Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800 9781512823127

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Corrosive Solace

CORROSIVE SOLACE Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780–1800

Daniel O’Quinn

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

 Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN 9781512823110 Ebook ISBN 9781512823127 A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

 For Leo and Celeste O’Quinn

 Between us and real­ity are our feelings. —­Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War a single reading is composed of the already read, what we can see in text the first time is already in us, not in it —­Barbara Johnson, “The Critical Difference: BartheS/Bal/Zac” Memory is that which pertains to the past but happens in the pre­sent. —­Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities

CONTENTS

Acknowl­edgments

ix

Introduction 1

Part I. Corrosive Solace Chapter 1. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Contingent Politics of She-­Tragedy

51

Chapter 2. The Other Macbeth: Shakespeare in Siddons’s Hands

94

Chapter 3. Thalia Inter Alia: The Biopo­liti­cal Turn in Post-­American Comedy

137

Part II. Interrupted ­Futures Chapter 4. Interrupted Histories: Henry the Eighth, Coriolanus, and the Disclosure of Biopolitics

183

Chapter 5. What Unhappiness Does: The ­Futures of Post-­Revolutionary Comedy

227

Chapter 6. Utopian Discomfort: Pizarro’s Bridge to the Cosmopo­liti­cal ­Future

266

Conclusion 307

viii Contents

Notes 321 Bibliography 341 Index 355

ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

I wish I could say when this proj­ect began. Readers familiar with my work on Georgian per­for­mance culture w ­ ill recognize the degree to which it weaves together and expands upon arguments first broached in Staging Governance and Entertaining Crisis. Although it is designed as a stand-­a lone book, Corrosive Solace is the culmination of a multide­cade program of research that was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In fact, the final chapter dates to a generous invitation from Emily Allen and Dino Felluga to pre­sent a workshop on Sheridan’s Pizarro for a joint meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the North American Victorian Studies Association in 2006. It has taken a long time to fully realize what I was saying twenty-­five years ago. A preliminary version of Chapter 6 was published in Jack E. DeRochi and Daniel J. Ennis’s Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context (Bucknell University Press, 2013). That said, the book was kick-­started by two more recent developments. The first was an extraordinarily kind invitation from Kristina Straub to join her and Misty Anderson in editing two anthologies: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century Drama and The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century Per ­for­mance. Extensive discussions with Kristina and Misty provided a deeply pleas­ur­able way of refining my thoughts on the situatedness of per­for­mance in the Georgian period. This book’s detailed attention to m ­ atters of celebrity and to how entertainments unfolded over an entire eve­ning can be traced back to t­ hese proj­ects. The second was the conferral of a fellowship at New College in 2016. Ready access to the Bodleian Library and to the panoply of museums and libraries in London accelerated the composition of the first two chapters and in many ways convinced me that t­ here was a book h ­ ere. While I was at Oxford, Michael Burden, Ros Ballaster, and Luisa Calè took me u ­ nder their respective wings, offering friendship and endlessly stimulating conversation. Ryan Hadley, Andrew C ­ ounter,

x

Acknowl­edgments

Susan Valladares, Julia Bührle, Megan Campbell, and Andrew Meadows ­were equally generous with their wisdom and their laughter. Perhaps b ­ ecause so much of the argument had been percolating for many years and ­because I was jump-­started by ­t hese two unforeseen invitations, this book’s composition was rapid, at first. Leslie Allin, my exceptional research assistant and former PhD student, worked ­behind the scenes compiling the reviews for all of the shows and events that I write about ­here and many that I did not. I owe her so much. Kristina Straub and Julie Carlson read an early version of the proj­ect that ranged over a much broader array of media. With their customary grace and intelligence, they provided incisive and encouraging commentary. They have long been models for me in part ­because their primary commitment is to the integrity of the argument and in part b ­ ecause they convey their critique with care and kindness. The first two readers at Penn w ­ ere equally perspicacious, but less inclined to accept the bagginess of the manuscript. Each in their own way recognized that the book’s multimedia approach, while generating some intriguing effects, was burying the lede. I am infinitely thankful for their candid assessments, especially the reader who rejected the manuscript outright, ­because they prompted a radical rewriting of the entire script. Jerry Singerman at Penn was also crucial at this point. With his usual rigor and insight, he kept the book alive when it could have been simply passed over. I think he saw what the book could be, and cannily told me that he would look at it again if it was 40,000 words shorter. The only way to meet that demand was to cut three chapters and radically compress some of the o ­ thers. He also passed on some incredibly helpful suggestions from an anonymous historian on the board for which I am very grateful. Kristina Straub, Ashley Cohen, and above all Helen Deutsch helped me pro­cess t­ hese reports, demands, and recommendations. Without them I’m not sure that I would have realized how to proceed. I’m telling this tale b ­ ecause each of the p ­ eople I have just listed, some known and some unknown, had the scholarly vision to intervene in the most productive ways imaginable. They each have my heartfelt thanks. As I was reassembling the argument, parts of the book ­were presented in two separate talks at the Huntington Library. The first was a talk on Reynolds for the USC-­Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Seminar that enabled me to refine the notion of “post-­ American.” John Mee, Kevin Gilmartin, Zirwat Chowdhury, Sarah Kareem, Angelina Del Balzo and Helen Deutsch provided im­mensely helpful feedback on how this concept might change how we think about Romanticism. The second was for a conference



Acknowl­edgments xi

on theatrical censorship or­ga­nized by David O’Shaughnessy and it was ­there that the first glimmers of the Coriolanus materials became vis­i­ble. I would also like to thank David Duff for his invitation to speak to the London-­Paris Romanticism Seminar about Siddons and Macbeth at Senate House. As well as David, Luisa Calè, Michael Simpson, Michael Gamer, Katrina O’Loughlin, and ­others thoroughly engaged with some of the material that makes up part of Chapter 2, and their questions eventually persuaded me to reconfigure that entire argument. Fi­nally, Laura Rosenthal kindly invited me to pre­sent a version of the book’s Introduction at the University of Mary­land, and again both faculty and students offered insightful thoughts and suggestions. I have covered briefly the beginning and the ­middle, but how this proj­ect ended was unlike any other scholarly work that I have done. As vast swathes of material on painting, prizefighting, opera, and hippodrama w ­ ere stripped away, the book became much more and much less about theatrical culture. The direct discussion never strayed far from the play­house, but this tight focus allowed the book’s argument about affect, biopolitics, and the repertoire to emerge more fully and I hope consistently. I think this is what Jerry Singerman saw hidden in the weeds. At this point, long-­standing friends became much more active interlocutors. Gillian Russell and Marcie Frank read the new manuscript in full, and I owe key aspects of the book’s current state to their brilliant and generous suggestions. Multiple conversations with Lisa Freeman about per­for­mance helped me refine my sense of the repertoire. Tracy Davis and Helen Deutsch read the Introduction and pushed me as only they can. And during the final edit Lynn Festa offered invaluable commentary on key theoretical prob­lems and became a vital sounding board as the argument on emotion and form coalesced. I hope that I have lived up to the faith that t­ hese brilliant scholars had in the proj­ect. In the background my colleagues in the R/18 Collective (Lisa Freeman, Misty Anderson, David Taylor, Kristina Straub, and Tracy Davis) ­were a constant inspiration. Jerry Singerman brought a third reader on board to assess the revised manuscript, and one of the e­ arlier readers returned to it with an ea­gle eye. The reports w ­ ere extraordinarily generous and helpful, but sadly Jerry had left the press before they ­were filed. Walter Biggins took up the manuscript with genuine enthusiasm, and I owe him a ­great deal for shepherding the book through this time of transition. The production team for Penn has been exemplary: Brian Ostrander, K. B. McQueen, and Amy Van Der Merwe have handled the manuscript with ­great care. The foregoing sketch of the book’s composition emphasizes the degree to which close friends, colleagues, and interested strangers came together to

xii

Acknowl­edgments

assist me in its production. Other friends—­Jordan Cushing, Celia Moore, Jennifer Schacker, Nadine Valcin, Anne Milne, Anna Van Der Meulen, Sunny Kerr, Teresa Heffernan, Tara Abraham, Ma­ya Goldenberg, Sandra Rechico, Deanna Bowen, Ella Dawn McGeough, Monica Tap, Celia Abraham, Tina Reilly, Laurie Setzer, and Michael Bossin—­were less directly involved, but they all played crucial roles in my life over the last few years. Writing a book about affect makes one highly aware of the emotional dynamics of one’s life especially during times of crisis. I would have been lost without ­these intimate connections and, frankly, every­t hing would have been a lot less fun. Which brings me to the most impor­tant connections of all. Jo-­Ann Seamon, Gabe Seamon, and Eli Seamon are a constant source of joy in my life and ample proof that love is endlessly mysterious, thrilling, and strange.

INTRODUCTION

How does the performative repertoire address and ultimately articulate the historical needs of its audiences? This book plumbs this question to argue that Britain’s recovery ­after the loss of the American colonies entailed intense cultural work that fundamentally realigned identity categories and social dispositions and that ­t hese realignments have become so constitutive that they have become all but invisible aesthetic and po­liti­cal norms. My objective is to enact and reflect upon a style of analy­sis that could render vis­i­ble or disclose the affective and topical dynamics of the repertoire at a particularly critical historical juncture. Although primarily concerned with British theater in the 1780s and 1790s, the proj­ect started as an intermedial study of painting, per­for­mance, poetry, and the press. As the argument deepened, it became clear that the performative repertoire and its traces in the press ­were the central concern and that extended discussions of Sir Joshua Reynolds, prizefighting, Charlotte Smith, and William Cowper would have to be published elsewhere.1 That said, the ensuing tripartite Introduction deploys examples from across the mediascape not only to establish primary historical problematics but also to set the stage for prefatory excurses on the book’s methodological and theoretical concerns. The first section below looks closely at two paintings by John Singleton Copley before introducing the notion of the “urgent repertoire”; the second section argues that a specific affective dynamic, referred to throughout the book as “corrosive solace,” was crucial to the recovery of Britain in the wake of the War of American In­ de­pen­dence;2 and the third section analyzes a specific issue of the Public Advertiser in order to meditate on the “interrupted ­f utures” inherent in the complex temporality of topical media. My hope is not only that the examples ­will tie the book to a specific historical moment but also that the theoretical nomenclature, all marked by quotation marks in the previous sentence, ­will be portable to other scenarios and situations.

2 Introduction

The Urgent Repertoire On 22 May 1784, John Singleton Copley exhibited two paintings in the g­ reat room at 28 Haymarket in London. For a shilling, middling and fash­ion­able viewers flocked to see the death of two heroic figures: one, a titan of politics who had brought the nation back from the brink of ruin in the Seven Years’ War and who loomed over the po­liti­c al landscape u ­ ntil his death in 1778; the other, a young officer cut down in a fairly inconsequential ­battle on the Isle of Jersey in 1781. What did it feel like to visit ­t hese rented rooms to see The Death of the Earl of Chatham and The Death of Major Peirson at this moment roughly a year ­after the Peace of Paris concluded the American War? The former painting, commemorating the deeply affecting death of a former prime minister in the midst of a debate where he made his last stand against American in­de­pen­dence at the same time that he argued for the end of the war, had already been exhibited and engraved to some degree of controversy (Figure I.1). It was rumored before the exhibition opened that the king spent three hours with the latter painting closely attending to its vibrant details, thus giving it royal imprimatur before it was brought to the public (Figure I.2). This conjunction of controversy and royal acclaim, of an image well-­k nown and in mass circulation, and one entirely unseen but highly anticipated, generated uncommon public interest. According to multiple accounts, cheers ­were heard “in Buckingham Palace” when The Death of Major Peirson was unveiled.3 What we have h ­ ere is a symptomatic Georgian phenomenon: an event where commercial media converged to activate a complex constellation of cultural signs whose impact on the sociability of London was both immediately documented and remediated. And its status as event is intriguing beyond its individual aesthetic components. At the core of the exhibition are two impor­ tant paintings, pictures of undeniable theatricality that had been pressed into the mediascape of London using the very strategies developed by the commercial theater. As Richard H. Saunders has argued, Copley’s formal strategies owe a ­great deal to innovations in lighting and stagecraft that typified the Georgian play­house in the post-­Garrick era.4 I would add that the advance advertisements and puffs in the papers that made the exhibition into an event ­were first pioneered by theatrical man­ag­ers.5 Further, Copley’s heady mix of topicality and g­ rand manner execution, his rewiring of history painting, had its roots in the propensity of Georgian theater audiences to pursue

Introduction 3

Figure I.1. John Singleton Copley, Death of the Earl of Chatham, oil on canvas (1783). Tate Britain.

topical allegory with such alacrity. Fi­nally, one could point to Copley’s associate, William Boydell, the man who commissioned The Death of Major Peirson so that it could be engraved and who would take the same model to found the Shakespeare Gallery, and argue that this event shows the active convergence of paintings, plays, and papers at this historical juncture.6 Copley’s decision to hang The Death of the Earl of Chatham with The Death of Major Peirson in rented rooms concurrently with the Royal Acad­ emy exhibition raises an array of questions that have been brilliantly probed by Douglas Fordham in the conclusion to British Art and the Seven Years’ War. So much of the story that Fordham tells comes into focus with the exhibition of The Death of Major Peirson: it has its formal roots in both William Hogarth’s Road to Finchley and Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe; the emergence of an institutional framework within which aesthetic judgment and circulation was fostered is directly registered; and,

4 Introduction

Figure I.2. John Singleton Copley, Death of Major Peirson, oil on canvas (1784). Tate Britain.

most obvious, the close ties between history painting and the imperial military state are manifest.7 What served Fordham so well as the conclusion to an argument about the consolidation of art and institutions ­will h ­ ere operate as the beginning of a dif­fer­ent argument, one pertaining less to the Seven Years’ War than to the unraveling of the British Empire in the Atlantic world twenty years ­later at the conclusion of the American War. My interests are less with consolidation than with dislocation and ultimately with realignment ­because, as we all know, the shock waves that reverberated through British society, culture, and politics following the American War w ­ ere in a sense subsumed into the wars with France ten years l­ater and the intensification of British imperial activity in the Asian subcontinent by the turn of the ­century. The quick supersession of t­ hese large historical narratives has in many ways eclipsed the topic of this book: what I have called the post-­ American repertoire, that complex assemblage of cultural and social forces that enveloped Britain in the waning years of the American revolution and

Introduction 5

much of the 1780s, and that I contend throughout this book changed ineluctably British culture. I leave the theoretical implications and the broad contours of that change to ­later sections of this Introduction, and its specific features to the chapters that follow, but for the moment a return to the ­great room at 28 Haymarket ­will allow us to make some preliminary provocations. With the Peace of Paris signed roughly one year before this exhibition, Britain was beginning to emerge from the disaster of the American War. The United States was entering a period of factional upheaval that would be temporarily allayed by the drafting of its deeply flawed Constitution, but what exactly Britain was d ­ oing at this moment was perhaps anyone’s guess.8 Po­ liti­cal life was hotly contested, the world of entertainment was in a funk, and the economy was in tatters; the nation was prone to polarizing expressions of exuberant confidence and torpid recrimination. For ­every cheering audience at an exhibition like Copley’s t­ here w ­ ere audiences grumbling about the lack of players that could compete with their memories of David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard. And yet cultural, po­liti­cal, and social formations, however moribund, continued to cobble together some kind of way forward. ­Those who had lived through historical crisis ­were working, however fractiously, t­ oward Britain’s post-­American ­future. Copley’s exhibition is one such negotiation with crisis. Po­liti­cally, both paintings mark the end of the first British Empire. That the structure of British imperial activity changed over this period is rarely in question, but, as P. J. Marshall has argued, precisely when the “tilt to the East” superseded the Atlantic empire is a “contentious m ­ atter.”9 India is not ­really on the horizon of interpretation in ­t hese pictures, but as we ­will see they offer an extremely complex repre­sen­ta­t ion of the history of imperial reor­ga­ni­za­tion. Formally, both paintings point back to West’s The Death of General Wolfe and that itself is a prob­lem. The martyrdom of Wolfe signaled the co-­emergence of Britain as a global imperial power and of British painting as defined by the Royal Acad­emy. Rarely have aesthetic and po­liti­cal ambition or achievement been so perfectly aligned; or so it seemed at the time. Within ten years, the imperial domination promised by the Peace of Paris in 1763 would be undermined from within its own precincts. With American rebels using the republican tools of liberty and private property that ostensibly defined the entire empire to initiate the first successful act of decolonization, the foundations of empire began to crumble. With no concept of federalism, the tools of British governance lacked the flexibility to deal with colonial rule in multiple venues.10 Could we make a

6 Introduction

similar argument about West? Did his example provide a ­v iable model for historical contemplation and artistic invention beyond the moment of overarching victory? I ask ­t hese questions ­because Copley’s two paintings provide two radically dif­fer­ent answers that I think would have been palpable on 22 May 1784. The Death of the Earl of Chatham uses West’s formula to eulogize the most famous and arguably the most impor­tant po­liti­cal voice of his generation. The French ­were dominant in ­every theater of the Seven Years’ War when Chatham took office. His policies and his leadership brought Britain back from the brink and forced France into a humiliating and damaging peace. Ten years ­later, he recognized early on that the policy of reconquest ­adopted by the North ministry would not work and he strongly advocated for a policy of conciliation. Chatham died in 1778 of a heart attack in the m ­ iddle of a speech to this effect.11 The dramatic circumstance of his death while speaking to the House of Lords was almost a gift to Copley: ­here was an event of unquestionable historical significance that could be rendered with all the theatricality of The Death of General Wolfe. The picture is hardly a failure—­its afterlife as an engraving made sure that it was imprinted on the cultural memory—­but the demands of portraiture overwhelmed the drama of the depicted event.12 Copley paid ­great attention to each of the surrounding peers (knowing full well that they would purchase the engraving) to the point where Chatham, the fallen hero, fails to draw our full attention. The published viewing guide that identified each figure crystallizes the prob­lem (Figure I.3). All t­ hose ­faces and bodies that distract us from Chatham belong to the politicians who ­were bungling the American War. Within the po­liti­cal logic of the painting, none of ­t hese figures is comparable to Chatham; but within the pictorial logic of the painting, all of them compete for our attention—­a fact that is exacerbated by the movement of many of the figures across the picture plane and by Chatham’s stillness. Lord North, his ministers, and the members of the opposition render Chatham inconsequential, and that may well be the point.13 The Death of the Earl of Chatham represents not the martyrdom of a g­ reat minister but rather the dissolution of the very empire he consolidated u ­ nder the weight of its own composition. Copley’s canny use of the bright red and white of the peers’ robes, so reminiscent of countless paintings of British martial subjects, establishes an ironic parallel between the fifty-­ five politicians surrounding Chatham and the soldiers killed, wounded, and other­wise entangled by the wrangling of ­these men. We could call this painting “The Death of ­Great Britain” with the added twist

Introduction 7

Figure I.3. A Key for M. Copley’s Plate of the Death of the Late Earl of Chatham, engraving 1782. Wellcome Collection.

that when this painting was first exhibited in 1781, shortly ­after the devastating loss at Yorktown, it was unclear if that martyrdom was in ser­v ice of anything at all. By reexhibiting the painting in 1784, Copley was registering a change. Admiral George Brydges Rodney’s victory at Les Saintes in the spring of 1782 and General George Augustus Eliott’s successful repulsion of the siege of Gibraltar l­ ater that fall allowed Britain to come out of the war with a small amount of bargaining power and a modicum of dignity. The Peace of Paris of 1783 could not have gone forward without t­ hese face-­saving victories.14 In this context, The Death of the Earl of Chatham reads slightly differently: it partakes more of nostalgia than of panic. Chatham is now the martyr to a lost ­f uture. And the crowd of politicians constitutes a disturbing remainder: some of ­t hese politicians would become the new establishment—­t he newly appointed prime minister William Pitt is in the bottom corner—­others would be relegated to obsolescence or infamy—­t he recently deposed Lord North is plainly vis­i­ble. The compositional center of the painting—­t he martyred Chatham—­becomes a vacuum of sorts, sucking the po­liti­cal elite into the space he once held. Confronted with this conundrum in May 1784, it would be hard not to feel the pressure of the king tyrannically pushing Chatham’s second son into the ministry of his choosing—­the king’s interference ensured that Fox’s East India Bill was defeated on 13 December 1783, George III quickly made Pitt the new prime minister, and the election of March 1784 gave Pitt a massive majority in the House.15 With the sheer po­liti­cal volatility of The Death of the Earl of Chatham looming above one in the g­ reat room on the Haymarket, perhaps The Death

8 Introduction

of Major Peirson offered a bit of a respite. The martyrdom of a man with no significant historical baggage in a ­battle of ­little more than ideological consequence, provided a less vexed subject. Without the burden of providing ­v iable portraits of a host of public figures, Copley could maximize the pictorial impact of the central group of figures. The walls of the House of Lords that ­were so claustrophobic in The Death of the Earl of Chatham are replaced by a three-­sided open-­air stage that both contains the action and allows the viewer to imagine a world just beyond the painting’s frame. In that sense, the painting exists in a larger historical and geo­g raph­i­cal chronotope whose dynamic forces are exemplified in the central group. But with prolonged viewing, that central group of figures proves to be very strange indeed. The ­dying major and the soldiers supporting his recumbent body evoke in reverse West’s The Death of General Wolfe. But the extraordinary black sharpshooter just to the left of the ­dying major makes this picture as much about killing as about being killed. At the very center of the painting, a shot is received and a shot is fired; a brave soldier is martyred and his killer is immediately avenged. This compositional zero-­sum game did not come easily to Copley; we know from numerous preparatory studies that he tried many dif­fer­ent arrangements before placing the d ­ ying figure’s theatrical collapse ­toward the viewer immediately adjacent to the sharpshooter’s absorptive gaze away from the viewer into the picture.16 The perfect balance of absorption and theatricality imbues the entire painting: the red and white of the uniforms in the central group mimic the crossed diagonals of the Union Jack; the pain of the wounded drummer in the left foreground is matched by the fear of the fleeing ­women and ­children on the right. The more one looks, the more one realizes that the picture’s dynamism resolves into a stalemate. This is why the statue of George II that emerges from the smoke in the square signifies with such calm intensity. It/He is the still center around which all the rest of this painting whirls, and this is its central irony. As Fordham has argued, Copley’s rendering of the statue brings us back not only to the last British sovereign who actually brought an army to war but also to the king who worked with Chatham during the annus mirabilis of 1759.17 George II did not survive the Seven Years’ War, but Britain’s triumph over the French was secured ­under his watch. Suddenly something about the 1784 exhibition of t­ hese two paintings becomes very clear. At the still center of both pictures we find explicit commemorations of Britain’s accession to global empire in 1759: Chatham and George II are strangely re­united ­here. One can imagine them looking at each

Introduction 9

other over the heads of the viewers congregating in the g­ reat room at 28 Haymarket. This means that the other figures, all primarily associated with the American crisis, operate as e­ ither ponderous agents of or glorious distractions from world historical loss. The panoply of lords who clutter The Death of the Earl of Chatham are less pictorially exhilarating than the fusiliers in The Death of Major Peirson, but both sets of figures have basically the same function. They are the remainders of a more glorious era and they share a ­g reat deal with the viewing crowds arrayed before them, for t­ hose paying their shilling to look at t­ hese pictures w ­ ere no doubt aware that both pictures rehearse the indelible image West crafted to commemorate Wolfe’s victory at Quebec.18 So, oddly enough, viewers ­were confronted with coalescing signs of “1759” within pictures referring to historical events post-1778, when it was widely acknowledged that Britain had already lost the war and the bulk of its Atlantic empire. Faced with this complex double history, the key questions ­were what aspects, what dispositions, what tendencies ­were ­going to make the loss of empire bearable and the new dispensation v­ iable. The Death of Major Peirson is so impor­tant ­because it c­ ounters the deadness of The Death of the Earl of Chatham, its lack of vitality as a picture, with a very specific kind of liveness. Unlike West’s ur-­martyrdom where the supporting cast shows us how to look at Wolfe, Copley’s central group of figures surges across the picture plane and the bifurcated gaze of ­those figures shows us how to look not only at the dead but also at the ­f uture—­a Tory nostalgia for an age yet to come. Major Peirson’s death is undoubtedly recorded, indeed emphasized by the play of light and by the collective glances of t­ hose who support him, but so too is the death of the French threat very much in the eyes of the soldiers charging onward across the town square. In fact, the drummer, the fleeing w ­ oman and child, and the black sharpshooter can be seen as crucial supplements to pictorial martyrdom. They are what remains: the wounded, the orphans and refugees, and the valiant subaltern. The fleeing ­mother is particularly resonant for reasons that ­will become more obvious ­later in this book. Throughout the 1782–83 and 1783–84 theatrical seasons, Sarah Siddons, in she-­tragedy ­after she-­tragedy, had been channeling much of the emotional aftermath of the war through this specific enactment of maternal abjection. By the time of the exhibition of The Death of Major Peirson, an entire emotional and visual economy was in place that would have been immediately recognizable to Copley’s audience. In fact, I would contend that the fleeing m ­ other in this picture is remarkably close to the early prints of Siddons’s per­for­mance in Isabella when she was frequently on

Figure I.4. James Caldwell, ­after William Hamilton, Mrs. Siddons and Her Son in the Tragedy of Isabella, engraving (1785). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Introduction 11

Figure I.5. Detail, John Singleton Copley, Death of Major Peirson (1784). Tate Britain.

stage with her son (Figure I.4). The conjunction of that strong profile with the gestural signs of maternal anguish signal “the Siddons,” an especially impor­tant and immediately recognizable feature of the repertoire (Figure I.5).19 That she is deployed h ­ ere says as much about Copley’s sense of a nation orphaned as it does about the po­liti­cal force of Siddons’s mobilization of maternal affect. What are we to make of that black rifleman? Attempts have been made to ascertain his historical identity—he may well be Captain James Christie’s or Major Peirson’s servant—­but that hardly captures his cultural significance.20 In the immediate aftermath of the war, ­t here ­were very few candidates for martial heroism. Even undisputed heroes like Rodney and Eliott

12 Introduction

would have to wait many years to be pictorially lionized.21 Indeed, Copley gravitated to this subject b ­ ecause t­ here w ­ ere not a lot of heroes on the ground and this one had the huge benefit of filling an ideological need by virtue of being dead. In Copley’s preparatory drawings, the sharpshooter is not distinguished from the other soldiers; to all intents and purposes difference does not signify. But in the final painting the racialization of the rifleman renders him singular. He is distinguished from comrades and enemies alike both by skin tone and by uniform, and in the pro­cess becomes the very emblem of colonial loyalty. Even if we only see him as a servant, and not as an avatar of a former slave, we can make a number of propositions. First, the vacuum instantiated by Peirson’s valiant death is filled by the black rifleman, and thus he accedes to martial glory: Peirson’s valor is subsumed into his own. Second, Peirson’s whiteness is perfectly matched by the rifleman’s darkness and in the transit from light to dark in this picture, martial masculinity has a rather stunning afterlife. But it is a form of life that cannot be conferred on any of the white soldiers for this would make Peirson just one of an interchangeable crowd. And, third, this painting needs the rifleman’s racial difference to secure Peirson’s exceptionalism. This is impor­tant ­because Peirson is not Wolfe, or Chatham for that ­matter. His repulsion of the French invasion of this tiny channel island was not a major event in the war; its very inconsequentiality threatens to undermine not only the patriotic purpose of this picture but also the far more sacred precursor paintings that align martyrdom with triumph. ­Here martyrdom threatens to devolve into sound and fury, signifying nothing. Except that Peirson’s resurrection in the body of the unnamed black rifleman figures forth a new imperial fantasy, one that speciously distinguishes Britain from Amer­i­ca and her Bourbon allies for its moral capital.22 As Christopher Leslie Brown and ­others have argued, Britons retroactively distinguished themselves from Americans by casting the former colonists as o ­ wners of slaves, thus undermining their claim to liberty and whitewashing their own continuing involvement in trans-­Atlantic slavery.23 Peirson’s resurrection is only pos­si­ble ­because this ­battle scene is a stand in for the much more consequential repulsion of the French and Spanish siege of Gibraltar. For the crowds who flocked to see Copley’s exhibition, it was the fact of Eliott’s victory at Gibraltar that gave Peirson’s minor victory meaning. Without Gibraltar, retaking the Isle of Jersey is Pyrrhic at best and, at worst, another example of the war’s excessive h ­ uman cost. Th ­ ose possibilities are all too pre­sent in the figures in the foreground of the painting and in the body of

Introduction 13

Figure I.6. Detail, John Singleton Copley, Death of Major Peirson (1784). Tate Britain.

