Perhaps the most exhilarating promise of Bridget Orr’s new book—methodologically contrasting with her Empire on the English Stage, itself a pioneering study of drama’s contact with the East—is its offer to recuperate the politics of the British provinces and regions composed of market towns, spas, villages, and wooded lowlands and their representation on the late Stuart and early Georgian stage. Although with allusions to Ireland never far away, the book seems to take it as axiomatic that its study refers decidedly to an England not yet wholly subsumed into a greater Britain. Orr charts a predominantly “Whig dramaturgy” produced by a distinctively “English Enlightenment,” with its presiding genius perhaps being Sir Richard Steele, whose name crops up throughout the study (7, 15). In short, Orr describes a theatre in which “distinctly subversive and utopian visions of interreligious and intercultural dialogue, and social and political justice, could . . . be written and performed” (2).Orr’s focus at the beginning of the book is on plays about Islam. A prime exhibit is John Hughes’ Siege of Damascus (1719–20), a powerful tragedy showing “How Spiritual Dragooning first arose / . . . Faith first propagated by the Sword.” Because it was written during the Quadruple Alliance against Catholic Spain, and despite its “lurid invocations of Islamic cruelty,” “it is hard,” Orr argues, “not to see the play subjecting the two competing faith communities to an equally critical gaze” (73). As with Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735), Orr writes (citing Kathleen Wilson) that such plays “generate dramatic sympathy both across national, ethnic and religious boundaries and to characters caught right on the borders” (82). What is remarkable about this early efflorescence of plays about Islam—such as Charles Johnson’s The Sultaness (1717) or Mahomet (1744), James Miller’s adaptation from Voltaire—is that they featured an “awareness of the debates over religious belief that characterized the early Enlightenment” (90). As demonstrated in Empire on the English Stage, Islamophobic ideologies were not the original sin of the English playhouses. Indeed, on this reading, the late Stuart and early Georgian ages were golden moments of theatrical experimentation, dramatizing the personal and social consequences of religious intolerances not yet tainted by Britain’s involvement in a global empire reaching beyond the solitary Irish colony. The Siege of Damascus had a remarkable afterlife. It was performed at Newcombe’s School (a progressive educational establishment for the sons of well-to-do gentry) in the 1730s, with John Hoadley—who played in it—going on to complete Miller’s Mahomet (75). Regularly revived in the mainstream theatres, it was also performed in the mid-1780s at the private theatre of the Dover banker John Minet Fector (77). Hughes’s dramatic lesson on the possibility of religious tolerance proved to be both useful and enduring.A caveat Orr often returns to is that, while plays about the Islamic world could be construed as proxies for the dangers of Catholicism, straightforwardly implicating France and Spain as England’s familiar natural enemies, such allegories also complicate the possibility of these dramas having the global or cosmopolitan perspectives they appear to offer. As Britain emerged during the century, its imperial reach never stretched to colonizing significant sets of Islamic people, at least not west of Suez. As Orr hints, the unspoken targets of these dramas of toleration were just as likely to concern the nearer problems of Ireland and Scottish Jacobitism. Similarly, Arthur Murphy’s Alzuma (1773) and other plays about the south and central Americas discussed in chapter 3 were, although ostensibly often about the end of Inca rule, necessarily concerned with the colonial near genocide perpetrated by one of Britain’s long-standing enemies. Although Orr emphasizes the plays’ recovery of the status of the original indigenous peoples, the anti-Spanish perspective remains unsurprising. Yet Orr also reminds us that, though informed by Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega’s seminal Royal Commentaries of Peru (1609–17), Alzuma adopts Murphy’s own distinctively “West Britain” (i.e., Irish) perspective. Crucially, although not performed until 1773, Alzuma was written in 1762 at the height of the Seven Years’ War, perhaps the last moment before Britain’s imperial rise became unstoppable. Although Orr does not note it, Alzuma’s Covent Garden premiere happened in the midst of Murphy’s burgeoning twin career as a barrister. Later that year he acted as legal counsel for his fellow Irishman Charles Macklin after the Covent Garden riots against his employment. As the book so thoroughly lays out, by midcentury, London was awash with the complications arising out of theatres’ relying on talented performers and playwrights who often came from backgrounds that helped them identify with the casualties of empire.If these tangled proxies and perspectives, although admirably categorized and navigated, may sometimes threaten to overwhelm, nothing could be clearer than Orr’s chapter on theatre and Freemasonry, one of the book’s most original contributions. In short, with its precise codes for admittance based on active declarations of belief in universal values, Freemasonry fast became a sort of ecumenical Enlightenment gluing together the otherwise asymmetrical forces of religion, rank, and trade. Within an often itinerant and international industry, the ability to establish quickly a vouched identity made Freemasonry extremely attractive to theatre workers. Registered Masons included the actors James Quinn, Dennis Delane, and Theophilius Cibber and the managers Sir Richard Steele and Charles Fleetwood. Lodge visits to theatres, Masonic processioning, and bespoke performances were typical group activities on both sides of the Atlantic. In one of the most revived dramas, George Lillo’s The London Merchant; or, The History of George Barnwell (1731), often selected by masters as a moralistic Boxing Day treat for servants, the collisions of loyalty, mercantilism, and the exigencies of desire and fate are barely held in place by the play’s Masonic ideals. As Orr writes: “[T]he bulk of the action is spent exploring the implications of a household governed by the masonic tenets of sympathy, benevolence and fraternity” (173). In the play’s original ending, the prison protocols of the dissolute apprentice Barnwell’s execution by hanging have him appearing bare chested and hooded, mirroring Masonic initiation ceremonies. Along with plays such as The Fatal Extravagance (1721) by Joseph Mitchell (probably a Freemason) and the repertory staple The Gamester (1753) by Edward Moore (definitely a Freemason), Orr identifies the allegiances of Freemasonry as the beginnings of a