Politically, the early eighteenth century was characterized by the Protestant compromise that first brought William and Mary to the throne in 1689. Eventually, this same demand for a Protestant line would bring a German-speaking George I (Georg Ludwig) in 1714, establishing the long-lived House of Hanover. The forced abdication of James II and the broad support for a Protestant monarch, even over an English speaking one, is an indication of how deep anti-Catholic sentiment and paranoia ran. From William and Mary through Anne and the Hanovarian Georges, administrations supported “business-friendly” philosophies and ventures, among them, the East India Company, the slave trade, and a series of pieces of legislation known as the Enclosure Acts, which effectively destroyed the commons and privatized British land. The massive consolidation of wealth fostered by colonialism and the slave trade fed the explosion of London’s population and the market for luxury goods. Liquidity in the marketplace, improved roads and turnpikes, the absence of a major plague, and modern farming techniques raised overall life expectancy, but not all benefitted equally. Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera exposed the economic savagery of modern boom-town London, as thousands of young people flocked to find work but instead often found themselves without networks of support, food, or shelter. Press gangs conscripting sailors, a corrupt prison system, a growing list of property crimes entailing capital punishment, and government collaboration with businesses fed cynicism about the Walpole administration, which rose to power in the wake of the South Sea Bubble. The South Sea debacle was Britain’s first modern stock market crash, in which South Sea share prices were driven up by insider trading and a public buying frenzy before crashing back down to below their initial price, leaving behind a trail of bankruptcies, economic depression, and a London gin-drinking epidemic. Robert Walpole became the first Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1721 in the wake of the crisis; a few years later, he became the first Prime Minister in 1730.

What Londoners saw on stage during this period is a mixed story of change and continuity. The diminished presence of libertine playwrights Wycherley, Etherege, Sedley, and the most frank Restoration sex comedies, such as The Man of Mode, Love in a Wood and The Gentleman Dancing Master on early eighteenth-century stages reflects a cultural shift in taste. The repertoire began to feature plays reflecting a more bourgeois optimism about companionate marriage, sexual fidelity, the power of contract generally, and the harmony of capital and nation in mainstream comedies. Jeremy Collier’s infamous A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the Stage (1698) is best understood as a sign rather than as the agent of this change. Older plays like The Relapse, All for Love, and The Indian Queen were joined by newer and more Whiggish plays like Steele’s The Conscious Lovers, Centlivre’s The Busie Body and The Wonder, A Woman Keeps a Secret, and Farquhar’s The Beaux’s Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer, which valued personal autonomy, merchant-class characters, patriotism in the language of the post-1707 Great Britain, and companionate marriage. Theatrical discourse, however, was far from monotone. Playwrights like John Gay and Henry Fielding savaged Whiggish assumptions about progress and contract culture in satiric worlds where the lives of the poor and the cruelties of the modern marketplace were on display. The ghosts of the past, including the Stuart court, the figure of the libertine, the witty Restoration heroine, and the fop continued to walk the stage, but they were accompanied by new figures: the bourgeois tragedians, sensible couples, harlequin, hornpipe dances, ballad operas, and most of all, reformed or reforming men. It was a rich mixture of political ideologies and forms of entertainment.

Shirley Strum Kenny has called the style of comedy that became dominant after the turn of the century “humane comedy,” which seems more accurate than the competing alternative, “sentimental comedy.” The Conscious Lovers and a few plays by Cibber and Steele can justly be called sentimental, but that term does not describe the bulk of the comedies that led at the box office. These comedies tend to appropriate elements of the witty comedies before them, but they are energetic without being cruel, mixing the likeable with the laughable and reconciling more characters into the dominant plot. Compared to the ending of The Country Wife, in which Margery still believes she can be Horner’s wife and the deception of most of the husbands continues, the ending of The Busie Body illustrates these principles at work. Centlivre finds a way to reconcile both main couples, one of the two blocking guardians, and the spirit is one of good cheer and patriotism in the triumph of British love.

