This erudite, engaging, and lucidly written study seeks to recover the “critical utility” of “transition” as a key term in the conception, description, and analysis of dramatic performance in the eighteenth century. “Transition” is one of those words that, once attention is drawn to it, seems ubiquitous within eighteenth-century writing about the stage. Harriman-Smith thus immediately has the advantage of its reader, for he has the great virtue of being the first to observe something—something important—that has been under our scholarly noses the whole time. Here, let me briefly add a lament that academic presses now feel so beholden to the power of the search engine that they insist on publishing books with absurdly topsy-turvy titles. It’s a real shame that this book’s true title, The Art of Transition, which is not only an elegant and memorable formulation but also a concise and accurate indication of its topic, has been relegated to a subtitle in order that a cumbersome collection of keywords can come first.“Transition” is that process by which an actor or dramatic text shuttles from one passion to another. But transition, Harriman-Smith tells us, is inherently paradoxical, at once “dynamic” and “iconic.” As a movement between two emotions, two dramatic points, it is interstitial and mobile. Yet in the eighteenth century this process, or art, was so attended to and celebrated by theatrical commentators and theorists that it became an object of appreciation (and wonder) in its own right. “Transition” was understood both as a space or journey between two dramatic moments and, at the same time, as a dramatic moment in itself—a constitutive tension neatly encapsulated in Aaron Hill’s phrase of 1735, “the very Instant of the changing Passion.” What’s more, this same, complex notion of transition can be discerned in Enlightenment epistemology. Hume’s skeptical analysis of temporality and causation, in particular, rested on an account of the mind’s “easy transition” from impression to impression, impression to idea, and idea to idea. Transition, then, as both diachronic and synchronic, was a concept that lay at the heart of how eighteenth-century Britain grappled with the nature of human thought and emotion.The Art of Transition—as I will insist on calling it—explores this foundational insight across various modes of writing and performance. Harriman-Smith takes us first to Aaron Hill’s acting theory, which, informed by Cartesian mechanism, sought to teach the actor to embody subtle modulations of emotion across a line or speech by impressing an idea upon their own imagination in a manner that would necessarily manifest itself in posture, gesture, and voice. From here, we move through chapters on Hill’s “experimental” tragedy Zara, which, for Harriman-Smith, shows the author attempting to practice what he’s preached; on the ode, which by reading together Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee ode and Daniel Webb’s Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (both of 1769), offers a compelling discussion of the relationship between music, poetry, and performance in the period as well as a highly effective critique of the critical distinction between lyric and dramatic; on the audacious transitions of David Garrick’s King Lear; and finally on the character criticism of Elizabeth Montagu, William Richardson, and Maurice Morgann, through which Harriman-Smith registers a cultural shift from transition to “character,” the latter term understood as a fully coherent system of which transition is a part.These discussions offer an especially adroit account of the competition between page and stage in the eighteenth century. Harriman-Smith argues persuasively that Hill sought to counter pantomime, which he regarded as a vector of cultural decline, by developing a theory of acting that internalized pantomime’s signature scenographic transformations within the performer’s body and mind. This gambit was inevitably precarious, for the art of transition could never fully conceal its repurposing of popular performance. But it was also, in Harriman-Smith’s judgment, a “Faustian pact,” for Hill’s method insisted on a “microscopic” attention to the playtext and so opened the way to the eclipse of performance by textual criticism. Equally, character criticism’s new attention to transition as part of a unified system that could be understood through close analysis of an author’s text was quietly pervaded by a suspicion of theatricality and spectacle.The Art of Transition is above all a book concerned with the ontology of theatrical texts, of the acting manuals, playscripts, promptbooks, and criticism that sought (sometimes anxiously) to instruct or record embodied performance through the different and even antithetical medium of print. Harriman-Smith’s tracing of various attempts to develop a notational or typographic system for transcribing pauses, vocal stresses, tone, and syllabic duration is fascinating. He also makes it a point of principle to quote passages from plays (principally those of Shakespeare) as they are cited in the contemporary critical and theoretical texts he is