specifically English genre of domestic tragedy that “emerged in tandem with the marketization of the British economy and the expansion of overseas trade” (186–87). While older historiographies of Masonry were apt to be somewhat reckless in their claims, today it would be a reasonable working hypothesis to assume that most actors in Britain were Freemasons. In turn, with entrance into the fraternity not available to women, on this count alone there are huge implications for our understanding of the challenges faced by actresses and female playwrights in advancing their careers.Although Freemasonry might be something of a theatrical fourth estate, Orr’s thesis of the general distribution of Enlightenment ideas through the medium of the stage takes a different turn in covering, in a chapter titled “Local Savagery,” the representation of the English regions and provinces. This chapter, subtitled “The Enlightenment Countryside on Stage,” is perhaps the most important in the book. In a “dramaturgical descent upon the shires,” Whig playwrights construed “the countryside as the true home of ancient constitutionalism and moderation, the site of resistance to Jacobitism and the refuge of patriots” (191). In Thomas Shadwell’s Bury Fair (1689), set in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, a muscular class resistance is unproblematically envisaged: “Our Peasants have Quarter-staves; and if Gentlemen go to run ’em through, they will knock ’em down; and we commend ’em for’t” (qtd. in Orr 203). Many will have forgotten that George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1707) was dedicated “To All Friends round the Wrekin,” a landmark hill in Shropshire, in a county itself almost an early eighteenth-century byword for sparsely populated rural England. Such dramas located deep in the English shire counties are central to what Orr describes as “a nation whose green heart is the countryside, not the counting house” (203). In this latter role, the emerging provincial spa towns, randomly geographically located according to the availability of spring waters, mixed localism with the new money they attracted to bring about the conflicted outcomes exemplified in Shadwell’s Epsom Wells (1672), Thomas Baker’s Tunbridge Wells (1703), and, not least, Sheridan’s later The Rivals (1775). The spa towns were of interest to London theatregoers not only as microcosms of the upheavals of metropolitan life but also because they gave a sense of the reality of spatial centers of regional autonomy within a national framework. These thriving country towns disrupted the old conventions of clever cities and backward countrysides, not least because the lands associated with them often became the trophy purchases of those benefiting from Britain’s growing international trade. Although the topic is beyond the scope of the book, by midcentury the classic comic setup—as exemplified by David Garrick’s High Life Below Stairs (1759)—will be the newly enriched West Indian slaver returning to his country estate to outtrick his stay-at-home servants, in Garrick’s case noticeably arriving disguised as “one of your cottagers boys out of Essex” (act 1, scene 1). It needed Garrick’s concluding homily to admonish the Drury Lane audience that disorder was the natural outcome of elites continually absent from the great “Parks” and estates of rural England. As Orr puts it: “Despite their apparently emollient descriptions of the manorial estates and villages that constitute the shires and counties, rural plays repeatedly reveal the violence and exploitation both intrinsic to, and constantly impinging on, the nation’s green heart” (247).In light of this, it might be asked what kinds of drama developed after, for example, Robert Dodsley’s pugnacious The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), located around a Nottinghamshire forest town, and what became of that play’s hard questioning: “What makes your lordship great? . . . [Y]our meanest slave . . . he’s as great as you” (qtd. in Orr 219). In this play written by a former footman, “the text moves beyond factional politics to attack social hierarchy in general terms, not least by rendering its rustic characters as intelligent, sympathetic agents” (21). As Orr argues: “Plays and comic operas set in a countryside that arguably still serves as a crucial element in the English national imaginary proliferated in the theatres of eighteenth-century Britain” (147). Although not mentioned, on at least one night in London in 1737, Dodsley’s play was programmed with yet another revival of The Siege of Damascus. Such conjunctions seem to confirm that plays about the rural shires were understood as cognate with those offering more readily recognizable international perspectives. In short, the shire counties, spas, and market towns were perceived as the nation’s depositories of the reliable good sense and personal resolution audiences hoped to find more widespread in their country, not least in the fractious cities they inhabited themselves. With good reason the protagonists of The Recruiting Officer went into the country, not the town.Of course, the case Orr makes for this burly native solidity is difficult to reconcile with the trembling, anxiety-ridden, metropolitan audiences some critics have identified as emerging in the wake of British success in the Seven Years’ War. Orr tantalizingly hints that one should not underestimate the long-term impact of irredentist Jacobitism on British political culture. As she cautions often enough for us to remember, not everyone was a Whig or even Whiggish. Although so often looking outward, toward Islam or the Americas, the plays discussed here also establish the depths of complex layers of national strength and resource. Many in the still semirural north Midlands towns of Manchester and Preston welcomed the Stuart Pretender when he arrived among them in 1745 en route to taking the capital. Their populations were hardly ignorant since these places became centers of industrial progress scarcely a generation later, not least associated with what is sometimes referred to as the distinctive Midlands Enlightenment discussed by Jon Mee and others. While a limitation of the book is that it does not discuss contemporary theatre venues outside London, the overall argument suggests that, at least as far as drama is concerned, we might need to construct a set of autonomous ideologies for the provinces and regions, a sort of nonnormative national archipelago of local perspectives, verified and authenticated by the plays so persuasively discussed here.Bridget Orr’s British Enlightenment Theatre opens up an exciting research field full of radically important questions about British religious and social attitudes, their relationship to regional diversity, and the multiple ways these issues were debated on the eighteenth-century stage.