Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman Shawna Mefferd Kelty Antitheatricality and the Body Public. By Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 361 pp. £36.00/$55.00 cloth. In Antitheatricality and the Body Public, Lisa A. Freeman situates her study beyond the borders of Jonas Barish's suppositions of antitheatrical mistrust, presenting an innovative and valuable argument that antitheatricality is not a response to the public harm of theatre but rather a means to challenge and question, claim, reclaim, and shape power and authority. Her book demonstrates an integrated and complex conversation with historical and theoretical scholars ranging from Barish to Phelan. Contextualizing antitheatrical events as complex cultural performances, Freeman carefully and painstakingly traces the multiple threads of political power that pervade the antitheatrical debates that span from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. According to Freeman, theatre has "ever been located at the center of … broad cultural movements and conflicts and … antitheatrical incidents … provide us with occasions to trace major struggles over historical shifts" with regards to power and authority. It is through her careful examination of evidence—both original documents and the narratives that arose from the historical incidents—that she illuminates the broader cultural movements at play in these five case studies (2). The five case studies, at first glance, hold only cursory connections in terms of religious fervor against playing, immoral behavior represented and lauded in plays, and attending the theatre: William Prynne's Histrio-mastix, Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, John Home's Douglas, the Richmond Theatre fire, and the National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley. However, through her careful and thorough dissection of the evidence of each case study, Freeman reveals a long history of those using antitheatrical sentiment along with theatrical form, genre, and performance techniques to create a body public who, in turn, could become a body politic. Each chapter and case study establishes the foundation and framework for the one that follows, building from William Prynne's not-so-subtle attack on monarchic rule in the 1630s to the Christian conservative attack and Supreme Court ruling on the NEA Four in the 1990s. These case studies create an antitheatrical history that brings the readers to the present-day United States in which a conservative Christian body public is still working to marginalize other bodies public in the name of "American" values. Each chapter is useful on its own, but the real argument of the book is the history Freeman constructs between all five cases studies. The reach of her work goes beyond the field of theatre into journalism [End Page 340] and political science, resonating with current media mistrust and culture wars. Freeman demonstrates how a body politic can silence the marginalized bodies public to maintain religious, cultural, and racial privilege and superiority. Freeman's book demonstrates the craft of a meticulous and rigorous scholar, who is exhaustive in her examination of the evidence, no matter how seemingly tangential, that intersects with her argument. Even her chapter notes not only present a thorough and sensitive critique of other scholars' work but also invite readers to further research, if they are so inclined. A reader could easily lose themselves in the archives of her case studies, but she deftly guides her readers through labyrinthine controversies, meticulously working through each facet and returning the reader to the larger landscape of the case studies and the overall book itself. The author provides a rich and open-ended history of each incident, and the book is intended for an audience beyond theatre scholars. A small, but important critique on verbiage: the far-reaching scope of her study is quite evident; however, some language is too discipline-specific or obscure and, as such, may exclude or turn away a general readership from engaging in her study. In particular, the introduction is quite weighed down with complicated terminology that may not be welcoming to a layperson. Freeman's writing style oscillates between rigorous exploration of her argument within the evidence and her experience of encountering the evidence of pamphlets, court documents, transcriptions, and playbills, placing the reader in...