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• W2018884906 abstract "Reviewed by: Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 Jason Shaffer Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760. By John O'Brien. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; pp. xxv + 274. $49.95 cloth. In Harlequin Britain, John O'Brien skillfully traces the development of the eighteenth-century British theatre as an institution of the emergent public sphere through the rise of pantomime, a wildly popular hybrid form of theatrical performance that fused Continental commedia dell'arte characters, classical mythology, dance, opera, acrobatics, and farce (xiii). O'Brien focuses on the pantomime afterpiece, a form that intermingled high and low genres and helped to overturn the Restoration stage's dominant oratory model of acting by emphasizing bodily movement as a medium of communication. O'Brien uses pantomime to chronicle the evolution of modern entertainment into a widely available commodity divorced from didacticism, subject to its audience's critical scrutiny, and vulnerable to the disciplinary forces of an increasingly regulated society. During its heyday the pantomime, like the theatre as a whole, appealed to mass audiences, experienced the explosion of critical debate facilitated by the proliferation of British print culture, and endured pressures from both the bureaucratic nation-state and the market economy. Center stage amid this turbulence stood the pantomime's leading character, Harlequin—a protean comedian in a black mask whose popularity led critics and playwrights to associate him with, among others, Roman ritual dancers, African slaves, London apprentices, and Sir Robert Walpole. O'Brien follows the British pantomime from novelty act to fad to repertory, a journey that paradoxically renders this emergent modern performance style available for nostalgia (xxiv), hearkening back to earlier forms of theatre, economics, and social organization. This interrelationship of the present and the (often invented) past unites O'Brien's depictions of the British pantomime and what came to be known definitively in the eighteenth century as the English stage (33). Indeed, his opening chapters seem to present a theatrical version of the period's familiar debates between the Ancients and the Moderns. O'Brien's first four chapters each focus on a different aspect of the pantomime's interplay between form and history, and between printed text and the human body. In his first chapter, O'Brien analyzes one of the few fully extant pantomime entertainments: Perseus and Andromeda; or, the Spaniard Outwitted, staged in 1730 at Lincoln's Inn Fields by John Rich, the pre-eminent Georgian Harlequin. O'Brien argues that this spectacle, which fused Ovidian operatic scenes with comic segments involving Harlequin and his beloved Colombine, both served to bring simplified versions of classical myths to the widest possible audience (12) and, in the figure of Perseus slaying the Gorgon Medusa, unconsciously articulated the public sphere's usurpation of a spectatorial position once reserved for the Stuart monarchs. O'Brien's second chapter examines the ways in which eighteenth-century commentators on the theatre held up the bawdy Roman pantomime and its British counterpart for praise or damnation in their [End Page 341] histories of the stage. His third chapter focuses on the early eighteenth-century theatre's renewed interest in the connections between the embodied actor and the audience, particularly the divergent views of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele on the importance of physicality to the theatre. In his fourth chapter, O'Brien argues that the widespread popularity of pantomimes based on the story of Doctor Faustus—whom he links to a sixteenth-century runaway printer's apprentice named Fust—staged the birth of printing, thus reversing the desire prevalent among conservative critics like Addison to make the theater into a subset of the word by making the word into an aspect of the theatre (110). In both an experimental entr'acte and the fifth chapter, the printer and novelist Samuel Richardson plays a key role. The entr'acte explores the question of a country girl visiting her London cousin in Richardson's 1741 Familiar Letters on Important Occasions: 'Why is Harlequin's face black?' (117). In response, O'Brien proffers the black mask's resonances with the expansion of the British slave trade during the period of pantomime's greatest popularity, rural English vigilantes, and histories of..." @default.
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• W2018884906 title "Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690-1760 (review)" @default.
• W2018884906 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2005.0078" @default.
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