This superb monograph examines how radical politics found expression in performance in the decade prior to the Glorious Revolution. The years from 1678 to 1688 saw the English monarchy rocked by successive crises, ranging from allegations of secret Catholic plots to murder the king (largely fabricated) to murmurings of dark dealings between Louis XIV and Charles II (largely true). The inability of Charles II to produce a legitimate heir also worried a Protestant citizenry who feared that the line of succession would devolve to James, the Catholic brother of Charles II. Arbitrary rule, strict censorship, excessive taxation, and an atmosphere of Stalinesque surveillance further inflamed the populace. As Johnson wryly notes, the problem with the Restoration was that it restored too much, especially the oppressive political attitudes that caused the Civil War in the first place. Amid this tumult, Johnson situates the patent theatres and street performance. He is certainly not the first scholar to do so, but he is, happily, the first in a long time to combine keen intelligence with common sense. That he tells this compelling story stylishly and with verve gives one all the more reason to read this first-rate study.

Horton Foote has won many distinguished awards, including two Academy Awards for screenwriting, the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Lucille Lortel Award, an Emmy, the William Inge Award, lifetime awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Writer's Guild of America, an Outer Critics Circle Award, the Master American Dramatist Award of the PEN American Center, and the National Medal of the Arts. Yet there has been relatively little written about this important American—and southern—writer. Partly that is because he has written in various media, including theatre, film, and television, gaining substantial but limited fame in each, and much of his work is either produced regionally or staged for a small circle of aficionados in New York, where seemingly simple, understated dramas about coastal southeast Texas are never the rage. This tendency is exacerbated by the production history of the nine plays in The Orphans' Home, the subject of Laurin Porter's book. Staged over twenty years, from readings of the first plays in 1977 to the premiere of the final one, The Death of Papa, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in February of 1997, the plays have never been staged together.

From its beginning, John W. Frick's Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America does the work of overhauling the received tradition with respect to melodrama, progressivism, the temperance movement, and social and moral reform in nineteenth-century American theatre. Frick's thesis is that “nineteenth-century temperance drama was born of the intersection of temperance motives and ideology with progressive trends in literature and the arts” (13). Though his definition of progressivism is (I think, too) broad, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform is neither a survey of temperance plays (readers are referred to two dissertations that have undertaken this work) nor a survey of progressive trends. Rather, it seeks to illustrate “stages or facets of temperance ideology and/or production” (16).

In 1896, Benedetto Croce donated to Naples's Biblioteca Nazionale two manuscript volumes from the late seventeenth century. These books had been prepared by Annibale Sersale, Count of Casamarciano, and contained 183 canovacci (scenarios) of the commedia dell'arte. Today, this Casamarciano zibaldone (collection) comprises the largest extant collection of commedia canovacci with nearly a quarter of the total surviving scenarios from any source. By contrast, Flaminio Scala's Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (first published in 1611, and translated into English by Henry F. Salerno in his influential 1967 edition) contains only 50. The Casamarciano scenarios have never been published in English translation, or even, astonishingly, in any complete Italian version, before now. For this reason alone, The Commedia dell'Arte in Naples is a publication of enormous significance for the dramaturgical study of commedia.

Heather S. Nathans's well-documented study, covering the colonial theatre, the theatre of the revolution, and postrevolutionary theatre to shortly after 1800, focuses on Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. She argues convincingly that the theatre of the time was significantly affected by social, political, and financial matters, therefore located in a social, political, and financial context Nathans calls “crucial” (5).

A Director Prepares presents Ann Bogart's approach to theatre training and art through a series of essays—memory, violence, eroticism, terror, stereotype, embarrassment, and resistance. Like Peter Brook's The Empty Space, the volume investigates the art of theatre and the creative process.

Bryan Reynolds's fascinating book, Becoming Criminal, contributes to the growing scholarly work that examines relations among early modern literature, theatre, and legalism. Reynolds identifies a distinct late sixteenth-century criminal culture that operated according to its own aesthetic, ideology, language, and lifestyle. This culture's proximity to state official culture was a crucial part of its own identity and also of its power to undermine and dissent from that official cultural identity. “Self-defined by the criminal conduct and dissident thought” of its members, and “officially defined by and against the dominant preconceptions of English cultural normality,” this culture “constituted a subnation that illegitimately occupied material and conceptual space within the English nation” (1). In this view, it sought not to destroy the dominant system but to feed off of it, possessing in itself a paradoxical coherence and chosen way of life that “transverses” official culture: that lies athwart of it, crosses into it, and is fetishized by it.