Tragedy grew in new directions as well, particularly in the development of she-tragedy and the rise of bourgeois tragedy, both of which tended to feature anti-Catholic and pro-Whig themes. Nicolas Rowe, who contributed The Fair Penitent (1703) and Lady Jane Grey (1715), was the first to use the term “she tragedy,” though Southerne, Banks, and Otway had already contributed examples of the form, which focuses on the penance of a woman for her sexual sins. She-tragedies created an erotic spectacle of the heroine’s suffering through rape and anguish. Domestic tragedy, epitomized in Lillo’s The London Merchant, maps mercantile class values tightly into scripts of sexuality and gender in a cautionary tale aimed at young apprentices who might sacrifice their economic duties when seduced by a more sexually experienced woman. Lillo’s tragedy held the stage well into the nineteenth century and influenced the work of the German playwright and dramaturge Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and others on the continent. One could draw a line from Lillo to Henrik Ibsen to Arthur Miller, tracing the thematic and ideological force of Lillo’s exposition of domestic themes. Later, the Rev. John Home’s Douglas (1756), denounced by conservative Scottish Presbyterians, took some of the same pathetic strategies that early eighteenth-century tragedy had cultivated and deployed them in a sentimental longing for a lost Scottish line. Like Lillo’s tragedy, Home’s is also connected to a traditional ballad, which rooted this branch of tragedy in popular and folk rather than elite experience. [In Lillo’s play, as in other tragedies such as Addison’s Cato (1713) and Home’s Douglas (1756) the behaviors and dispositions that signify proper masculinity and femininity do the work of regulating class identity. These tragedies unfold under the shadow of the Restoration rake and the related problem of how to make virtue, sexual continence, and bourgeois values interesting.

Celebrity culture supported the success of many plays which, while worthy on their own, became box office successes with the likes of Betterton, Cibber, Charke, Woffington, and Garrick in the cast. The expiration of the old Licensing Act in 1695 contributed to the rise of modern celebrity by making more print material available, including copies of plays, newspapers, pamphlets, and other vehicles that allowed audiences to relive, ruminate upon, and experience at a distance key theatrical events.  Copperplate technologies, best illustrated in the detailed work of William Hogarth, made it possible for the general public to own images of their favorite actors. Celebrity biographies, like Charles Gildon’s Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton (1710), Benjamin Victor’s account of Barton Booth’s life, Colley Cibber’s autobiographical An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, with an Historical View of the Stage During His Own Time, Written by Himself (1740) and his daughter Charlotte Charke’s confessional A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755) fed the public’s appetite for intimate details, and structured performance strategies of what Julia Fawcett calls “overexpression,” deliberately constructed public personae which included strategic moments self-erasure. Colley Cibber’s enormous Lord Foppington wig, which later appears on the head of his cross-dressing daughter Charlotte Charke, is a material example of how performative excess could also shield the performer from the glare of new media’s spotlight. The culture of theatre reviewing, which would only come into focus in the 1750s, furthered the celebration of particular performances and writers. Newspapers moved from charging theatres for brief ads at the beginning of the century to paying for access to fresh theatrical news and, eventually, the right to print the next night’s cast. Stuart Sherman, building on Danny O’Quinn’s work, has argued that this tightly knit “news-play nexus” forged new networks of circulation and commentary in a culture bursting with live performances and daily reporting. Like Steele’s “quidnunc,” the news addict, this culture produced fans, commentators, and theatregoers who inhabited networks of relations between the coffeehouse and the theatre.

The availability of stage space follows a similar story of expansion, with some significant complications. After the formation of the monopoly United Company in 1682 and then the rise of Christopher Rich’s management in 1693, the actor’s revolt in 1694 marked the beginning of Lincoln’s Inns Fields and a period of theatrical expansion, including the Queen’s Theatre (later known as the King’s Theatre) in 1705, the Haymarket (spearheaded by John Vanbrugh and John Hervey), also in 1705, and the Little Haymarket in 1720. These new spaces meant venues for more plays, which led to the development of new genres, including ballad opera, the harlequinade, the flourishing of various kinds of afterpieces and alternative entr’act entertainments, such as hornpipe dances. The most notable of these new forms was the ballad opera, Gay’s oxymoronic The Beggar’s Opera in particular, which opened at Lincoln’s Inns Fields in 1728. The form took well-known songs and gave them new lyrics, often with the original text sharpening the edge of the parody. The popular “O Jenny, O Jenny, where hast thou been,” for example, a reproof sung as a duet between the “wanton” Jenny and her sister Molly, becomes Gay’s “O Polly you might have toy’d and kist/By keeping men off, you keep them on,” Mrs. Peachum’s warning not to be chaste but rather to use sex as necessary for gain. The music itself could also surprise and unsettle, as in the contrast of the gentle “Greensleeves” and its original lyric of lost love with Macheath’s closing commentary: “Since laws were made for ev'ry degree,/To curb vice in others, as well as me,/ I wonder we han't better company,/ Upon Tyburn tree!” 

