The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance ed. by Daniel O’Quinn, Kristina Straub, and Misty G. Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance ed. by Daniel O’Quinn, Kristina Straub, and Misty G. Anderson Jeanne Willcoxon The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance, ed. Daniel O’Quinn, Kristina Straub, and Misty G. Anderson. New York: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xxix + 720. $240.00; $59.95 (paper). O’Quinn, Straub, and Anderson conceived of this anthology in response to their previous edited volume, The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama (2017). While that text started with the scripts and then brought in “resources for [End Page 92] understanding their performative contexts and impact,” their new collection starts with the performances, providing resources to both contextualize the singular historical events and give the reader a sense of the circulation of those events in a larger cultural and aesthetic repertoire. Drawing from the field of performance studies, the editors invoke Diana Taylor’s conceptualization of “repertoire” and Rebecca Schneider’s work on the archive to craft an anthology that combines historical scholarship with the methodology of performance studies. By doing this, the editors hope to give the reader an idea of the audience-member experience in viewing the performance; provide an understanding of the interactions of print and performance during this time period; “encourage an understanding of performance that emphasizes the immediacy—and changeability—of the theatrical repertoire”; and investigate how performance participates in the formation of “modern categories of social identity.” Surprisingly, given the breadth and depth of these goals, the editors largely succeed by selecting events that allow them to shift the focus of each reading. For example, Otway’s Venice Preserv’d provides an excellent opportunity to contrast the 1682 audience reading of play and performance as clearly loyalist to the audience reception of Charles Kemble’s 1795 production as provocatively republican. The political moment informs the audience reading of text and performance, which in turn potentially enriches our contemporary understanding of this work; the repertoire, in other words, challenges our investigation of theatrical text as purely archival. On the other hand, John O’Keefe and Philippe De Loutherbourg’s Omai, or a Trip around the World offers an ideal tool to analyze the formation of identity in the precarious British Empire of 1786 through a pantomime combining commedia dell’arte characters, scenic spectacles drawn from Thomas Cook’s South Sea voyage, and a fictionalized characterization of the real-life Raiatean, Omai, whose appearance in London society was the subject of gossip in print. While the editors sometimes privilege particular events within the anthology (Omai, a relatively short pantomime, garners almost sixty pages of resource materials while Addison’s Cato warrants a meager four), and occasionally do not quite make a persuasive case for an event (I cannot help thinking there is a more apt and interesting entry for an investigation of Nell Gwynn and female sexuality than Dryden’s Secret-Love, or the Maiden-Queen), they do craft an intriguingly provocative collection that provides advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students with an introduction to both performances of this time period and approaches to historical research that engage with current theories on performance. That the editors also achieved this admirable goal with their previous anthology on drama does not diminish this achievement but does illustrate the shift within the discipline of theater toward not only the methodology but the language of performance studies (for example, the dusty text of “drama” is replaced by the scintillating ephemerality of “performance”). As with the earlier anthology, the editors provide the reader with a breadth of performances, featuring selections from the more well-known and anthologized plays of the period (Behn’s The Rover, Fielding’s Tom Thumb, Addison’s Cato, and Otway’s Venice Preserv’d), less anthologized but popular plays during the period (Dryden’s Secret-Love, Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, Southerne’s Oroonoko, and Centlivre’s The Wonder), musical entertainments (Purcell’s Fairy Queen: An Opera and Thomas Arne’s Love in a Village), special events (the Handel Commemoration of 1784), afterpieces (Charles Macklin’s Love a-la-Mode), dances (Jean-Georges [End Page 93] Noverre’s 1755 The Chinese Festival...