| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre. By Benjamin McArthur. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xx, 438 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-300-12232-9.)
Readers of Arthur W. Bloom's magisterial Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theatre (2000) may wonder what could justify a second major monograph devoted to Jefferson only seven years on. While Bloom's will remain the definitive chronicle to date of Jefferson's life and career, Benjamin McArthur's The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle deserves our attention for its use of Jefferson as a glass focusing "more of the changes in theatrical styles and business organization" than did the career of perhaps any other nineteenth-century American actor (p. xv).	1
In his introduction, McArthur confesses that "my account will frequently digress from [Jefferson's] life to explore other theatrical avenues," in order "to provide a vivid sense of how both the theatrical community and its public experienced the stage" (p. xvii). Accordingly, McArthur surveys other careers (Mrs. Mowatt's, Edwin Booth's, and Laura Keene's, for example), and he examines a plethora of entertainments of the era (tableau vivant, minstrelsy, hippodrama) and social issues affecting theater (race and segregation, prostitutes in theaters, and business panics and riots) at the points where these impinge on Jefferson's career as an actor or manager.	. . .

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