Poser, Norman S. The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick.

Abstract

This book presents its offering as “a vivid description of the eighteenth-century London theatre scene.” It does not purport to make an original contribution to scholarship on eighteenth-century theater; rather it portrays the “Age of Garrick,” with an emphasis on the most colorful aspects of the lives of the leading personalities within the theatrical world. Its author is a scholar of the law and of legal history—eighteenth-century scholars will probably know him for his impressive biography of William Murray, Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason (2013). He is also, though, a passionate enthusiast for both theater history and the theater of his own time, and The Birth of Modern Theatre is an expression of love for what he deems (borrowing from Donald Greene, one assumes) “an age of exuberance” during which the foundations for the modern theater were laid.His enthusiasm comes through on every page. The book is divided thematically into seventeen chapters devoted to different aspects of the mid-eighteenth-century theater world: Garrick’s acting, management, and personal relations; the Licensing Act; the 1743 actors’ walkout from Drury Lane; Shakespeare worship; the careers of Samuel Foote and Charles Macklin; the Irish theater, and other such topics. Leading actresses such as Peg Woffington, Susannah Cibber and Kitty Clive are not granted chapters of their own but do make regular appearances. There is some chronological organization in the book including two framing chapters—”Dawn of an era” and “End of an era”—but Poser aims more to build an accumulative portrait of the period than to offer a linear journey through it.Poser stresses the novelty that Garrick and his colleagues brought to the stage, including the revolutionary “natural” acting that came to supplant the more oratorical style of the early decades of the century. But, as his subtitle suggests, he is also keen to present the sensational events and intrigues that the period’s leading actors were involved in offstage. There are substantial accounts, for example, of Garrick’s personal relationship with Woffington in the 1740s, of the adultery lawsuit that Theophilus Cibber brought against his wife Susannah, and of Foote’s conflict in the 1770s with Elizabeth Chudleigh that resulted in his being tried for sodomy. Such matters are by no means unimportant within theater history: given the gossipy interest in actors and actresses during the period, there was a blurring of the line between on- and offstage, and it is appropriate to explore private matters since they became inseparable from the public persona of the era’s performers.Poser, though, is perhaps too drawn to scandalous tales and anecdotes as ends in themselves. In many ways his book falls within the tradition of the anecdote-rich theater histories that began to be written in the eighteenth century itself and which provide many of the tales spun again here. His approach makes for engaging reading, but the anecdotal character of the book also makes it less useful for readers of a scholarly leaning who may fairly be considered his target audience, given that the book is published by an academic press. For example, as background to the 1737 Licensing Act, Poser presents the story of The Golden Rump—the anonymous dramatic satire on George II, which, had it been performed, would have involved a backdrop depicting the king’s buttocks surrounding an orifice which was to be the entry and exit point for the performers. The story of the play’s prohibition certainly bears retelling, but in itself the scandal was only a trigger for Walpole’s Licensing Act, the deeper motivation for which lay in the broader culture of political satire on stage in the 1730s. Poser’s book would have been more useful had greater space been devoted to consideration of why this immensely influential piece of legislation was introduced and less devoted to, say, retelling witty exchanges between Garrick and Foote, entertaining though these are.Again, in common with many eighteenth-century stage histories, the book is not entirely reliable, and includes some straightforward errors. Thomas Hallam becomes “Charles Hallam”; Thomas Betterton, we are told, “first appeared on the London stage in 1695” and died “twenty-five years later,” when, in fact, he was acting when the theaters reopened in 1660 and he died in 1710. We are told that Garrick and James Lacy “worked together smoothly” as co-managers of Drury Lane, which glosses over huge tensions in the relationship. The unreliability can on occasions be traced back to an unscholarly assumption that anecdotes and hearsay can be trusted—for example, when we are informed that “the modern actor John Gielgud tells us” that eighteenth-century actors “took curtain calls after every scene.” Gielgud was not right on this; seeing how more recent actors look back on their forebears is interesting, but it is not a basis for accurate theater history. Such errors (plus proofing errors) are regrettable, but it is more the chosen anecdotal emphasis that renders the book less useful than it could have been.To be a truly “vivid description,” more attention to what was actually performed onstage is needed, but there is surprisingly little interest in the eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire. There is no mention, for example, of Lillo’s enormously popular The London Merchant (1731), while Centlivre’s vast output is dealt with in a single sentence. Poser, in fact, is no fan of most of the period’s original drama. Before the works of Sheridan and Goldsmith, he writes, “very few of the new plays are worth remembering; it was the quality of the acting that drew playgoers to Drury Lane and Covent Garden to see many mediocre dramatic works.” This is not very helpful, and such un-nuanced critique is likely to result in few recommendations of the book by scholars seriously interested in the history of drama, of audiences, and of popular culture and taste.It feels genuinely churlish to find fault with this labor of love. Had it not appeared within Routledge’s academic covers, The Birth of Modern Theatre would be easy to praise as an appealing entry point for the non-specialist reader into a remarkable period within theater history—a survey that makes many suggestive connections between the novelties of the eighteenth-century dramatic world and more recent performance practices on both stage and screen. Poser finds in the innovative performance practices of the eighteenth-century London stage the basis for Stanislavski’s approach to the training of actors and the method acting that many North American actors and directors subsequently came to embrace. There are traces of Garrick, he suggests, in “Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, and Hilary Swank, among others.” If this likable but flawed book leads readers who are interested in these modern actors and their methods back to the age of Garrick, it has undoubtedly performed a useful service.