Comparative Drama

The fate of eighteenth-century tragedy in the long sweep of Western theatre history is most often to get swept under the rug. Sandwiched between the early modern heights of Shakespeare or Racine and the twentieth century's revived interest in the tragic after Ibsen and Nietzsche, marked by philosophical optimism and the rise of the novel, the eighteenth century as a period is witness to "the decline of tragedy as a viable theatrical genre" (2). Such is a persistent narrative of theatre history that editor Blair Hoxby describes in the opening pages of Shadows of the Enlightenment and that the volume on the whole convincingly dispels. The eleven essays collected here unearth the assorted ways in which dramatic tragedy remained essential to European intellectual life between the late seventeenth century and Romanticism. Wide-ranging in locale and language (the featured scholars work in and sometimes across the English, Dutch, French, and German national traditions), discipline, and method, the essays render the long eighteenth century as a complex and exciting moment in the genre's history for the way it operated, as Hoxby argues, as "a period of transition in which dominant, residual, and emergent ideas of – and practical experiments in – tragedy coexist" (8). One of the book's strengths is how fruitfully it substantiates this claim, as it documents a lively cultural moment in which the inheritance of tragic models from classical antiquity sits side-by-side, both productively and uneasily, with fresh designs for the genre. The book's second strength lies in its account of how dramatic tragedy addresses issues on the vanguard of current eighteenth-century studies, particularly affect theory, form and history, and the role of theatre as a public institution.

After clarifying the stakes of the volume's intervention in his introduction "Tragedy at the Crossroads of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment," Hoxby opts to proceed via a discussion of illuminating examples rather than pursue a more pointed line of argument. He outlines the neoclassical theories of the French l'abbe Batteux as a launching point to explore the diversity of Enlightenment thought on tragedy in a pan-European setting: from discussions of Aristotelianism and tragic pleasure to different contemporaries' takes on the form, history, and public function of the genre. On the one hand, the preference for multiplicity of example over more sustained critical synthesis of the field has its drawbacks. Perhaps the most notable of these is that Hoxby has a real command of the material (as evidenced in his own 2015 monograph What Was Tragedy?, which possessed a similarly impressive scope), but his authoritative voice is not always evident in this format. On the other hand, what emerges in the [End Page 418] introduction is an intriguing series of motifs that connect Enlightenment ideas of tragedy to classical and modern ones, depicting tragedy as the grounds in the period for a productive "collision between antiquity and modernity" (25). To take an example: if the 1960s debate between George Steiner and Raymond Williams on tragedy as universal or as historically contingent remains a flashpoint for studies of tragic theory still today, then Hoxby's readings uncover how eighteenth-century writers were already working through the same crux. The critical lineage of these two camps—with full awareness of inevitable slipperiness between them, Hoxby denotes them "Enlightened" and "Counter-Enlightened"—becomes one of the more fascinating throughlines of the volume (9-10).

Shadows of the Enlightenment is judiciously divided into three sections with three distinctly thematic (rather than national) focal points. To resist the urge to group the essays by nation or by chronology is a nice touch, and the thematic categories do much to advance the volume's comparativist impulses. Part I, "Ancient Forms, Modern Affects," assembles four essays on Enlightenment theories of the passions, but takes readers from the early eighteenth-century she-tragedies of Nicholas Rowe through discussions of reason, enthusiasm, religion, and...