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Daniel O'Quinn. Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. 440. $75. What is theater for? In this remarkably original and detailed study, Daniel O'Quinn argues that in the late-eighteenth century theater served the culturally complex purpose of entertainment. O'Quinn's book begins by exploring the nuances of "entertainment," noting that it evokes both the work of amusement on the part of players and producers and the reception of a performance by a particular audience, either in person or in print. The recovery of an older idea of entertainment is essential to O'Quinn's case: those entertained may also be "soldiers or servants" of the main players, meaning that theatrical entertainment itself is bound up with movements of politics and society that reach well beyond the stage (I). To comprehend the cultural significance of the theater in this period, then, is to understand not only those messages that were sent from actor to audience member, but also to recognize the burgeoning power of the media to comment on that pattern of spectacle and exchange. O'Quinn explains, "Put simply, the argument focuses on how the rhetorical effects of print media and the performative elements of sociability and theatre feed upon one another" (3). In addition to traditional theatrical productions, the likes of which eighteenth-century audiences found at Covent Garden and on Drury Lane, O'Quinn follows circum-Atlantic performance theorist Joseph Roach's lead in examining public shows of many kinds: from coterie events such as John Burgoyne's Fete Champetre, to open spectacles such as the Thames Regatta, to grand celebrations such as the five-day Commemoration of Handel in Westminster Abbey (c.f. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance). As he "use[s] the methods of close reading associated with cultural and literary analysis to attend to the formal qualities of how social and cultural materials are represented in text and performance," O'Quinn draws on an astonishingly rich archive of dramatic scripts, poems, images, and newspaper reviews to "break down the distinction between text and context" that often keeps drama in literary isolation from the culture it represents (4). In a time of transition in British society precipitated by the crisis of confidence that resulted from a string of defeats in the American Revolutionary War, theatrical performance served as a means of self-expression, self-examination, and self-critique. How long would pastoral pleasures such as Burgoyne's Fete Champetre last? O'Quinn demonstrates "the gravity of diversion" as he uncovers General Burgoyne's simultaneous roles in the institution of the Coercive Acts in Parhament that led colonists to revolt in the Boston Tea Party and in the orchestration of an exclusive aristocratic celebration of a family wedding (45). Would those who waited in the wings--the mob of "codlings," as O'Quinn describes them--be content with mere glimpses of splendor, or would they demand the democratic access that fired the European nationalist revolutions of the nineteenth century (51)? In the middle ground between these two social extremes, we see a new print public taking shape: one that thanks to newspaper reports is both "privileged" in its access to such elite scenes and spatially removed from their production. These are the eager readers who consume celebrity gossip from this age forward into our own era of dramatizing Hollywood weddings, as well as the arch commentators who would judge such spectacles as signs of the excess that leads to a culture's demise. O'Quinn remarks that "this feeling of being in the know, and yet somehow free of scrutiny, is one of the great inventions of the age" (65). As he does so, he builds an important addition to the structure of nationalist subjectivity first imagined by Benedict Anderson, who observed in his Imagined Communities that readers experience "community in anonymity" while consuming novels or newspapers (Anderson 25, 36). … |