Peirson himself, and thus the remarkable rhetorical sleight of hand that allows Peirson to become the black rifleman, for Jersey to become Gibraltar, for a nation trapped in a quagmire to become a state capable of recognizing American in­de­pen­dence without losing a ­great deal to France and Spain, and for an empire in tatters to suddenly blaze forth in the black rifleman’s sartorial

14 Introduction

flair (Figure I.6). That amazing cockade on his hat and the elaborate knotted ­belt that hangs down his leg are as distinctive as his skin. ­These accessories as much as the cut of his jacket and pants mark him as a subject unlike all ­others in this painting. He gives this painting life, not only b ­ ecause of his power­f ul gaze and his forceful gesture, but also b ­ ecause he is fundamentally an enigma.24 He is a question that needs to be resolved somewhere beyond the narrative that killed Peirson; the contours of his post-­American life are perhaps posited but remain vague. As a meta­phor, he is futurity writ large in that the f­ uture is by its very nature dif­fer­ent from the moment from which it emerges. This book seeks to understand how one moves out of the light of death and into dark—­because they are undefined—­regions of life. I would contend that for the crowd standing in the ­great room in 1784 that singular unnamed black man was not a sign of affirmation or of identification, but rather he was a palpable indication that the nation and empire that they wished to become was alienated from them no less than the one for which they nostalgically yearned. In this par­t ic­u ­lar place and time, the way forward was figured by a racialized surrogate.25 As this book unfolds, we w ­ ill be encountering many surrogates, but alienation w ­ ill be figured primarily by gender and class difference—­figures similar to the wounded drummer and the fleeing w ­ oman and child. But it is impor­tant to remember that the drummer, the ­woman, and the rifleman are flung away from the ­dying soldier in this picture; they are the vectors from which new tendencies ­will cohere.

* * * Copley’s paintings testify to the manifest strangeness of an era that many feel has been exhaustively explored. Indeed P. J. Marshall’s The Making and Unmaking of Empires and Remaking the British Atlantic have provided a thorough account not only of the discontinuities but also of the continuities that allowed British imperial activity to be reor­ga­nized in the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century.26 As Linda Colley has also argued, “The humiliation of defeat at the hands of a former colony was profound for a ruling elite possessed of strict notions of hierarchy and massive pride. . . . ​Yet, paradoxically, the defeat proved more constructive in the long term [and] actually seems to have resolved some of the uncertainties and divisions of the 1760s and early 1770s.”27 My interest lies in how dislocation was transformed into productive realignment and in the often unacknowledged role that culture

Introduction 15

played in t­hese shifts.28 I would contend that the analy­sis of per­for­mance and affect can allow us not only to see this period differently but also to address one of the most recalcitrant prob­lems in cultural analy­sis, namely the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. From this opening example, the Introduction needs to outline the methodological strategies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis and it must make that which is historically familiar strange again, and thus make vis­i­ble for discussion key ave­nues that have remained dormant. Both of t­ hese objectives turn on recognition: how do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment, and how do we recognize what we, in our pre­sent moment, cannot discern? Let’s start with a number of working axioms associated with the term repertoire, the concept above all o ­ thers that does the bulk of the theoretical and historical ­labor in this book. Repertory and repertoire are terms that first gained traction in the nineteenth c­ entury and originally referred to the array of parts or tunes conventionally associated with a par­tic­u­lar player or musician. Eventually, the term came to stand for the body of work performed by a com­pany and, further, the general repository of per­for­mances that constitute a per­for­mance culture.29 This gradual expansion of the term brings us to our pre­sent usage, but I would argue that the expanded understanding that animates this book is very much in operation throughout the eigh­teenth ­century and was intensified as the commercial theater was consolidated in the age of Garrick. Tracy Davis provides a valuable “working hypothesis” ­because it too focuses resolutely on ­matters of recognition and intelligibility: “Repertoires are multiple circulating recombinative discourses of intelligibility that create a means by which audiences are habituated to understand one or more kinds of combinations of performative tropes and then recognize and interpret ­others that are unfamiliar so that the new may be incorporated into repertoire. Thus repertoire—as a semiotic of showing and a phenomenology of experiencing—­involves a pro­cess of reiteration, revision, citation and incorporation. It accounts for durable meanings, not as memory per se but in the improvisation of naming which sustains intelligibility.”30 With her customary precision, Davis emphasizes that the intelligibility of per­for­mance relies on the repetition of and variation from already recognizable signs and preexisting protocols for their pre­sen­ta­t ion and reception. This sense that per­for­mance has always already been anticipated is indeed part of the temporality of per­for­mance itself and it is crucial that her term repertoire is internally bifurcated into a semiotic of showing and a

16 Introduction

phenomenology of experiencing. This bifurcation roughly maps onto the performer-­audience dyad, but this separation can never be fully sustained: In the time and space of per­for­mance, performers and audiences come to imagine each other’s roles; affective and cognitive exchanges are developed that blur the boundary between showing and experiencing. Davis is building outward from Jacky Bratton’s notion of inter-­theatricality and I fully concur with both understandings of per­for­mance in this historical frame, but I would argue further that the pro­cess of “reiteration, revision, citation and incorporation” that defines the repertoire extends beyond the now-­time of per­for­mance itself.31 The semiotic of showing and the phenomenology of experiencing are amplified and distorted by their remediation.32 I have argued elsewhere that, by the 1760s, the nocturnal world of theatrical per­for­mance was remediated in the diurnal world of the increasingly vibrant world of the press in ways that impinged not only on how plays ­were staged but also on how plays w ­ ere received—­t hat is, on how they ­were shown and experienced.33 In fact, the remediation of per­for­mance was very quickly incorporated into the repertoire itself at the level of both production and reception. Thus, the press is more than an archival ele­ment from which to reimagine the repertoire; it is a dynamic force whose power needs to be incorporated into our understanding of the place of repetition in the memory—­ and the forgetting—of per­for­mance. This indeed is one of the fundamental propositions of Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire, for it suggests that e­ very pre­sent moment of per­for­ mance not only activates the memories of past per­for­mances but also marks out certain possibilities for the ­f uture. As she states, The repertoire is composed of all ­t hose acts usually thought of as ephemeral, non-­reproducible knowledge; and while some per­for­ mances dis­appear, ­others replicate themselves through their own structures and codes. This means that the repertoire, like the archive, is mediated. The pro­cess of se­lection, memorization or internalization, and transmission takes place within (and in turn helps constitute) specific systems of re-­presentation. Multiple forms of embodied acts are always pre­sent, though in a constant state of againness. They reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next. Embodied and performed acts generate, rec­ord, and transmit knowledge.34

Introduction 17

Inextricably tied to memory, the awareness of the repertoire is something that happens in the pre­sent but pertains to the past.35 Theoretically one could tap into the repertoire at any moment, it exists in and through time; but for precisely this reason it is elusive. The traces of its operation are unevenly distributed and developed. Although the repertoire lives in memory, memory is not always activated—it, of course, has a dynamic relation to forgetting—­ nor is it always accessibly mediated. Joseph Roach’s work on surrogation offers perhaps the most extended analy­sis of both the force and the failure of the repertoire to reach its destination as it ­were and, as he emphasizes, it is this precarity that makes per­for­mance so likely to return, repeat, and surface in times of need.36 I would add that the same precarity all but demands remediation. This is why repetition is so crucial and such a complex aspect of the repertoire. Taylor relies on the notion of the “scenario” to describe “meaning-­ making paradigms that structure social environments, be­hav­iors, and potential outcomes.”37 ­These scenarios are composed of varying numbers of signs—­t hey can involve every­t hing from plot structure to more local situations and gestures—­but what renders them active in a field of cultural significance—­that is, what makes them recognizable—is their repetition, accumulation, and variation. Furthermore, the notion of the scenario moves away from individual identification with a par­tic­u­lar figure to imbrication in the scene. Working from Laplanche and Pontalis, Teresa De Lauretis shrewdly argued some time ago that it is identification with the scenario rather than any par­tic­u­lar subject that makes fantasy such a dynamic cultural force, especially in scenes of pain or abjection: one only need feel the set of relations to be engaged by the affective import of the scene.38 In a sense, it is precisely this oblique sense of engagement that allows audiences to approach and productively engage with historically critical situations, for po­liti­cal engagement to operate u ­ nder the veil of entertainment, and for viewers to feel collectively that which might overwhelm the subject as an isolated individual. It also indicates why the performative scenario has such deep ties to the formation and management of collective memory and ­future social affiliations. Theatrical per­for­mance, the press, and, to a lesser degree, painting in the latter half of the eigh­teenth ­century w ­ ere urgent media that impelled or demanded action ­because they existed in a newly convergent mediascape that expected and elicited opinion about t­ hese forms of public culture.39 Part of

18 Introduction

this urgency was a ­matter of scale. For the latter thirty years of the eigh­teenth ­century, the number of ­people g­ oing to plays, attending exhibitions, and reading papers in London was large enough for horizons of expectation to be activated but small enough to resist entropic dispersal. It is for this reason that plays, painting, and the press from this period are so resolutely topical. This may sound like a truism with regard to the press, but it is remarkable how, within the discursive economy of the four-­page paper, individual names still operate as potentially recognizable signs. Similarly, within the pictorial economy of the Royal Acad­emy exhibition, the semiotic scope was still bounded enough to allow for recognition of history painting’s combination of topicality and allegory and for portraiture to operate within some horizon of verisimilitude. As Kate Retiford has recently reminded us, portraits in the late eigh­teenth ­century ­were given only the most bare descriptive title—­ “Portrait of a W ­ oman”—­but a critical mass of viewers w ­ ere able to identify sitters ­because they ­were already familiar with them, and hence could judge “likeness.”40 This was enhanced by accelerating image circulation: many paintings of the period, including the two Copley pictures with which we started, w ­ ere commissioned with an eye to their immediate remediation in the print market. A similar sense of urgency imbued the eighteenth-­century play­house: both the scale of the audience and the depth of the repertoire allowed for a tight awareness of repetition and variation. Topicality was recognized and mobilized within the repertoire. It is for this reason that this Introduction looks at t­ hese very dif­fer­ent media as events not as artifacts, in the sense that events emerge in time from prior experiences and posit potential f­utures for meaning and sociability. At this historical moment, media scale was such that the event loop was sustainable—­t hat is, intelligible—in ways that make it a particularly auspicious site for the intermedial analy­sis of cultural change, for recognizing the repertoire in this expanded sense. This book goes to this unevenly developed archive to take core samples in search of the repertoire. My close readings of the press, of reminiscences, scripts, and pictures are akin to the kind of micrological analyses geologists regularly employ to search for meaningful events and patterns, only the phenomena I am searching for are not physical or chemical but rather affective and visceral. Sifting through the textual and pictorial data left by per­for­ mance events, through the performative and textual traces of past viewing practices, through the diurnal ebb and flow of printed “information,” I am searching for historical crisis as it was felt in the body. What separates geological from performative analy­sis h ­ ere, and thus renders my comparison

Introduction 19

meta­phorical, is confident verifiability. My interpretive tools are nowhere near as definitive and my object of study is obviously less tangible. But it is no less real. Putting this in specific terms, historical circumstances predisposed populations to identifiable mentalités, which themselves provided both the interpretive horizon and the structures of feeling needed to link cultural expression to historical experience in a meaningful way. The recent return to Annales-­school historiography most conspicuously articulated in Ashley Cohen’s The History of the Two Indies is instructive not only ­because it underlines the utility of the concept of mentalité for joining formal and historical analy­sis, but also ­because it takes us back to a moment before world systems theorists consigned the analy­sis of mentalités to oblivion ­because it was ostensibly too unverifiable, and thus too soft.41 The gendering of this strain of Annales-­school thinking is revealing ­because the push t­oward hard data channeled world systems theory t­oward economic phenomena. The hypostatization of the economic realm set the stage for increasingly neoliberal cooptation of this historiographical method. The loss for the understanding of culture and sociability is manifest and must be taken up in earnest ­because it is intimately tied to the rehabilitation of Raymond Williams’s notion of structures of feeling. Williams’s evocative notion has been crucial to recent literary scholarship that seeks to excavate the history of emotion. The centrality of Williams to Kevis Goodman’s Georgic Modernity and Mary Favret’s War at a Distance are perhaps the most salient examples for the period I am discussing h ­ ere. Cohen reminds us that this strain of British Marxism was very much in dialogue with Annales-­school thought and that recovering this methodological linkage has impor­tant disciplinary ramifications. I would add that per­for­mance studies provides not only a way of dealing with the temporal problematics associated with transient experiences but also a set of evidentiary procedures for dealing with the ephemeral archive deposited by the mentalité or, to shift terms slightly, the habitus.42 Indeed, Taylor’s notion of the repertoire offers a sustained way of thinking about how the habitus inheres si­mul­ta­neously in the subject and the culture. Without some sense of performativity, culture, and, by extension, society, would not be recognizable to itself, and thus would not be able to reproduce or sustain its existence, for good or bad. The close proximity to theories of ideology is unavoidable, and one finds a renewed version of Althusserian ideology critique in both Judith Butler’s work on performativity and Cohen’s excavation of mentalités. This is not surprising b ­ ecause the desire is to understand both

20 Introduction

how certain kinds of social formations and privileges are sustained over time and the alternate f­ utures that often remain invisible to us ­because we actively participate, perhaps in spite of ourselves, in the propagation of the habitus and the sustenance of the repertoire. Before turning to the vital question of sustenance, we need to think through the aesthetic relationship among history, affect, and crisis.

Corrosive Solace Jean Marsden’s recent Theatres of Feeling has conclusively argued that the late eighteenth-­century play­house was a “world of feeling” where audiences came to experience emotion, where playwrights elicited emotion to delight and instruct, and where emotion itself was the central topic of the plays. For ­t hose familiar with this repertoire, Marsden’s argument is both immediately apparent and strangely revelatory b ­ ecause so much of our language for analyzing per­for­mance keeps affect at a distance. Although working on dif­fer­ent cultural materials and phenomena, Lauren Berlant’s central question in Cruel Optimism is perfectly attuned to fundamental issues in Georgian theater scholarship: “How can it be said that aesthetically mediated affective responses exemplify a shared historical sense?”43 Berlant’s engagement with the historicity of con­temporary experience revolves around our attachment to conventional fantasies of the “the good life”—of enduring reciprocity in ­couples, families, po­liti­cal systems, institutions, and markets in spite of the abounding evidence of their instability, fragility, and failure. She asks if our attachment to t­ hese fantasies constitutes an obstacle to our flourishing, an impediment to life. Th ­ ese fantasies constitute “promises” for the subject that may in fact guarantee its attrition. Th ­ ese par­tic­u­lar fantasies can be historically aligned with a very specific genealogy of the lives and aspirations of the middling ­orders. By way of shorthand, the entire Jane Austen corpus is about fantasies of reciprocity and meritocracy in which the endurance of the subject in the object constitutes the central narrative drive. The ­later Austen novels are so alive for us now ­because their fulfilled narrative promise instantiates both happiness and dread. Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley quietly, and ruthlessly, opens onto a f­uture attuned less to the needs of the married c­ ouple than to t­ hose of the invalid f­ ather. Anne Elliot finds reciprocity in Went­worth and yet, as the final page of Persuasion emphasizes, her love is now thoroughly entwined with the state’s prosecution of war and its capacity

Introduction 21

for demanding the very life through which she endures.44 Austen, I think, allows us to see the fundamental linkage between Berlant’s proj­ect and my own b ­ ecause both authors explore the unraveling of a set of fantasies first brought into being during the eigh­teenth ­century. The same level of discontent attends the beginnings of this cultural and social formation ­because the co-­emergence of fantasies of conjugal reciprocity and of social meritocracy displaced e­ arlier fantasies of “the good life” based on familial alliance and landed property, fantasies that w ­ ere undercut by the dissolution of the first British Empire in the late 1770s and 1780s. Berlant’s own work suggests clear topoi for fruitful enquiry regarding this complex transition—­“the unfinished business of sentiment,” erotophobia, austerity45—­but I would argue that ­these topoi, especially as they manifest themselves in British culture, are coeval with the response to American decolonization, for it was at this moment that a new kind of “good life” was fitfully articulated: with the very sustenance of En­glish culture at stake, cultural prac­ti­tion­ers took the fragments at hand and cobbled together a new kind of monster.46 In Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, I examined the notion of entertainment at a moment when it would seem most difficult to achieve. As British soldiers ­were losing the war in Amer­i­ca, a series of remarkable cele­ brations, social events, amusements, diversions, and dramatic per­for­mances ­were staged in London and Philadelphia that attempted to speak to the historical predicament of what amounted to a civil war in the Atlantic imperium. The combatants in this war had fought side by side only fifteen years ­earlier in the Seven Years’ War. Out of that first global war emerged a new kind of imperial state, beset with prob­lems of management, and a new kind of British subject. As the prob­lems of governing this new global empire reached a crisis in the 1770s, Britons w ­ ere suddenly confronted with the perplexing situation of dealing with rebellious subjects whose investment in notions of liberty and property ­were almost the defining characteristics of the British polity itself. As Lord North and his ministry attempted to put down the rebellion, the po­liti­cal and social world of the metropole fractured in increasingly disturbing ways. From the po­liti­cal turmoil associated with Wilkite calls for reform to the numerous bank failures that destabilized private credit and through to the terrifying eruption of ethnic vio­lence during the Gordon riots, Britain was plunged into a condition of social insecurity. Crisis is an impor­tant concept for Berlant not only ­because she deploys it to displace trauma theory’s mono­poly on the analy­sis of severe social transformation, but also ­because her primary historical archive responds

22 Introduction

to con­temporary examples of social insecurity that resonate with the cascade of adjustments that beset Britain in the 1770s and 1780s. For Berlant, “Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a pro­cess embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”47 That navigation involves a careful attention to form and genre for, as she states, “Affect’s saturation of form can communicate the conditions ­under which a historical moment appears as a visceral moment, assessing the way a ­t hing that is happening finds its genre.”48 ­There is a generative caesura of sorts in that sentence, a pause where energy gathers before a sudden leap to a new level of complexity. How does one get from the opening statement on form to the final invocation of genre? The first clause implies that affect saturates form to communicate viscerally the conditions u ­ nder which historical pro­cesses are disclosed. The aesthetic mediation of affect makes contingent historical forces recognizable in embodied semiosis, so we have a kind of formal translation of historical experience into emotional life where it is now susceptible to judgment or “assessment” as it “finds its genre.” This move to genre is perhaps the least elaborated aspect of Berlant’s argument, but it is everywhere pre­sent in her work prior to Cruel Optimism. In The Female Complaint, she attends rigorously to the (unfinished) work of sentimental genres, especially melodrama. Form and genre are not interchangeable concepts ­here ­because affect’s saturation of form has to do with communicating historical contingency while genre is invoked to ­handle the question of how this communication is assessed or evaluated.49 This makes sense not only ­because genre is inherently involved with establishing and modifying norms, but also ­because genre itself, like the repertoire, is experienced in time: it constantly refers to what has gone before and instills the promise of continuation in the ­future. Our assessment of generic normativity is both relentlessly multimodal, it is bolstered and amplified by the treatment of similar topoi in other genres, and susceptible to contestation b ­ ecause internal contaminants are constantly contravening the law of genre from within.50 I would contend that in the early stages of dealing with cultural crisis, the visceral recognition of historical transformation becomes a shared phenomena within familiar aesthetic forms. Forms and indeed genres inherited from the past become staging grounds for feeling the flux of “now time.”51 It is perhaps for this reason that forms that partake of a certain liveness—­ theatrical per­for­mance, oratory, social and po­liti­cal action—­feel so urgent in times of turbulent change.52 Affect saturates familiar forms in ways that exert pressure on their composition, enactment, circulation, interpretation,

Introduction 23

and remediation ­whether that form be discursive, performative, pictorial, or social. Through the aesthetic mediation of affect, ­t here is a shared sense that something is happening even if that something cannot yet be named. Once this shared sense rhizomatically chains its way through the mediascape, the condition of possibility for naming this inchoate experience emerges and that pro­cess of naming involves the evaluation of genre. This question of ­whether generic norms have been met or contravened, or ­whether a new genre is upon us, intrinsically raises the question of the pre­sent’s relation to the past and the ­f uture. In this latter pro­cess, one assesses what has been lost and what can be sal­vaged, one apprehends which f­utures are no longer ­v iable and what hopes and dispositions can be sustained, and norms are realigned to maintain the continuity of life. Cultural sustenance cannot be simply assumed; the very entropic qualities of the social can erode traditions like waves on the seashore or they can manifest themselves catastrophically in eruptions of ­human vio­lence, natu­ ral disaster, or intermittent pandemics. But between t­ hese two extremes the prob­lem of sustaining culture is perhaps most vis­i­ble in times of crisis. As Berlant has argued, the tendency to apply trauma theory to cultural change tends to skew ­things ­toward the catastrophic; but resilience, continuity in the face of danger—in a word, sustenance—is an equally salient issue. By moving to the notion of crisis, our analytic focus turns to the incremental ways in which subjects and cultures sustain themselves in the face of often radical uncertainty. With ­people once figured as ­brothers and sons suddenly articulating a more vigorous version of their own identity on the western littoral of the Atlantic, Britons found themselves confronting their relation to their own past attachments.53 The ensuing anxiety took many forms. Was Britain still worthy of its cultural patrimony? Could the republican mentalité so forcefully described by J. G. A. Pocock be sustained in Britain now that it had migrated across the Atlantic? Or would something dif­fer­ent emerge? And if a new po­liti­cal mentalité was needed, what could be sal­vaged from the past and what had to be realigned or reinvented? Historians of Britain have tended to see the 1780s as a period of remarkable resilience: an era that started with a fundamental change but then paradoxically became a period in which ­little changed at all. The flow of ­people was quickly reestablished; transatlantic trade was at first a contentious m ­ atter 54 but by 1790 had settled into a mutually beneficial pattern. As Linda Colley and o ­ thers have emphasized, the broad bottom consensus that sustained the Tory ministry of William Pitt allowed for the consolidation of the national

24 Introduction

economy and the redirection of British imperial activity eastward. And yet, the 1780s and 1790s w ­ ere also a period of ­great social and po­liti­cal turbulence. The Whig opposition, especially during the Hastings trial, shone a light on the corruption of the East India Com­pany; the Regency Crisis revealed the intense polarization of parliamentary factions; the revolution in France not only ruptured the parliamentary opposition but also activated a wide range of extra-­parliamentary dissensus that threatened to destabilize the status quo; the advent of war with France led to food shortages and spiraling debt; late in the 1790s, mutinies at Spithead and Nore no less than rebellion in Ireland threatened to undo both Britain’s much vaunted naval supremacy and its longest-­standing act of colonization. Pitt navigated t­ hese ­waters, but ­t here is no question that he did so by becoming increasingly authoritarian. Whig critics had been arguing since the king’s interference in Fox’s India Bill in 1783 that Pitt was the instrument of George III’s tyranny, but a­ fter the king recovered from his illness in 1789, critics of the government tended to represent the Crown as an alibi for Pitt’s increasingly incursive mea­sures. From a macro-­political perspective all was consistency and continuity, but close attention to the daily press and an eye to topical media indicates a recurrent sense of crisis. Some of t­ hese crises, such as that precipitated by George III’s bout of madness, ­were designated as such, but equally impor­tant disturbances operated below the surface of the social, struggling to find a form in which they could be recognized and thus understood. Throughout this book, I refer to this lingering sense of crisis as post-­American because the unsettled conditions of the nation and the imperium that undergird the final two de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century can be traced back to the loss of the American colonies. All the chapters in this book examine this fundamental problematic, but they do so by exploring how affective crisis was aesthetically mediated, how feeling found its requisite formal articulation and eventually gravitated ­toward its genre. Crisis h ­ ere is understood as a pro­cess from dislocation to realignment or, in a dif­fer­ent nomenclature, from detachment to attachment, thus I am very attentive to how per­for­mances ­were subtly or radically altered to suit the pre­sent predicament, to uncertainties regarding what ­were once canonical expressions of the cultural patrimony, and to the vicissitudes of obsolescence and topicality. The first three chapters of this book track this pro­ cess from the Peace of Paris in 1783 to the advent of the first Regency Crisis in 1788 to provide a nuanced account of how she-­tragedy, “Shakespeare,” and post-­Restoration comedy ­were realigned in this temporal win­dow, and how

Introduction 25

this realignment fundamentally defines how we understand the repertoire to this day. I start in the epochal 1782–83 theatrical season at Drury Lane and twist down into the archive in order to excavate the feelings of dislocation that drove the desire for realignment that permeated British culture in the 1780s. When the core is drawn up and carefully examined, we see symptomatic fractures in gender, class formation, and social hierarchy, that all but necessitate interventions in the realm of culture. Th ­ ese disturbances in the mentalité, in the performative habitus of the repertoire, are historical in nature, they pertain to the continued viability of past practices, but their import is for the f­ uture. The second and third chapters explore the very specific forms of consolation mobilized by Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan, how they re-­territorialized the repertoire in ways that consolidated the emergence of middling biopower. Across ­t hese three chapters, I identify a structure of feeling, to be discussed shortly, that I refer to as “corrosive solace.” Devised in relation to Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism”—­a result of my own critical transference with her work—it amounts to a form of consolation that slowly scours away social and po­liti­cal dispositions that proved to be obsolete in the wake of the War of American In­de­pen­dence. Like all forms of erosion, corrosive solace works through a repetitive pro­cess that is especially pronounced in the theatrical repertoire of late Georgian Britain. Audiences went to shows again and again and again; the signification of familiar forms was incrementally altered such that some level of surface continuity was maintained while subterranean affective forces slowly realigned British culture. The final chapters of this book complicate the provisional norms of gender, race, and class that emerged through corrosive solace in order to come to terms with crucial interruptions, seismic fractures if you w ­ ill, at the level of both form and event, in the repertoire in the 1790s. What I show is how post-­American dispositions haunted Britain’s cultural response to events in France and indeed remain the largely undisclosed affective vector in that turbulent period. In making this argument, I am consciously hollowing out residual claims for the exceptional qualities of the 1790s in Romantic studies and suggesting that much of what we see as inherently Romantic is in fact better understood as post-­American. As should by now be evident, this book is fundamentally concerned with social change and cultural transformation. It offers a fine-­grained analy­sis of the consolidation of middle-­class power both in its biopo­liti­cal manifestations and in its appropriation of morality as a mechanism of social discipline.

