The year 1642 looms large in studies of both England's theater and its public sphere, but for very different reasons. For theater scholarship the closing of theaters in that year is the terminus of the (extended) age of Shakespeare; political studies contend that the deregulation of the printing press following the outbreak of the Civil War was the means by which English publicness came into being. In her ambitious Theatre and the English Public from Reformation to Revolution, Katrin Beushausen challenges this consensus, and argues that theater and political debate were intimately entwined in the Interregnum. The prohibition of 1642, after all, was a temporary measure. Plays were performed between 1642 and 1660. New plays were circulated in pamphlet form, drawing on theatrical forms that predated the beginnings of the Civil War. Theatricality framed political debate. Figures as disparate as John Milton and William Davenant called for a reformed “public theater” to educate and engage the people in political life (or, alternatively, serve as a means of control), while political pamphleteers deployed theatrical form to castigate the opposition (by presenting them as affected, distant, hypocritical) and to promote an agenda (ironically, often by adopting self-consciously dramatic personae like the Fool). The Interregnum, then, was far from devoid of theatrical performance, and its theatricality was not confined to the stage; printed matter and political actors drew on theatrical convention and, as it were, staged political debate by imagining and then appealing to an audience long conversant with the cultures and styles of English theater.

In the first two chapters, Beushausen traces the prehistory of this convergence of theatricality and the public, arguing that it manifested at moments of transition (the accession of James I) or religious controversy (the break with Rome, the Marprelate Controversy, the William Prynne trial). These convergences were temporary but bore witness to peculiar instantiations of public spheres founded less on the circulation and cultivation of rational thought, as per Habermas, but marked rather by appeals to the passions. Drawing on notions of theater as a transformative site, a commonplace in both screeds against and apologies for the theater, commentators forged public spheres by appealing to their audience's emotional responsiveness. Beushausen argues that these temporary spheres cohered in the Interregnum, when a wider circulation of commentary drew on conflicting arguments about the theater (as either corrupting or moral) to frame political debate. Affective appeals could be highly effective, but they also could unleash responses that exceeded their authors’ expectations. Davenant, who emerges as one of the book's key figures, recognized this: his early calls for the ban's revocation, when he posited a reformed theater for a wide audience, were later tempered by recognition that a people's theater could be a dangerous place; he subsequently argued for an apolitical theater for elite audiences (a theater we know as the Restoration stage).

Theatre and the English Public is thorough, perhaps overly so: sections of the book get bogged down in historical narratives that meander away from the book's key claims (in particular, sections on Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne and public appeal; on backgrounds to the English Civil War; and on Hobbes); other sections are dutiful to historical debate without furthering an argument. It is not clear if there is a difference between the theatrical (implying a clear connection to theatrical form, content, styles, and sites of performance) and the performative (which may not have any connection to the stage): the (repeated) raising of the royal standard in 1642 may have been highly performative, and Beushausen's reading is attentive to how reports of the raising repeatedly describe how “moved” the crowd was; the valence of calling this event “theatrical” is less clear, and while the episode is included to strengthen the overall argument, instead it weakens it. Despite its flaws, the arguments at the heart of Theatre and the English Public are convincing, and the book as a whole successfully reframes debates about the relationship between theater and its publics. It makes visible the ways in which theatricality constituted the public sphere while it also made appeals to the passions unpredictable and even dangerous.