on a kind of causeandeffect relationship between political and historical events and the events on stage, he has nowhere to go. In many ways, this book is two in one: a narrative of David Douglass’s career as an actor, manager, and entrepreneur and the historical moment in which he found himself on the one hand, and an argument for the colonial stage as a site of the transmission of Britishness that the title promises—a sort of prequel to Jeffrey H. Richards’s Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic—on the other. Either or both of those books would have been valuable in and of themselves, and, given Johnson’s direct and idiomatic style, both would have been a pleasure to read. But ultimately, despite its wide range, London in a Box ends up being oddly unsatisfying (not least because the one thing that is missing from this book is close readings of the plays themselves, which would allow readers to see how British values were communicated through dramatic texts). That’s not to say that the book isn’t an engaging, engrossing study of the place of the theater in the twenty years that preceded the American Revolution: it surely is. But it’s so baggy that it’s hard to hold onto, which is a shame given the skill and eminence of its author.

中文翻译：

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阅读这些美国：早期共和国的联邦识字，1776-1830 由 Keri Holt

对于政治历史事件与舞台上的事件之间的某种因果关系，他无处可去。在许多方面，这本书是二合一的：一方面讲述了大卫·道格拉斯 (David Douglass) 作为演员、经理和企业家的职业生涯，另一方面讲述了他发现自己所处的历史时刻，并论证了殖民阶段是标题所承诺的英国性的传播——一种杰弗里·H·理查兹在美国新共和国的戏剧、戏剧和身份的前传——另一方面。这两本书中的一本书或两本书本身就很有价值，而且鉴于约翰逊直接和惯用的风格，这两本书读起来都会很愉快。但最终，尽管它的范围很广，盒子里的伦敦最终出奇地不令人满意（尤其是因为这本书缺少的一件事是仔细阅读戏剧本身，这将使读者了解英国价值观是如何通过戏剧文本传达的）。这并不是说这本书不是对美国革命前 20 年中剧院地位的引人入胜的研究：它确实是。但它太松松垮垮的以至于很难抓住，考虑到它的作者的技巧和杰出，这是一种耻辱。