Actions taken in the name of Liberty by British settlers in North America forced those living in the British Isles to differentiate themselves from people they commonly understood in familial terms. Overconfidence in a military solution to the American crisis in retrospect looks like an attempt to avoid a true reckoning with the new global world after the Peace of Paris in 1783. Britain’s own imperial holdings were now strangely double: governing the territorial empire in North America and the mercantile empire in India required radically different economic and political strategies. The loss of the thirteen colonies sent shock waves through the British economy that were partially alleviated by the injection of capital from India, but the decades-long struggle to regulate the East India Company, which reached its period of most intensity during the 1780s, indicates that this recalibration was itself destabilizing. If the 1770s were about American decolonization and the 1780s were about reorienting the empire to face the East, then the 1790s turned attention towards political divisions within the nation itself. The French Revolution resuscitated unresolved anxieties associated with the American war and suddenly the government was fighting battles against radical factions at home and against Revolutionary France in Europe. And yet this 30-year period, marked by almost constant war and a sense of social insecurity, was a crucible for many of the most salient changes in what by now was a full-fledged entertainment industry.

Theatre history has been slow to recognize these developments and many of the most important playwrights of the period are only recently receiving the attention they deserve. Perhaps because the string of plays from The Rivals through The Duenna and The School for Scandal to The Critic essentially moves from masterpiece to masterpiece, consideration of the 1770s has revolved around Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s remarkable transit across the London stage. Much ink has been spilled on a supposed turn from sentimental to laughing comedy first heralded by Oliver Goldsmith, but this simple substitution no longer seems convincing even with regard to Sheridan. A case could be made for similar explosions of high caliber work in the 1780s and 90s: Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald, in comedy after comedy, offered complex ripostes to Sheridan’s cultural dominance by combining laughter and sentiment in increasingly subtle fashion. In many ways, five-act comedy reaches its full elaboration in the work of Sheridan, Cowley and Inchbald, but the most significant aspects of late eighteenth-century theatrical culture are to be found beyond the work of these specific playwrights. Rather, we have to turn to transformations in the playhouses themselves, to remarkable innovations in design and spectacle, to the increasing prevalence of musical entertainment, to new forms of celebrity and finally, to the ever increasing integration of print and performance media to gain some sense of the theatrical world that played host to the productions selected in this section.

When Garrick staged The Jubilee in 1769, Drury Lane Theatre held an audience of approximately 2,360 patrons. Garrick’s slight afterpiece turned the rain-soaked fiasco in Stratford-upon-Avon into a source of consistent receipts, easily recouping his losses from the failed Jubilee celebration. But the play is also a harbinger of many things to come. Bardolatry was a going concern in the final 30 years of the century, but The Jubilee’s reliance on ethnic mimicry, its obsession with class mobility, its blatant nationalism, the exploitation and immediate publication of songs from the play and above all its remarkable procession of favorite characters from Shakespeare all point to increasingly spectacular, musical expressions of ethnocentric and nationalist sentiment in the theatres of London. By the time John Philip Kemble opened the refurbished Covent Garden Theatre in September 1809 and sparked 67 days of rioting—known now as the Old Price War —London audiences had become accustomed to large, cavernous playhouses designed to maximize capacity. Huge spectacular productions, leavened by musical interludes, were becoming increasingly the norm. Across the last third of the eighteenth century, both patent theatres were remodeled, both patent theatres burned down, and both were re-built to accommodate more and more seats in the pit, in the galleries and in the stalls. Theatre went from being a fairly intimate experience to a form of mass entertainment. This expansion had an immediate impact on acting style, on the repertoire, on design, and on the forms of affiliation felt between audience members. Bigger houses meant highly stylized gestures and a performance pattern that tended to move increasingly from point to point. The dialogue in five-act tragedy and comedy needed to be supplemented by music and visual spectacle so that key scenes registered in the back seats and stalls. Designers, led by Philippe Jacques De Loutherbourg, developed extraordinary visual effects and the scenographic experience became a draw in itself. This emphasis on spectacle had always been the case in pantomime, but Garrick and especially Kemble started bringing new scenographic techniques to bear on productions of Shakespeare and other plays from the stock repertoire. And finally, the new houses generated new forms of observational and conversational sociability. Playhouses were still fully lit throughout this period so audiences enjoyed the spectacle of fashionable life regardless of what was on the playbill.

