As Joseph Harris states in his introduction, “writing intellectual history is never easy” (15), and yet he masterfully synthesizes a large number of theoretical writings and concepts from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. By limiting his corpus almost exclusively to theoretical texts, Harris is able to highlight the continuous “inventing” of the spectator by theoreticians as a “composite or hypothetical construct” (13), a rhetorical and often-imaginary figure, around which they build their poetics and aesthetics. The theoreticians, Harris contends, thus invent and reinvent their “models of spectatorship in line with their own concerns, tastes, and priorities” (19). Inventing the Spectator presents a fresh and timely account of theory for scholars and students of early modern French theater, particularly since Harris shifts perspective from “the more reflective, critical process of reading dramatic works in private” to the experience of theater in performance (8).

In eight chapters on major dramatic theorists (the abbé d’Aubignac, Corneille, Dubos, Rousseau, and Diderot), as well as key themes including the rules, illusion and the senses, the pleasures of comedy and tragedy, interest, antitheatricality, and identification, Harris aims, on the one hand, to show how dramatic theories offer insights into the human mind and, on the other, to “revisit and rehabilitate” these same theories to demonstrate how they are “complex and contradictory reflections emerging from an ongoing dialogue with questions of human subjectivity and experience” (2). Methodologically, Harris avoids the potential pitfalls of anachronism by not having “recourse to modern theories of audience response, psychology, or phenomenology,” which “facilitate[s] a more historically attuned engagement with the period’s theatre that does not rely on modern assumptions about audience response” (17).

Harris’s detailed analyses of spectatorship address writings that appeared after 1630, as he claims that theoretical reflections on spectatorship did not really begin in France until this time (20). In turn, chapter 1 explores notions such as illusion, perspective, judgment, the three unities, vraisemblance, and music in the theater. Chapter 2 studies d’Aubignac’s spectator(s) and theories of dramatic practice, while chapter 3 examines Corneille’s ambivalent and problematic relationship with dramatic theories of spectatorship. Chapter 4 grapples with the slippery concept of pleasure in terms of suspense and surprise, comedy and laughter, and emotions and pain. Chapters 5–8 focus on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Dubos’s engagement with emotion and the tacit conflation between theater and painting in chapter 5; titled “Interest and Identification,” chapter 6 explores pro- and antitheatrical writings on topics such as Aristotelian theories of catharsis, voluntary and involuntary identification, and self-recognition; Rousseau’s “alienated spectator” is the subject of chapter 7; and chapter 8 discusses Diderot, domesticity, and the drame. The epilogue, titled “The Decline of the Spectator,” extends analysis into the nineteenth century and Hugo’s preface to Cromwell (1827).

For all of the merits of the book regarding dramatic theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, those of us who study sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French drama may be frustrated that Harris tends to gloss over writings by Jean de La Taille, Vauquelin de La Fresnaye, and Laudun d’Aigaliers, and to use them as rather two-dimensional foils for the post-1630 theorists. More substantial engagement with the critical and theoretical writings from this period would arguably have allowed Harris to have a more thorough critique and analysis of the role of illusion, performance, subjectivity, and spectatorship during the French Renaissance.

This criticism aside, Harris’s contribution to scholarship on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must not go unnoticed. This is a rich, well-written, and thought-provoking book that will be sure to encourage further research into the theoretical writings on drama in early modern France.