26 Introduction

The emergence of a biopo­liti­cal ­middle class had palpable implications for the largely unspoken tropes subtending whiteness and for the shift in how race itself was articulated, for we are exploring the moment when the earliest strains of biological state racism began to gain traction.55 ­These concerns with the cognate issues of class and race depend and/or impinge on the complex re-­stylization of gender per­for­mance and sexual regulation and thus transitions in the sex/gender system are a constant thematic. The triangulation of wounded drummer, black sharpshooter, and terrified m ­ other in Copley’s Death of Major Peirson is a helpful mnemonic for this reparative cir­ cuit. One of my primary concerns is to demonstrate how the fracturing of masculine ideals during the war required complex acts of reparation that took place within the precincts of both men’s and ­women’s lives. One of the most provocative, but I think unassailable, conclusions of my argument is that ­women in many ways saved British culture, and yet in d ­ oing so w ­ ere complicit with emergent forms of social regulation, restraint, and discrimination. Sarah Siddons, Frances Abington, and Dorothy Jordan loom large ­here, but I think similar arguments could be and have been made about Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and Frances Burney.56 It is impor­tant to remember, yet again, that t­ hese seven w ­ omen ­were among the most publicly recognized and most consequential cultural prac­ti­ tion­ers of the 1780s. If that sounds hyperbolic, then I hope this book ­will go some way to demonstrate the critical role they played at this time of deep cultural and social reckoning. Although Inchbald is addressed in this study, my interest in Smith, Cowley, and Burney has been presented elsewhere in large part ­because I had been paying attention to “new” cultural products. ­Because this book is concerned with the repertoire, ­there is much more sustained attention to Siddons, Jordan, and John Philip Kemble whose ­careers ­were built on innovative recalibrations first of post-­Restoration plays (often in mid-­century adaptation) and then of Shakespeare. In order to discern change, we need to look carefully at what remains apparently constant. If we see the American War as a historical rupture, or a severe dislocation, it was ­these three celebrities who took on the necessary public task of carry­ing that which could be sal­vaged from the cultural patrimony of the first British Empire into the emergent culture of the second. That salvage operation is an affective and formal ­matter that I describe as “corrosive solace.” The OED defines “solace” as “comfort or consolation in a time of ­great distress or sadness” and indicates that the word has its roots in the Latin verb solari “to console.” Consolation has a long rhetorical and

Introduction 27

philosophical history, but for our purposes its inherent proximity to notions of sympathy in times of loss or disappointment is crucial ­because the play­ house was a hot­house of sympathetic emotion throughout the Georgian period. Consolation is one of the mechanisms through which affective detachment is achieved. As a work fundamentally concerned with ­matters of attachment, Cruel Optimism argues that all attachment is optimistic in that it implies a f­ uture for the subject in the object of desire, but that not all attachment is necessarily salutary. Berlant understands cruel optimism, its capacity to lock a subject into a desiring structure that generates its own attrition, as the psychic substratum of neoliberal austerity, but, as she implies, it has a longer history that would include the history of sentimental fiction and melodrama that she describes in her ­earlier work.57 Corrosive solace is a precursor to this affective dynamic. The solace or consolation or compensation for the loss of Amer­i­ca that imbues the early work of Sarah Siddons and Dorothy Jordan is not optimism; it looks back rather than forward; or, rather, it looks back in order to look forward. In the hands of t­hese two remarkable performers, repertoire thinking became a way of connecting with what was vital from the past while si­mul­ta­neously stripping away that which was no longer useful for life in post-­America Britain. In that sense, solace was productively corrosive: past forms, genres, identities, and modes of sociability ­were immersed in an acid bath that slowly removed the scales of the ancien regime to reveal the bare white bones of middling sociability that would ground the new national and imperial formations of the nineteenth ­century. As we ­will see, the upper ranks would continue to exert their ­actual and symbolic power, but they would do so in ways that the social m ­ iddle could recognize 58 and accept as their own. Watching that come into full fruition in the realm of politics would take us well into the history of reform in the nineteenth ­century, but we can trace its subtle activation at the level of culture throughout the 1780s. In this regard, corrosive solace worked alongside more explicit forms of interdiction and recrimination in the wake of the American War. One of the most complex aspects of corrosive solace is that it took ­those aspects of aristocratic self-­stylization that animated the repertoire and re-­territorialized them to bolster the emergent norms of middling biopower: rakes became conjugal lovers, mistresses became icons of maternity, marriages of alliance became scenes of reproductive self-­sufficiency. This implies that t­ here is a conservative impulse at the heart of corrosive solace for it entails a desire to maintain the fantasy of ­wholeness that the past promised but failed to deliver. In this sense, corrosive solace is the hidden

28 Introduction

flip side of cruel optimism: looking backward and then forward with the corrosion coming in both directions. In the act of detaching itself from the fantasy of imperial plenitude in the Atlantic world, ­England (and I use the term advisedly b ­ ecause Ireland and Scotland add further levels of complexity that deserve books of their own) recovered by shedding t­hose aspects of itself that defined its attachment to the thirteen colonies but in so ­doing enacted a pro­cess of self-­a lienation. Perhaps the first attachment to go was the investment in aristocratic martial masculinity; the fate of its phantasmatic efficacy w ­ ill be very much on our minds in what follows. More impor­tant, however, the fantasy of British liberty that underwrote the first British Empire was redirected ­toward a style of territorial conquest fully alienated from concerns about virtue and civitas. Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan made this all too clear during the proceedings against Warren Hastings. What they understood throughout the late 1780s and I have discussed at length in Staging Governance is that the corrosive solace that defined the post-­American repertoire had prepared ­England for the cruel optimism that constituted its second empire in Asia. And that new form of attachment would exact its cost in the metropole in less direct ways than in the colonies, but the hollowing out of the imperial imperative was as inevitable as it was decisive. We could argue that “Britain” has never recovered from this self-­attrition for it haunts Tory politics to this day. In this regard, Sheridan’s remarkable attempt to imagine dif­fer­ent kinds of utopian attachments that interrupt corrosive solace in Pizarro ­will feel, sadly, like the road not taken, a ­f uture irrevocably past. The new dispensation that emerged from this dislocated world would be effectively exported to and throughout the second British empire, frequently understood as yet another Rome only this time with all pretense of republicanism thoroughly scoured away, and thus its impact on the social formations and cultural practices was felt around the globe. Thus, the spatial connotations of my heuristic terms, dislocation and realignment, need to be considered to their full extent, for the implications of my argument regarding corrosive solace as a strategy for sustaining everyday life in the metropole, especially as it pertains to the consolidation of whiteness and the regulation of sexuality, scales out to ­matters of global consequence.59 In the broadest application, local feelings of dislocation and detachment precipitated realignments in imperial fantasy, and I would contend that the per­for­mance of corrosive solace enacted by Siddons and Jordan in the 1780s was not only remediated in the fractious world of the press but also woven into the emergent

Introduction 29

sex/gender system that would lay the groundwork for the ascendancy of middling biopower ­later in the nineteenth ­century. Recognizing that linkage in its vari­ous manifestations is to discern the post-­American repertoire and to comprehend how norms of embodiment and sociability ­were and are ineluctably attached to recalcitrant inequities in the global systems bequeathed by British imperial culture.

Interrupted ­Futures The very notion of discerning the repertoire needs further elaboration ­because the repertoire exists in time, not separate from it. I have used the word discern advisedly b ­ ecause we are talking about perceiving or recognizing a phenomenon through difference or distinction. The repertoire is perceived when we recognize variations in per­for­mance protocols, pictorial strategies, or rhetorical tactics. Th ­ ese formal variations make us aware of change and thus of our relation to former manifestations of the cultural practice in question. The recognition of variation and continuity presupposes memory, although it does not guarantee replication; in fact, memory is as much a force for change as it is for stabilization. Th ­ ese problematics have been at the heart of per­for­mance studies for some time now ­because the very ephemerality of per­for­mance requires a modified sense of evidence. The evidentiary concerns of per­for­mance studies allow us to think about visual and textual cultures in a similarly slant fashion. My discussion of Copley’s exhibition in 1784 handled painting as an event and in so ­doing revealed the degree to which both paintings exhibited ­were not only doubly commemorative—­t hat is, engaged with the Peace of Paris of 1763 as well as the Peace of Paris of 1783—­but also set in mutual relation to the emergence of Pitt’s ministry. A similar strategy can be a­ dopted in relation to the press as a cultural praxis whose management of time and ephemerality is crucial to its social and commercial operation. Again, an example may be helpful. I want to direct our attention to the reporting of the negotiations of the Peace of Paris that ended the American War in part to introduce how the papers are used in this book and in part to prepare the reader for some of the key historical problematics that animate the subsequent chapters. It is ­here that I think we can gain some purchase on questions of urgency and on the designation “post-­American.” Providing a syncretic account of the reporting of the peace negotiations from the first moves of the Rockingham ministry in

30 Introduction

1782 to the publication of the definitive articles in early 1784 is beyond my remit h ­ ere: The daily contretemps is as factional and detailed as one might expect.60 But “repertoire thinking” implies that we do not have to provide a detailed account of an entire temporal arc to comprehend key dispositions and problematics. For our purposes, burrowing down into one paper, much as Cowper famously did in Book IV of The Task, proves to be deeply revealing, not for any specific treatment of a topic but for the formally complex treatment of temporality and mediation.61 My example is the Public Advertiser for 11 July 1782, an issue relatively early in the Treaty of Paris archive. Calls for conciliation and obviation of the war itself had, of course, preceded the onset of violent conflict at Lexington and Concord and continued to dominate both po­liti­cal debate and the vast number of newspapers critical of the North ministry’s prosecution of the war. As Elijah Gould has argued, North’s bellicose policies ­were sustained by a paradoxical combination of imperial ambition and isolationist fantasy.62 But with the fall of Yorktown on 17 October 1781 a desire for peace began to permeate nearly all levels of the social fabric. The question of how to satisfy that desire was multivalent and the press ­imagined a wide range of ­f utures in the ensuing months and years ­until the definitive articles w ­ ere published. ­A fter defeat at Yorktown, the British military suspended action on the North American continent and shifted its focus to retaining its holdings in the West Indies and elsewhere from the threat of French and Spanish aggression. Of paramount importance was the repulsion of ongoing threats of invasion of the British Isles themselves and the relief of Gibraltar. In a critically weakened state and diplomatically isolated, the British government was not in a strong negotiating position. This is why Admiral Rodney’s decisive victory over the French fleet at Les Saintes on 12 April 1782 was so vital. Not only did the defeat of the French in the West Indies preserve Jamaica as a British colony, it also severely wounded the prestige and impeded the capability of the French navy. The satirical print Rodny’s New In­ven­ted Turn About from 1 July indicates the larger import of Rodney’s victory, for the admiral is ­here punishing all of the allied powers not merely the French, and suddenly every­ one is calling for an end to war (Figure I.7). Rodney’s elevation to the status of a national hero and the outpouring of public cele­bration that attended the news of British victory was more than simply good news in a war that rarely afforded much optimism, it presaged a route to peace.63 I say presaged ­because only a­ fter the relief of Gibraltar in October 1782 did negotiations between all the powers began to move apace. Britain quickly recognized

Introduction 31

Figure I.7. Rodny’s New In­ven­ted Turn About, engraving (1 July 1782). Trustees of the British Museum.

American in­de­pen­dence and set about working on terms with France, Spain, and Holland. But between April and November 1782 the question of w ­ hether a favorable peace would happen at all remained open, and from late 1782 to early 1784 the question of what peace would mean in a practical sense was a troubling conundrum that strained the very sinews of established power. My example comes almost precisely in the m ­ iddle of this first period of uncertainty, ten days a­ fter the publication of the aforementioned Rodney print. The desire for peace involved a number of key conceptual leaps and a series of symptomatic rhetorical strategies that had been unfolding throughout the war. The first conceptual prob­lem, documented by Dror Wahrman and Jay Fliegelman, was how to establish difference between metropole and colony in the face of repeated assertions for much of the ­century, at the level of both rhe­toric and military action, that the Atlantic world was to be ruled by British subjects in opposition to French and Spanish rivals and Indigenous

32 Introduction

­ eoples. Especially during the Seven Years’ War, British colonists w p ­ ere understood in familial terms as b ­ rothers, sons, and cousins.64 With the onset of rebellion in the thirteen colonies ten years ­later, we begin to see key rhetorical shifts. The vast majority of satirical prints freely use caricatures of Indigenous figures to allegorically stand for the thirteen colonies. Within the structure of eighteenth-­century notions of ethnic and racial difference, t­ hose most like inhabitants of Britain—­both in their po­liti­cal commitment to liberty and in their social and cultural heritage—­suddenly emerge as ­those least like most Britons’ fantasy of their own identity (Figures I.8, I.9). The proliferation of allegorical savages across all media was not uncontested, but its rhetorical effect was crucial when it became apparent that Britain would be unable to retain the colonies ­u nder its rule.65 Even prints that used the Indigenous allegory to figure conciliation allowed for a handy assertion of

Figure I.8. SHELB—­NS SACRIFICE, engraving (1783). Trustees of the British Museum.

Introduction 33

“difference” where previously none had been felt, or, perhaps more accurately, it was more germane to ignore. In another version of this rhetorical transfer, the sons of liberty w ­ ere quickly transformed into the holders of slaves despite the fact that chattel slavery had been and would continue to be practiced in British colonies throughout the eigh­teenth ­century and well into the nineteenth. Christopher Leslie Brown has documented the importance of this rhetorical exculpation for British self-­fashioning in the wake of the War of American In­de­pen­dence, but ­t here is evidence that this distinction had quietly presented itself in the 1760s.66 As Jack Greene has summarized, anti-­planter sentiment no less than anti-­nabob discourse, had for some time rendered British colonists in Amer­i­ca and the two Indies less than British in the eyes of the metropole on the grounds that they so routinely traduced notions of liberty and indulged in corrupt commerce.67 Britons, faced with the loss of

Figure I.9. A Po­liti­cal Concert, engraving (1782). Trustees of the British ­Museum.

34 Introduction

territory, retained whiteness and moral capital for the metropole as ­simple signs of both po­liti­cal liberty and ethnic identity that ­were now deeply muddled, perhaps even threatened, by the emergence of a new dissident state or states in the Atlantic world. We could be even more precise h ­ ere and suggest that Britain compensated for territorial and governmental loss by claiming the capacity to define identity even while that identity remained inchoate. This rhetorical h ­ ouse of cards could not sustain much pressure: E ­ very indigenous allegory for “Amer­i­ca” printed, performed, or visually deployed is as much a sign of desperation as an act of self-­assertion and needed to be constantly supplemented and ultimately replaced with more self-­sustaining norms and practices. The very deployment of ­t hese Indigenous caricatures, as well as the term Amer­i­ca itself, as nominal tropes allowed Britain to begin the much more vexing prob­lem of defining itself as somehow “post-­American.” A quick glance at Figures I.8 and I.9 shows that singular “Amer­i­ca” is deployed in a scene involving ongoing factional conflict in the British Isles; it is this tangled sense of conflict, humiliation, and, at times, hope that dominates the visual and textual archive. ­After the fall of Yorktown, my sense is that very few Britons are concerned with defining American identity; a s­ imple allegory or nominal placeholder would do. But the prob­lem of defining what Britain was to become and how it would get ­t here was an urgent concern. “Amer­i­ca” quickly became a temporally and spatially stable notion—­despite the fact that it was anything but.68 In contrast, “peace” became imbued with all the uncertainty of futurity, not just of a specific f­ uture but of many pos­si­ble f­ utures that would emerge from a range of uncertain military actions and po­liti­cal crises. In the light of this urgency, it is thus not surprising to see e­ very column of the Public Advertiser for 11 July 1782 plumbing the depths of this topic. What is perhaps surprising is the complexity of the mediated engagement with the prob­lems of peace. In order to fully comprehend this, some further context is necessary. Lord Rockingham, who along with Lord Shelburne had replaced North as prime minister with an explicit mandate to recognize American in­de­pen­dence, had only recently died, on the first of July. George III quickly appointed Shelburne the next prime minister, prompting Rockingham’s secretary of state Charles James Fox to resign. Fox’s resignation provoked a po­liti­cal firestorm b ­ ecause, although he stated in Parliament that he resigned b ­ ecause of differences with Shelburne’ policy ­toward Amer­i­ca, it was an open secret that he felt that Shelburne had been undermining the Whig

Introduction 35

caucus on behalf of the king. It was a moment of maximum po­liti­cal turmoil that Rockinghamite figures could only indirectly discuss ­because open airing of their suspicions would directly impugn the Crown. To many observers, Fox’s po­liti­cal death was imminent and the king’s despotic tendencies ­were becoming increasingly manifest. In short, the desire for peace was troubled not only by ongoing war but also by a visceral sense of constitutional crisis that was struggling to find its form. If we look at the first two pages of the Public Advertiser we find eight columns of text, four per page, divided into dynamic zones of historical concern each of which approaches the ­matters of peace, war, and po­liti­cal crisis in a dif­fer­ent temporal and affective register. The two largest sections each take up the better part of three columns. A ­ fter the customary theatrical advertisements that take up the first and second columns of the first page, the two right-­hand columns of page one are dominated by an extraordinary “Dialogue of the Dead”—an i­magined colloquy between Lord Chatham and Lord Rockingham that offers both a po­liti­cal history of the war and thoughts on the pre­sent predicament. The “Dialogue” flows over to the left-­hand column of page two and is followed by an inflammatory letter to the editor about Fox’s conduct. The second column offers “Stanzas on Our Late Successes. Addressed to the Right. Hon. Lord Rodney, Commander in Chief of his Majesty’s Forces at the Leeward Islands” and a brief note from the paper to its “Correspondents” before launching into “A fuller Account of the Conclusion of Tuesday’s Proceedings in the House of Commons than appeared in Yesterday’s Paper.” This account of Fox’s dramatic defense of his resignation in the Commons on 7 July flows over the next two columns, thus dominating the entire right side of the page. With some sense of the layout, a number of observations can be made. First, the two multicolumn ele­ments—­t he “Dialogue” and the “Account”—­ are comparable in depth, location, and intensity. Both concern posthumous Whig politicians: Chatham and Rockingham are dead; Fox is a dead man talking. The spectacle of Fox’s self-­exculpation not only captures the widely held opinion that he was finished but also involves a repeated self-­a lignment on the part of Fox with the dead Rockingham. The late minister and his policies w ­ ere referred to repeatedly, by both Fox and Burke, as a way of disassociating themselves from Shelburne, despite the fact that the out­going ministry was a co­a li­tion of Rockingham and Shelburne. Fox’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Shelburne is scathing:

36 Introduction

The country had now an Administration . . . ​of a man who was gigantic in promises, but a pigmy in per­for­mance; a man who could not think of reformation with temper, however loudly he might speak about it; a man who would declare, that the influence of the Crown ­ought to be diminished, but who would, at the same time, say, that the King had a right to use his negative in passing laws, and would threaten with the exercise of that negative all t­hose who should attempt to move any Bills that went to retrenchment. . . . ​If was now the intention of the Cabinet, as he said, to grant in­de­pen­dence to Amer­i­ca, it was an intention very lately ­adopted; and he found that he, in fact, had much more weight out of the Cabinet, than ever he had in it: He had never before seen the papers from which his Honourable Friend had stated his four ­great princi­ples; and therefore he could not be answerable for their contents; but this much he could assure the House, that he differed from the Cabinet on this subject, ­because he found the majority of them averse to that idea of unconditional in­de­pen­dence to Amer­i­ca, which he conceived it to be necessary to the salvation of this country to have granted. (PA, 11 July 1782) We w ­ ill discuss this contretemps at length in Chapter 1, but I have provided this long excerpt to give some sense of the degree to which Fox’s critique of the Shelburne ministry, from the outset, was si­mul­ta­neously a veiled attack on the royal prerogative and a naked declaration of the necessity of recognizing American in­de­pen­dence for “the salvation of this country” [emphasis added]. For Fox and other Rockingham Whigs, reining in George III and recognizing in­de­pen­dence w ­ ere mutually constitutive actions. The insinuation that Shelburne is the king’s minion implies that the new ministry ­will sabotage the peace. Fox had ample reason to believe this ­because Shelburne had been giving instructions to the diplomats negotiating with the American commissioners at variance with ­those Fox had been receiving as the primary negotiator with France. Fox concluded his remarks with a prophecy, one that clearly suggested that the civil war that had riven the Atlantic imperium was to transform into a far more local form of civil war that would embroil the British Isles: “He concluded, by observing, that he should have been mad indeed, if having been placed as a watchman in a tower, he remained an unconcerned spectator, while he saw the ­enemy at work in undermining it; and had not hung out the flag of distress to warn the p ­ eople of their danger. He was now about to build

Introduction 37

a fortress, to which all ­t hose might fly, who should hereafter find it unsafe to trust their fortunes and character in the tower from which he had fled; and he made no doubt but sooner or ­later he should see his Honourable Friend and o ­ thers fly to it for shelter” (PA, 11 July 1782). Fox’s meta­phorical turn h ­ ere imagines two fortresses, one the pre­sent state in the throes of corruption and the other a new edifice preparing to provide shelter to ­t hose fleeing ministerial and royal tyranny. It is a meta­phor that keeps Fox and ­t hose willing to come with him po­liti­cally alive and it posits a ­f uture beyond the Shelburne ministry. But, significantly, this articulation of a dif­fer­ent ­f uture than that likely to emerge from the pre­sent dispensation evokes an immediate comparison to a past moment that haunted the debate no less than Rockingham’s death—­namely, the advent of Chatham’s ministry in 1766. In response to Fox, General Conway suggested that despite Fox’s references to the repeal of the Stamp Act and other key issues of that year, he had neglected to recognize Chatham’s willingness to work with parliamentarians from a wide range of po­liti­cal constituencies to address the unresolved ­matters arising from the end of the Seven Years’ War. Conway’s remarks are terse but significant beyond a mere charge of bad faith; they make explicit the long historical arc leading to this debate and they explain why Lord Rockingham and Lord Chatham have so much to talk about in the next world on page one of the Public Advertiser for 11 July 1782. The dialogue between Chatham and Rockingham from beyond the grave is by turns funny and trenchant in its criticism of the pre­sent po­liti­cal “World.” The two Whig statesmen, subtly ensconced somewhere below the terrestrial world, trade notes on their famous illnesses, but Chatham is e­ ager for information from one more recently alive: I have as ­great a Thirst for Intelligence, even in ­t hese unreal Regions, for the Politics of the other World, as I had when I was permitted to direct the Affairs of E ­ ngland. My Inclination for Power is not extinguished, and only my Ability of exercising it taken from me. I wish I could ascend the upper Regions to chastise the House of Bourbon! Indeed you have been snatched away in an impor­tant Moment. To make Peace ­after so many disgraceful campaigns may be an arduous task. I was sensible of the Difficulty, ­after the Triumphs of a most glorious War. I confess that I flung up, not merely ­because I was not permitted to guide, but ­because I was not permitted to make a Peace adequate to our Victories. (PA, 11 July 1782)

38 Introduction

As the latter sentences indicate, “A Dialogue of the Dead” is more than satire on the pre­sent state of British politics. Rockingham offers frank appraisals of the likelihood that Shelburne would scuttle his own desire for po­liti­cal reform and provides Chatham with “inside” information on the pre­sent moment, but it is through Chatham’s reflections that the “Dialogue” offers a detailed genealogy of the historical circumstances and po­liti­cal missteps that have generated the perilous situation at hand. And this genealogy is remarkably subtle and detailed: ­There are careful discussions of the problematic terms bequeathed by the Peace of Paris in 1763, of the Declaratory Act and the Stamp Act, of the ongoing prospect of French aggression, and, in a telling moment, a recognition from Chatham that “the Destruction and Downfall of our Country, (or, confessedly by all, she has stood for some Years on a dangerous Precipice) originates a l­ittle higher in Time, than our Colonial Intention” (PA, 11 July  1782). As in life, when Chatham’s patriotic reputation allowed him to speak plainly as to how imperial policy was undermining the very definition of British liberty, his fictional avatar declares that imperial ambition had unmoored Britain from its past po­liti­cal identity. But in order for “Chatham” to do this historical work, to consolidate the past into a diagnostic narrative, he also has to declare that this past has a ­future. In response to Chatham’s analy­sis, Rockingham asks, “What is to become of us?” Chatham’s response should remind us in substance and tone of Fox’s concluding remarks regarding his resignation that the Public Advertiser prints across the page: “This, my Lord, is the Language of Despondency. If your successors do their Duty, I ­shall soon see you in better Spirits. For my Part, I never knew what Fear was, personal nor po­liti­cal, notwithstanding the Danger of an Invasion, during my Administration. I s­ hall never give up my Country for lost till, as I heretofore told the Spanish Ambassador, the ­Enemy has taken the Tower of London Sword in Hand” (PA, 11 July 1782). It is evident that neither Rockingham nor Chatham, no less than Fox, feels that the successor, Shelburne, w ­ ill do his duty, but crucially Chatham sets himself as an example for the next minister to emulate. The complex genealogy that precedes this remark not only tells us how “we” got h ­ ere but also describes the kind of “character” who ­will lead Britain through the “arduous task” of peace. Both of ­these two large sections of the Public Advertiser for 11 July 1782 enact a self-­conscious search for a historical understanding of the pre­sent predicament. Historical analy­sis ­here, w ­ hether it is dramatized through fictional

Introduction 39

colloquy or presented as ostensibly referential recording of parliamentary debate, attempts to consolidate a version of the past that w ­ ill allow for the imagination of v­ iable f­ utures for the empire and for the realm. It is not incidental that both texts are accounts of per­for­mance; as such, they are partaking of per­for­mance’s ineluctable relation to a specific time and place of enactment. In the pro­cess, narrative enigmas are e­ ither foreclosed or activated to keep events and their analy­sis alive in time. This is crucial ­because the paper itself, as a commercial entity, is premised on its capacity to resolve and instantiate ­t hese questions, thus generating a need and a desire for the consumption of the next issue of the Public Advertiser. This may seem like a truism—­papers are issued sequentially on a daily basis—­but if we look closely at the rest of the first two pages of the paper in question we discover an equally complex engagement with time past and time ­f uture in the theatrical advertisements, the letters to the editor, and the verses that separate “The Dialogue of the Dead” and the account of Fox’s speech from one another. The most salient issue ­here is the dogged appearance of Admiral Rodney across this seemingly ancillary material. British victory at Les Saintes had taken place three months ­earlier, but with the lag time of war­time news and the sheer consequentiality of the action, cele­bration was ongoing. B ­ ecause it is the summer, ­t here are no offerings from Covent Garden, Drury Lane, or the King’s Theatre, but Sadler’s Wells has Particularly a new Piece (never yet performed) consisting of Airs, Recitatives, Trios, Chorusses, ­etc. called HUZZA FOR OLD E ­ NGLAND! With DANCES, &c. Containing, among vari­ous Pieces of Machinery, a lively ­Repre­sen­ta­tion of The late ACTION in the WEST-­INDIES. Descending G ­ rand Transparencies, representing the gallant DE Grasse surrendering his Sword to VICTORIOUS RODNEY Fame hovering over the Latter, about to crown him With the Laurel Wreath. Striking figures, representing the Cardinal Virtues; And, at the Bottom, FRANCE and SPAIN suing For PEACE. (PA, 11 July 1782)

40 Introduction

Audiences at Astley’s Summer Amusements, as one might expect, would be entertained by ­horse­manship and tumbling, but “In addition to the Variety of pleasing Amusements This Eve­ning, ­will be presented, a pleasant repre­ sen­ta­tion (by Shadows) of Admiral Rodney’s Defeating the French Fleet on the 12th of April last; both fleets are seen in close Action, each contending for the honour of the day” (PA, 11 July 1782). Th ­ ese shows proliferated throughout the spring months and are in­ter­est­ing in and of themselves, but within the context of their advertisement in this paper, the salient m ­ atter is that Rodney’s victory attributes the desire for peace to France and Spain in t­hese per­for­mances. In this very specific form of wishful thinking, the British desire for peace is projected onto her enemies. In so ­doing, the repetition and remediation of a past event—­Rodney’s victory—is deployed to concretize a ­f uture that the rest of the paper soberly indicated remained unresolved. I would argue that it is this repetition both in per­for­mance and in the repeated textual cele­bration—­t he “Stanzas” on the next page similarly gets ahead of itself and confidently declares Britain’s return to imperial domination—­t hat allows for the exploration of uncertainty and contingency in “A Dialogue with the Dead” and in the account of Fox’s oratory. The recurrent presence of Rodney across t­ hese pages and across the broader mediascape provided a phantasmatic mooring from which crisis could begin to be formally resolved. At this point, the aesthetic mediation of the affective sense of historical crisis was only beginning to emerge. ­There was as yet no fully realized formal articulation of what was happening, no singular manifestation that would capture the visceral feeling of change. But the sum total of the eight columns of the first two pages of this issue of the Public Advertiser, for all their disjunctive qualities, indicate a desire to recognize the affective cost of the war and feel the contrary “blessings of peace.” I use that phrase intentionally ­because, as we w ­ ill see in Chapter 2, a famous print of that title indicates that the blessings of peace, at this moment, may not be blessings at all.69 But each textual ele­ment deployed across this two-­page spread, like the posthumous Chatham, argues against despondency ­either by hyperbolically celebrating Rodney or by demonstrating that sophisticated critique remained alive and well in parliament and in the pages of the paper. The Public Advertiser for 11 July 1782 allows us to see that this pro­cess of “navigating what is overwhelming” is never separate ­either from an engagement with past social and cultural per­for­mance and its remediation or from the subjunctive articulation in the same media of ­f utures both bad and good.

