London in a Box: Englishness and Theatre in Revolutionary America by Odai Johnson (review)

The book is a kind of receptacle itself, in which Johnson has stuffed as much information as he could about a huge array of historical phenomena, both directly related to Douglass, the American Company, and the transmission of Britishness in the eighteenth-century theater, and others not so much: the history of the colonies; narratives of Scottish gentlemen's clubs; the peripatetic lives of eighteenth-century actors; the death of Thomas Hallam (father of Lewis), who was accidentally stabbed through the eye with a prop walking stick (!); the life of radical Whig politician John Wilkes; the struggle over the Stamp Act and later the tea tax; and the various market and court sessions in Williamsburg, to name a few. On the one hand, his juxtaposition of the crisis over the tea tax and the frequency with which tea appears in British plays is enlightening—even as theatergoers are awash in tea at the theater, they are burning it, throwing it off ships, or simply allowing it to rot in port (Johnson points to a delightful coincidence that a less eagle-eyed researcher might have missed: when Douglass sails from London back to Charleston with his company, one of the three boats that formed a flotilla of which his was a part carried the first load of tea affected by the new tax). 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.