Kinservik, Matthew J. 2002. Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth Century London Stage. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. $38.50 hc. 301 pp.I recently saw a production of April De Angelis's new play A Laughing Matter at the Royal National Theatre. It merrily dramatizes the choice between financial concerns and artistic instinct that David Garrick faced as he debated whether or not to produce Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. De Angelis's play chronicles the hazards of eighteenth-century theatrical life, as actors, writers, and managers navigated the treacherous shoals of fickle public taste, censorship, personal ambition and aesthetic sensibilities.Matthew J. Kinservik's recent study of the eighteenth-century stage is a painstakingly researched examination of some of the same issues. Professor Kinservik sets out to study without prejudice the effects of the 1737 Licensing Act upon the production of satiric comedy. Unlike some scholars, such as L.W. Conolly or Calhoun Winton, who argue that the act largely undermined dramatic satire, Kinservik contends that rather than punishing playwrights or prohibiting plays, the Lord Chamberlain's office sought to help plays to the stage. In so doing, it encouraged a public and artistic taste for a particular kind of satiric comedy, characterized by an equal emphasis on ridicule and moral reform, which Kinservik labels as satire.His first chapter examines the production of satiric comedy in the years immediately following Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). He offers a helpful analysis of what the term meant to an early eighteenth-century writer or theorist, posing a stern challenge to other theatre historians who need to liberate 'satire' from [their] reductive opposition to 'comedy' and to 'sentiment' that continues to characterize satire theory. (2002, 21-22). Doing so allows for a more accurate appraisal of the marriage between moralizing reform and satiric energy that characterized many successful plays of the early eighteenth-century stage.The second chapter takes up the 1730's, which witnessed a revival of topical, punitive satire (Aristophanic in Kinservik's schema). When studied contextually, this kind of play seems an anomaly. In his careful chronicle of Henry Fielding's development, Kinservik shows how he began as a sympathetic satirist but eventually responded to the new satiric possibilities modeled by John Gay's The Beggar s Opera. His work grew increasingly topical, partisan, and representational, finally attracting the hostility of Sir Robert Walpole's ministry. But the argument that the government instituted the Act to put a stop to Fielding's work, as Martin Battestin has suggested, is too simple and reductive a perspective.Chapter three establishes the immediate effects of the Licensing Act, focusing on both its prohibitive and productive effects. …