New World Drama traces the sociopolitical functioning of Anglo-American theatre across two centuries, during a time when performance relied upon a more diverse public than did literate print culture. At the playhouse, ordinary folk exercised what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon labels “popular sovereignty” (2). In an age when theatres were voluble, well-lit spaces, the gathered audience constituted a commons ready to watch scenes that spoke to its concerns, or that could be made to do so. Scenes might be appropriated and meanings made by spectators shouting commentary or clambering onstage to become part of the action. Riotous hissing could terminate a performance, assaulting both the actors and their schedule. This dialogic drama spoke to pressing questions regarding settler colonialism, global capitalism, social mobility, and international rivalries.

Dillon points out that from the late 1650s, the theatre had the potential to assemble an imperial English public. Even Oliver Cromwell realized this, his patronage of William D'Avenant contravening Puritan, wartime scruples. In plays like D'Avenant's The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, the audience witnessed what it was to be freeborn English men and women, and why their nation was justified in its violent resettlement of the Caribbean and North America. The ambitions for universal monarchy exhibited by Catholic Spaniards or Protestant Dutch were contrasted against a liberty-loving English intent on freeing the New World, and perhaps its first peoples too, from such tyranny. A century and a half later, playing the Indian, in dramas such as Metamora, would inculcate a similar attitude in citizens of the young American republic.

Peopling the New World meant not only settlement by the English (later Britons or Americans) but also the enslavement of non-Europeans. Anglo-Americans had to find a resolution to the ideological impasse of relying on chattel slavery—somehow resolving the settlers' self-conception as a free and self-determining people with their economic dependence upon a subjugated workforce. Dillon argues that eighteenth-century drama eased anxieties about this reliance by inscribing as natural a white–black binary, where some were to rule while the majority toiled. This division was operational in the alien environs of the American plantation, but adaptations of metropolitan works also asserted that the English were fit for the New World. Thus, Shakespeare's Tempest morphed into Dryden and D'Avenant's pantomime The Enchanted Island. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko became even more popular once it was adjusted for the stage and to these colonial concerns. Conversely, Richard Brinsley Sheridan scripted comforting ends to metropolitan social conflicts between Old World pedigree and New World wealth.

That the theatre made sense of profound socioeconomic and political change is, Dillon suggests, also attested by absent or avant-garde performances. The presence of nonwhite spectators, both free and bonded, challenged racial stratification. If not a rabble making a scene, as authorities feared, these spectators could still find emancipatory potential in drama. That performance had this potential is evidenced by playhouse riots, which occurred with some frequency in antebellum America, and surveillance of nonwhite performance, including the carnivalesque Jonkonnu, which may, in turn, have provoked what became blackface minstrelsy.

Early American studies may privilege the literary (and native) over the dramatic (and imported), but the participatory character of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre, and its possible significance, are well known among historians of early modern London's theatre. Dillon's discussion of metropolitan drama elides several complexities in order to allow the argument, one only partly bolstered by older Marxist historiography, that 1649 “marked … the new authority of public audiences” (60). Few scholars of Jacobean and Restoration drama would recognize such a cultural caesura at midcentury, however, for the choice of amphitheatres and city halls, as well as courtly chambers, meant that a performative commons was as likely or more so in the first half of the century. After the Restoration, the courtly masque had had its day and the playhouses were commercial, but they were neither capacious nor designed primarily for a common audience, and royal, command performances were still given in town and at Whitehall. As the study ultimately concedes, generic differences created different publics and popular-cum-plebeian theatre was long in the (re)making.

Dillon broadens our horizons. Yet readers should not expect a well-paced history of how a circum-Atlantic theatrical network came into being by the later eighteenth century. Important geographical nodes, like the port cities Bristol or Dublin, are passed over. So, too, is a generation: we learn little about the period ca.1740–90 and the reconfigurations wrought by the Seven Years' War or ensuing American Revolution. What of drama that might be considered intergenerational for the eighteenth century—the tale of Inkle and Yarico for instance?

For a book appearing in an American studies series, perhaps a certain amount can be taken as read. Yet overly much is made of how drama perpetuated what Dillon baptizes the “colonial relation” (8). Anglo-Americans could live with the contradiction of liberty supported by indigenous dispossession and African bondage by “positing an unbridgeable distance between white and nonwhite persons, despite the quotidian proximities” (59). This relation has been a central concern of colonial American historiography for decades, certainly since Edmund Morgan's classic formulation, acknowledged in a single, parenthetical note. Likewise, when attention shifts to the Caribbean, Eric Williams is duly referenced, but, aside from the endnotes, there is small mention of, and even less engagement with, the recent work of historians such as Trevor Burnard and Natalie Zacek.

Dillon's main goal is to show how social identities framed by class, nation, gender, and race were enacted and contested in the galleries and onstage simultaneously. Yet to move beyond assertion to demonstration that the theatre had its own powerful and dynamic real-world effects requires more evidence, especially for the period 1649–ca. 1750. Traces of drama's reception, from newspaper advertisements to diaries, are used effectively in the final two chapters, so why not the earlier three? Moreover, in terms of social scripts circulating, what do transatlantic playgoers, such as William Byrd, have to tell us?

Daringly, Dillon draws a long bow, but only when taking aim at early nineteenth-century theatre do her arrows easily find their mark.