Introduction 41

It is this very productive relation to the time of crisis that makes the repertoire such a dynamic historical force on the one hand and such an elusive phenomenon on the other. Its integral relation to time’s unfolding both activates the habitus and disperses the traces of its action. In the face of this dispersion, this book seeks to understand the affective force of a repertoire in crisis. As I trace the dislocations and realignments of the post-­American repertoire, it w ­ ill become apparent that the harsh f­ uture that haunted all media in the early 1780s would be transferred to l­ ater conflicts with revolutionary France and to colonial locales well beyond the “ruined world” of Britain’s Atlantic imperium. Establishing “peace” and equanimity at home in the wake of the American War would correlate with the escalation of global war and the fierce application of colonial vio­lence throughout the nineteenth ­century.

* * * This foregoing analy­sis of the Public Advertiser for 11 July 1782 highlights a methodological problematic that lurks ­behind the first three chapters of this book but which erupts into full significance during the book’s closing chapters. At the level of both form and content, this par­tic­u­lar issue of the Public Advertiser is trying to understand the implications of and potentialities nascent in interruption. Chatham and Rockingham, whose po­liti­cal ­careers ­were suddenly truncated by death, worry over Shelburne’s efficacy b ­ ecause his mismanagement threatens to interrupt a history of governance that goes back to the Glorious Revolution. Fox’s resignation finds him teetering on the verge of po­liti­cal death and the structure of his speech meta­phor­ically suggests that his time in the wilderness w ­ ill be merely an interruption of true parliamentary princi­ples. Every­thing about t­ hese interlocking rhetorical engagements seeks to refigure death as interruption: the fearsome detachment precipitated by finality is mitigated by promises of continuation ­after a pause. All manner of affective possibilities flow into that hiatus: the patriotic attachments of Chatham and Rockingham are only intensified by their ghostly condition; Fox imagines a “new fortress” that ­will greet the refugees of the current po­liti­cal distress with open arms and found a new social (Whig) contract; the Rodney cele­brations ­will stop the flow of bad news and proj­ect the possibility of redemption. All t­ hese moments of wishful thinking mark both a rupture and a need for consolation. Loss itself, even when catachrestically put forward as unrealized victory or continuation, lurks ­behind the acts of

42 Introduction

corrosive solace that accrued to Siddons’s ­great she-­tragedy per­for­mances a mere two months a­ fter the publication of this issue of the Public Advertiser. Lurking within loss and interruption are promised f­ utures. As we ­will see, the corrosive solace afforded by Siddons’s and Jordan’s engagement with the repertoire tended to work by re-­territorializing aristocratic dispositions into the structures of middling biopower. The po­liti­cal disturbances so vis­i­ble in the press ­were transmuted into domestic allegories as corrosive solace did its work. But the prob­lem as well as the potential endemic to interruption, both at the level of event and at the level of aesthetic form, did not simply dissolve. Rather, interruption came back with a vengeance with the sudden announcement of George III’s madness in 1788, the revolution in France in 1789, the regicide of Louis XVI in 1794, the suspension of habeas corpus in Britain shortly thereafter, the mutinies at Spithead and Nore in 1797, and the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. ­These events both reactivated the social insecurity of the postwar years and subsumed ­t hese affective intensities into new horizons of historical change. The unfinished work of mourning instantiated by diminished empire in the Atlantic was eclipsed first by the stirrings of rebellion within Britain and then by the global war with France. The Pitt ministry’s authoritarian response to the former laid bare the fragility of what­ever post-­American détente had been thus far achieved and the latter repudiated and repressed that vulnerability through the propagation of nationalist per­for­mances, discourses, and modes of identification. The hyper-­nationalism evinced by the ongoing war with France interrupted the reparative work of the post-­American repertoire and arguably accelerated its drive ­toward sexual and racial normativity. And yet, in the early 1790s, the repertoire became a zone of contestation: divergent affective intensities infused moments of performative interruption and cracked the fragile social consensus that was beginning to cohere in the mid-1780s. ­These interruptions provide us with auspicious sites for cultural analy­sis ­because the discomfort audiences experienced became harbingers of the post-­ American repertoire’s uneven operation. Th ­ ose aspects of corrosive solace that operated primarily at the level of affect and the body suddenly became vis­i­ble and thus w ­ ere pressed, sometimes prematurely, into formal articulation. With the advent of new national crises that reactivated potential repetition of past humiliation, many of the performative strategies explored in the first part of this book w ­ ere amplified and supplemented. The second part of this book looks at moments in which this acceleration and supplementation threw up forms of amelioration that elicited discomfort

Introduction 43

more than solace or that critically rehearsed scenes of solace to assess the cost of its corrosive power. In keeping with our discussion of genre above, we ­will see that generic normativity becomes a consequential ­matter in the ­later stages of corrosive solace. As pressure builds along social fault lines, debate over genre often erupts as an indirect way of assessing the affective vectors of historical forces. Despite the significant realignment of the repertoire in the mid1780s, the erosion of former norms was neither smooth nor continuous. The interaction of events, old plays, and new plays from the Regency Crisis to the end of the ­century explored in the final three chapters of this book fractured response in symptomatic ways and it is my contention that interruption became an occasion for po­liti­cal and aesthetic experimentation across the performative scenario, taken up as much by audiences as by man­ag­ers, playwrights, and players. This is impor­tant ­because it allows us to isolate how the repertoire makes manifest the affective dynamics of historical change. Returning to Tracy Davis’s theorization of the repertoire h ­ ere is helpful b ­ ecause she understands the critical agency I am describing h ­ ere in terms of naming. As she states, “Repertoires are multiple circulating recombinative discourses of intelligibility . . . ​ that account for durable meanings, not as memory per se but in the improvisation of naming which sustains intelligibility.”70 As the final chapters work through moments of aesthetic and historical interruption, we ­will see the press constantly trying to name or render intelligible the conflicts that coalesce in ­t hese moments of performative suspension. The pause generates an urgent desire to name, which forces inchoate po­liti­cal and affective dispositions to take form, to come into discourse. The fact that the press is struggling to capture social change should not be surprising, but it is genuinely intriguing that dramaturgical shifts in many ways forced the issue and fomented discomfort. The work of naming not only heightened the affective intensity of the formal and historical interruptions experienced in the post-­ American repertoire but also coincided with a massive expansion in dramaturgical scale—­t hey reverberated in the newly enlarged physical and m ­ ental theaters of the Romantic period. Serious plays and po­liti­cal crises generated melancholy reverberations both tragic and comic, and blurring the boundary between the two modes became a constitutive feature of the mediascape. Discomfort became not a distraction or an impediment to corrosive solace but rather was co-­opted to become the principal form of attachment and affiliation in the play­house. Audiences increasingly demanded an unsettling of generic expectations and invested more thoroughly in the supplementation

44 Introduction

of scripts by visual spectacle or ­music, while at the same time expressing uncertainty about ­t hese new hybrid entertainments. Working at a moment when new genres and venues ­were proliferating, formal interruption and spectacular supplementation became the hallmarks of John Philip Kemble’s practice. We w ­ ill be looking at his 1788 production of Henry the Eighth, his 1789 adaptation of Coriolanus, his 1794 Macbeth, the controversy surrounding his 1795 production of Venice Preserv’d, and his star turn as Roderick Penruddock in Richard Cumberland’s The Wheel of Fortune in order to track the emergence of impor­tant interventions in the repertoire that, unlike t­ hose practiced by Siddons and Jordan, had less to do solely with acting than with larger dramaturgical m ­ atters pertaining to scenography, spectacle, and topicality. When Kemble took over the management of Drury Lane Theatre in 1788, the com­pany featured the most celebrated players of his generation, but he made sure not only to fulfill the desire for spectacle but also to situate his productions within a topical media environment. Kemble’s dramaturgical experiments had lasting effects on the repertoire and yet also generated symptomatic forms of re­sis­tance both among audiences and within the theater system. The final section of this book is called “Interrupted F ­ utures” b ­ ecause Kemble’s interventions in the repertoire invariably restructured the past in order to explore promised affective conditions beyond the pre­sent predicament. Just as Siddons and Jordan had delved into voice, movement, and gesture to re-­territorialize scripts in a way that promised new forms of life, Kemble’s predilection for spectacle and topical engagement expanded the affective dynamics of the late eighteenth-­century play­house to posit new forms of attachment and sociability. Significantly, this expansion often went awry: spectacle could be too excessive or topical allusion could fail to register or inadvertently waylay the production. In ­these moments of overstatement or miscommunication, the ­futures promised by the repertoire become starkly vis­i­ble before being all too quickly subsumed into the past. What is so fascinating about the historical work of the repertoire in this mode is that ruptures in the temporal continuum suddenly revealed subterranean forces that w ­ ere more often felt than cognized. The disclosure of t­ hese affective forces is remarkable by any standards, but they are especially significant ­here b ­ ecause increasingly in the 1790s the promises afforded by the repertoire ­were as likely to be abjured or contested as they ­were to be accepted. Much of this had to do with ways that theatrical per­for­mance fleetingly engaged and disengaged with the real as it was mediated in the press. Georgian

Introduction 45

theater was a highly topical medium and yet topicality remains an undertheorized notion. In this period, it is rare to see topical allusion achieve the systematic organ­ization of topical allegory: far more often, a performative parallel to topical events or personages interrupts the temporality of a given scenario. It is recognized, registered, and suspended as the per­for­mance unfolds. ­There are occasions, most notably the famous theft of Kemble’s 1795 production of Venice Preserv’d by John Thelwall and his associates, where that interruption becomes a temporal loop capable of fully displacing the per­for­ mance’s own internal drive. Kemble’s work in the 1790s mobilizes topical allusion in seemingly anodyne parts of the repertoire but then uses a range of dramaturgical strategies to expand the temporal interruption inherent in allusion in order to activate full-­blown thought experiments regarding sovereignty, republicanism, and sociability. Chapter 4 turns to Kemble’s first season as man­ag­er at Drury Lane and looks closely at his productions of Shakespeare’s Henry the Eighth and Coriolanus. ­These two plays are in many ways synonymous with the legacy of Siddons and Kemble, respectively. Queen Katherine was one of Siddons’s most famous roles and Kemble’s Coriolanus one of his greatest achievements; and yet, in 1788, Siddons was not well received in the role and Coriolanus had to be shelved quite quickly. Understanding what happened to ­these plays in that season requires a consideration of how topicality si­mul­ta­neously made the plays mean too much and too l­ ittle. Henry the Eighth was scheduled to open on the same date as the resumption of the trial of Warren Hastings and I argue that the suspension of the trial ­because of George III’s illness unmoored Siddons’s per­for­mance from its topical substratum. ­There was palpable discomfort with her per­for­mance of sympathetic concern for the ­women of her ­house­hold that resonated with Sheridan’s famous evocation of the emotional distresses of the Begams of Awadh.71 We need to ask what happens when the tight web of emotional reference unravels, especially in a case in which emotion itself was being mobilized as evidence by Burke and Sheridan against Hastings and the ministry ­because it helps us to understand what happens when the engagement with topical events is perhaps too tightly wound. Kemble’s 1789 Coriolanus is very much in dialogue with the Regency Crisis, but his profound engagement with the diminishment of the republican tradition in British po­liti­cal thought unfolds next to the amplification of another kind of politics altogether. The biopo­liti­cal imperatives that failed to reach their destination in Henry the Eighth ­were radically disclosed in Siddons’s embodiment of Volumnia. Weaving together t­ hese two remarkable revivals in the

46 Introduction

repertoire, I argue that the supplementation of parliamentary politics by biopo­liti­cal norms becomes suddenly vis­i­ble, a rare sign of history. This type of transient disclosure is fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the type of historiographical work that is the focus of Chapter 5. In order to gain perspective on Kemble’s interventions in the repertoire, we ­will be attending not only to the social dynamics of discomfort and disapprobation but also to three of the most impor­tant new plays of the post-­American era: Elizabeth Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault, Richard Cumberland’s The Wheel of Fortune, and Benjamin Thompson’s The Stranger, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Menschenhass und Reue. Each of t­ hese plays offers a complex commentary on what was transpiring both in the world of politics and in the post-­American repertoire. In the first two cases, however, historical change is not made vis­i­ble through interruption; rather, interruption is itself narrativized. This effectively thematizes the post-­A merican predicament and instantiates a subtle redirection in the deployment of topicality in five-­ act comedy. Thus, I ­w ill argue that something is happening at the level of genre to name, and thus pro­cess, the emergence of new social and po­liti­cal formations. Inchbald takes what was implicit in Siddons’s and Jordan’s re-­ territorialization of the repertoire and makes explicit claims for the biopo­liti­cal imperatives of the middling ranks. Through an extraordinary act of transformation, corrosive solace was crystallized in the realm of comedy and brought to its full luster in her Wives as They ­Were, Maids as They Are of 1797. As I have argued elsewhere, with the latter play the sexual dynamics of eighteenth-­century comedy would be changed utterly, but it is in ­Every One Has His Fault that Inchbald traces this transformation to the British experience of loss in Amer­i­ca.72 Something even more strange happens in The Wheel of Fortune, for Cumberland’s comedy both explic­itly explores the “tilt to the East” that enabled British imperial culture to recover from its loss of the thirteen colonies and implicitly examines both Cumberland’s and Kemble’s own place in the repertoire. It does this by stranding Kemble, a player ineluctably associated with tragedy, in a five-­act comedy. The role became one of Kemble’s most famous and enduring parts, but what is fascinating for our purposes is the way that it explic­itly disentangles the history of Roman republicanism from British imperial ideology. The historical work of the repertoire is h ­ ere pitched at the level of generic change and thus written directly into the script. It should not be surprising therefore that both ­Every One Has His Fault and The Wheel of Fortune provoked explicit commentary on their historical analy­sis and their

Introduction 47

generic status, for generic change within the repertoire was being explic­itly used to figure historical change. To the degree that something was perceived as changing at the level of genre, we could argue that a new social and imperial dispensation was being articulated. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with The Stranger, a play that did for Siddons what The Wheel of Fortune did for Kemble. The heartrending per­for­mance of Mrs. Haller became Siddons’s only successful comic role, but the play’s topic, its incorporation of per­for­mance protocols honed in she-­tragedy, and above all its stunning use of interruption as a formal mechanism posed serious questions about the law of genre. The drive ­toward normativity that is inherent to all claims to generic integrity w ­ ere revealed to be contaminated by that which was ostensibly outside the horizon of expectation. Comedy and tragedy, both at the level of form and content w ­ ere invaginated, just as the play’s topic, adultery, was revealed to be constitutive of normative sexual relations.73 The Stranger revealed the irreducible contingency of the repertoire’s negotiation with crisis. The Stranger raised fundamental questions about genre and about Siddons’s function within the sex/gender system that ­were debated at length in the press. The play’s sudden interruption of expectations regarding narrative and the identity of the actress w ­ ere only amplified by another adaptation from Kotzebue in the next theatrical season—­namely, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro. Rather than rupturing the temporal continuum or thematizing recent history, Pizarro makes the affective and po­liti­cal dynamics of the post-­ American repertoire vis­i­ble in a dif­fer­ent way by reversing its flow. Rather than consolidating the work of corrosive solace, Sheridan fractures it in order to return us to the moment immediately following the War of American In­de­pen­dence and prior to the founding of the Pitt ministry when a dif­fer­ ent, cosmopo­liti­cal ­future based on Whig princi­ples could have emerged that detached liberty and virtue from the shackles of national fantasy in order to theorize a utopian fantasy of universal humanity. Pizarro is a plangent interruption in the repertoire ­because Sheridan is exploring a ­future whose moment has passed, a promised ­f uture that has slipped through his hands. That Sheridan explic­itly pitches his utopian rupture of the repertoire against nativist understandings of national and racial identity specifies exactly what was amiss in corrosive solace but was likely difficult to comprehend in the mid1780s—­namely, its biopo­liti­cal articulation of white supremacy that was silently operating beneath the veil of middle-­class ascendancy. This racial fantasy, first applied by the social ­middle to itself to distinguish itself from the aristocracy and the lower o ­ rders, would eventually be exported by the

48 Introduction

middling ranks to its class ­others as the question of racial alterity became an urgent issue for colonial governance in the second British Empire.74 In short, Inchbald articulated and Sheridan critiqued the biopo­liti­cal substructure of liberalism that could be traced back to Siddons’s and Jordan’s re-­ territorialization of the repertoire: a re-­territorialization that was mobilized in response to the loss of the American War and specifically the thirteen colonies. Thus, the post-­American repertoire as discussed in this book is the crucial, undiscussed precursor to liberalism’s cruel optimism.

PA R T I Corrosive Solace

CHAPTER 1

Between a Rock and a Hard Place The Contingent Politics of She-­Tragedy

This chapter is about theatrical per­for­mance in the 1782–83 season, a period of im­mense cultural and geopo­liti­cal significance. In historical terms, the fall of 1782 saw the successful repulsion of the French and Spanish forces that had besieged the British garrison at Gibraltar for three years. The heroic efforts of General George Eliott and the 5,000 soldiers ­under his command not only allowed Britain to retain this strategic colony but also enabled the negotiations that would result in Britain’s recognition of American in­de­pen­dence and prosecution of peace with Amer­i­ca’s French and Spanish allies. Without the relief of Gibraltar, the Peace of Paris would have been drastically less favorable for G ­ reat Britain. It is not surprising that news of Eliott’s repulsion of the siege resulted in vast public cele­brations. From a cultural standpoint, James Boaden’s hagiography of Sarah Siddons provocatively declares that “the most impor­tant season that the Theatre has, perhaps, ever known, was that of 1782–3.”1 The period from September 1782 to February 1783 was crucial to establishing the po­liti­cal contours of the post-­American era. My objective in this chapter is to consider Siddons’s famous she-­tragedy per­for­ mances, the per­for­mances that consolidated her fame and reactivated a moribund portion of the repertoire, in relation not only to the relief of Gibraltar but also to the rocky prosecution of peace that immediately followed the retention of the Rock. Much of this book’s argument can be derived from a thorough consideration of the per­for­mance of Isabella and All the World’s a Stage at Drury Lane Theatre on the eve­ning of 15 October 1782. This was not the first night Siddons played the title role of Garrick’s adaptation of Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage; it was her third per­for­mance as Isabella in London (she had played

52

Corrosive Solace

the role previously in Bath). Siddons took London by storm in this role and Isabella was the first in a cascade of post-­Restoration plays that would dominate the 1782–83 season at Drury Lane, and indeed much of Siddons’s ­career. Cycling through per­for­mances of Isabella, The Grecian D ­ aughter, Jane Shore, The Fair Penitent, Venice Preserv’d, and The Mourning Bride, Siddons’s capacity to channel tragic affect turned Drury Lane into a highly profitable zone for the revivification of she-­tragedy.2 On any given night with Siddons performing, Drury Lane was reaping on average double the receipts of what­ever Covent Garden had to offer. This, of course, is all very well known; it is a crucial part of the narrative of Siddons’s ascendance on the London stage. I ­will be coming back around to Isabella and t­ hese other notable per­for­mances shortly, but I believe that a new vantage point for their consideration ­w ill emerge ­after duly attending to the other aspects of that Tuesday eve­ning.

15 October 1782, or The Rock As Diana Taylor has emphasized, the repertoire is mediated and we can learn a ­great deal by looking at the second page of the Morning Post for 16 October 1782. ­There we find a fascinating notice of the play embedded in the four-­ column quilt of foreign and domestic news, as well as some very revealing bits of gossip and opinion. The news is remarkable: in a section marked “Foreign Intelligence,” a dispatch from Paris dated “Oct.  6” describes the preparations undertaken by the Bourbon allies for the “­Grand Assault” on Gibraltar. Immediately below in a section marked “London,” we effectively leap forward to consider the aftermath of the failure of that military action. On 13 October, the combined forces of Spain and France attempted a coordinated bombardment of the British garrison both from the land and from specially designed floating batteries. It was reported that 80,000 spectators had gathered to see the British fortress destroyed once and for all. The show did not go as planned; instead, a horrific spectacle unfolded when the floating batteries ran aground and they started to explode one by one. Despite rescue attempts, large numbers of Spanish seamen w ­ ere e­ ither killed or drowned and the bay was littered with smoldering debris. The French commander of the siege, General Louis de Crillon, Duc du Mahon, called off the artillery bombardment planned for the following day; the British fortress remained ­under siege, but the Bourbon allies had suffered the worst loss of the entire American War.



