The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780–1830

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780–1830 is a robust collection of essays. With dozens of illustrations, its thirteen chapters offer a feast for the eyes and the mind. The book’s methodology is interdisciplinary with emphases on performance, transmedia, and cultural studies. Were The Visual Life an evening at the theater, it would include tragedy, comedy, melodrama, pantomime, and opera, star legitimate and illegitimate, male and female, and White and Black actors, and feature mise-en-scène prisons, moving statues, alluring costumes, enchanting music, nuanced lighting, ghostly presences, and background mirrors. The spectacle of spectators would garner as much attention as the onstage action and scenography. Inside the playhouse, high, middling, and lower classes would intermingle, while outside printed play texts, reviews, graphic arts, and toy theatres would give new life to the evening’s entertainments. Political and economic interests and gender and racial concerns would suffuse it all.The Visual Life has three sections—“Imagined Scenes” (four essays), “Spectacular Bodies” (four essays), and “Performances in Print” (five essays)—each of which deserves further attention than my short review can provide. Despite the book’s three-part design, the editors consider its thirteen essays to be “interlinked, intimating categories in dialogue” (10). Taking their cue, I would like to suggest a few ways to read this fascinating collection. Its three sections can be read as explorations of media transformations that complicate conventional notions of stage-to-page, page-to-stage, and extratheatrical visual representations. For those less familiar with British Romantic theater, start with Diane Piccitto’s and Terry Robinson’s introduction, followed by the first chapter in each section: Robinson’s “The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects,” Atesede Makonnen’s “Visualizing Othello in Nineteenth-Century British Literature,” and Michael Gamer’s “A Visual Life of Romantic Playbills.” For those more familiar with British Romantic theater, begin with Jonathon Mulrooney’s “Afterward: Romanticism Is Seeing Ghosts,” followed by the second, first, and then third sections.Mulrooney’s self-reflexive querying of the term “Romantic” puts me in mind of the more-than-meets-the-eye essays about “the onstage racialized body, the moving body, the costumed body, and the singing body” (11) in section 2. Makonnen’s chapter examines how Edmund Kean’s White English Othello and Ira Aldridge’s African American Othello challenged British racial paradigms, something that portraits and reviews of these actors white- and blackwashed. Makonnen also reflects on Aldridge’s remarkable whiteface performances. Next, Sophie Thomas’s “Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage” focuses on women—namely, Emma Hamilton, Sarah Siddons, and Helen Faucit—whose on- and offstage performances of moving classical statues transfixed and transported audiences. Susan Brown’s ensuing “‘Dresses in hand’: Mary Rein’s Costume Workshop” investigates Mary Rein’s Drury Lane Theatre wardrobe journal from the period 1803–04, spotlighting the essential—and underpaid—creative labor of female costume makers. Uri Erman’s “The Singing Cat: British Audiences, Angelica Catalani, and the Threat of Opera” concludes this section with an Italian opera singer whose popularity in Britain led graphic satirists to zoomorphize her as an aggressive, fickle cat (pun intended) representing Continental cultural imperialism.Keeping the bodies of section 2 in mind helps elucidate the playhouse and extratheatrical conjurings and spectators and domestic and exotic scenery of section 1. Robinson’s chapter about John Philip Kemble’s David Garrick– and Henri Fuseli–invoking Macbeth refutes passive theater audience stereotypes and argues for spectators’ creative capacities and their cultural and political savvy. Next, Joseph Roach’s “The Scenography of the Romantic Prison” identifies mise-en-scène prisons—influenced by Giovanni Piranesi’s series of etchings Carceri (1761)—as Romantic icons that charged set designers’, visual artists’, and writers’ imaginations and politics. Then, Daniel O’Quinn’s “Worldmaking and the Regency Toy Theater” explores in case studies of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Aladdin (1788 (most likely by John O’Keefe)) how audience participation beyond the playhouse involved fans who bought and assembled printed versions of stage scenes to play at home in recombinatory and newly creative ways. Concluding this section, Dana Van Kooy’s “Conjuring the Space and the Right to Appear in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800)” argues that, although this London pantomime advocates for Jamaican slaves’ rights, its picturesque scenography ultimately inhibits audiences from imagining an end to the plantation slavery system.The first four essays of section 3 explore the significance of nonpatent theaters for the development of newer stage, print, and visual arts genres. Leading the way, Gamer’s analysis of playbills from 1765 to 1832 reveals how this subgenre’s innovative typographies and shifting rhetorical situations shaped and reflected audience, reviewer, and playhouse expectations. Next, Deven Parker’s “Harlequinade’s and Melodrama’s Visuality in Print” examines how printed play texts translated pantomime’s onstage visual tricks and humor into epigrams and italicized puns and melodrama’s sublime spectacles into extensive (and often dash-filled) narrative, descriptive, and psychological stage directions. Then, Gillian Russell’s “Robert Schnebbelie, Londina Illustrata, and the Visual Life of Regency Theater” brings to light how Schnebbelie’s published watercolors of minor theaters such as the Regency and the Coburg portray ideals of sociability and wonder that counterpoint William Hazlitt’s influential ambivalence about the growth of minor theaters. The penultimate chapter, Heather McPherson’s “Staging Satire: Gillray and ‘Caricatura-Sublime,’” interprets the political and moral significance of James Gillray’s graphic satire miniseries from 1802–03 lampooning the “Pic Nic Society” (the Regency Theater’s elitist, amateur troupe) alongside Drury Lane’s manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan (the Pic Nics’ chief antagonist) and the renowned actor Kemble.The last chapter of section 3—Dianne Piccitto’s “Theatrical Spectatorship in Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel”—analyzes how William Blake’s illuminated drama remediates and redeems Lord Byron’s alienating mental theater. While engaging, this chapter does not fit well with the other chapters in the section. I also have a few reservations about the book’s title and introduction. First, The Visual Life of British Romantic Theater would be a more accurate and less misleading title. Second, the introduction neglects to explain the editors’ choice of 1780 and 1830 as temporal “Romantic” bookends. Third, although the introduction ably describes the collection’s rationale, purpose, and scholarly significance, some readers will see a missed opportunity to lay out a more nuanced and groundbreaking argument for the book. Regardless, the thirteen essays in this collection make a compelling case for understanding theater’s visual, visionary, and remediated lives as central to what we still term “British Romanticism.”