Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman W. B. Worthen ANTITHEATRICALITY AND THE BODY PUBLIC. By Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; pp. 376. Lisa Freeman's rich study Antitheatricality and the Body Public should take a privileged place alongside the most influential work in the field, ranging from synoptic literary studies like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981), to broadly sociological landmarks like Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (1976), and to historically localized studies like Martin Puchner's Stage Fright (2003). Freeman's book takes an alternative, case-study approach, as each of five detailed chapters traces a moment when some dimension of "theatre" broadly conceived provides the occasion to trace "major struggles over historical shifts in the nature and balance of discursive power and political authority" (2). While Freeman examines "the particular ways that the theater as both physical space and metaphorical realm" has been a "site of contestation for positing and projecting publics" (5), the emphasis here is largely on the latter: plays and performances, the stuff of making theatre, fall below a richly considered discursive horizon on which theatre figures as an instrument for contesting state sovereignty, for negotiating the role of religion, for tracing the legal standing of the state's patronizing of the arts. A theatrically inflected body public does emerge here, evolving practices of dissent, often dissent from the law, working along the interwoven axes of class, religious sect, race, gender, and sexuality. After a brief introduction, the first chapter treats an obligatory figure in the history of English anti-theatricalism, William Prynne, whose "vertiginous" (32) and massive Histrio-Mastix (1632) has long been regarded as an obsessive catalog of antitheatrical mania. Although it landed the author in jail when his comment "women actresses—notorious whores" was taken as a slander of Queen Henrietta Maria's performance of a speaking part in a court masque, Histrio-Mastix, in Freeman's deft reading, undertakes a searching inquiry into the theatricalized abuse of state power. Paying particular attention to Prynne's appropriation of the performative technology of print, she charts his outline of the consequences of the "growth of a theatrical body public, unmoored from either church or state and in possession of a distinct political consciousness" (43). Although the theatre images the antitype of a legitimate public, Prynne uses the "theatrical" rhetoric of acts and scenes, prologues and choruses to marshal the Calvinist community against the overweening power of the church episcopate, personified by Bishop Laud and Charles I. The centerpiece of the chapter is Freeman's meticulous reading of Prynne's trial for sedition, in which the government did not mount the charge of Puritanism (which would galvanize Prynne's low church support), appealing instead to the godliness of the sovereign's transcendent responsibility for the body politic. Freeman's brilliant analysis of trial records shows Prynne and the state vying to appeal to sovereignty over sect, claiming the same high ground of public-minded authority that gentlemen of the Inns of Court asserted in the public masque performed just prior to Prynne's trial, a performance distancing them from their sometime colleague. In the end, the charges against Prynne of libeling the king and the queen, and—more centrally—to being a "stirrer vpp of the people to disobedience" (12) were prosecuted: he was disbarred, fined, degraded at Oxford, had his ears clipped in the pillory, and was imprisoned for life; as the result of his second trial, his ears were again cropped and his cheeks branded, singed by the authority of a theatricalized state. In the second chapter, Freeman reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) not as a complaint against the scurrilous wit of Restoration drama, but instead as an indictment of the church's involvement—conspiring against the claims of the Catholic James II—in the Williamite Glorious Revolution, where Collier's animus against the satirical treatment of [End Page 423] clergy in Restoration drama is part of a wider animation against "levelling," the resistance to established forms of social and moral authority. In Freeman's hands, Collier...