The Theatre of Nuclear Science: Weapons, Power, and the Scientists behind it All By Jeanne Tiehen. Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies. London: Routledge, 2021; pp. 166. $170.00 cloth, $39.71 e-book.

Abstract

for private interests at the expense of the public good. Part II comprises two chapters that investigate how the theatre–finance nexus responded to a financial crisis that has since come to define modern ideas of speculative enterprise: the South Sea Bubble (1720–2). Chapter 4 covers Richard Steele’s short-lived periodical The Theatre, which ran for three months in the wake of the bubble in 1720, as well as his play The Conscious Lovers (1722). In a fascinating excavation of Steele’s reflections on the bubble and its aftermath, Burkert shows how his work, like Centlivre’s, ultimately gives “voice to the concern that elites could use new market structures and dynamics to hijack what appeared to be middling-class sentiments” (123). The book concludes by returning to Cibber and a late comedy, The Refusal; or, The Ladies Philosophy (1721), to show how another writer with middling-class sympathies used his position within the theatre to “theoriz[e] the relationship between changing class structures, speculative investment, and public opinion” (156). Burkert ends with a brief coda that discusses the Half-Price Riots of the 1760s, showing how the theatre–finance nexus persisted into the second half of the century. Burkert’s thesis is highly compelling, and I cannot do justice here to the erudition and deftness of her argumentation and analysis. Through her careful contextualization of the plays and other works within the history of financial crises, she overturns long-held critical assumptions about, among other things, sentimental comedy and its relationship to the emergent middling class. This stimulating account shows how the early eighteenth-century theatre responded to the economic crises that so materially determined its own opportunities for success and failure. The book will prove an extremely valuable contribution to scholars working on the theatre history of the period, as well as on cultural representations of, and engagements with, finance and economics in the early eighteenth century.