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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
Jane Moody. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 278. $75.00.
Rigorously researched and superbly written, this study opens new dimensions of inquiry for romanticists and theater historians Mike. As the book's prologue makes clear, Jane Moody's intention is ambitiously twofold: capturing "the wonderful excitement of theatregoing in early nineteenth-century London" (I), she aims to rewrite the period's theatrical historiography and to reclaim theater as an institutional context of Romantic writing. With her wide-ranging interest in metropolitan performance and acute sense of the vital interdependence of theatrical and literary culture, Moody succeeds admirably on both counts. Seven tightly constructed chapters provide a window onto London's vast theatrical world--encompassing everything from quadruped drama to water-tank naval battles to playwrights and poets living the rapidly changing life of the theatrical city. Throughout the book, Moody's prose works in the spirit of the best materialist inquiry, integrating original sources, anecdotes, and commentary with an analysis that is at once sympathetic to its subject and aware of its own historicity. Bringing the theatrical experience of the past to bear on the academic concerns of the present (rather than simply the reverse), Illegitimate Theatre in London investigates not only Romanticism's emergence as an historical and cultural phenomenon, but how our own critical assumptions were shaped by that process. While much recent scholarship has explored the degree to which Romanticism was self-consciously historical--even historicist--Moody contends that the legacy of an "idealist history" continues to obscure from view theater's "claims of the body, the institution, and the market" (3). The book's striking premise is that the discourse of cultural "illegitimacy," crafted as a contemporary response to the proliferation of London's legally unsanctioned theatrical entertainments, writes popular theater out of the period's history and, eventually, out of "Romanticism" altogether. By denigrating a theater of raw physicality, sensational representation, and spectacular violence in favor of a "text-based canon of English drama" (13), the concept of illegitimacy eventually enabled "imagination, solitude, and critical self-consciousness" (3) to...
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