In 1696, when the English government attempted to realign the face value of silver coins with their actual worth, it set off a nationwide depression, throwing into doubt the stability of value itself. The simultaneous explosive growth of the stock market left London awash in paper and varying degrees of faith in credit. The crucial years of this financial revolution saw similarly striking changes in print culture and in the business of theater. In Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763, Mattie Burkert explores these intersections, arguing that the public theater “played a key role in debates over new financial instruments and institutions . . . addressing audience members as economic subjects within complex webs of interdependence and conflict” (3). Indeed, in focusing on the theater as both a physical profit-centered space and a location for the public circulation of ideas, Burkert brings a new concreteness to the conception of theater as its own kind of public sphere, an unruly, less homogenous public space than generally understood by the term, with competing voices and demands. Burkert explores comedies by Colley Cibber, Susannah Centlivre, and Richard Steele, playwrights who were also involved in the business of theater as actors (Cibber and Centlivre), as theater patentees or managers (Cibber and Steele), and as commentators. She brings a layered approach to her reading, building on the politico-economic subtext and explicit analogies in the plays, reading a range of public paratextual documents such as prologues and epilogues, poetry and periodicals, to make audience knowledge itself a central context.
The first part of Speculative Enterprise situates Colley Cibber's debut comedy Love's Last Shift (1696) in the debate over debased value—of women, of plays, of coins, of men. Written when the Drury Lane company's greatest actors had rebelled against their manager, Christopher Rich, for, among other things, debasing the quality of the theater by treating it as an investment above all else, Cibber's play, its performance and its narrative, appeared amidst a spirited public debate about value and worth, tradition and novelty. Appropriately, speculation in novelty for its own sake, typified by the character Cibber wrote for himself, Sir Novelty Fashion, produces only a cycle of exploitation and emptiness. Burkert argues that using “the tropes of bullion and specie as metaphors for virtue,” Cibber “explores issues of historical continuity and change . . . in order to ask whether his society is actually progressing” or whether “the cultural obsession with reform (of financial institutions, of public morality, of dramatic genres) may be seen as . . . playing to a less virtuous impulse” (26, 25). Burkert's excellent reading of the play is supplemented, in another chapter, by her research on prologues and epilogues. She demonstrates how specific prologues function as marketing devices, mediating “between the repertory and the moment of performance,” thus “play[ing] a key role in conversations about what it means for cultural markets to operate according to the same rule as financial markets” (55). Cibber could indeed expect audiences to apply the critical commentary of his play to those financial and cultural markets whose currents so affected a Londoner's life.
Burkert's articulation of a theatrical public sphere is expanded in the second half of the book, which details the interconnected nature of theater, print culture, opera, and the stock market, particularly in public discourse. Focusing on the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Burkert explores continuities between Steele's short-lived periodical Theatre (1720), and his 1722 play The Conscious Lovers, set among merchants whose colonial trade has become the basis of English financial stability. Steele's opposition to the Tories, who controlled both government and the South Sea Company, led the Lord Chamberlain to interfere with his privileges and duties as a theater patentee. In the periodical, Steele frequently parallels the frenzy for stock in the South Sea Company and the “predatory aesthetics” of the opera craze explicitly and in satire, presenting a narrative of cynical manipulation of the public by those in power, be they purveyors of mindless spectacle, the managers of joint-stock companies, or government officials (135). In The Conscious Lovers, one character asserts that “all great Men know, if you can command absolutely the Toys of little people, you will . . . come into the Possession and Direction of the Goods and chattels of the rest of the World” (quoted at 136). Burkert persuasively argues that “the theatrical media landscape interacted with financial news and opinion at this tumultuous moment when the trustworthiness of institutions and the rationality of the masses were very much in question” (126). The strength of Speculative Enterprise comes through most clearly here, where she explores an abundant “theatrical media landscape” at its many points of contact with a tumultuous public.
Speculative Enterprise explores other moments, including the ginned-up debate about plagiarism in Cibber's adaptation of Les Femmes Savantes in his The Refusal (1721), the Half-Price Riots, in 1763, when an angry public shut down the theaters for several days, and Centlivre's business acumen in marketing her plays and her persona, balancing the demands of the competing theaters throughout her career. These chapters, convincing in themselves, are less closely aligned with the larger argument that the dynamics in the plays participate in the interplay between theatrical business, economic crisis, and the counterpublic sphere Burkert evokes so well.
Throughout, Burkert supports her bold claims about the knowledge and consciousness of the London audiences in these years, demonstrating thoroughly what writers could confidently assume about audience knowledge, desire, and expectations. Her methodology, as much as her conclusions, will certainly enrich the field of eighteenth-century theater studies.