Between a Rock and a Hard Place 53

Plans w ­ ere already well underway to relieve the fortress: The British fleet ­ nder Admiral Richard Howe had left for Gibraltar from Spithead on 11 Sepu tember. If he could break through the Spanish blockade, the siege would be effectively over. Readers of the Morning Post ­were informed that the ­grand assault had failed and that “the Duc de Crillon had expressed a wish to his Sovereign to be immediately recalled from public ser­vice,” but ­whether Howe had been successful was very much an enigma: “According to the French accounts, the ­grand assault upon Gibraltar was to have taken place while the attention of the besieged was directed t­ owards the gun-­boats and the floating batteries; but as t­ hese unfortunately miscarried, it was i­ magined the Duc de Crillon would continue the bombardment till it was seen ­whether Lord Howe could or could not relieve the place” (MP, 16 October 1782). This tight knot of conditional and subjunctive verbs maximizes the sense of uncertainty. Four paragraphs down, the paper returns to Gibraltar: “As no official accounts have been received lately from Gen. Eliott, ­t here is ­every reason to suppose that the blockade by sea must have been completed for some time past” (MP, 16 October 1782). Caught in the temporal thrall of what Mary Favret has so usefully described as war­time, readers of the Morning Post ­were primed with reports from early in the month in the “Foreign Intelligence” and then poised between triumphant jubilation and anxious anticipation in the domestic news, for w ­ hether Eliott’s repulsion of the g­ rand assault would translate into the end of the siege was a ­matter of ­great consequence.3 Breaking the siege of Gibraltar, like Rodney’s victory at Les Saintes, was a crucial step ­toward peace in the War of American In­de­pen­dence. ­These victories gave Britain valuable bargaining power in the ongoing negotiations that ­were taking place in Paris. Aggressive naval operations ­were no longer happening in the Ca­rib­be­an; the Royal Navy was simply protecting its possessions t­ here. War in the thirteen colonies was effectively over. Gibraltar remained the open question, but with the defeat of the ­grand assault on 13 October and Howe’s relief of the fortress achieved by the eigh­teenth, a key issue was resolved. Spain’s primary desire was to remove Britain from the straights. To do so now would require giving up a ­great deal in the peace negotiations. Spain’s concerns ­were no longer of interest to the French, so France immediately recognized the preliminary peace treaty between Britain and the United States. The next few weeks saw intense negotiations between Britain and France and Spain that would eventually result in the treaties signed at Versailles in early 1783. Britain would retain Gibraltar, and

54

Corrosive Solace

its status as the most fetishized colonial acquisition in the empire was not only reaffirmed but intensified. But as the Morning Post of 16 October indicates, two columns over from the aforementioned news, just above an extensive discussion of the related prob­lem of war with France’s proxy Hyder Ali in India, the desired peace with the Americans was also mired in uncertainty: The paper names the negotiators, but it can only state that the Congress “is expected to be held very soon” (MP, 16 October 1782). The po­liti­cal prob­lems of getting to peace w ­ ere, of course, tremendous. Britain went through three governments over the period of the negotiations; acrimony both within and between parties escalated to a fever pitch. The death of Rockingham, the installation of Shelburne as prime minister and the subsequent resignation of Fox as secretary of state, the descent of the Shelburne ministry into chaos, the advent of the Fox-­North co­a li­tion, and the ultimate ascendance of William Pitt ­after the king’s intervention in the India Bill all happened in quick succession. Backward glances ­were full of recriminations for a war poorly prosecuted and full of the awareness of the economic implications of the collapse of the first British Empire. Attempts to see a way out of this debacle focused on the only recent successes that would allow Britain to retain its profitable holdings in the Ca­rib­bean and its access to Mediterranean trade. Admiral Rodney and General Eliott had offered a ­f uture for a deeply wounded imperium. It seems fitting then that the reports of a literal theater of war in the left-­ hand column of the second page of the Morning Post for 16 October—­reports that ­imagined the local population congregating in the hills above Gibraltar to watch the extermination of the British forces and the destruction of the fortress—­would be countered in the right-­hand column by the invocation of Gibraltar in a very dif­fer­ent theater. In a section labeled “Drama,” the Morning Post reports, “The Fatal Marriage was performed for the third time last night, at this theatre, to a most numerous and brilliant audience. Lady Shelburne, Lady Melbourne, Mrs. Damer, Lady Sefton, Lady Essex, Lord North, Lord Chatham and several other persons of distinction, formed part of the com­pany” (MP, 16 October  1782). One won­ders ­whether the brilliance of the power­ful Whig w ­ omen in the beginning of this list was largely a result of dullness of the two ineffectual Tory politicians with which it ends: Lord North was already ineluctably associated with the failure to retain the American colonies; Lord Chatham would eventually become “the late Lord Chatham” while still very much alive b ­ ecause of his lassitude while serving as Pitt’s Lord of the Admiralty. But at this time, the second Earl of Chatham, heir to the



Between a Rock and a Hard Place 55

former prime minister’s title, was known mainly for his military ser­vice. John Pitt joined the army in 1774, but he had resigned his commission in 1776 ­because his f­ ather, the first Earl of Chatham, opposed the American War. When France joined the war in 1778, John Pitt resumed his c­ areer as lieutenant, was quickly promoted to captain, served at the siege of Gibraltar in 1779, and was transferred to the West Indies, but by early 1782 he was appointed captain in the London-­based 3rd Regiment of Foot Guards. Seated in Drury Lane Theatre, with his Gibraltar and West Indian pedigree, Pitt stands for what can be sal­vaged from the mess bequeathed to the nation by Lord North, the man next to him in print and quite likely in the play­house. We would be well advised not to read too much into the names of the distinguished audience members; they are but a prelude to a panegyric on the per­for­mance of Isabella that finds “the female Tragedians most celebrated in this c­ entury . . . ​inferior to t­ hose of Mrs. SIDDONS.” This is only the Morning Post’s second notice of Siddons, so the praise h ­ ere is remarkable and it is reiterated through an act of reported speech that has the effect of bolstering the reviewers’ judgment: “A Nobleman of the first rank, and who is generally considered as sound a critic as any of the pre­sent time, made the following observation last night at Drury-­lane, a­ fter Mrs. Siddons’s per­for­mance of Isabella—­‘This Actress’ (said his Lordship) ‘approaches nearer to excellence than any female I ever yet saw on any stage in Eu­rope’ ” (MP, 16 October 1782). In the fall of 1782, Siddons’s success was instantaneous. Part of that no doubt had to do with the fit between her virtuosity and the role she was being asked to perform, but I would argue that part of her success was based on the audience’s need for her, or something like her. I w ­ ill be exploring this question of the audience’s need for Siddons shortly ­because I think it can be understood more clearly in the light of a more explicit articulation of desire. The Morning Post’s account of the eve­ning of 15 October concludes with the following commentary on the afterpiece to Isabella: “­After the play, the farce of All the World’s a Stage, was performed: in the dinner scene, at the commencement of the second act, Mr. Baddeley, who performed the part of Sir Gilbert Pumpkin, gave the following very in­ter­est­ing and patriotic toast: ‘Come my lads, (addressing himself to the two young officers at t­ able) I’ll give the healths of that gallant veteran and his brave soldiers, who have so nobly defended the old rock of Gibraltar.’—­The applause this temporary stroke received, is hardly to be paralleled: the audience gave three rounds, each of which lasted for a considerable time” (MP, 16 October 1782). The interpolation of patriotic content into plays, particularly afterpieces, was fairly

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routine. As Gillian Russell, Kristina Straub, David Taylor, Timothy Jenks, and o ­ thers have demonstrated, the Georgian theater was a conspicuously patriotic space: per­for­mances celebrated British military victories in front of audiences full of officers, soldiers, and families with military connections.4 But this toast to “that gallant veteran and his brave soldiers, who have so nobly defended the old rock of Gibraltar” is more “in­ter­est­ing” than most of t­ hese topical interpolations in that it viably refers to separate persons far and near. The most obvious candidate for Sir Gilbert Pumpkin’s toast is Sir George Eliott, commander of the Gibraltar garrison, ­because the ­grand assault had only just been repelled; but it also applies to Lord Chatham, veteran of Gibraltar ser­ v ice, noted just paragraphs before for his gallant presence in the theater. With Eliott both spatially and temporally removed from London, Chatham can fleetingly operate as his surrogate, despite the fact that he is pre­sent only in the theater, not the theater of war. What the Morning Post itself indicates through its incessant invocation of the siege’s uncertain denouement is that what Britons want and need is a resolution to this uncertainty. What they want is the Rock, but the only way they can grasp it is by invoking old news or persons who have not been ­there recently enough. The eruption of applause is thus a sign more of desire than of desire fulfilled, and that in part is why the applause comes in rounds, each outburst requires a supplement to drown out the realization that while Gibraltar has been defended, it has not been liberated, and thus the key requirement for peace remains just out of reach. ­There is certain irony nascent in this act of surrogation b ­ ecause Chatham is no Eliott. Like many other aristocratic soldiers in this war, he is serving his time in fash­ion­able London. From this perspective, Sir Gilbert’s on-­stage toast is a rather double-­sided utterance, as much a cele­bration of the kind of patriotic fortitude and accomplishment being enacted at a distance as it is an indictment of the kind of lassitude Chatham would come to embody ­under his b ­ rother’s ministry. The brilliance of this equivocal response to the very uncertainty of the situation at Gibraltar comes into focus when we look closely at the afterpiece in question. Jackman’s All the World’s a Stage was one of the finest farces to come out of the 1770s and it demonstrates the sheer complexity and power­ful pull of the repertoire on theatrical culture in this period. The play follows the adventures of two successful, but penurious, soldiers recently demobilized from the Seven Years’ War. Charles Stanley, the nephew of Sir Gilbert Pumpkin, with the aid of his friend Harry Stukely, comes down to the country with the express purpose of eloping with Sir Gilbert’s ward Miss



Between a Rock and a Hard Place 57

Kitty Sprightly. Charles’s stratagem turns on Kitty’s obsession with the theater. She has persuaded her guardian to allow her to get up The Beggar’s Opera and Charles has set himself up to play Macheath to her Polly Peachum. He plans to use their rehearsal time for this private theatrical to seduce her. Harry is supposed to appear in a supporting role, but he is charged with making love to Miss Bridget, Sir Gilbert’s rich spinster s­ ister, in order to keep her out of the way. Charles’s scheme works, in part b ­ ecause his vicar-­friend, honest Joe Tackum, happens to be traveling through a nearby inn at just the right moment to surreptitiously marry the two lovers without Sir Gilbert’s consent. When Charles and Kitty retroactively tell Sir Gilbert they are married, he believes they are merely acting out the parts of Macheath and Polly; when he fi­nally gleans the truth, Kitty pleads, “Dear guardie, forgive me for this time, and I’ll never do it again” (36). Beyond the structural incorporation of The Beggar’s Opera, the play is laced with references to Shakespeare, The Rival Queens, and a host of comedies. The meta-­theatricality of All the World’s a Stage relies on the audience’s knowledge of famous speeches and performative tropes from across the repertoire. And that reliance is both blatant and incredibly subtle. Eighteenth-­ century audiences ­were so immersed in theatrical culture that nearly the entire repertoire was citational and cross-­referential. Even new plays reworked well-­k nown scenes and situations to the point where pastiche was a guiding princi­ple. Audiences knew scripts by heart, and they knew what specific actors did or had done at specific moments in any par­tic­u­lar play. What is compelling about All the World’s a Stage is how it mediates this citational environment within a moment of cultural crisis. Throughout the play, the repertoire is evoked to “transmit communal memories,” as Taylor argues, but in order to overcome this shared past: retroaction has a decidedly subjunctive mood and thus the pre­sent’s relation to the f­ uture feels urgent and full of potential. Like many plays about the enthusiasm for private theatricals, the aspirations of amateur actors to transcend the limitations of rank and gender are of par­tic­u­lar concern. Miss Kitty has enlisted the servants Diggery and Cymon to perform not only in that eve­ning’s production of The Beggar’s Opera but in other plays as well. Her enthusiasm is insatiable and contagious to the point where the servants are neglecting their duties. Kitty seems blissfully unaware not only of her physical charms but also of how her active interest in the theater and her reputation are on a direct collision course. What it means for a young w ­ oman to cast herself as Polly opposite Captain

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Macheath, when he is played by an unknown soldier would seem at first glance not to cross her mind. That said, the incorporation of The Beggar’s Opera into the farce seamlessly provides the play with its primary plot twist— at the play’s end, Sir Gilbert fails to recognize that Kitty and Charles have illicitly married ­because he thinks they are performing Gay’s comic opera. Gay’s play provides a veil for their very real impropriety. It would be easy to see this all as Charles’s cunning plan, but all is not as it seems. Not thinking about her relation to other role-­playing men is a pattern of be­hav­ior for Kitty; she is a willing accomplice in impropriety. Charles’s stratagem goes nowhere without Kitty’s prompting. Sir Gilbert and Miss Bridget see the spate of private theatricals as a menace, although their anti-­t heatricality has less to do with the moral outrage of Collier and Gildon than with a desire to keep servant/players in their places. And yet the first specific example given of Kitty’s theatrical exploits refers specifically to Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens and, therefore, the audiences would know that Kitty has already played the role of Statira in one of the earliest generic precursors to she-­tragedy (9). And the choice of parts is telling, for Kitty casts herself not as the passionate and distressed Roxana, famously played by Elizabeth Barry, but as the passive maiden associated with Anne Bracegirdle. The “Prologue” informs us that the cook, whose “bosom is inflamed with desire,” is Roxana. Within the context of this eve­ ning’s entertainment, All the World’s a Stage both signals the history of female distress on the eighteenth-­century stage that Siddons has just reactivated in the mainpiece and indulges in the kind of insouciance that allows a character like Kitty to come through the play as a relatively unscathed sexual subject. How we read Kitty’s per­for­mance of innocence—is it simplicity or is it strategy?—­makes Jackman’s farce a remarkable way out of the emotional debacle so fiercely put forward by Siddons in Isabella. Before attending to this dynamic interplay between mainpiece and afterpiece, between sexual distress and sexual agency, it is impor­tant to recognize that the other chief forerunner to she-­tragedy identified by Jean Marsden—­ namely, Shakespeare’s Othello—­is the occasion of All the World’s a Stage’s most complex comic interlude.5 Charles’s seduction of Kitty—­a lthough it may well be Kitty’s seduction of Charles—­happens during rehearsal for the eve­ning’s entertainment. Immediately upon entrance in the play’s penultimate scene, Charles takes Kitty in his arms, but she pushes him off, saying, “You must not lay hold on me in such a monstrous way; that’s just like Cymon” (26). Explaining that when she has no other person to rehearse with,



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she takes the servant Cymon, Kitty declares that “he does not perform badly, when I instruct him” (26). Charles flirtatiously asks, “­Don’t you imagine my per­for­mance would please you better than his?” Kitty responds, “How can I tell, ­until I try you both. If you ­will give me a specimen, I’ll soon tell you—­Try now” (26). Having tried Cymon already, Kitty’s open invitation leaves Charles at a loss for lines. He tries out terms of endearment that sound like they might come from a play, but Kitty stops him in his tracks, declaring that she “does not know where that is” and suggests that he try a speech out of “Romeo, Crook’d-­back Richard [Richard III], [Steele’s] the Conscious Lovers, Scrub [Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem], the Journey to London, [Garrick’s] the Clandestine Marriage, the School for Wives.” Charles stops, not knowing any lines, but he makes a dif­fer­ent kind of line when he says that he has the latter three “strong at this moment in my recollection” since they all imply his desired elopement. We gain a clear sense of how the repertoire works ­here. The audience is able to discern Kitty’s disingenuousness and Charles’s rakishness b ­ ecause they are aware of the scripts, titles, and per­for­mances being referred to and the jokes range from the s­ imple to the complex. Kitty asks for Charles as Romeo, Richard III, or Scrub, but he opts out of t­ hese in f­ avor of the more rakish options; why be a hunchbacked villain, a dead lover, or a low servant when you can be a man on the make? At this point, Charles is anything but an actor and this precipitates an unfortunate comparison and a remarkable revelation: Ch. Stop, stop; yes, yes, Kitty, I have the Journey to London, the Clandestine Marriage, and the School for Wives, strong at this moment in my recollection. I think I can do— Kit. What then, you only think, ­you’re not certain? Lord; lord! I do not believe you can do anything—­W hy, Cymon, could say them all without missing a word. I only desired him, ­after supper, a few nights ago, to go into the barn, and get by heart the speech, where the blackamoor smothers his wife, and I had not been in bed ten minutes, when he came into my room, and repeated e­ very word of it. (27–28) Aside from the obvious sexual-­performance jokes, this disclosure transforms into a meditation on the per­for­mance of Othello. Kitty explains that Cymon, like any good player, does not need his book and comes fully prepared: “He had black’d all his face with soot and goose dripping; and he did look so

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charmingly frightful! But then he did play so well—­He laid down the candle, and came up to the bed-­side, and said—­‘One kiss and then . . . ​put out the light’ ” (28). Like Charles, Kitty’s servant takes advantage of her enthusiasm for plays, but his initial success (by Charles’s standards) is undone by his imitation of prevalent per­for­mance protocols for playing Othello, for when he kisses her his blackface is transferred to Kitty’s left cheek. She comes down to breakfast inadvertently blacked up, is forced to reveal the encounter, and tells Charles “that I am locked into my room ­every night since” (28). ­There is a lot ­going on ­here. The primary strategy for establishing racial difference on the London stage is ­here deployed to racialize the lower ­orders and thus implicitly compare sexual relations between ranks to the most famous interracial relationship in the repertoire. This consolidates Kitty’s whiteness, derogates Cymon, but, more impor­tant, establishes an intriguing way forward for Charles ­because the transfer of blackness operates as a lesson of sorts in his own adoption of Othello ­later in the scene. With minimal input from himself, he successfully persuades Kitty that he can be her Macheath and, at this point, he, unprompted, starts channeling his seduction through Othello. With explicit references to famous speeches from act 2, scene 1; act 3, scene 3; and concluding with Iago’s “This night ­either makes me or undoes me quite” (32) from act 5, scene 1, Charles scrambles the play and yet becomes Othello in ways that Cymon cannot. It is revealing that Charles “starts” as Othello but ends up misappropriating Iago’s utterance. He avoids Cymon’s discovery and Othello’s fate by distancing himself from blackface and from Shakespeare’s script. Charles’s errant rehearsal of lines from Shakespeare becomes a way of obviating the tragedy of Othello. To further avoid tragedy, Charles starts skipping through Macbeth and ultimately brings his “real” consummation with Kitty in line with Macheath’s amorous dealings with Polly. A line as famous as “If it ­were done when ‘tis done; then would it ­were done quickly—­‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished” (33), adapted from act 1, scene 7, of Macbeth, both invokes the most potent tragic play in the repertoire and turns it t­ oward rather dif­fer­ent comic purpose by simply overwriting assassination with sexual consummation. What is so remarkable ­here, or rather so typical of afterpiece entertainment in this era, is that all of this is achieved with only the slightest references to theatrical experiences. Charles is pulling up the most famous points from Othello, moments in the play almost engraved on the audiences’ memory, but reappointing them for dif­fer­ent, comic, ends. The avoidance of racial identification inherent in Charles’s slide from Othello to Iago relies



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on knowledge of Iago’s line. The miscitation of Macbeth is built on audience knowledge and turns on the recognition that “consummation” is tantamount to assassinating a w ­ oman’s character. The witty complexity of sexual repartee instills an awareness of and a desire for the repertoire by calling up per­for­mances that preceded the experience of this play, so in a strange way All the World’s a Stage instills a desire for what is not ­there, for the long chain of per­for­mances that solidified cultural belonging. Recognizing the afterpiece’s re-­territorialization of the repertoire is crucial to understanding the interpolation of Sir Gilbert’s toast to the veterans of Gibraltar on the night of 15 October. That toast works in two directions: It is both a cele­bration of distant heroism and an indictment of local lassitude and cowardice. The critique of fash­ion­able, London-­based officers such as John Pitt turns on the fact of General George Eliott’s absence from the ­house. This same strategy of inserting explicit references to evoke what is manifestly missing is a perfect description of how All the World’s a Stage engages with the repertoire. Charles is hard pressed to come up with the lines of famous plays even when it suits his desires. It is only when Kitty informs him that his inferior, Cymon, knows Othello all too well, that his memory of the repertoire is sufficiently activated to “become” Othello without making Cymon’s error of embodying a racialized position. From this perspective, All the World’s a Stage is about taking that which already exists in the repertoire and then cutting and splicing it in order to fashion a way forward. In this case, that way forward operates through the seduction of a w ­ oman who wants to get away from the restrictive constraints of her guardian. In the hot­house environment of war­time theater where topical allegory is always on the horizon of interpretation, the obviation of Sir Gilbert’s tyranny has obvious revolutionary implications. But Charles performs Othello, Macbeth, and The Beggar’s Opera in a fashion that establishes a new domestic arrangement that allows Sir Gilbert to retroactively save face: he gives his consent a­ fter the fact, but he condemns Miss Bridget’s impropriety and Diggery’s ongoing thespian efforts. As realignments of the habitus, Miss Bridget’s and Diggery’s role-­playing—­for a spinster to act like a maiden is no less unsettling than a servant acting like a prince or a general—­destabilizes the social fabric: their engagement with the repertoire of social per­for­mance generates too many disjunctions. Charles and Kitty, however, instantiate a new social dispensation by realigning the cultural patrimony, not rejecting or ignoring it; they do not threaten Sir Gilbert’s economic and social position. By operating through some vestige of Othello and The Beggar’s Opera, Charles

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and Kitty’s actions both celebrate what is not t­ here, Shakespeare and Gay, and indict t­hose who would inhabit ­these performative models errantly. ­A fter all, Cymon’s Othello is explic­itly derogated through the racialization of class relations, and Miss Bridget, who every­one imagines as an apt Mrs. Peachum, commits the sexual/social error of being flattered into thinking she could be Harry Stukeley’s Polly.6 Sir Gilbert has lost his prize ward but has retained some portion of his dignity; Britain has lost the thirteen colonies, but the retention of Gibraltar would allow the nation to remain connected to its lost glory. Sir Gilbert’s toast to the veterans of Gibraltar is merely an extension of the play’s relation to the cultural patrimony. What makes it singular is that its reference is explic­itly po­liti­cal, whereas the rest of the play’s concern with loss and gain is implicitly cultural; thus, it works through citation and allegory. The engagement of All the World’s a Stage with the repertoire allegorizes the rather equivocal relation between British society at the end of the war and its status prior to the American crisis. The repulsion of the g­ rand assault, like the elopement of Charles and Kitty, is at this moment not yet the end of something but more properly contains the possibility of the beginning of a new era. That possibility requires supplemental affirmation, not one overwhelming moment of applause but three; and, as with All the World’s a Stage, it requires the ejection of errant figures. In All the World’s a Stage, errancy is embodied by Cymon and Miss Bridget, and it is figured in terms of racial, class, and sexual alterity; but on this par­tic­u­lar night at the theater, the players implicitly called for the ejection of another kind of subject, namely the fash­ion­able soldier, embodied by John Pitt. This, of course, could not be done directly but was more effectively staged through the praise of someone ­else, someone not ­here. Pitt’s adjacency to Lord North on the page of the Morning Post should be noted b ­ ecause attacks on the po­liti­cal ineptitude and martial inefficacy of elite men w ­ ere part and parcel of critiques of the war that would only intensify during the negotiation of the Peace of Paris; negotiations that we know from the pages of the same issue of the Morning Post ­were happening at the very moment of this per­for­mance. This immediately raises questions about Charles and Harry’s martial masculinity. Within the play’s plot, they appear to have served honorably in the Seven Years’ War; they are appropriate, not hypocritical, participants in Sir Gilbert’s toast. But t­here is no denying that their stratagems are amorous, not martial, and that their actions undermine the established order. That said, the establishment ­here, as embodied by Sir Gilbert and Miss Bridget, is



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tyrannical, miserly, and barren, hardly a model for governmental or social sustenance. I think it is pos­si­ble to see how, through the alignment of the two captains, Charles and Macheath, the play satirically posits a way past the social blockage of Kitty’s guardians that comes close to endorsing revolution by adopting a strategy of reform. ­Here reform needs to be understood in terms of adaptation, for All the World’s a Stage not only deploys ele­ments of proto-­ she-­tragedies such as The Rival Queens and Othello but also stages a reverse Beggar’s Opera. Like Macheath, Charles operates outside the norms of marriage and the repertoire alike, but he does so ­because the norms are themselves disconnected from life and can no longer sustain a new generation. I raise the m ­ atter of life advisedly b ­ ecause it is impor­tant to remember that my interest in this afterpiece is inextricably tied to its per­for­mance ­after Siddons’s deeply affecting turn in Isabella, a play very much about the erosion of life unto death. It is to that part of the eve­ning that I now turn ­because the events referred to in Sir Gilbert’s toast ­were a ­matter of a­ ctual life and death for the soldiers stationed at Gibraltar no less than for the figural nation fleetingly embodied within the confines of Drury Lane Theatre.

10 October 1782, or The Hard Place It is unusual to spend as long as I have on such a slight afterpiece; even more unusual to build an argument around the insertion of a toast. And it is verging on hyperbolic to scale out to such consequential cultural and po­liti­cal ramifications. I have done so ­because I think it helps us to come at Siddons’s ­great per­for­mances in Isabella and Garrick’s adaptation of Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage, in a manner that is responsive to their moment of per­for­mance. Siddons’s remarkable run of she-­tragedies in 1782–83 constitutes more than the emergence of a new star player. It was a concerted effort to reactivate the tragic repertoire at a time when the viability of such plays was both precarious and uncertain. Isabella, The Grecian ­Daughter, Jane Shore, The Fair Penitent, Venice Preserv’d, and The Mourning Bride combined for seventy-­five per­for­mances in the 1782–83 season. The first five of ­t hese plays ­were introduced into the roster of plays roughly two to three weeks apart and, once introduced, Drury Lane’s offerings cycled through the plays to maximize receipts. Almost invariably discussed in terms of the consolidation of celebrity, the reactivation of this part of the repertoire is no less remarkable.7 This was not a full-­scale revival of moribund scripts, for all of ­these

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Corrosive Solace

plays ­were popu­lar throughout the c­ entury, but at no time did one genre dominate the theatrical season with this level of intensity. And one would be hard pressed to find another example of where the repertoire met the affective needs of the audience so completely and so forcefully. The first in this chain of she-­tragedies was staged on 10 October 1782 with Siddons in the title role of Isabella. Reviewers ­were immediately impressed: Blessed with a fine figure, a profile at once ­grand, elegant, and striking, an eye expressive and commanding, a voice beautifully plaintive, and yet sufficiently power­f ul to give full scope to ­every natu­ral vent of passion, Mrs. Siddons now comes forward an original, an accomplished, and in many re­spects, a capital actress. In Isabella she arrested the attention, wrung the heart, astonished the listening ear, and for the most part, gratified the judgement. Perhaps t­ here has not been a character in tragedy played with such success, since the days of Mrs. Cibber, as that of Isabella yesterday eve­ning. (WEP, 10–12 October 1782) As Jean Marsden has argued with regard to she-­tragedy in general and Southerne’s play in par­tic­u­lar, it is crucial that the lead actress establish herself as the object of a highly sexualized gaze in her first scenes.8 All the reviews immediately establish the elegance of Siddons’s figure, but ­here her status as a spectacle of distressed femininity is supplemented by an assertion of her agency: she has a “commanding eye” and an “astonishing” voice. She is both gazed upon and returns the gaze; her power­f ul voice elicits equally forceful sounds from the audience. The comparison to Susannah Cibber is significant ­because her success is being mea­sured in relation to the repertoire; and this reviewer is saying that she eclipses memory of the previous generation. Understood as a rupture in the repertoire, the terms of her intervention ­were recognized with remarkable speed and specificity, and that intervention was explic­itly pitched at supplementing the passivity of the she-­tragedy heroine with the activity of the she-­tragedy actress. This means that Siddons enacted what Jessica Munns has cogently described as Isabella’s abjection and performed its negation in a singular act of overcoming.9 Both conditions, abjection and agency, exist si­mul­ta­neously in Siddons’s per­for­mance like two sides of the same coin. To put this provocatively, Siddons kills Isabella to give life to herself: out of fictional death, a­ ctual life.