In Theatre, Society and the Nation, S. E. Wilmer promises two enticing strands of investigation. First, he seeks “to illustrate the role of the theatre and live performance in reformulating concepts of national identity” (3) over some two hundred and fifty years of U.S. history. Second, his introduction asserts that besides examining “theatrical events and the printed texts of plays” the book “considers the audience and critical response” on the part of both “the dominant and oppressed groups in society” (3–4). Wilmer's work is rewarding on roughly half the topics proffered: it provides valuable information about many printed texts and performances of resistant discourse as well as some critical journalism and scholarship that responded to these pieces. On actual audience response, the book is virtually silent, sometimes substituting the comments of artist participants, publicity, or theory for the reactions of people who actually witnessed the events.

This book, which focuses on the manner in which four Renaissance actor-playwrights justify their practice as dramatists, is both stimulating and exasperating, since it is based on a splendid idea insufficiently realized. The central premise of Nora Johnson's study is her contention that recent scholarship has tended to overemphasize Ben Jonson's model of “sovereign” authorship to the exclusion of those early modern English dramatists who acknowledged the communal and collaborative sources of their labor.

William W. Demastes's new book is a rare find. It shows a new direction for interdisciplinary theatre scholarship, combining drama and performance with cognitive science, fuzzy logic, and complexity theory. With this challenging combination, Demastes extends the significance of theatre beyond its conventional place in the humanities and proposes specific ties between an ancient art form and recent scientific discoveries. He demonstrates a post-postmodern or “neostructuralist” approach that dares to discuss “the emergent essence of life itself,” through a materialist, yet “nonpositivist” science of the drama. He thus offers a glimpse “of ’universal' consciousness” in theatre's “spiritual something more” (7–9).

While Irish theatre history and criticism has closely linked performance, nationalism, and identity politics throughout the twentieth century, far less attention has been paid to the Irish theatre's profound role in nation building in previous centuries. Cheryl Herr, John Harrington, and others have reminded us of the nineteenth-century popular theatre's role in subverting British opinions of Irish history and identity. But the eighteenth century, the century of Thomas Sheridan, John O'Keeffe, and Smock Alley, as well as Jonathan Swift, the United Irishmen, and Grattan's Parliament, has received surprisingly little attention from the point of view of theatre history.

The first complete study of the dramatic conventions that governed soliloquies in Western drama throughout history, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies reveals a drastic and heretofore undisclosed shift in those conventions after Shakespeare's death. In theatrical history there have been three types of soliloquy: speeches that are addressed directly to the audience, speeches that are self-addressed, and interior monologues. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, one type of soliloquy occupied a place as the dominant convention during each major period of theatrical history. Hirsh argues that during Shakespeare's lifetime, soliloquies were meant to represent self-addressed speech. The implications of this argument are profound.

“A new language of criticism is essential to describe and inscribe dramatic forms” (145): so writes Imelda Foley at the conclusion of her study of gender in contemporary Ulster theatre, The Girls in the Big Picture. It is not without irony, therefore, that her book is a perfect example of the exuberantly lively business of theatre in performance continually bursting through the limits of an overly schematic theoretical paradigm.

Scholars preparing production histories of individual Shakespeare plays have long been faced with the challenges of structuring their studies. The scholar can choose to write a straightforward one-actor-or-production-after-another monograph (Rosenberg on Othello, Ripley on Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Bartholomeuz on Macbeth and The Winter's Tale, etc.), a transhistorical encyclopedic scene-by-scene and line-by-line collation (Rosenberg on King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet), a transhistorical interlineated text (Bratton and Hankey's Shakespeare in Production editions, under a variety of different series titles and publishers), or an exemplary-production snapshot album (Mulryne and Bulman's Shakespeare in Performance series).