discussing, for it is in the nuances of punctuation and typography that the marks of transition are to be found. Such attentiveness is hugely rewarding.This tension between page and stage does, though, pertain to The Art of Transition as much as its subject. The fourth chapter’s meticulous and vivid reconstruction of Garrick’s performance as Lear is, for this reader, one of the book’s highlights. Here, Harriman-Smith judiciously mines and compares information from various sources, especially a promptbook annotated by Garrick and members of his Drury Lane company and the 1773 Bell edition of King Lear (a text based on contemporary promptbooks and edited by Francis Gentleman). The result is an account of Garrick’s Lear at three moments—the cursing of Lear, Lear on the heath, Lear recovering under the care of Cordelia— that practices the very enargia the book elsewhere examines. The power of Garrick’s transitions in these scenes, Harriman-Smith contends, owed as much to stage lighting, sound effects, scenery, and cosmetics as it did to the actor’s manipulation of his body and voice. Yet the confidence with which this chapter takes readers close to Garrick-as-Lear sits a little uncomfortably with the rest of the book, which seems skeptical that a textual archive can ever really allow us to understand or recover the experience of performance in the eighteenth century. Texts about performance tell us something not about performance itself, the book otherwise suggests, but rather about the complex strategies—rhetorical, syntactical, and typographical—that texts deploy to mandate or transcribe performance. The reconstruction of Garrick’s Lear instead conjures the possibility that primary documentation might tell us what actually happened on stage, albeit that such recovery work is only to be realized through an intricate triangulation of source materials.There are a number of questions that this book’s insights and provocations raise but don’t answer and all of them circle around performance. For one, this is really a book about Garrick, a fact Harriman-Smith makes no attempt to hide. But how much can texts about or related to Garrick, an actor defined as exceptional rather than exemplary, really tell us about the broader cultural valency of transition? It would have been interesting, for instance, to have had more discussion of another performer, an actress especially, which would have allowed for some exploration of the potential gendering of transition (an idea briefly glanced at in the fourth chapter’s citation of Helen Brooks’s work). Likewise, this is really a book about tragedy. Again, Harriman-Smith is laudably transparent about this focus and indeed provides one of the most convincing accounts of the peculiar generic quality of eighteenth-century tragedy: the wish to prevent audiences from becoming emotionally exhausted meant that tragedies offered what Lord Kames called “seasonable respite” in the form of characters, scenes, and even endings that were self-consciously other-than-tragic. Again, though, it might have been interesting to consider how “the art of transition” manifested in comic performances, especially given Harriman-Smith’s compelling argument that pantomime was in many ways the always-to-be-hidden prototype of transitional form.And his finding in the period’s tragedy of transition as a structural principle begs the question of what transition tells us about eighteenth-century audiences. Harriman-Smith hints at the disciplinary politics of transition on a number of occasions—transitions keep the restless, novelty-seeking audience engaged—but the matter of the spectator’s (rather than the reader’s) agency and attention remain at the fringes of the book. In his coda, Harriman-Smith makes the cogent point that “transition” distinguishes itself from “variety” in the sense of movement between and interconnection of different points that it introduces. I’d like, though, to have seen the book think further about the relationship between these two terms, for “variety” opens up a discussion both of the period’s aesthetics—I’m thinking especially of the likes of Addison and Hogarth—and of “novelty,” a word that speaks to so many facets of eighteenth- century consumer culture. Variety, in short, might have put a spotlight on audience response just as transition leads Harriman-Smith to focus on the actor’s body (or textualizations of that body).For all this, however, The Art of Transition is a welcome and even thrilling book because it offers its reader a new word for thinking about—and through that word, a new way of reading—the eighteenth-century theatrical archive. Harriman-Smith at once excavates and, in his own exegesis, models a mode of close reading drama that is particular to the period, a mode devised to register seemingly infinitesimal alterations in a character’s emotion (or perhaps more accurately, a mode of close reading that conceives of character as a series of such alterations). The Art of Transition’s great achievement is to leave its reader newly equipped to perceive and experience the rhythms of eighteenth-century drama with what Michael Baxandall calls “the period eye.”