The success of The Beggar’s Opera, which was highly critical of the Robert Walpole administration, helped to precipitate the 1737 government crackdown known as the Licensing Act, which required all new plays to be scrutinized by the Lord Chamberlain. The act was built on pieces of older laws restricting or punishing players as “sturdy beggars,” but the Licensing Act also took aim squarely at playwrights. The newly-founded office of the Examiner of Plays would correct copies and approve an authorized version for performance; objectionable parts were struck out or entire plays turned down. Performers, writers, and theatre managers found creative strategies for evading the restrictions of the Licensing Act. Samuel Foote, after playing Iago in an illegal production of Othello, opened The Diversions of a Morning, or a Dish of Chocolate in 1747, the first of a series of skits in which he took off prominent people and other actors. The event was advertised as a concert with refreshments (hence the “dish of chocolate” or hot chocolate) at which a theatrical performance would be offered for free. Similar strategies for evading the restrictions of the Licensing Act and producing plays without an official patent or license from the state led to the rise of melodrama, which originally referred to a performance of primarily music and later morphed into the sensational and emotive genre that later gave us Rousseau’s Pygmalion, Verdi’s La Traviata, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s parodies.

A revolution in acting styles in this period should be attributed jointly to Charles Macklin and David Garrick. Macklin transformed the role of Shylock, which had been played as a buffoonish stereotype, by studying Antiquities of the Jews and observing Jewish communities in London. This attention to realistic detail began a movement toward greater historical accuracy in costume and manner. The young David Garrick, after coming to London with his teacher Samuel Johnson and initially failing as a wine merchant, benefitted from Macklin’s instruction and helped to move acting style further from the declamatory to a more natural style with his portrayal of Richard III. The next year, Garrick played Lear in Nahum Tate’s King Lear with Peg Woffington’s Cordelia (in this version, both live), and he and Woffington  went to Dublin at the end of the London season, where they honed their skills and added more roles to their personal repertoires. By April of 1747, Garrick was managing Drury Lane, where he subsequently instituted reforms that removed patrons from the stage, on which they had previously been allowed to sit, improved the lighting, regularized box office procedures, and ushered in the modern theatrical adoration of Shakespeare. While it is difficult to know exactly what this more natural acting style looked like, both Garrick and Macklin championed it, and audience and commentators praised the revolution in style. David Garrick’s “An Essay on Acting” (1744), Aaron Hill’s The Art of Acting (1753), James Boswell’s On The Profession of a Player (1770) all speak to elements of this changing kinetic philosophy as well as a corresponding professionalization of the actor’s art.

The audiences for eighteenth-century theatre grew and changed along with the expanding London population. The seats in the houses were priced differently, and prologues and epilogues often reflected on the class variation that these sections represented. Garrick’s prologue to Arthur Murphy’s All in the Wrong (1761) appeals to a varied audience for advice on pleasing them all:
What shall we do your different tastes to hit?
You relish satire (to the pit) you ragouts of wit—(to the Boxes)
Your taste is humour and high-seasoned joke. (First Gallery)
You call for hornpipe, and for hearts of oak. (Second Gallery)
The pit (largely populated by wits and critics), the boxes (for the wealthiest theatregoers) and galleries (the cheap and cheaper seats) stand in for different classes. While the playhouse mixed these classes, it also kept them sorted into sections. That spatial sensibility continued after Garrick abolished the footman’s gallery in 1759, taking away the perquisite of free admission after the fourth act.  After this practice ended, following  rounds of theatre riots, it was replaced by a half-price scheme, which ensured that working class spectators filled the empty seats (usually in the galleries) after the second act.  Roles for servants shifted in tone from the abused, reviled, or manipulated figures like Foggy Nan in The Man of Mode and Waitwell in The Way of the World to the witty Lissardo of The Wonder, a Woman Keeps a Secret or the charming if naïve Davy in The Bon Ton. Such positive representations of servants, along with the growing number of good soldiers and merchants, represent a wider swath of the population in a more flattering light. The variety of identities and class experiences illustrated on stage and within the audience, along with the circulation of news, put mid-century theatres at the heart of an experience of public culture, especially in London. Theatres were a site of contest, often riot, but they were also a space in which the “imagined community” of the new Great Britain represented itself to itself.

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Kenny, “Humane Comedy.” Modern Philology 75:1 (1977), 29-43: 31.

For more on she-tragedy, Jean I. Marsden, Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660–1720. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

See Julia Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P., 2016.

Sherman “ ‘The General Entertainment of My Life’: The Tatler, the Spectator, and the Quidnunc’s Cure.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2015): 343-371.