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This rather strange resurrection had par­tic­u­lar purchase b ­ ecause, as the review above indicates, Siddons drew the audience with her. In terms of their historical situation, Siddons’s audience was in a liminal state, waiting to see if they could emerge from the American War with any level of vitality. Perhaps an example would help to crystallize this point. In early December 1781, less than two months ­a fter Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, William Cowper sent an imaginary “sociable conversation” to his friend Joseph Hill in which Cowper articulated his thoughts on the War of American In­de­pen­ dence. ­After stating that he knew of no one up to the task of leading Britain out of the conflict, Cowper offered the following summary of the state of the empire: “If we pursue the war, it is ­because we are desperate; it is plunging and sinking year a­ fter year in still greater depths of calamity. If we relinquish it, the remedy is equally desperate, and would prove, I believe, in the end no remedy at all. . . . ​­Whether we adopt the one mea­sure or the other, are equally undone. For I consider the loss of Amer­i­ca as the ruin of ­England.”10 For Cowper and ­others, the reverses of the early 1780s, both in Amer­i­ca and in other colonial locales, raised the simultaneous possibility that British culture may die and yet live on in a ghostly form elsewhere. In varying degrees of this emotional state, Siddons’s audience was primed for a par­tic­u­lar kind of affective experiment in the repertoire. Bereft and then doubly shamed, Isabella’s abjection captures well the desperation of Britons in the closing phases of the war. Marsden’s remarks on Southerne’s original are applicable to Garrick’s adaptation: “Unlike so many overtly Whig dramas, The Fatal Marriage does not represent the suffering of its victimized heroine as the result of tyranny; rather, Southerne links Isabella’s misery to the distinctly mercenary aspirations of the play’s male characters.”11 This helps to clarify what Siddons was not ­doing: she was not enacting the suffering felt by the American colonists and which had drawn the sympathy of many Whig observers. Rather, Isabella suffers ­because of the machinations of a homosocial elite whose sexual and financial corruption mutually reinforce one another. No one in Isabella, except Isabella, exhibits an ethic of care, and within the allegory that links domestic figures to po­liti­ cal situations this means that the nation has been abandoned by ­those responsible for its governance. Isabella’s pain at this historical moment is equivalent to the very specific pain of a nation that has been dispossessed b ­ ecause of corruption, greed, and general disregard. In short, Isabella’s abjection allegorizes that of the now shaken metropole. Audiences ­were well aware that

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the play makes an inexorable transit from widowhood to sexual betrayal to madness and death and that it turns the entire experience into a highly sexualized spectacle of punishment for Isabella’s unwitting infraction of kinship rules. As Marsden argues, the complicity of the male characters in Isabella’s fall is effectively erased when the d ­ ying heroine is sacrificed to the sexual norms she has inadvertently broken for the plea­sure of the male gaze. This is where Siddons’s intervention in the repertoire becomes so trenchant ­because she meets all the terms of the plot, but she drew the audience with her t­ oward a dif­fer­ent zone of attachment: In the very first scene t­ here was something so affecting in her manner— in fact, she wore her sorrows with so much persuasive sincerity, that she made the audience her advocates; and it must be confessed, she never quitted the hold she had so early taken of their feelings, till she had created an universal and a melting sympathy all around. Before the play ended, several Ladies in the dif­fer­ent parts of the Theatre went into hysterics; and t­ here was scarcely a dry eye, e­ ither male or female, throughout the ­house. In fine, her merit in the character was infinite, and the applause she received unbounded. In vari­ous of her scenes the plaudits ­were repeated, and at each repetition the sound gathered strength. During the fourth and fifth acts t­ here was almost an incessant clapping; and when Isabella expired, her death was rendered glorious, by the Theatre’s resounding with thundering applause for more than a minute. (WEP, 10–12 October 1782) As this review states, she made the “audience her advocates” from the outset and their sympathy for her progressively amplifies throughout the play to the point where the audience members become the spectacle. Note how the review moves away from the objectification of Siddons/Isabella to fixing its gaze on “several Ladies in the dif­fer­ent parts of the Theatre [who] went into hysterics” and then expands its purview to take in all men and w ­ omen in the h ­ ouse. In the pro­cess, it leaves b ­ ehind its obsession with her voice to the sounds of the repeated plaudits of the audience. This amounts to a radical repositioning of suffering in she-­t ragedy. As Marsden persuasively demonstrates, former productions and the script itself made the audience akin to the duplicitous Carlos; witnessing Isabella’s destruction and self-­abnegation si­mul­ta­neously asserts masculine sexual privilege and maintains sufficient distance for ­women spectators to differentiate



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themselves from Isabella’s “crimes.” Siddons’s per­for­mance effectively shifted the axis of the gaze such that the audience feels what it means to be seen in this way, to be controlled and destroyed by corrupt men who do not care for anything beyond themselves. Isabella’s pain thus becomes their pain, it leaves the stage and manifests itself within the spectators in a fashion that allows Siddons to emerge from the character as a female agent. Significantly, that agency is both maternal and performative. As Shearer West has emphasized, Siddons appeared on stage with her son Henry cast as Isabella’s child, thus using her off-­stage relation to crystallize an ethic of care on stage that shifted the play’s emotional center of gravity away from her distress as a ­widow to her anxiety about losing her child.12 ­Later in her ­career, Siddons’s self-­stylization as the epitome of maternality would become an occasion for satire, but in the 1782 Isabella Siddons effected an aesthetic deflection onto the child and a power­ful literalization of reproductive capacity.13 As Helen  E.  M. Brooks carefully demonstrates, the moments in the play most lauded in the press and in retrospective accounts of Siddons’s per­for­mance ­were ­those involving significant by-­play with her son and thus, “Siddons encouraged audiences to see her dramatic per­for­mances of tragic ­mothers as the specific expression of her au­then­tic maternal self.”14 Robyn Asleson brilliantly observes that con­temporary engravings of the deeply affecting interview in act 1, scene 1, show that, unlike prior renderings of the scene, Siddons “cradled the boy’s hands in both of her own.”15 That intimate touch became the performative sign of maternal attachment and was the affective punctum that electrified her audiences. As we ­will see in our discussion of Macbeth in the next chapter, what Siddons does with her hands is a ­matter of life and death. To rephrase our e­ arlier provocation, the recognition that the script lets Isabella die allowed for Siddons to make live both herself and the child. I am echoing Foucault’s maxim on biopower advisedly b ­ ecause the imperative “to make live and let die” has far-­reaching po­liti­cal ramifications for Siddons’s engagement with maternality.16 By amplifying the per­for­mance of maternal care in this script, Siddons effectively reversed the flow of sovereign power that would normally “make die and let live”—an apt description of the play’s early per­for­mance history as described by Marsden and Munns—­into a regulatory scenario grounded in the deployment of sexuality. The involution of the biopo­liti­cal and thanatopo­liti­cal imperatives in The Fatal Marriage’s relentless sacrifice of Isabella ensures that her death produces a f­ uture, but one now embodied in the young Henry Siddons.17 Through this realignment of the repertoire, the affective experience of loss could be tightly sutured to

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feelings of continuity and ­future life. Crucially, the affective intrication of loss and gain, mourning and hope, elicited by the per­for­mance of maternal care in the character of Isabella was transferred to the role of the actress: with none of the corrupt men on stage or offstage living up to their custodial role, the actress allegorically accorded solace to the nation.18 The salient issue h ­ ere is how Siddons managed to pull the audience through Isabella’s pain to feel what it is like to have one’s pain on display. This act of externalization is tragic in the strictest sense of that term ­because it allows one to cathartically experience the feeling of isolation and alienation that was permeating much of British society at this moment. It allowed the audience to watch female suffering and watch themselves watching in a way that moved beyond the victimization that is the cost of normativity to a mode of aesthetic experience grounded in mutual recognition. Siddons’s per­for­ mance of Isabella was an act of overcoming in that it made ­people feel and express together the thrill of aesthetic agency at a moment of vastly diminished confidence in such a creative way forward. I can think of few more power­f ul examples of aesthetically mediating historical crisis. And yet Siddons’s virtuoso turn in Isabella highlighted two prob­lems. Right in the m ­ iddle of the very same review that we have been reading so closely, we get the following hesitation: “The Fatal Marriage is built on the finest circumstances for a good plot that ever poet figured, and yet the construction of the play is bungling, tedious, and trifling beyond all excuse. In spite of t­ hese g­ rand defects, however, the interest is strong and natu­ral; but Mrs. Siddons may truly be said to have rendered it irresistible” (WEP, 10– 12 October 1782). The rhe­toric of overcoming, which informed much of my previous analy­sis, is ­here explicit. Siddons is ­great in spite of the play’s defects. This would become a regular refrain; ­here is a passage from the review of the 15 October per­for­mance that was paired with All the World’s a Stage: “As the situations in this piece of Southern’s [sic] are rather confused, and the sentiments awkwardly directed to the feelings of the h ­ uman heart, Mrs. Siddons in a more in­ter­est­ing play, as for instance, Jane Shore, or Lady Macbeth, ­will undoubtedly improve upon the public” (MP, 16 October 1782). Siddons, of course, was to become synonymous with ­these roles, but clearly her per­for­mance in Isabella activates a desire for its supersession, for a shift in repertoire. What are we to make of this inducement to replacement? Siddons’s re­orientation of the gaze in Isabella made tragedy v­ iable again and, I would argue, suitable to the deeply unstable times. The 1782 Isabella is impor­tant ­because it instantiates a desire for tragedy without resolving that



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desire within the play. The key to Isabella’s aesthetic mediation of historical crisis is the way that it propels the audience out of the play and into the theater as it ­were by prompting identification with the actress not the title character’s disintegration or with characters observing her disintegration. That so many of the reviews stress Siddons’s judgment is impor­tant ­because identifying with her amounts to developing a critical relation to the part of Isabella that recognizes how it works both within a specific performative milieu and within the repertoire. In short, audiences ­were incited into an almost theoretical relation to the scene of abjection that gave them purchase on the dynamic forces within which Isabella, and they, w ­ ere trapped: h ­ ere’s what it feels like and why. As soon as the domestic-­political allegory is then engaged, the experience of seeing Isabella in the fall of 1782 provides a heuristic for understanding both how it feels to be caught in a historical crisis and how it feels to come out the other side of that very hard place. That said, the other side of crisis was still not yet fully in sight. It is impor­ tant to remember that the first per­for­mance of Isabella preceded the Bourbon powers’ ­grand assault on Gibraltar on 13 October 1782, that the second per­for­mance unfolded before news of Eliott’s repulsion of the assault reached London, and that it was only by the third per­for­mance on 15 October, the one paired with All the World’s a Stage, that the audience found itself contemplating the Rock and a hard place on the same eve­ning. This means that the first per­for­mance on 10 October took place at a moment of maximal anticipation and anxiety that I think helps us to understand the remarkable channeling of affect on that par­tic­u­lar eve­ning. That moment of deep anxiety and cathartic overcoming entered the repertoire in a decisive fashion and permeated ­every subsequent per­for­mance of Isabella that season. But this ­wasn’t felt as a resolution; it was felt as a need. Audiences kept ­going to Isabella again and again; each repetition propelled them further and further away from Isabella’s abjection and t­ oward Siddons’s exaltation. Julie Carlson identifies this as one of the fundamental paradoxes in Siddons’s per­for­mance of femininity: “Viewers perceive w ­ omen’s social and sexual disempowerment while experiencing a ­woman taking London by storm.”19 And each repetition realigned the repertoire so that the dislocation from past per­for­mances of the play was less a potential cause for concern than cele­bration. This is why the eve­ning of 15 October 1782 was such a compelling night at the theater. Like the very world outside the theater waiting for news of Howe’s relief of Gibraltar, both mainpiece and afterpiece left the audience poised between the suffering of being fully dislocated from its ostensibly

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glorious past and the hope that some sort of realignment would allow po­liti­ cal, social, and cultural traditions to be sustained. Isabella managed this by repositioning the audience itself and altering the audience’s relation to character and player alike: The audience would feel Isabella’s disempowerment in order to feel the power of playing Isabella. All the World’s a Stage bridged pre­sent and past through errant citation that si­mul­ta­neously depended on the audience’s knowledge of the repertoire while imagining a world where it operates other­w ise to ­f ree, again, a ­woman subject to patriarchal mismanagement—­Sir Gilbert is a rather bumbling tyrant. In order to propel Kitty into a dif­fer­ent social role, Charles starts playing roles himself and thus, like Siddons’s audience, comes to work with the object of his desire. Across tragic, comic, and, ­shall we say, historic registers this night at the theater remains suspended before our eyes as one of potential release or collapse, one that by its very position in time calls to the ­future for relief. To understand this fully, we need to look to the immediate f­ uture, at the remaining she-­tragedies performed in the 1782–83 season, especially Jane Shore and Venice Preserv’d.

Fall 1782, or Searching for Generic Aptitude This question of the f­ uture is crucial to the 1782–83 season. Most observers felt that Siddons’s advent in Isabella came in time “to revive the decaying spirit of the tragic Muse” (PGA, 11 October 1782), but such expressions ­were leavened by a desire that “the stage be soon blessed with a son of the buskin equally promising” (WEP, 12 October  1782). The Morning Post’s call for “Mrs. Siddons in a more in­ter­est­ing play, as, for instance, Jane Shore, or Lady Macbeth,” as early as the third per­for­mance of Isabella is telling ­because the examples point to short-­term and long-­term plans (MP, 16 October 1782). Macbeth posed a prob­lem: without a suitable “son of the buskin,” the play remained out of the repertoire at Drury Lane for the first half of the 1780s. The play was staged at Covent Garden a handful of times over the final years of the American War to l­ imited success. At Drury Lane, the two per­for­mances of Macbeth in 1781–82 generated miserable receipts; it was not scheduled in 1782–83 or 1783–84; it is not ­until the fall of 1785 when Siddons takes on the role of Lady Macbeth that the play returns to regular per­for­mance. This is no small ­matter; for many, the play’s moribund status was a barometer of cultural disarray and when it did reemerge it was not without prob­lems.



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From the outset, Siddons’s talent signaled the promise of Macbeth’s return, but the Morning Post implicitly understood that the way to Macbeth would have to travel through a non-­Shakespearean route. The invocation of Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore reads like an interim stop: a play of higher reputation than Isabella in which Siddons’s capacity for inhabiting pain, distress, and madness could be more satisfyingly appreciated. Siddons did indeed make the journey to Jane Shore roughly one month ­a fter she first appeared in Isabella, with a brief excursion through The Grecian D ­ aughter at the end of October. Her per­for­mance in Arthur Murphy’s tragedy was as acclaimed as her per­for­mance in Isabella, but ­t here was a repeated assertion across the press that she succeeded despite the material she was working with.20 Siddons’s per­for­mances invariably generated a desire for better scripts. Having “been able to give celebrity to two very indifferent Tragedies,” Siddons met her audience’s historical needs head on in Jane Shore on 8 November 1782 (MC, 1 November 1782). I say historical in part ­because Rowe’s play is a historical tragedy and in part ­because Siddons was clearly locked in on how to make this play work in her historical moment. That moment was auspicious: news that Admiral Howe’s fleet had successfully resupplied Gibraltar reached London on 7 November; preliminary peace between G ­ reat Britain and the United States was soon to follow and would be recognized by France by the end of the month. An honorable way out of the war had been found, but at home the nation was mired in a constitutional crisis that would plague reception of the peace and affect British politics for years to come. Siddons’s first three per­for­mances in Jane Shore coincided not only with this transitional moment between overall victory at Gibraltar and the preliminary declaration of peace but also with the deeply unstable and controversial ministry of Lord Shelburne. As each she-­tragedy is introduced into the 1782– 83 season at Drury Lane, the repertoire drives t­ oward explic­itly po­liti­cal theater. In Isabella and The Grecian ­Daughter, the po­liti­cal import of the plays relies on the allegorical alignment of domestic and po­liti­cal governance. With Jane Shore, politics exists equally at the level of trope and plot. Since the po­ liti­cal intervention of Jane Shore was perhaps too explicit, t­ here is a momentary retreat into an allegorical exploration of despotism with the introduction of The Fair Penitent. As the season progresses to incorporate Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d, we begin to see a reversal of this movement: the play’s explic­ itly po­liti­cal themes are subsumed into a spectacle of domestic woe. But before looking at Siddons’s complex engagement with Otway, we ­will proceed

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from the cultural implications of her intervention in the per­for­mance of Jane Shore to the more explic­itly po­liti­cal ramifications. The call for Siddons to take up the role of Jane Shore or Lady Macbeth is more than a desire for better plays; it is also a peculiar call for Shakespeare in a post-­Garrick world. Jane Shore offers a way of indirectly engaging with the legacy of Garrick’s epochal per­for­mances in Richard III. Rowe’s play comes at the Richard III story at an ­angle by elaborating on the oppression of Edward IV’s former mistress at the moment when the regent Gloucester is plotting to kill the young Edward V before his coronation. Garrick’s Shakespearean c­ areer was launched by his famous per­for­mance of Richard III, but in Jane Shore he consistently played Hastings, thereby preventing the roles of Richard and Gloucester from being fused together as one continuous ­whole and the plays from directly addressing one another. One implication of this decision is that Jane Shore invokes much of the energy of the first two acts of Richard III but then channels it away from Richard’s tragedy in order to amplify the suffering of one of his victims. The 1782 production of Rowe’s play thus both interrupts and elaborates on the Shakespearean script in a fashion that not only contains but also supersedes memory of Garrick’s per­for­mance. And it does so through a symptomatic shift in the gendered protocols of tragic per­for­mance that enabled Siddons both to signal the importance of Shakespearean per­for­mance to the health of the repertoire without actually enacting it and to subtly describe the cultural wound she was working around. As with so much of the reception of Siddons’s per­for­mances in the 1782–83 season, the reviews of Jane Shore are rife with comparison to former benchmark per­for­mances. She is deemed better than Susannah Cibber and Ann Crawford (formerly Ann Street Barry) in numerous venues.21 The following poem, “On Seeing Mrs. Siddons in Jane Shore” concludes by granting her the mantle of Melpomene but first clears away the competition: Tho’ Cibber’s sweetly plaintive moans, Are still to mem’ry dear; And Crawford’s truly heartfelt moans, Still vibrate on my ear. Yet thou, my Fair, may’st brightly blaze, Where they, to shine have tried; Thy grace and judgment claim that praise, That was to them denied. (MP, 23 November 1782)



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As with the early notices of Isabella, Siddons is associated not simply with succession but also with overcoming. At a moment when connection to the cultural patrimony was an issue of anxiety rather than self-­assurance, this ability to draw up memories of past per­for­mance protocols and surpass them portends the beginning of a new era. If continuity could not be simply asserted through traditional acts of performative succession or surrogation, then perhaps discontinuity could be subsumed by a form of overcompensation. With Jane Shore, Siddons’s capacity to activate memory and overcome its traces reaches the zone of most acute cultural concern ­because comparison suddenly jumps the constraints of gender and brings the memory of Garrick into view: “Her powers have that Variety, which the pre­sent P ­ eople have before seen only in that paragon of Actors, Roscius. Thus she excels equally in the Heroic and the Pathetic; and if in the Scenes with Shore she is ‘thrilled with Horror’ herself, and cleaves the general Ear with that Horror communicated,—in the Scene with Hastings—­­g reat and commanding as the Breath of Kings, she lifts herself up into the Proxy of Providence” (PA, 9 November 1782). Sixteen days ­later, in an even more laudatory review, the same paper becomes much more specific: “Her scene with Gloster, and her last Act, both similarly excellent, but in their Expression, altogether dif­fer­ ent, deserved, if pos­si­ble, more Applause than she gained—­Indeed, to say the Truth of her, and to the Apprehension of the pre­sent ­People we cannot well say more, much of Mrs. Siddons’ Per­for­mance is equal to Garrick’s in his best Manner, and some of it essentially better—­Thus in the two scenes we have before mentioned, the Elevation is entirely equal to Garrick, the Shew of Pathos in the last Act is unfeignedly beyond him!” (PA, 25 November 1782). As I have argued elsewhere, and w ­ ill explore more fully in the next chapter, the loss of Garrick and the loss of the American colonies mutually activated feelings of diffidence and alienation in British culture. Richard Brinsley Sheridan had made this explicit in his “Verses on the Death of David Garrick” and in The Critic.22 The plenitudinous memory of Garrick “in his best Manner,” like the memory of General Wolfe’s or Admiral Hawke’s glorious triumphs in the Seven Years’ War, or Chatham’s patriotic leadership, cast a long shadow when ­t here ­were so few comparable figures of cultural, military, or po­liti­cal greatness. The unresolved historical rupture caused by the American War was in many ways emblematized by the loss of Garrick in 1778, and the conjoined sense of cultural and imperial loss was felt most acutely in the precincts of masculine efficacy. This is why Rodney

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and Eliott w ­ ere so celebrated in the closing phases of the war; but t­ here was no comparable masculine figure in the realm of theatrical culture, only a vast legacy that was slipping further and further into the past. What are we to make of the precipitous suggestion, immediately following the relief of Gibraltar but prior to the recognition of American in­de­pen­ dence on 30 November and the ensuing treaties with France and Spain, that the damage to the repertoire, particularly its Shakespearean component, had been obviated in a manner that actually exceeded or overcame Garrick’s memory?23 ­There is an obvious desire to get past the current cultural predicament that matches the overall desire to get out of Britain’s wars with the Americans, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch. Impatience imbues nearly ­every page of the newspapers in the summer and fall of 1782. But the specificity of the praise of Siddons reveals an impor­tant valence to her per­for­ mances in Jane Shore. Not surprisingly, both reviews above single out her stunning per­for­mance of abjection in act 5 to argue that in the per­for­ mance of pathos she has no peer; but they also argue that she is equal to Garrick in the play’s heroic moments. In her scene with Hastings and in her scene with Gloucester she exhibits “king”-­like heroism. In the former, she resists Hastings’s rape, his attempt to tyrannically seize her person; in the latter, she resists Gloucester’s usurpation, his attempt to tyrannically seize the throne. ­These scenes are linked ­because they not only show how Hastings and Gloucester share a violent patriarchal corruption but also demonstrate how Jane Shore, in her abject state, becomes the embodiment of the nation u ­ nder tyrannical, corrupt rule.24 When we remember that Garrick is associated with both characters in the memory of the repertoire, we realize that the precipitous claim that Siddons is “better” than Garrick partakes of a certain identification with both her pain and her patriotism, with her re­sis­tance to corruption. In Jane Shore, that corruption is inextricably tied to civil war, thus part of Siddons’s act of overcoming involves getting past civil war in the Atlantic imperium. This propulsion into the f­ uture, past the pre­sent predicament, travels through an affective investment in being the object of punishment and through a self-­imposed separation from the repertoire. One cannot feel the force of po­liti­cal righ­teousness without also feeling the permanent loss of prized po­liti­cal and cultural possessions. One way of thinking about how this works, to help explain the excessive investment in Siddons’s per­for­mances at this time, is to simply point out that within the logic presented ­here she is all that “the pre­sent ­People” have and hence her value eclipses all ­else.



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That Garrick haunts both the overall reception of tragedy and the specific per­for­mance of Gloucester and Hastings is impor­tant ­because in Jane Shore Siddons was both exploring a cultural impasse and linking it to a specific set of po­liti­cal dilemmas that enveloped the play­house and the nation at large in the fall of 1782. Understanding this requires that we recognize, first, the po­liti­cal dynamics of Rowe’s play and their relation to the spectacle of Jane Shore’s abjection and, second, the deeply unstable po­liti­cal situation following Lord Shelburne’s accession to the office of prime minister in July 1782. Both of ­t hese issues equally inform the reception of Siddons’s first per­for­mances in the role. In her impor­tant reading of the play, Lisa Freeman argues that “Rowe concerns himself directly in Jane Shore with the prob­ lems of succession and usurpation in the state and draws an unmistakable connection between private actions and ­those very public concerns.”25 While most criticism of the play focuses on female suffering, Freeman’s argument is based on a careful reckoning of the male homosocial dynamics that structure this affective spectacle. Rowe’s subject ­matter was widely known, thus the play does not have to spend much time establishing Jane’s moral turpitude. As Edward IV’s mistress, she was the most famous adulterous of her time; with the death of the king, however, she is without the protection of a power­f ul lover or a husband. In what appears to be an expression of loyalty to the former king, the power­f ul Lord Hastings advocates on her behalf to the regent Gloucester, but his corrupt motives are revealed when he attempts to rape Jane in the next scene. Tired of his lover Alicia and now enamored of Jane, Hastings is a patriotic libertine, whose commitment to right rule is absolute, but whose relation to ­women is transactional. His desire for Jane operates as a displaced desire for Edward and thus as a simultaneous desire both to be the object of the sovereign’s desire and to replace the sovereign subject. Nestled within Hastings’s “loyalty” lies a tangle of perversions. As Freeman notes, Gloucester recognizes that Hastings’s patriotism is an impediment to his own plans to usurp the throne and that his ungoverned desires can be used against him. In the play’s most explic­itly po­liti­cal moment, Gloucester, through a combination of promised protection and threatened destruction, tries to force Jane to seduce Hastings, both sexually and po­liti­cally, so that he w ­ ill support the extermination of Edward’s ­children. In a fiery speech in act 4, scene 1, she refuses to be complicit with the murder and, more to the point, makes a patriotic stand for succession and right rule. Her past vice makes her vulnerable, but she is publicly destroyed for an act of po­liti­cal rectitude and re­sis­tance.

