<i>Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies</i>, by Lauren R. Clay

Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies, by Lauren R. Clay. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2013. xvi, 334 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). Lauren Clay's study of the business of theatre in eighteenth-century France is a model of ambitious, thoughtful research. This is the rare work of French history that is truly national in scale and the author offers well-reasoned contributions to multiple fields of history. Analysis of the theatre has been far from rare in recent French historiography. Where previous works, by scholars such as Gregory Brown, Susan Maslan, and Paul Friedland, have tended to focus on theatricality and its relationship to literary or political culture, Clay's work stands out for its focus on the material and commercial elements of this industry as well as for its refusal to be mesmerized by the royal companies in Paris. Clay argues, indeed, that the most important developments in the rise of public theatre in this period occurred in the provinces and the colonies--in Lille, Le Mans or LeCap---rather than in the capital. To uncover the daily activities of theatre directors, actors and actresses, spectators and state and municipal authorities, Clay has conducted research in a staggering list of cities including, in addition to LeMans and Lille: Saumur, Rouen, Nantes, Besancon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Paris. Her sources include administrative records, correspondence among state, provincial, and municipal authorities, petitions from actors and directors to the Comedie frangaise, and an apparently unique list of subscription holders for the 1787-1788 season of the Lyon theatre. She has also read extensively in the published sources of the period, which have yielded newspapers, travelers' memoirs, Enlightenment treatises, and at least one actor's autobiography. In seven thematically organized chapters, Clay traces the establishment and operation of theatres from the late seventeenth century to the 1780s. Chapter One opens the story with an examination of the entrepreneurs and investors who replaced the old makeshift auditoriums (often borrowed from tennis courts) with new purpose-built structures, a story continued in Chapter Two's account of the architectural evolution of playhouses toward ever more elaborate and elegant structures. Chapter Three delineates the (limited) role played by royal officials in the rise and oversight of provincial theatre. Chapters Four through Six recount in turn the emergence of professional theatre directors in place of the traditional collaborative management practices, the labour of actors and actresses in the newly enlarged, permanent provincial troupes, and the spectators whose numbers swelled throughout the 1760s to 1780s to fill the new playhouses. The final chapter analyzes the arrival of public theatre in the cities of Saint-Domingue, where the number of seats per capita eventually outstripped their metropolitan counterparts. Clay situates her work in a number of distinct, yet related, historiographical contexts. The first is absolutist rule and its relation to cultural production. Here, Clay argues that--in contrast to what one might expect from the abundant historiography on the theatricality of absolute power and the centralization of culture undertaken by Louis XIV--the royal government played little direct role in the rise of the theatre industry outside of Paris. …

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