaum's fault, is that the book suffers from inconsistent citations, following both MLA and Chicago style, occasionally on the same page.

The book is a pleasure to read, with a deft balance of anecdote and theory, statistical data and narrative. Nussbaum, an acknowledged expert on gender and literature in the long eighteenth century, demonstrates her facility with eighteenth-century theatre as well. The book will certainly appeal to feminists, theatre historians, and scholars looking for nuanced histories of acting. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate scholars as well. Rival Queens' focus on the “cult of celebrity” (12) that surrounded eighteenth-century actresses makes the work especially relevant for scholars and classes that strive to bridge narratives of the theatrical past with disciplinary interests (like celebrity and stardom) that compel contemporary scholars.