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Even though she is the embodiment of vice and ­will be punished as such in act 5, Jane’s patriotism is pure, almost maternal. She has shifted from the object of sovereign desire to the protector of sovereignty itself against the forces of patriarchal and po­liti­cal despotism. Even without the c­ hildren on stage, this displaced ethic of care is crucial to how Siddons inhabited the role ­because she suffers for this canceled f­ uture.26 Beyond the plot of the play, the ­children w ­ ill be executed; within the plot, it is Hastings who is killed on the basis of false evidence provided by his jilted lover Alicia, whose intention was to damage not Hastings but Jane. As Freeman argues, Hastings, a power­ful landowner, is the fiercest opponent to Gloucester’s scheme; he explic­itly links Gloucester’s plot to the eruption of civil war and the overturning of rank and order. For Hastings, civil war must be avoided at all costs in order to prevent the natu­ral order of ­things—­read the distinction of ranks—­from being turned upside down. This is indeed what happens, but Freeman powerfully demonstrates how Rowe provides the audience with a dif­fer­ent position from which to view this social upheaval with the deployment of Jane’s husband Matthew Shore in the drama. Shore is a goldsmith and first appears in the play disguised as the servant Dumont and it is in this character that he defends Jane from Hastings’s assault. As Freeman states, Shore embodies “the ideals of both a modern sense of right and a model of masculinity that stresses the governance of the passions.”27 Significantly, his critique extends to both Hastings and Gloucester: the former is impugned for the entire system of oligarchical patronage that maintains rank above all; the latter is deplored for his unnatural ambition and cruelty. Both are symptoms of ungoverned passion, thus when Shore reemerges in act 5 to succor his wife, forgiving Jane her adultery, he posits a dif­fer­ent kind of state grounded not on hierarchy and brute force but rather on merit and mutual love, a new Eden. The class politics ­couldn’t be more evident to an increasingly middle-­class audience. As Freeman states, “Although it cannot be sustained in the fallen world of fifteenth-­century ­England, where ‘charity [has] grown treason,’ Rowe intimates through the moment [when Shore beckons Jane back into the marital fold] that this ideal might be sustained in an eighteenth-­century world in which merit outweighs rank, a husband’s authority is restored, and the bonds of matrimony are honoured.”28 This complex articulation of a bourgeois ­f uture beyond the prosecutions and persecutions of the plot of the tragedy suggests that the only way out of the dynastic conflicts that envelope Edward’s ­children, Gloucester, Hastings, and Jane herself is the postulation of a world that works on entirely



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dif­fer­ent social princi­ples. This is affectively registered by the remarkable shift of focus in Jane Shore, for, as Freeman brilliantly indicates, the story of Gloucester’s ambition and Hastings’s libertine patriotism fades into the background as every­t hing ultimately revolves around the emotional encounter between Jane and her estranged husband. The damaged domestic ­couple of middling rank comes to stand as the normative ­f uture of the nation. It is hard to imagine a more apt figure for Britain at this moment, and it is why Siddons elicits in equal mea­sure pathos for the damage incurred by regal and oligarchical tyranny and heroic patriotic investment in an emergent ­future where the middling ranks would provide the model for right rule. Without Shore’s interventions, this latter implication remains vestigial and, as we ­will see, that is a crucial ­matter to the overall po­liti­cal import of this production of Rowe’s play. To understand this, we need a brief digression on the highly volatile state of domestic politics in the closing phases of the American War. Between 1782 and 1784, Britain went through four governments in quick succession; the nation was in a state of almost perpetual constitutional crisis. A ­ fter the fall of Yorktown, Lord North’s ministry became increasingly untenable. In an attempt to end the war, he proposed the Conciliation Plan, in which he promised that ­Great Britain would eliminate all disagreeable acts if the colonies ended the war. The colonies rejected the plan ­because it did not offer full in­de­pen­dence. A ­ fter a historic vote of nonconfidence, North resigned on 20 March 1782. The king was forced to accept a ministry led by Lord Rockingham and Lord Shelburne on the condition of recognizing American in­de­pen­dence, but George III had no interest in working with a Whig ministry. As L. G. Mitchell has documented, Shelburne effectively worked on the king’s behalf not only to sabotage Charles James Fox’s attempts to negotiate peace with France and Spain but also to fracture the Whig cabinet from within. As Mitchell summarizes, “In Fox’s opinion, evidence of a plot concocted by George III and Shelburne to destroy the Ministry was not hard to find. For example, on the question of eco­nom­ical reform, and on some aspects of parliamentary reform, Shelburnites and Rockinghamites had traditionally held similar views. Suddenly, in Cabinet, Shelburne began to drag his heels on t­ hese issues. . . . ​It seemed clear to Fox, Burke, and many o ­ thers that Shelburne was deliberately reneging on his commitment to reform, in order to split the Ministry.”29 Fox and other Rockingham Whigs became convinced that Shelburne was being used as a pawn by the increasingly despotic crown. When Rockingham died in July, George III appointed Shelburne and Fox resigned as secretary of state ­because he felt that the king was undermining

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Parliament. But it was nearly impossible for Fox to state this publicly without the utterance being construed as sedition. Fox resigned on 4 July. Burke and other Rockinghamites followed shortly thereafter, but every­thing came to a head in Parliament on 9 July. According to the Morning Herald, “The curiosity of the public to learn the ­causes and the extent of the late revolution in the cabinet, had collected ­great multitudes about the House of Commons” (MH, 10 July  1782). As Mitchell argues, Fox was in a po­liti­cal bind in part ­because the constitutional reasons for his resignation could not be stated openly without impugning the king and in part ­because proving Shelburne’s double dealing was difficult. Conspiracy between Shelburne and George III was vis­i­ble in patterns of be­hav­ior seen in the Cabinet but not in ­actual evidence that could be produced in the House. As noted in the discussion of this speech in the Introduction, Fox declared that he and Shelburne differed on how to ­handle the American debacle and thus he could not serve in the new ministry; outside of Parliament, he was less restrained. Regardless, his enemies and Shelburne’s supporters countered his position by stating that it was all a m ­ atter of frustrated ambition or oligarchical intent. Fox failed to communicate the constitutional dangers posed by George III and Shelburne with disastrous short-­term and long-­term consequences. In the short term, ­there was a real question as to ­whether Fox’s po­liti­cal ­career was over; in the long-­term, one can look to this rupture in the party as the beginning of the tortuous disintegration of the Whigs throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Some hint of what was to come can be found in Burke’s speech on the Change of Ministers on 9 July when he lashes out at Pitt for supporting Shelburne.30 In a typically Burkean flourish, he aligns Shelburne with Catiline and imagines how Cato would respond to the installation of Catiline in the consulship. Pitt, who had accepted the office of the chancellor of the Exchequer u ­ nder Shelburne, strongly objected to the comparison and defended Shelburne. Burke, in one of the most withering responses of his ­career, indicated that the son had betrayed his ­father’s g­ reat legacy: “For ­here the son ­rifles the enemies of his f­ ather of all their deadliest weapons, to discharge them in the face of his friends.”31 Many of the primary po­liti­cal and rhetorical battlegrounds that would characterize British politics right up to Burke’s break with Fox over the French Revolution ­were fully activated. The importance of this event cannot be overemphasized for, as we ­will see, it makes a rather startling return in perhaps the most impor­tant account of Siddons’s rise to theatrical prominence.



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­After Fox’s resignation, many felt that he had been consigned to the po­ liti­cal wilderness. ­After Gibraltar, Shelburne’s negotiations with the United States and her allies moved rapidly, but Fox found a way back into the fold by building a controversial co­a li­tion with Lord North based on a re­sis­tance to the terms of the peace with Amer­i­ca. Thus Fox, arguably the most vocal critic of war against the colonies, was now voicing public dissent to the peace by suggesting that Shelburne had given away too much. This sudden emergence of a co­ali­tion between two figures who had spent much of the war publicly denouncing and ridiculing each other was shocking to many, but it was po­liti­cally effective in the short term. It brought Fox to power, displaced Shelburne, and yet it also set into motion the king’s interference with the India Bill. By directly pressuring members of the House of Lords, George III ensured that Fox’s East India Bill was defeated on 17 December 1783; the king immediately dismissed the co­ali­tion and named Shelburne’s former chancellor of the Exchequer William Pitt the new prime minister. That interference proved to many that Fox’s insinuations that George III had despotic tendencies w ­ ere well founded; o ­ thers simply wanted to get past factional politics and supported the new Pitt ministry. He would remain in power for the rest of the ­century. With all this in mind, it is worth returning to the third act of Jane Shore. In order to determine if Hastings w ­ ill support his usurpation, Gloucester paints a picture of unrest in the state: Amidst the wealthy City, Murmurs rise, Lewd Railings, and Reproach, on t­ hose that rule, With open Scorn of Government; hence Credit, And public Trust, ‘twixt Man and Man, are broke. The golden Streams of Commerce are with-­held, Which fed the Wants of needy Hinds and Artizans, Who therefore curse the ­Great, and threat Rebellion. (3.1) Gloucester starts with this account of the middling and lower ­orders threatening the natu­ral order of rank b ­ ecause it is in Hastings’s interest to join forces with him to suppress rebellion. In fact, it is Gloucester who threatens the Crown from his position immediately adjacent to it. Without asking for Hastings’s support outright, he explains that the ­people are fractious in part ­because he has only a regent’s powers and thus lacks absolute authority

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and in part ­because the ­people are calling into question the lawfulness of Edward’s issue. Gloucester paints a vivid picture of factional unrest that prompts Hastings to declare his allegiance to Edward’s vision of sovereignty, to condemn faction’s tendency to advocate for change, and to curse the traitor who would introduce any variation in right rule b ­ ecause it would lead to civil war. ­Little does he realize that Gloucester is that traitor. The vehemence of Hastings’s curse indicates to Gloucester that he must be eliminated. He praises Hastings for his loyalty but secretly plans to kill him as his most ardent e­ nemy. What is so remarkable about the reception of Siddons’s first appearances in Jane Shore is the specific link drawn between this portion of the play and topical po­liti­cal events. ­Here is the Morning Post for 16 November: A Correspondent who has seen, with some concern, how a contest for mere place and power has superseded almost e­ very attention to the interests of G ­ reat Britain, warns his countrymen to be no longer duped by such artifices on the approaching sessions of Parliament (a crisis in which the safety of E ­ ngland, as well as Eu­rope, is concerned), but resolutely mark such characters not as patriots, but as firebrands, who rather than not blaze themselves, would draw on a general conflagration. Rowe, in his Jane Shore, gives a just description of such men in the following lines, which the audience felt the other night with that applause which evidently pointed out their application When s­ hall the deadly heat of faction cease; When s­ hall our long divided land have rest; If ­every peevish, moody malecontent, ­Shall set the senseless rabble in an uproar? Fright them with danger, and perplex their brains, Each day with some fantastic giddy change? ———­Curse on the innovating hand a tempts it; Remember the VILLAIN, righ­teous heaven, In thy g­ reat day of vengeance: Blast the traitor, And his pernicious counsels; who, for wealth, For power, the pride of greatness, or revenge, Would plunge his native land in civil wars. (MP, 16 November 1782) The audience members are seeing their pre­sent situation in t­ hese lines, but their “application” is not straightforward. For reasons of character, reputation,



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and po­liti­cal position, Fox is the most obvious candidate for this hy­po­t het­i­cal villain. All through this period, he reveled in his status as a “man of the ­people,” he was frequently associated with reform, change, and innovation. In the fall of 1782, he was regularly depicted as one seeking revenge on Shelburne, as the profligate gambler seeking position to pay down his debts, as one acting purely out of self-­interest and vanity. And, most impor­tant, he was publicly seen as an e­ nemy to the king’s wishes. In this context, it would appear that the audience is aligning Hastings with Lord Shelburne. But this is a complex alignment ­because Hastings/Shelburne is being duped by the man charged with protecting the legacy of a ­great but now deceased king. The dead king in this case is the heroic George II and this means that George III is being aligned with Gloucester. The imputation that George III is a threat to true sovereignty is manifestly in line with the opinion of Fox and his Rockinghamite supporters. Like many topical allegories, this one both indicts Fox for promulgating factional unrest and impugns the Crown and its minister for the very despotic tendencies Fox was attempting to resist. The indirection is crucial ­because it obviates charges of sedition but captures the po­liti­cal crisis felt inside and outside the play­house. That the application of the allegory leaves no one unscathed is impor­tant ­because this is also the logic of the play. Gloucester and Hastings exhibit complementary forms of tyranny: both aristocrats, they dominate the social order through vio­lence and deceit. But the unnamed hy­po­thet­i­cal provocateur is also questioning the legitimacy of the government. This agent of faction would not remain unnamed for long: Amongst the many respectable personages who attended the fine exhibition of Mrs.  Siddons’s Jane Shore last night at Drury-­lane Theatre was the Right Hon. C. J. Fox, who upon the w ­ hole of the play was much moved; but seem particularly agitated at the following lines:    When s­ hall the deadly heat of faction cease;    When s­ hall our long divided land have rest;   If ­ every peevish, moody malecontent,   ­Shall set the senseless rabble in an uproar?    Fright them with danger, and perplex their brains,    Each day with some fantastic giddy change? (WEP, 4–7 January 1783)

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This is typical of anti-­Fox rhe­toric in the fall of 1782, but what interests me is that the citation from the play is getting smaller.32 The curse and the charge of treason have been dropped, suggesting that by early 1783, when this paragraph was published, Fox was more of an irritant than a threat. And this draws attention to what was not printed in the first “application” of this scene to the con­temporary politics. The quoted passage deployed so trenchantly in the Morning Post for 16 November elides two crucial lines just before the curse. Goading Hastings on, Gloucester asks: “What if some Patriot for the public Good, / Should vary from your Scheme, new-­mould the State?” (3.1) This posits the emergence of a patriotic third figure. In the play, this unrealized patriot acting for the public good remains a hy­po­t het­i­cal; but, as Freeman suggests, this “Patriot” is figured by the middling Shore, or perhaps more accurately by the suffering married ­couple that engrosses the audience’s attention at the end of the play. In politics, this could have been Fox in his Man of the P ­ eople mode, the Fox who was everywhere advocating for po­liti­cal reform to restrain the despotic power of the Crown. But Fox ultimately shares too much with Shelburne/Hastings for this to hold. Fox is the very embodiment of the libertine aristocrat and, in that sense, is indistinguishable from Hastings in his best and worst qualities. One can align Fox’s re­sis­tance to the king with Hastings’s valiant re­sis­tance to Gloucester, but anyone versed in the play knows two t­ hings: Hastings, like Fox, is morally corrupt, and his re­sis­ tance is futile. This would have had unmistakable resonance in the period before the advent of the Fox-­North co­a li­tion b ­ ecause few expected that such an arrangement could be pos­si­ble. In the fall of 1782 and the early winter of 1783, “Gloucester” had won. Th ­ ose loyal to George III would have seen this in the terms Gloucester sets forth: as a m ­ atter of necessity to maintain order in a period of upheaval. For t­ hose wary of the king’s absolutist tendencies, the play would have captured their feeling of disenfranchisement. This is why Siddons’s per­for­mance of pathos in act 5 is so po­liti­cally significant. Civil war in the Atlantic imperium started with charges of royal despotism on the part of the colonies. The Foxite nightmare was that the same civil war set up the conditions for the emergence of royal despotism at home. Siddons allowed the audience to feel this and, at the same time, to find some level of solace in the potential of love and forgiveness to reconstitute domestic and po­liti­cal relations. The possibility of a repaired marital state presaged by the return of



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Shore now reads as a glimmer of hope whose vectors squarely point to the emergence of middling, not aristocratic, norms of restrained be­hav­ior. In this sense, the solace afforded is corrosive for it strips away prior forms of social and po­liti­cal normativity. Like Gloucester and Hastings in the play itself, the constitutional crises attending the actions of George III, Shelburne, and Fox drown out every­t hing in the world of politics, but within the domestic precincts of Drury Lane Theatre, Siddons’s power­f ul per­for­mance of abjection resuscitates the social m ­ iddle, both its damage and its potential reconstitution. That possibility would not be embodied by Fox, even when he returned to power in the Fox-­North co­ali­tion, but rather by his immediate replacement William Pitt. Although still an aristocrat, Pitt’s restrained persona was one perfectly in keeping with the symbolic politics of middle-­class ascendancy as performed by Siddons in Jane Shore and thus a broad bottom consensus could cohere ­under Pitt that relegated Foxite politics to merely factional concern. Pitt’s tenure lay in the ­f uture, but the association of Fox with factionalism and libertine corruption would hobble Whig politics from this period forward, ultimately destroying the party from within. If reactivating the po­liti­cal valences of Siddons’s per­for­mances in this play seems tendentious, we only need to shift our attention from topical reception of the play to considerations of Siddons’s ­career published some years ­later. I have built the argument for this chapter from the sources most proximate to the per­for­mance in question. I hope it is now apparent that the mediation of Siddons’s she-­tragedy per­for­mances in the press is rich and complex, worthy of close analy­sis and careful reflection. Siddons’s chief biographers, James Boaden and Thomas Campbell, acknowledge this directly, and it is clear that they go to the newspapers to build their narratives. Subsequent criticism relies heavi­ly on Boaden’s and Campbell’s reminiscences, and I want to conclude this section with a consideration of how memory works in Boaden’s Memoirs of Mrs.  Siddons. We ­will have occasion to discuss Campbell’s text in Chapter 2 when we look closely at Siddons’s per­for­mance of Lady Macbeth, but it is telling, I think, that his discussion of the 1782–83 season is so vapid. For Campbell, Siddons is Lady Macbeth; Boaden’s hagiography, however, recognizes that “the most impor­tant season that the Theatre has, perhaps, ever known, was that of 1782–3” (1.277) when Siddons was playing Isabella, Euphrasia, Jane Shore, and Belvidera, not Shakespeare. Boaden’s declaration of the importance of 1782–83 may seem hyperbolic, especially ­because he ­doesn’t immediately elaborate. Before arguing that

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“Theatre” changed utterly ­after this date, he informs his readers: “As the person of our g­ reat actress has under­gone some change, and her features by time become stronger, I should find it difficult now to describe by memory, as she stood before the audience on the night of the 10th of October.”33 The ensuing three-­page description argues that Siddons’s deportment becomes the model for femininity itself a­ fter this revolutionary season. His long familiarity with her person interferes with his memory, suggesting not only that his sense of her physical presence changes with time, but also that the norms of feminine decorum have evolved with her. In order to overcome the accretion of memories and highlight how she realigned expectations regarding beauty and be­hav­ior, he cites someone e­ lse’s description. This rhetorically transports the reader back to the moment of her (re)emergence in 1782 to create an illusion of contemporaneity. This may seem like a small point, but it is part of a larger rhetorical strategy that brings Siddons and the reader to a par­tic­u­lar historical moment. What is at stake ­here is a specific history of embodiment. ­After citing the description of Siddons, Boaden plays out his memory of each of the she-­tragedies performed in 1782 in sequence. Each play is handled in detail and each discussion builds on the previous account in a cumulative fashion. Every­t hing builds t­ oward a dif­fer­ent citation, Mme. De Stael’s famous assessment of Siddons’s brilliance (another strategy to bring us closer to the now time of per­for­mance), but, in a rarely remarked-­upon move, Boaden concludes the chapter by aligning the ascendance of Siddons with that of Pitt: “­There is often a singular coincidence in the production of excellence. Minds of peculiar power appear in clusters—­the eloquence of the state was now as greatly distinguished as that of the stage. At the time that Mrs. Siddons quitted Cheltenhamm, her summer cir­cuit, to delight the metropolis with her talent, WILLIAM PITT quitted the cir­cuit, the law courts and his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, to become at three and twenty His Majesty’s Chancellor of the Exchequer; and to amaze, by the splendour of his eloquence, a senate already possessing Fox and Burke.”34 This is not a passing gesture on Boaden’s part, nor is it a s­ imple declaration of coincidence; he devotes five full pages to the point and, by the end, he posits a singular relation between Siddons’s per­for­mances in 1782–83 and the emergence of a new po­ liti­cal dispensation, an altogether new po­liti­cal style, and implicitly a new form of reformed masculinity that matches the normativity he associates with Siddons’s per­for­mance of femininity. Boaden’s comparison incorporates the speech alluded to ­earlier regarding the change of ministers and Fox’s resignation and moves on to a detailed



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discussion of a contretemps between Burke and Pitt regarding the Articles of Peace. Burke had already impugned Pitt for his willingness to work with Shelburne, a politician “who acted without truth, or conscience, or princi­ple,” and declared that “he was sorry to see a young but honourable Gentleman [Mr.  Pitt], of such promising talents, attaching himself to a school, which would certainly endeavour to destroy all the culture and all the maxims, for which he stood so much indebted to one of the greatest and brightest men this country had ever produced.”35 The suggestion that Pitt was joining forces with ­those who would undo the achievements of his ­father, the Earl of Chatham, set the tone for much of the ensuing exchanges between the veteran Whig and the quickly rising new parliamentarian. When Parliament reconvened in December, preliminary treaties with Amer­i­ca, France, and Spain ­were in place. Both the terms of the peace and the way it was conducted ­were subjected to scathing criticism from the former Rockingham faction. Burke and Fox denounced Shelburne repeatedly and in the most extreme terms, especially when Shelburne and his ministry brought the peace to the House on 17 February. By that time, it became clear that the Rockingham faction led by Fox had come together with North and his supporters in the most unlikely co­ali­tion, and the treaties ­were attacked from all ­angles. Pitt defended both Shelburne and the Crown and frequently staged his defense in terms of style. It is this aspect of Pitt’s rise that interests Boaden: The character of his oratory was of a lofty stamp, and he considered the business of the state as an object of deepest interest, and the situation of the country was calling for the gravest consideration. The nation had long strug­gled with the mischievous contest in Amer­ i­ca: and a House of Commons, which had pledged itself never to abandon the right of the m ­ other country to legislate for the colonies, had now compelled an unsuccessful ministry to propose the peace of in­de­pen­dence to refractory subjects. On ­every view such a subject might be supposed to press deeply upon the hearts and heads of all who felt for their country; and something in a well-­born mind might suggest melancholy sympathy with a sovereign, who was thus to relinquish no mean ornament of his crown. Mr. Pitt having carried his favourite mea­sure of conciliation, the House addressed His Majesty upon that part of the royal speech which announced that “provisional articles of peace with the American colonies ­were actually agreed upon:” and the report of that address was brought up. It was at

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such a moment that Mr. Burke exerted all the powers of his wit, to turn the speech of the sovereign into ridicule; and, by breathing freely his vein of sarcastic humour, he kept the ­house long in continued laughter. But while he accused Lord Shelburne of duplicity and delusion, he affected to give the most liberal assent to the virtue, integrity, and honour of Mr. Pitt. The youthful minister ­rose with the feeling that became him, and hushed the volatile temper of the House into attention “still as night,” while he read a lecture of decorum to the veteran orator: and, what Fenelon never ­imagined, Telemachus was seen reproving the indiscretion of Mentor.36 Boaden now cites three full paragraphs from Pitt’s speech that attack Burke’s vulgar and sarcastic style of oratory and more damningly his inability to register “His Majesty’s . . . ​feelings on so affecting a subject as the dismemberment of his empire.”37 Pitt had turned Burke’s style into a symptom of more than ­simple factional corruption, it now amounted to an inhuman inability to feel not only George III’s pain but also the pain of a wounded empire. Burke and his fellow Rockinghamites are ­here charged with a lack of sympathy that extends back to their support of the colonists and that now makes a cynical co­a li­t ion with North even more egregious. With the benefit of hindsight, George III has transformed from a would-be despot to a wounded sovereign who embodies the psychic and territorial loss felt across the nation. What is so impor­tant h ­ ere is that Boaden argues that Pitt’s ability to read po­liti­cal style as an affective symptom of historical consequence comes from witnessing Siddons’s per­for­mances in 1782–83: “As to Mr. Pitt, it may be scarcely fanciful to suppose that, in addition to the weighty subject of his deliberation, some sober and dignified impression had sunk into his mind from the recent efforts of our transcendant actress—­t hat, in such a disposition, the severer muse aided the youthful debater, and thus led to the correction of a vulgar ribaldry, equally unbecoming the place, the occasion, and the exalted talents of the orator. Mr. Pitt was one of the earliest and most sincere admirers of Mrs. Siddons.”38 Pitt’s “sincerity” is crucial ­here; like William Shore, his restraint and his concern for ­t hose damaged by politics and civil war figures for a new era. Like William and Jane Shore in act 5 of Jane Shore, Pitt and Siddons emerge as models for a new kind of anti-­martial, asexual po­liti­cal masculinity and a new kind of domestic femininity, whose restraint and suffering are perfectly adequated to each other, to the historical moment, and to emerging norms of middling society.39



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For Boaden, ­t hose critical of the Crown and her ministers in this period of constitutional and geopo­liti­cal crisis w ­ ere not feeling appropriately; this would suggest that their well-­recorded appreciation of Siddons, like their politics, was cynical and riven by hy­poc­risy.40 And this attribution of pathological feeling was not merely a ­matter of hindsight (Boaden is writing well ­a fter the disintegration of the Whigs and Pitt’s long ministry). ­Here is the Morning Herald for 14 January 1783, the day that rumors that the Fox-­North co­a li­tion had become public: “Mr. Fox is so much improved in the pathetic since he has attended Mrs. Siddons’s per­for­mance that he means to adopt the buskin in his ­future declamations. The sublime and beautiful criterion of taste, has attended several of his rehearsals, previous to the next Westminster meeting, and is so much charmed by his manner that intends collecting a reservoir of tears to enable himself to weep by way of illustration, and puff hypo critic upon the day of experiment!” (MH, 14 January  1783). ­Here we have Fox cynically imitating Siddons’s capacity to elicit tears and Burke, “the sublime and beautiful criterion of taste,”41 hypocritically deploying the signs of true emotional engagement to undermine the articles of peace. They are a horrible parody of the hope figured by the reconciliation of Shore and his estranged wife. The charge of hy­poc­risy was, of course, well-­g rounded ­because both men had so fiercely advocated for conciliation and in­de­pen­dence right up to this moment. The scandal of the Fox-­North co­ali­tion would never go away and both the writer for the Morning Herald and Boaden are effectively arguing that Fox, Burke, North, and their followers had all failed to understand what Siddons was affectively mediating for them in the closing stage of the war, namely that overlooking or cynically deploying the damage sustained to the empire during the war was a dangerous game. Furthermore, it suggests that veteran politicians on both sides of the American crisis ­were similarly out of step with the visceral feelings of historical change that Siddons was channeling in the cascade of she-­tragedy per­for­mances in 1782–83. Forty years down the road, it is this pedagogical conjunction between Siddons and Pitt that stays with Boaden; and the structure of this all-­important chapter in his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons justifies his remark that the 1782–83 season is the most impor­tant in theater history. It was a moment when repeated interventions in the repertoire aligned not only with significant re­orientations in the realm of politics but also with fundamental shifts in Britain’s geopo­ liti­cal situation. For audiences at Drury Lane Theatre, ­these historical changes ­were aesthetically mediated in a decisive fashion with implications

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that would take a de­cade or more to be fully realized, but the fact of their affective manifestation changed British culture and politics irrevocably.

