Bernhardt, Marcus reckons, was the first fully fledged celebrity. According to a Boston Herald reporter in 1891, she ‘does what she pleases on all occasions and doesn’t hold herself amenable to any law’. There are certainly examples of similar public figures from before her day, but the difference between her and a Lady Hamilton or a Sarah Siddons, say, is that by the fin de siècle the technologies were in place – the press, vast theatre industry, photography – for celebrities to establish a rapport with the general public and to no longer depend entirely on the approval of élites. Bernhardt did attract severe criticism from journalists for her thin frame, but her mass appeal, inseparable from her talent, propelled her above it. The triangle of celebrity culture had begun, fuelled by the media in one corner, celebrities in another, and their ‘publics’ in the last.

Photographs played a large role. ‘Celebrity and photography spurred each other’s growth,’ Marcus writes. She is good at analysing images, such as one very arresting photo of the actress Maude Adams (1872–1953). Millions of people bought photographs of stars like Adams: ‘Perhaps photography’s most significant effect on celebrity,’ Marcus explains, ‘was to make it much easier to identify different images as representing the same person.’ Film, surely, was even more revolutionary, though the book’s focus is very much on theatre. Bernhardt did star in several silent films, but only a few clips and recordings remain. With sound film, however, actors ceased to be fleeting presences and became performers whose every line and mannerism was recorded and whose work was therefore open to ongoing critical appraisal. Marcus argues that the more a performer ‘multiplies’ the better: ‘Copies do not dim the celebrity’s halo; they brighten it.’

As a chronicle of celebrity in the nineteenth century, the book succeeds. The prose is stolid but clean, goes light on the jargon, and has some irresistible nuggets. (Did you know that Henry James once got stuck in a doorway while trying to imitate Bernhardt?) As what it claims to be, however – a ‘bold new account’ of celebrity culture in its entirety – it falls short. Marcus’s purview is both too broad and not broad enough: there are only the flimsiest suggestions of what fame looked like prior to 1800, but after 1800 she flits so often between Bernhardt and contemporary celebrity culture – with a few stops in between – that no line of argument is ever truly sustained.

It is a shame, because the book is often insightful. Where it is most illuminating in fact is in relation to Donald Trump. Marcus identifies shamelessness as a key trope of celebrity: ‘shameless celebrities … elicit adulation by displaying abnormalities rather than hiding them’. Rather like Napoleon’s ‘matchless audacity’ (from a cited 1887 book), or Davy Crockett, Trump exists in a ‘state of social exception’ through which his supporters can vicariously transgress social codes and break free from the burden of moral considerations. What if many people admire Trump not so much because he flouts convention in egregious and xenophobic ways, but simply because he flouts convention at all? Doesn’t he seem a little bit less anomalous when placed alongside a Sylvester Stallone or a Mel Gibson? While theatricality has always had a place in politics, there seem to be some significant ways in which the relatively new phenomenon of celebrity culture reshapes some classical notions of rhetoric. But that would be for another book.

Celebrity culture can seem by turns like the height of democracy and a deeply aristocratic and capitalist force, but The Drama of Celebrity never truly reckons with that paradox. Where conclusions are drawn, there tend to be equally convincing counter-arguments alongside them. The import of celebrity culture in the age of Trump is clear. Exactly what it means, however, and what it says about us, are questions beyond the grasp of this book.