Katherine Newey and Jeffrey Richards. John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-230-52499-6. Price: $US 90.00

Although dual authorship could result in a book that loses focus or abruptly switches voices, John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre is organized into eight well integrated chapters. It gathers an exceptional array of data demonstrating that Ruskin’s ideas significantly affected the Victorian theater both directly and indirectly. It also furnishes absorbing details about the plays, actors, managers, set designers, and so on that fit into the realm of Ruskinian theater. It is a work of new theater history, participating in the shift within theater historiography toward economics, gender, and other vital but somewhat neglected fields, exemplified by the work of Jacky Bratton and Tracy Davis (and, of course, earlier books by Newey and Richards). The first chapter describes Ruskin’s frequent attendance at all kinds of theatrical entertainments—from Shakespeare to the Christy Minstrels—and establishes his attitudes towards theater as a didactic and moral tool. By the second paragraph, the chapter has quoted a half dozen comments in which Ruskin offers a variation on his statement that he has “always held the stage quite among the best and most necessary means of education–moral and intellectual” (qtd 1). He formed friendships with many theater people; through them, Ruskin’s aesthetic influence extended from art and architecture to theater. The second chapter expands on this point, arguing that “those who wished to . . . change the theatre” in the late nineteenth century “were all Ruskinians, to a greater or lesser degree” (20). This chapter looks at nine influential people whose ideas about the theater Ruskin affected: Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, W. E. Gladstone, Henry Arthur Jones, Reverend Stewart Duckworth Headlam, Henry Irving, Wilson Barrett, Madge Kendal, and Helen Faucit. Although in some cases the influence Ruskin exerted was specifically addressed to drama or theatrical practice, in most cases the authors argue for a more diffused impact derived from Ruskin’s writing on art and aesthetics. The third chapter demonstrates that Edward William Godwin acted as an important “conduit for Ruskin’s ideas about the theatre and actual theatre practice” (45). Godwin trained as an architect; in 1853 he read Seven Lamps of Architecture and Stones of Venice, experiencing “an instant conversion” to Ruskin’s ideas (45). Although Godwin claimed a later unconversion, Newey and Richards convincingly present him as continuing to echo Ruskin in his many theater reviews and in his criticism of the aesthetic underlying scenic, set, and costume designs. His zeal for antiquarian correctness on stage was so strident that he “published 33 articles on the correct architecture and costume for each of Shakespeare’s plays in The Architect in 1874 and 1875” (61). The authors attribute this goal of historical accuracy, along with Godwin’s concern for the theater’s capacity to educate, to Ruskin’s influence. The chapter concludes by tracing a genealogy of influence from Ruskin, through Godwin as the main link, to the late nineteenth-century theatrical triumvirate: Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Wilson Barrett. Clearly written, tightly constructed, and very interesting, the fourth chapter looks at toga plays–dramas set in ancient Rome–which were popular in Victorian Britain. This theatrical vogue “coincided with the classical revival in paintings from the 1860s to 1914" (85); it is part of a phenomenon of classicism often seen as a way for the British to define their empire as the modern Rome. Newey and Richards locate Ruskin in the thick of concern for the success of the British Empire and interest in the toga play as a site of moral and aesthetic education. Indeed, the chapter points to Ruskin’s letter to actor-manager Wilson Barrett about his 1884 production of Claudian, complimenting the scene-painting as doing “more …