Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter Aaron Santesso Joel Schechter. Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. Exeter: Exeter, 2015. Pp. xii + 276. $95. Lloyd Evans concluded a recent review of a revival of The Threepenny Opera with the assertion that “this is the last century in which [Brecht’s] work will be performed” (The Spectator, June 11, 2016). For Evans, Brecht is chained to a particularly preachy version of Marxism, and his work feels ever more “puerile and dated.” Joel Schechter could not disagree more. For him, Brecht has never been more relevant. I suspect Mr. Schechter is closer to the truth than Evans: one need not be a doctrinaire Marxist to appreciate anew Brecht’s critiques of a world run by corrupt plutocrats. But while Mr. Schechter may have started out with a promising subject, the finished product is frustrating. The basic claim is that the writers attempting to criticize Walpole under the restrictions of the Licensing Act were “early Brechtians.” This argument is interesting enough—if somewhat vague, since “Brechtian” is used very liberally—and even plausible at points. But the desperate attempt to show the “relevance” of both eighteenth-century satiric drama and Brecht pretty quickly leads Mr. Schechter into some very odd places. Every academic wants his or her work to be “relevant,” but Mr. Schechter’s approach is scattergun and far from subtle. Occupy Wall Street is named several times. Chelsea Manning shows up randomly. Fictional interstitial chapters (“lost Messingkauf [End Page 79] Dialogues,” etc.) set up imaginary situations in which Georgian dramatists or Brecht himself are brought back to life to comment on modern-day events. These digressions range from odd to cringeworthy: particularly painful is a first-person essay from Macheath explaining why he has decided to become a Wall Street banker rather than a highwayman (Bernie Sanders and Goldman Sachs make awkward appearances). Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is recognizably one of those books that, while presenting a relatively conventional argument, sets itself up as iconoclastic and radical, something that will scandalize if not terrify all those dusty academics out there. Peter Thomson introduces the book as “a bid to jolt the Anglophone theatre out of its political doziness,” as if the real world were not doing enough in that regard. At its heart this is a kind of influence study, fleshed out with much interesting and possibly useful historical anecdote and contextualization. But Mr. Schechter claims his book is actually an attempt to “reduc[e] the authority of chronology,” so that Brecht turns out to have influenced John Gay rather than the other way around. Other critics (Claude Rawson, most notably) have played with this conceit, though as far as I know none has strung it out to book length. What we end up with are passages of straightforward theater history presented as Brecht avant la lettre, interspersed with various asides in which eighteenth-century authors complain about the fate of their works (so that Swift, for example, appears in order to complain about Max Fleischer’s 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels—this is much less fun than it sounds). There is no real evidence presented, just the author’s general sense that this or that author is a member of the Brechtian club. And just in case we are tempted to take the conceit seriously, Mr. Schechter takes the time to clarify things for us: “It almost goes without saying that Gay and Farquhar did not set out to write Brechtian . . . plays.” Yes, almost. Meanwhile, the actual links to Brecht are often either nebulous or unconvincing (Theophilus Cibber is “an eighteenth-century Brechtian” because “his concerns anticipate a call to join with the discontented”). Several times Mr. Schechter seems to imply that any author writing satire is “Brechtian.” Why several of the works discussed resemble Brecht rather than, say, Karel Čapek, is unclear. Various other lines of influence are proposed, somewhat randomly, occasionally as a kind of flight-of-fancy: “Perhaps Henry Fielding would have cited a continuity between his work and Gay’s, too, if his adaptation of John Gay’s Polly had been...