The repertory itself also went through significant transformations. In the wake of Garrick’s simultaneous restoration of some Shakespearean scripts and his re-writing of others, celebrity in this period was never very distant from Shakespeare. With the partial exception of Frances Abington, the most important players—Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, and Dorothy (Dora) Jordan—owned specific Shakespearean roles and used them to articulate a specifically English national culture. The Siddons phenomena—audience members were frequently described in emotional paroxysms during her performances of Lady Macbeth, Katherine of Aragon, and non-Shakespearean roles such as Lady Randolph and Belvedira—lasted for a remarkably long time and her powers of declamation and statuesque presence generated highly expressive forms of tragedy. Her brother’s impact was in many ways the opposite. Kemble’s learned productions often strove for one intense effect—usually hammered home by the elimination of comic subplots and the insertion of tableaux and processions. Neither of these players excelled in comedy and thus this part of the repertoire fell to Abington and Jordan. Both women were very much associated with fashionable society or the Ton and their celebrity was entwined with stylistic innovation outside the playhouse.

Despite the prominence of celebrity actors—such as Siddons, Kemble, and Jordan—associated with Shakespeare, perhaps too much attention has been placed on Garrick’s legacy of coupling virtuoso acting with the Bard’s plays in these years. As Robert D. Hume has argued, John Rich’s cultivation of spectacle, dance, and musical entertainment earlier in the century arguably had a more vivid afterlife than any mode of theatrical entertainment in the late eighteenth century. Comic opera, harlequinade, and all manner of musical interludes and afterpieces became the driving force of receipts in both the patent houses and the illegitimate venues outside the borough of Westminster. Sadler’s Wells, Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, and a host of smaller companies emerged in this period and their blend of music, dance, pantomime, hippodrama, and spectacle was both inviting in its own right and deeply influential on the managerial practice of Thomas Harris, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Colman, and Kemble. By the early nineteenth century even Kemble was supplementing Shakespeare and plays such as Addison’s Cato with equestrian productions of Bluebeard,pantomimes foregrounding the antics of Grimaldi, and musical afterpieces by John O’Keefe and Charles Dibdin. At least part of the impetus behind these productions was to co-opt the attractions of competitors; with new forms of leisure being commodified every day towards the century’s end, the entertainment marketplace became more and more saturated. But there is also evidence that the social unrest of the 1790s, with its incipient demand for the performance of patriotism, fostered hybrid musical genres. As Gillian Russell has argued, the theatre of the 1790s was a wartime theatre; managers and audiences alike were finely attuned to nationalist sentiment in the playhouse and to events on the continent. The theatre became a site where military and naval characters were celebrated. The outpouring of musical plays celebrating Nelson’s victory at the Nile is one notable example, but even a cursory review of the newspapers indicates how frequently productions were interrupted or framed by calls for and performances of “Rule Britannia” and “Britons Strike Home.”

The performance of patriotism was a crucial issue among players and audiences alike, but so too was dissent. Many of the most successful and important plays of the 1770s and early 1780s directly satirized the failure of the North government to retain the American colonies. Indeed Sheridan’s entire career can be understood in terms of political commentary. Likewise, the 1790s saw similar forms of dissent in the playhouse. Despite government censorship, scripts by Inchbald and Holcroft still managed to engage with the policies of the Pitt government. And audiences, most notably under the influence of radicals such as John Thelwall, fundamentally politicized the reception of even “loyal” scripts. The “theft” of Venice Preserv’d is one such example of audience intervention that challenged government regulation of theatrical culture.