Is it perverse to take an interest in the infamous death of a writer? How many years should pass until we can discuss the details of a tragic death in an objective context? In the case of the promising playwright Sarah Kane, it is still too soon. With Joe Orton, however, it is easy to mistake the man for the literary construction that now personifies him. In different ways, both of these writers suffer the plight of being forever fused with their texts in postmortem criticisms of their writing. In the case of Orton, however, because of the genre of his writing, we seem to be able to laugh about it.

In their “Editors' Preface” to the Cambridge University Press Shakespeare in Production series, J. S. Bratton and Julie Hankey proudly describe the “comprehensive dossier of materials,” including “eye-witness accounts, contemporary criticism, promptbook marginalia, stage business, cuts, additions and rewritings,” that make up the heart of this brilliant and exceptionally useful collection of Shakespeare editions. Conceived by Jeremy Treglown and first published by Junction Books, the series was later printed by Bristol Classical Press as Plays in Performance, though none of the original four titles remains in print. Already published in the descendant Cambridge Shakespeare in Production series are nine plays—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, The Tempest, King Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice—with Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and As You Like It forthcoming.

In this clear, concise, and accessible volume, Michael Patterson sets himself the task of examining “the work of nine talented and innovative British playwrights who shared a laudable but strange conviction: that by writing plays and having them performed they might help to change the way society is structured” (1). As if conscious of the inevitable charge that by focusing on Wesker, Arden, Griffiths, Barker, Brenton, McGrath, Hare, Bond, and Churchill he is perpetuating the damaging myth that political theatre in postwar Britain centers on these usual suspects, Patterson takes pains to define his terms. Political theatre for the purposes of his volume “implies the possibility of radical change on socialist lines: the removal of injustice and autocracy and their replacement by the fairer distribution of wealth and more democratic systems” (4). But as the Lord Chamberlain found in his increasingly desperate attempts in the 1960s to hold on to his power to censor British drama, the more you attempt to define, the more problematic the issues that arise. Theatre historians are now becoming increasingly aware of the power of “hidden theatre” in the evolution of postwar British theatre—that is, the large number of community-based and politically active groups that have been marginalized by a disproportionate focus on “representative” political playwrights and a few well-scrutinized collective organizations, such as 7:84, Monstrous Regiment, and Belt and Braces, who are all alluded to in this volume. In light of this fact, Patterson's interest in the phenomenon that saw a generation of playwrights flourish between the mid-fifties and the early eighties, who shared a desire to change society, now seems rather quaint. It is all the more to his credit, therefore, that he has produced a highly thought-provoking work.

This richly eclectic volume contains much of interest for theatre historians and academic critics of Renaissance drama as a sociocultural phenomenon. Additionally, it offers a good deal for theatre artists. The main part of the volume, dedicated to the theme of “Shakespeare and Religions,” comprises sixteen articles on topics as various as performance in Japan and the first translation of Shakespeare into Hebrew. Most of the articles are broadly new historicist in flavor, offering insights into interpretation through examination of cultural formations embedded within the text of the plays. Religion is, of course, demonstrated to be one of the most formative influences.

“One of modern theatre history's enduring shibboleths is that the Shakespearean stage was a bare one,” assert editors Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda in their introduction to this remarkable volume of essays.

Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley explores the role theatrical artists played in the emergence of literary criticism. Marcie Frank suggests that a study of this emergence should begin with John Dryden, and that it must also include the contributions made by female playwrights (such as Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley)—not merely as side notes worthy of attention in a feminist attempt to include women writers in the history of criticism but, more important, as writings that actively carried on the genealogical literary tradition that Dryden established. Frank makes the case that by figuring the transmission of a national vernacular canon “as a patrimony, [Dryden] drew the lines of access to a native literary tradition for subsequent writers and critics” (2). The essays in the book work to establish the presence of a critical legacy left to us by Dryden, Behn, Trotter, and Manley. In doing so, Frank hopes to restore the theatre's rightful place in the story of criticism's emergence, thereby allowing an acknowledgment of the “performativity of criticism, both in the sense of what it accomplishes—the establishment of a native tradition coded as filiation—and in the appreciation of the means by which it does so” (2).