Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 by Daniel O’Quinn

Abstract

Daniel O'Quinn. Entertaining Crisis in Atlantic Imperium, 1770-1790. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. 440. $75. What is theater for? In remarkably original and detailed study, Daniel O'Quinn argues that in late-eighteenth century theater served culturally complex purpose of entertainment. O'Quinn's book begins by exploring nuances of entertainment, noting that it evokes both work of amusement on part of players and producers and 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 main players, meaning that theatrical entertainment itself is bound up with movements of politics and society that reach well beyond stage (I). To comprehend cultural significance of theater in period, then, is to understand not only those messages that were sent from actor to audience member, but also to recognize burgeoning power of media to comment on that pattern of spectacle and exchange. O'Quinn explains, Put simply, argument focuses on how rhetorical effects of print media and performative elements of sociability and theatre feed upon one another (3). In addition to traditional theatrical productions, 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 Thames Regatta, to grand celebrations such as five-day Commemoration of Handel in Westminster Abbey (c.f. Roach, Cities of Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance). As he use[s] methods of close reading associated with cultural and literary analysis to attend to 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 distinction between text and context that often keeps drama in literary isolation from culture it represents (4). In a time of transition in British society precipitated by crisis of confidence that resulted from a string of defeats in 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 institution of Coercive Acts in Parhament that led colonists to revolt in Boston Tea Party and in orchestration of an exclusive aristocratic celebration of a family wedding (45). Would those who waited in wings--the mob of codlings, as O'Quinn describes them--be content with mere glimpses of splendor, or would they demand democratic access that fired European nationalist revolutions of nineteenth century (51)? In 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 eager readers who consume celebrity gossip from forward into our own era of dramatizing Hollywood weddings, as well as arch commentators who would judge such spectacles as signs of excess that leads to a culture's demise. O'Quinn remarks that this feeling of being in know, and yet somehow free of scrutiny, is one of great inventions of age (65). As he does so, he builds an important addition to 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). …