Considering the market for novelty and the tendency of audiences to construct topical meaning, it is not surprising that so much of the theatre in the period addressed colonial and national issues. Throughout this period both patent houses staged a wide variety of plays representing zones of colonial contact and imperial desire. In quite fascinating ways, London audiences were being shown the world, and their place in it, on a regular basis on the boards of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The increasing integration of colonial and metropolitan economies meant that there was a market for ethnographic display and demonstrations of imperial efficacy. Foreign locales and peoples were often a pre-text for lavish design and costume, but many plays explicitly took up the challenge of transmitting knowledge about these distant societies. The pantomime Omai, or A Trip round the World is perhaps the most revealing because it blends harlequin entertainment with recently published discoveries about the South Seas. Many of the most successful plays of the period, Samuel Foote’s The Nabob, Cumberland’s The West Indian,and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, come immediately to mind, satirizing with varying degrees of intensity the class mobility made possible by the influx of colonial money.

This interest in cultural difference and social mobility was also played out in relation to long-standing forms of ethnic difference within the British Isles. Michael Ragussis has identified a significant proliferation of “multi-ethnic spectacles”—plays staging interactions between ethnic types—in both patent houses. Many of the performance protocols associated with specific ethnic types were refined and consolidated in this period. Individual actors carried out deeply significant cultural work by implicitly challenging or reinforcing stereotypes: for example, John Moody established one form of stage Irishness in Garrick’s The Jubilee only to implicitly critique it in his performance of Major O’Flaherty in The West Indian.Likewise John Quick moved beyond Charles Macklin’s famous representations of Jewishness (see The Merchant of Venice and Love a la Mode) by enacting a different form of anti-Semitism in the character of Isaac Mendoza in Sheridan’s The Duenna, only to reprise and critique the role in the masquerade scene of Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem.Plays such as The Padlock and Inkle and Yarico also pushed the use of blackface beyond its prior deployment in Othello and Oroonoko towards demeaning forms of racist comedy.

The self-conscious engagement with the theatrical repertoire by players and playwrights alike gives some sense of the deeply immersive world of Georgian theatre. Theatre professionals clearly expected and relied upon audience knowledge not only of prior productions, but also of performance protocols. Many of the most important developments in acting were based on an implicit and assumed departure from received practice. When Sarah Siddons first appeared as Lady Randolph in Home’s Douglas,much of the thrill for the audience lay in recognizing how and when she modified the points pioneered by Mary Barry. Actors’ modes of performative differentiation were often aimed solely at carving out a different stage persona. But often these changes were tied to complex forms of social critique. This strategy is perhaps most visible in the work of Hannah Cowley. As Sheridan’s most formidable competitor in the 1770s and 1780s, Cowley’s plays often consciously rehearse scenarios from Sheridan’s scripts to argue for a different vision of sociability. Cowley’s plays explored the changing laws around marriage and the shifting norms around women’s behavior. These themes were also directly addressed by Inchbald’s comedies but her concerns often strayed into the realm of politics proper. As Gillian Russell has argued, a complex debate about women’s place in the public sphere was repeatedly engaged by activating the audience’s knowledge of the repertoire.

That knowledge was by our standards extraordinary. Audiences were deeply informed not only about the plays, but also about the lives of the managers, the players and musical performers. That knowledge was gained in part from the sheer repetition that marked play-going during this period and in part from the convergence of theatrical culture with print media. When the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post and other papers gained the right to print parliamentary debatein the late 1760s, London saw a veritable explosion in newspaper culture. As papers became more numerous and expanded to a full four pages, “Theatrical Intelligence” remained the only form of cultural information published on a daily basis in the London press. Throughout the middle of the century the relationship between theatrical management and the booksellers behind daily newspapers had become a synergistic cultural force. Each relied on the other for revenue and for subject matter: papers advertised plays and reported on theatrical scandal, whereas plays frequently represented the world of ephemeral print culture and brought the news into the playhouse. This tight feedback loop of re-mediation meant that it became increasingly difficult to separate the nightly experience at the theatre from the daily experience of reading the news. This shift is visible in the “Contexts” of this third section of the anthology. By the early 1770s one can always find a wide array of reviews of new plays, and some newspapers, such as the Morning Chronicle,begin to develop a specific critical language for talking about the theatre.

