The London Stage Database is a major achievement that offers new directions in research and will change the way we think about eighteenth-century theater.

This lucid, compelling, and highly original study has the rare quality of making novel insights feel familiar. [Speculative Enterprise is] a major contribution to eighteenth-century studies, theater history, and economic history.

Burkert demonstrates a new way of understanding the relationship between the theater and the financialization of the early modern economic system, revealing the construction of a new kind of what we might call ‘publicness’—a way of conceptualizing both the theatergoing public and the broader mass of population that this public represented.