The convergence of theatre and the press radically changed the culture of celebrity. Garrick had already shown the possibilities for the daily press to keep performance “alive” in spite of its inherent transience, but his involvement with the press was hardly singular. The great celebrities who followed Garrick’s example all recognized the importance of managing the mediation of their fame not only in print, but also in visual representations. As Shearer West has shown, the proliferation of engravings of players in representative roles had a significant impact on audience expectations and on the articulation of a specifically English theatrical culture. And there is an argument to be made for a similar transformation in the behavior of audiences. If we look closely at theatrical reporting in this period we can see audiences performing with the knowledge that their interventions will be re-mediated in the newspapers. With this knowledge in hand the theatres became a place where political praxis could be engaged with an eye to its widespread dissemination. The damnation of Lady Eglantine Wallace’s The Ton is instructive in this regard. As readers will find in the “Nights at the Theatre” section, audience unrest during the performance of the play wasn’t simply about its aesthetic shortcomings—many less satisfying plays survived audience scrutiny—but rather was directed specifically at Lady Wallace’s gender insubordination. She had appeared in the gallery of the House of Commons in breeches and the audience used the performance of her play to publicly shame her, both in the playhouse and in the press. The media convergence of theatre and newspapers became particularly important during the Revolutionary wars with France. As John Barrell has argued, within the government controlled precincts of the theatre both radical and loyalist constituencies had their say with the full knowledge that performative debates would be transmitted in the print public sphere. Despite the censorship inherent to the Licensing Act of 1737, managers, playwrights, players and audiences devised ways of instantiating publics and counter-publics in the theatres. These complex practices often led to productions that were genuinely difficult to locate politically. Sheridan’s Pizarro, which was in many ways the culmination of much of the theatrical experimentation of the eighteenth century, was widely celebrated for its loyalism even though equally if not more convincing arguments can be made for Sheridan’s criticism of the Ministry. This undecidability eventually found its way into audience behavior, perhaps nowhere more famously than in the Old Price War. The politics of those protesting the rise in prices and the proliferation of private boxes in Covent Garden looked backward to a Burkean fantasy of loyalty to King and Constitution, but expressed through tactics derived from radical popular convention. In quite tangible ways, the complex interplay between performance and print allowed these convergent media to increasingly capture the dynamic forces of everyday life.

This permeability between drama and life would seem to set the stage for the birth of nineteenth-century realism, but it is important to recognize the degree to which late eighteenth-century theatre clung to performative artifice. Theatrical culture in the 1790s tended to approach the real via the emergent genres of the Gothic and melodrama. Highly expressive productions such as The Castle Spectre and The Iron Chest seemed to catch the social insecurity of the age by conspicuously displacing anxiety onto gloomy castles and psychologically extreme states. We can point to a similar indirect strategy in harlequinade. The rise of the great clowns Delpini and Grimaldi is inseparable from the way that their transformation tricks engaged with the incipient forces of commodity capitalism. Grimaldi’s transformation of a post-chaise into a wheelbarrow engaged with incipient anxieties about class mobility, and his remarkable animation and subsequent dismemberment of the “Vegetable Man” in Harlequin Asmodeus explored the affective cost of wartime in a way that was beyond spoken drama. What Grimaldi did with things on stage was both magically funny and dead serious. Perhaps this mixture of the grave and the ridiculous is the challenge posed by the plays and the dramaturgical innovations of the latter eighteenth century: comprehending the transit from the trivial to the blindingly serious requires that we think about the importance of minor forms, of sudden shifts in performative register, of seemingly meretricious forms of display. In other words, the gravity that we tend to bring to the analysis of contemporary culture serves us well in this historically distant manifestation of the entertainment industry.

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See Lisa A. Freeman Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage.Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002 for a thorough discussion of this issue.

See Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Robert D. Hume, “John Rich as Manager and Entrepreneur” in Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow, The Stage’s Glory: John Rich 1692–1761, 29–60.Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011.

Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pressremains the definitive account of these developments.

Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815.Oxford University Press, 1995.

See Daniel O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1800. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011 and David Francis Taylor, Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 554–70 and Daniel O’Quinn, “Insurgent Allegories: Staging Venice Preserv’d, The Rivals and Speculation in 1795,” Literature Compass 1 (2004), 1–30.

Michael Ragussis, Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, 24 and 43–5.

See Misty G. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York: Palgrave, 2002, 139–200.

Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

See John Barrell, “An Entire Change of Performances,” Lumen 17 (1998): 14–15, and his Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 554–70.