15 December 1782, or What Is Preserved in Venice? Boaden’s retroactive remarks on the po­liti­cal resonances of Siddons’s per­ for­mances in 1782–83 confirm the movement t­oward politics across the season, but they are far from the only indication that her interventions in the repertoire w ­ ere received in relation to both the constitutional and military crises directly impinging on the Peace of Paris. I have described that transit as one from implicit allegories about domestic tyranny in Isabella and The Grecian D ­ aughter to much more explicit topical allegory in the case of Jane Shore. The alignment between the sexual power dynamics in marriage and the po­liti­cal dynamics between sovereign and constituent power on the eighteenth-­century stage is never distant. But as the she-­tragedies of 1782 are unrolled, ­t here is an unmistakable movement from the domestic to the broadly public, from trope to plot, that makes the suffering female body public both a figure for and a narrative device for thinking through consequences of civil war and global conflict. As we have seen, Siddons’s activation of emergent gender norms as a form of class ascendancy is not only contrasted to the recession of aristocratic deployments of sexuality but also brought into close proximity to the alteration of politics as such. The per­for­ mance of gender and sexuality at this moment becomes a key site for overcoming the social and po­liti­cal formations that had failed the nation during the war and the factionalism that threatened to further dismember the state from within. Explicit po­liti­cal readings of the plays in the press are perhaps most intense with Jane Shore in late November and early December, but they are no less active in the reception of Siddons’s first per­for­mances in Venice Preserv’d, the play that would prove most po­liti­cally explosive in the post-­American era. Perhaps the most immediately po­ liti­ cal play in the repertoire, Venice Preserv’d is explic­itly concerned with quashing rebellion, but Otway’s script grants full subjectivity to the demo­cratic rebels Jaffeir and Pierre. The complexity of the play turns on the depth of their resentment and on the tragic love between the duke’s d ­ aughter Belvidera and one pulled into the rebel’s orbit by the bonds of honor and friendship. At the moment of its initial production, the topical relation between the events on stage and the world out



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of doors during the Popish Plot was explicit and, as the ­century unfolded, this most loyal of plays would regularly be evoked to attack sedition and rebellion. It is therefore not a surprise to see the Morning Post for 17 December 1782, the very moment when re­sis­tance to Shelburne’s peace settlement was most vocally declared by the Rockingham faction, making the following move: “Such ­were the astonishing powers of Mrs. Siddons, in the character of Belvidera, which she performed on Saturday eve­ning, that she absolutely drew TEARS from Mr. Fox, who sat in the side box during the ­whole repre­ sen­ta­tion. This Gentleman seemed very attentive to Bensley’s Pierre, particularly in the scene with the Conspirators” (MP, 17 December 1782). The imputation that Fox was conspiring to overthrow the government was well-­ worn, but it reminds us that Otway’s tragedy had been and would continue to be a barometer of loyalty. How one defines loyalty is, of course, critical; Fox, like the conspirators, saw himself as resisting the corruption of liberty and the notion of King-­in-­Parliament by the despotic forces of the Crown. Note how the Morning Post seems at first to be condemning Fox but then asks the reader to attend carefully to the scene where the justification for treason is explored. Are ­t hose tears for the death of his friends or for the notions of love and liberty he holds so dear? All ­t hese terms—­love, liberty, and friendship—­had been and would remain flashpoints for po­liti­cal rhe­toric throughout the post-­American era. For this reason, I want to conclude this chapter much as it began, by looking briefly at the intersection of social and historical forces during another singular night in the theater: this time, Siddons’s benefit night on 15 December 1782. It is extraordinary how quickly the reception of Siddons’s exceptionalism becomes normalized. ­A fter the first per­for­mances of Isabella in September 1782, it takes the press and audiences some time to pro­cess what is happening to the repertoire and the cultural landscape. When Siddons first performs Venice Preserv’d three months ­later, on 15 December, every­t hing is more streamlined b ­ ecause a key historical decision has been made. The following passage from the Morning Post is symptomatic: Since the night our ever-­to-be lamented Garrick closed his dramatic life, we never beheld such a splendid auditory as filled this theatre on Saturday eve­n ing. . . . ​The Tragedy of Venice Preserv’d was represented, in which Mrs. Siddons appeared in the character of Belvidera, for the first time on a London stage. As t­ here is no opening for criticism, ­because ­there did not appear to be a single error in her

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per­for­mance of this amiable and in­ter­est­ing character, we s­hall briefly inform our readers, that such a constellation of accomplishments ­were prob­ably never before exhibited in the dramatic world, as Mrs.  Siddons manifested on Saturday eve­ning. We consider the advantages of an elegant figure, directed by the Graces, in the most minute situation, and a countenance exquisitely formed to express the tender and distracting passions, but secondary considerations in the formation of this dramatic luminary: she points the dialogue of her author with such correctness and precision, that she discovers a very enlightened mind, highly polished by the Classics. If this lady has not been regularly instructed in our language, we can only say, she has got it by inspiration. . . . ​In a word, Mrs. Siddons’s Belvidera is, in our opinion, the best commentary extant on the genius of Otway. (MP, 16 December 1782) ­ ere are no longer comparisons to other actresses; her surrogative relation to Th Garrick is immediately registered and the entire paragraph elaborates on this point. But the way Garrick is invoked is crucial: Siddons’s benefit night is compared to the night that Garrick retired from the stage on 10 June 1776, thus rhetorically suturing over the cultural and historical rupture associated with Garrick’s loss. It is as though we move from that crucial moment in 1776 to this moment in 1782 in one seamless assertion of plenitude. The implications for cultural continuity could not be more clear, but ­there is an equally impor­tant po­liti­cal suture. Garrick retired on the day that news of the skirmish at Lexington and Concord first reached London and Siddons’s benefit occurred the eve­ning a­ fter news that British negotiators might retain Gibraltar and gain regions in West Florida. This paragraph’s less-­than-­subtle treatment of cultural descent from Garrick to Siddons has been achieved with a minimum of damage to British culture; the transit from 1776 to 1782 has led to colonial retention and even gain. It is a stunningly partial view, the kind of wishful thinking needed to sustain a culture and an empire in peril. If we look two columns to the left on the same page of the Morning Post, this is confirmed when we see the same partial history at play in the reporting on the negotiations at Versailles, and specifically with regard to Gibraltar. The Foreign Intelligence from Paris starts in uncertainty, indicating that “a messenger is expected to return from Madrid with the ultimatum of that Court to-­morrow or Wednesday. This, it is confidently reported, is the cause of delay



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in the pre­sent negociation for preliminaries, which are still asserted to be in a fair way of completion ­towards peace” (MP, 16 December 1782). The uncertainty of negotiation is maintained three paragraphs ­later when “it is confidently said, Spain not only offered Porto Rico for Gibraltar, but ­will also give the island to New Orleans and Western Florida for that fortress,” but ­t here is the implication that Britain has the upper hand (MP, 16 December 1782). The paper’s careful management of patriotic emotion relies on the ebb and flow of imperial anxiety. The final paragraph on Gibraltar is remarkable for how it declares that the colony w ­ ill be retained, b ­ ecause it pre­sents retention through loss: “In case Gibraltar is ceded to the Spaniards, General Eliot [sic] is to depart from the government of it some time previous to its being given up. . . . ​But the Spaniards are not to take possession of it sooner than twenty-­four hours ­after the British troops have departed from it, and not to fire a gun till the expiration of forty-­eight hours, from the time the En­glish colours are hauled down.—­We can assure the author of the above article that the evacuation of Gibraltar is not in contemplation” (MP, 16 December 1782). This is not the last word on Gibraltar in the Morning Post for 16 December 1782, but we need to register the complexity of the rhetorical strategy ­here. Narrative enigmas and anx­i­eties are activated only to be quickly leavened by countervailing desires and confidence; and then the overall narrative is played out in its negative registers—­here’s how evacuation ­will play out—­before being s­ topped dead in its tracks by the final assertion in italics. The transit from “the time the En­glish colours are hauled down” to “We can assure the author,” ­here marked by a mere dash, is much like the stunning transit from Garrick’s departure to Siddons’s emergence in the theatrical intelligence two columns to the right. Both movements happen in a rhetorical heartbeat and consign a plethora of heartfelt pain to temporary oblivion. And notice how the emblem for the nation “hauled down” is replaced by the assurance of a stable, power­f ul “We.” No such unified public can be found in the world of politics or in the social fabric at this moment: it is only ever rhetorically performed or enacted in per­for­mance, and thus needs to be both repeated and located in the body of exemplary figures. ­Those exemplary figures are not hard to find on the page of the Morning Post for 16 December 1782, in Drury Lane Theatre on the night of 15 December 1782, or in the habitus itself. They are named George Eliott and Sarah Siddons and the way they are presented confirms the performative and geopo­liti­cal parallels I have been drawing throughout this chapter. ­A fter the assurance that Gibraltar ­w ill not be evacuated and that access to the

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Mediterranean ­will be maintained, the Morning Post turns immediately to Eliott’s character: The superior greatness of General Elliot’s [sic] character appears as much from his attention to his garrison, as from the judicious and gallant defence of the fortress. . . . ​He walks the rounds at all hours of the night, and is so generally expected in e­ very quarter, that e­ very centinel is constantly upon his guard. In his ­table, while ­there was a scarcity in the garrison, he was always so plain and parsimonious, as to partake of the allowance of the common soldier; by which he has created a partiality for his command, which no General in Eu­rope perhaps ever shared in so ample and so flattering a degree. (MP, 16 December 1782) With Eliott’s martial prowess a given, the focus ­here is on how he governs the garrison, quite literally on his domestic economy. His greatness lies in the combined power of an almost panoptic surveillance of the social body he is ruling and a fundamental unwillingness to allow difference in rank to separate his body from t­ hose of the men he commands. Th ­ ese are coeval forms of governmentality and discipline that explic­itly operate outside hierarchies that structure the ancien regime. Although of aristocratic background, Eliott is presented ­here as the very epitome of merit, self-­control, and judgment; in short, the exemplary fantasy of middling social regulation.42 More to the point, he is the masculine counterpart to the complementary fantasy of middling femininity that is beginning to congeal around Sarah Siddons. On the same page of the Morning Post, we find the cognate ele­ments of character attached to Siddons’s judgment: The brilliant com­pany that visited Drury-­lane theatre on Saturday eve­ning is an unequivocal proof of the advantages arising from an amiable character in a private station. The THOUSAND POUNDS which it is said Mrs. Siddons received for tickets previous to her benefit w ­ ere in truth presented not merely as a compliment to her abilities as an actress, but as an honourable and public testimony of her PRIVATE VIRTUES;—­she is known to be a tender ­mother, a faithful wife, and in no instance to stray from ­t hose relative duties, which make life amiable and respectable.—­If Mrs. Siddons’s character was of another complexion, she would have shared in common with t­ hose ­women who possess theatrical talents, without virtue; her abilities



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would have secured her a maintenance, but the theatre, on her benefit night, would have been deserted. Before the close of the pre­sent season, the sceptic may be convinced of the truth of t­ hese remarks by example. (MP, 16 December 1782) This is one of the earliest summations of Siddons’s moral and biopo­liti­cal exemplarity. Her exertions as observant m ­ other and conjugal wife are incorporated into her cultural achievement and she emerges on the other side as a figure ­every bit as exceptional as General Eliott. In fact, Siddons’s alignment with middling biopower and Eliott’s enactment of panoptic discipline and self-­regulation are mutually constitutive fantasies that are clearly aimed at closing off the geopo­liti­cal reverses and the social insecurity fostered by aristocratic mismanagement of the war. In his willingness to move across class bound­aries and resist both libertinism and ambition, Eliott is the new Shore; in her extraordinary capacity to channel patriotic love and suffering into a re­sis­tance to further corruption, Siddons is Jane Shore made manifest in her private capacity. That said, all of ­t hese parallels are drawn on the occasion of her first appearance as Belvidera, not as Jane Shore. This is significant b ­ ecause the politics of Rowe’s tragedy revolve around usurpation and possibility of a return to civil war; Otway’s tragedy is explic­itly about rebellion and its suppression. Thus, ­t here is a specifically po­liti­cal resonance to the declaration that Siddons’s per­for­mance is deemed to be “the best commentary extant on the genius of Otway.” This is a remarkable statement and the specific example given of her excellence is a moment when the “delicate glow of conjugal affection in her look” coincides with “such a heart-­searching tone of voice, that she absolutely threw most of her auditors into tears” (MP, 16 December 1782). As with the account of the negotiations regarding the fate of Gibraltar, Siddons’s per­for­mance si­mul­ta­neously elicits assurance and anxiety in a way that perfectly matches Otway’s capacity to keep the destruction and loss of Venice, and every­thing that it represents in the history of republican po­liti­cal theory, in play despite the fact that, like Gibraltar, we know it has been and w ­ ill be preserved. In the pro­cess, the larger loss of the Atlantic empire temporarily recedes. Ultimately, we find ­here the preservation of that feeling when one makes the transit from fear and disappropriation to assurance and self-­ possession. What Eliott and Siddons ­were able to preserve in the fall of 1782 was a feeling of self-­regard and autonomy within the horizon of loss, something that had not been felt ­t hese many years.

CHAPTER 2

The Other Macbeth Shakespeare in Siddons’s Hands

Alas Poor Country! Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot Be called our ­mother, but our grave, where nothing, But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell Is ­there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives Expire before the flowers in their caps, ­Dying or ere they sicken. —­Macbeth (4.3.166–76)

Chapter 1 argued that, as the 1782–83 season unfolded, the po­liti­cal import of Siddons’s per­for­mance of femininity became both more pointed and more pervasive. As a form of corrosive solace, Siddons’s per­for­mance of feminine abjection in Isabella or Jane Shore overcame an entire panoply of social strictures and norms associated with an increasingly obsolete social and po­liti­ cal regime. The sense of dislocation that attended the loss of the war, figured first in terms of space, was almost immediately alleviated, both at the level of rhe­toric and per­for­mance and by realignments in gender and class across the mediascape. The per­for­mance of maternal care and conjugal domesticity became increasingly salient in scripts where it had heretofore been a minor concern. Furthermore, the po­liti­cal valence of Siddons’s interventions and the feelings of precarity they addressed ­were explic­itly recognized in the press.



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From at least as early as the fall of Yorktown, a desire to get out of the war permeated British po­liti­cal and social life. In the light of the previous chapter’s extensive discussion of the mediation of the Treaty of Paris, that desire was complicated by an intensely factional po­liti­cal landscape that meant that the nation was constantly on the verge of constitutional crisis between the fall of the North government in early 1782 and the foundation of the Pitt ministry in early 1784. Perhaps not surprisingly, ­t here was never a feeling of equanimity or satisfaction with the peace.1 This is perhaps nowhere more forcefully registered than in Benjamin West’s American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with ­Great Britain, an unfinished oil sketch from 1783 or perhaps early 1784 (Figure  2.1). Anecdotal reports suggest that the British representative Richard Oswald and his secretary, Caleb Whitefoord, refused to sit for the artist and hence the right side of the painting is ­little more than a preparatory wash. According to John Quincy Adams and o ­ thers, Oswald was exceedingly ugly and self-­conscious about his looks. When he died in the summer of 1783, West discovered that Oswald had never had his likeness painted and thus he ­couldn’t resort to another image to complete the painting. Significantly, one of the finished figures, Benjamin Franklin, also ­didn’t sit for West, whereas John Jay, John Adams, Henry Laurens, and William ­Temple Franklin ­were all painted from life. Franklin was copied from another image. Attempting to capture West’s intention, the Metropolitan Museum’s cata­log quotes John Quincy Adams’s diary, “As I very strongly expressed my regret that this picture should be left unfinished, Mr. West said he thought he could finish it. . . . ​ I understood his intention to be to make a pre­sent of it to Congress,” before concluding, “Instead it remained unfinished, a power­f ul symbol of the division between G ­ reat Britain and its former American colonies.”2 But we need to remember that West had been appointed historical painter to the court by George III and would remain in the king’s employ ­until his death. Much of the discussion of this painting jumps from lack of a likeness of Oswald to some assertion that the painting is an emblem of historical enmity or disjunction. But this begs the question of West’s intention and his relation to the king. If we w ­ ere to imagine a finished painting, what would be its function? If it was made for or at the direction of the king, then it was meant to mark or commemorate the end of conflict. But at the moment this painting was being made conflict was far from over, it had merely changed place: civil war in the Atlantic imperium had come home to the British Isles and threatened to destroy the relationship between king and Parliament that had been

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Figure 2.1. Benjamin West, American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with ­Great Britain (1783–84). Winterthur Museum.

established since the Glorious Revolution. Oswald’s premature death (at least in terms of West’s paint­erly objectives) and his equally significant vanity had produced an emblematic image of discord, but not between the American negotiators and Lord Shelburne’s commissioners, but rather between the Fox-­ North co­a li­tion and West’s patron, George III. This is why the wash on the right side of the canvas is so eloquent. It operates as a historical screen that allows the past conflict—­now resolved—to stand in for the ongoing crisis in British politics. That crisis would be forcefully put to rest by the king himself when he personally intervened in Fox’s India Bill at precisely the moment at the end of 1783 when West likely gave up on this painting. What had been Britain’s crisis would now live on as a crisis in the Whig Party. But ­here on this canvas a power­f ul act of displacement is crystallized. The American del­e­ga­tion forcefully emerges by virtue of being t­ here, even if being t­ here means simply being remediated from an engraving in the case of Franklin. Britain’s avatars are pre­sent, but unspecified, by virtue of their absence, and that absence allows all manner of



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interpolations to unfold, every­thing from John Quincy Adams’s desire for material and historical appropriation of the object to the king’s desire for control over the ministry to be understood in relation to preexisting enmity over American affairs rather than the ­f uture strug­gles that would define British imperial governance both at home and in the Asian subcontinent. By saying so l­ ittle, the painting says far too much. This operates in stark contrast to most of the visual repre­sen­ta­tions of the Treaty of Paris, which tend t­oward prolixity.3 If West’s painting veils historical chaos, then The Blessings of Peace, a print published on 16 April 1783, allows the chaotic aspects of postwar politics to almost overwhelm the picture (Figure 2.2). At this moment, most of the terms of the peace had been hammered out, although the definitive articles would not be signed ­until the fall; what strikes one ­here, however, is the fractious rendering of the po­liti­ cal landscape. Amer­i­ca, figured as a young Indigenous w ­ oman, is flanked by France and Spain on the shores of the remarkably proximate continent: it is an allegorical scene of equanimity on the western littoral of the Atlantic. Not so in G ­ reat Britain. In the foreground, George III is surrounded by sixteen notable po­liti­cal figures from a stamping Fox on the left to a quisling Lord Amherst telling the wounded and maimed veterans of the war, “Gentlemen we have no further occasion for you,” on the right. In between can be found ­every species of mendacity, but most impor­tant, the country itself has erupted into a violent fracas in the background. Civil war at home is a very real aspect of this print’s understanding of peace between Britain, Amer­i­ca, and her allies. In a sense, this is all too vis­i­ble: the chaotic pre­sen­ta­tion of factional opinion is framed by violent chaos in the land. But what are we to make of the print’s other most arresting ele­ments? All of the po­liti­cal turbulence is framed on top and bottom by specific references to Macbeth. The farting witch hurtling overhead does not bode well; nor does the specifying citation of Ross’s elegy for Scotland from act 4, scene 3: “Alas poor Country, almost afraid to know itself.”4 The famous passage from which this comes, used as the epigraph to this chapter, is arguably the lowest point in the play, a point where the nation itself has become ­little more than a grave ­under Macbeth’s despotic usurpation of power and awaits liberation by the expatriate forces of Malcolm and Macduff. But it is the assertion that the afflicted nation is afraid to recognize this, willing to keep chattering on in some kind of zombie factional condition that is so disturbing and frankly warrants the witch’s flatulence. The stench of peace that permeates such a state is simply a prophecy of the much more pervasive smell of

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Figure 2.2. Anonymous, The Blessings of Peace, colored engraving (16 April 1783). Trustees of the British Museum.

national death sketched for the viewer in the background. David Taylor emphasizes that the Weird ­Sisters operate as a comic presence in the play throughout the ­century.5 The fact that the last remaining witch is fleeing the scene in this print may indicate that the time for comedy is over. The sheer complexity of this print’s integration of historical crisis and Shakespearean citation is instructive for it demonstrates how easily the repertoire could be deployed. A ­ fter all, the deep implication h ­ ere is that someone or something w ­ ill come to save Britain from the peace. That that is signaled but not specified in spite of the print’s prolix textual and visual economy places it at one end of a repre­sen­ta­tional paradigm that has West’s painting at the opposite end. Both images, e­ ither through prolixity or paucity, are



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attempting to recognize their deeply unsettling historical situation. As we ­will see, the question of what is too much and what is too l­ittle would be decisive for Siddons’s realignment of the Shakespearean repertoire and for the complex reception of her intervention in the role of Lady Macbeth. Taking its cue from The Blessings of Peace, this chapter is about Macbeth, the play incessantly called for during Siddons’s reemergence on the London stage and the play most insistently invoked to capture the disaster of the American War. Siddons’s epochal per­for­mances of Lady Macbeth constitute one of the most sustained analyses of the legacy of her precursors and of the repertoire itself in the eigh­teenth ­century, thus much of what I ­will have to say directly concerns memories of David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard. How Siddons engaged with the repertoire in 1785 is remarkable and, I believe, largely underappreciated in its specific performative strategies. Much of her intervention revolved around her complex interaction with stage properties, and I spend a significant part of this chapter considering her relation to t­ hings on stage. The visual rec­ord w ­ ill be of g­ reat importance h ­ ere, but my primary point has to do with how once this new version of Lady Macbeth was unleashed, it had to be contained in symptomatic ways. That containment is the focus of the final sections of the chapter b ­ ecause the stabilization of the play in 1788, Fuseli’s complex remediation of it for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, and Kemble’s spectacular restaging of Macbeth in 1794 need to be understood in relation to the fearsome energy of Shakespeare in Siddons’s hands.

“Busy Memory”: Ghosting Hannah Pritchard in the 1785 Macbeth In 1782–83 Sarah Siddons’s interventions in the repertoire jump-­started a culture that felt disconnected from its cultural patrimony. But Siddons’s intervention was very much circumscribed to serious post-­Restoration plays; Shakespeare was at this moment in the wilderness. We w ­ ill be looking at Siddons’s renovation of the role of Lady Macbeth shortly, but first it is worth considering the state of Shakespeare at Drury Lane during the war years. By the advent of the War of American In­de­pen­dence, most Britons understood the repertoire of Shakespeare’s plays and Handel’s operas and oratorios as definitive statements of the cultural patrimony. The combined efforts of prac­ti­tion­ers—­especially at Drury Lane ­under the management of Garrick—­ and critics had forcefully established Shakespeare’s plays as an expression

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of En­g lish national spirit.6 Likewise, Ruth Smith has shown the importance of Handel’s work to patriotism ­under Hanoverian rule. The starting point for my argument ­here is the s­ imple recognition that neither Shakespeare nor Handel w ­ ere in terribly good shape at the end of the American War. Prior to the Commemoration of Handel in 1784, the Handelian repertoire was only ever played in fragments with the notable exception of Messiah. And with the retirement of Garrick in 1776, the Shakespearean repertoire was in a holding pattern, if not in a state of outright decline. The nature of that holding pattern is significant: Shakespeare ­didn’t dis­ appear from the boards but was dispersed and relocated. While Garrick was still performing, a wide array of Shakespearean scripts was staged and ran for multiple eve­nings ­every season. When Garrick performed in signature roles, receipts ­were vibrant. In the season ­after Garrick retired, the range of Shakespearean plays was cut in half and focused on plays not associated with the former man­ag­er. Julius Caesar and A Winter’s Tale ­were revived to moderate success (the former had not been staged for twenty-­five years; the latter, ten), but they ­weren’t carried over into subsequent seasons. In the years following, l­ imited productions of a small array of Shakespearean plays w ­ ere scheduled throughout the season, but no one show played for more than three nights.7 In the aggregate, they filled out the roster of plays but d ­ idn’t drive the schedule; they operated in the background while new plays like The Duenna, The School for Scandal, or The Belle’s Stratagem had extended runs. Not surprisingly, Covent Garden’s Shakespearean productions radically increased in the wake of Garrick’s retirement. From the 1779–80 season onward, Covent Garden was scheduling twice as many dif­fer­ent plays and many of t­ hese w ­ ere having extended runs; most notably, Charles Macklin’s production of The Merchant of Venice once again became a significant draw. Much of the sense of the fragile state of Shakespearean per­for­mance in the early 1780s was circumstantial. With Garrick’s retirement in 1776 and his death two years ­later, the foremost promoter and performer of the Shakespearean repertoire was gone. Five years ­later, the thirteen colonies would be gone as well. In his “Monody on the Death of David Garrick” and in The Critic, Richard Brinsley Sheridan d ­ idn’t have to wait to the end of the war to articulate the crisis at hand. ­These two works offered the most trenchant analy­ sis of the cultural predicament heralded by the double loss of Garrick and the thirteen colonies. For Sheridan, continuity was a double-­edged sword. When culture is corrupted or unmoored from its roots, then continuity only compounds the degradation. This was at the heart of the American cause and what



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drove their supporters t­oward a radical critique of the value of liberty. For liberty, the defining ele­ment of British identity, to flourish, it needed to separate itself from its heritage. This paradoxical rupture, a discontinuation of pre­sent relations aimed at preserving a dif­fer­ent kind of continuity for the ­f uture, describes both the war itself and the kind of action staged by Sheridan in the l­imited confines of Drury Lane theater. In this sense, The Critic needs to be understood partly as a pro-­American performance—­this was already evident in its explicit critiques of the ministry—­and partly as a radically post-­American intervention.8 The play’s propulsion of the audience into the f­ uture is nothing short of a demand to reinvent British culture in a way that could revitalize its relation to the past, without demanding a slavish repetition of the per­for­mance protocols that had configured the relations between the living and the dead. And it was clear that new per­for­mance protocols needed to be developed from the audience’s intense sense of loss, both for Garrick and for their past imperial confidence. Although it may seem strange to equate the death of an actor with an act of decolonization, both events temporarily severed ties to the intertwined fantasies of liberty and Shakespeare to the point where one would invariably activate the other. With Siddons’s return to London on 10 October 1782, t­ here is a sea change: not only does she dominate receipts, she also effectively consigns both Shakespeare and comedy to temporary oblivion at Drury Lane. Cycling through per­for­mances of Isabella, The Grecian D ­ aughter, Jane Shore, The Fair Penitent, Venice Preserv’d, and The Mourning Bride, Siddons’s capacity to channel tragic affect turned Drury Lane into a highly profitable zone for the revivification of she-­t ragedy. But, as we have seen, each successive per­for­ mance from this she-­tragedy repertoire provoked calls in the press for Macbeth. With the leading comic actress of her generation, Fanny Abington, now fully ensconced at Covent Garden, the patent ­houses effectively divided the repertoire in the 1782–83 season such that Shakespeare’s plays ­were more frequently played in one of the patent h ­ ouses. The 1783–84 season is a transitional one. Frances Abington remained dominant in comedy at Covent Garden. Siddons, used more sparingly, continued in the she-­tragedies, but Sheridan boldly made a pitch for Drury Lane’s reclamation of the Shakespearean repertoire by engaging John Philip Kemble in Hamlet. Kemble’s controversial readings divided audiences and the press alike: a way back to meaningful Shakespearean per­for­mance had been broached, if not universally welcomed. Kemble’s reinterpretation of Hamlet was a harbinger of what his s­ ister would do the following season. The waywardness of Shakespeare

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at this moment would continue to haunt British culture u ­ ntil Siddons herself devised a way to channel the affective intensity of she-­tragedy into the role of Lady Macbeth in 1785. Siddons’s ability to engage the affective needs of her audience was now aligned with that portion of the repertoire most vitally associated with British national character, but that realignment was not without its prob­lems. On 2 October  1785, Siddons redefined the role of Lady Macbeth and audiences no longer felt loss in the same way. But Siddons’s virtuosity was si­mul­ta­neously recognized as an aesthetic triumph and a prob­lem. To understand this coeval sense of triumph and vexation we need to look closely at the reception of her early per­for­mances in the role. Some sense of this desire to overcome cultural stasis can be gleaned from the Morning Chronicle’s review of Siddons’s first per­for­mance of the role, for it explic­itly marks a need in its opening sentence: “Much as we wished to drive away from our minds all recollection of former acting we had witnessed in this noble tragedy—­much as we wished, instead of entering into comparisons—­ which by the bye are always odious,—to form a positive judgment on the merits of the pre­sent ­people—­yet, no sooner was the curtain drawn up than, in spite of all our endeavours to the contrary, busy memory began to trace the delight we had in days of yore experienced from such acting, as we much fear we s­ hall never look upon again” (MC, 3 October 1785). This explicit discussion of the repertoire’s hold on the reviewer’s “busy memory” is a crucial rhetorical gesture ­because it introduces a harsh critique of a show that has generally been considered a turning point in eighteenth-­century theater history. Retroactive accounts of this night in the theater—­and critical discussions that work primarily from the archive of nineteenth-­century reminiscences by James Boaden, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt—­tend to focus on Siddons, but this review only gets to Siddons ­after dealing first with memories of Garrick: Of the excellencies of Garrick, powerfully as they impressed themselves upon our feelings in former times, it cannot be but that the remembrance must in the course of seventeen years for it is upwards of seventeen years since Garrick appeared in this ­great part be in a ­great mea­sure lost, and therefore perhaps we found it not a hard task to dismiss from our recollection the faint traces which still remained; but the memory was still green of a recent per­for­mance of Macbeth, when



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Kemble performed the hero, and obtruded itself upon us during the ­whole play. (MC, 3 October 1785) This reference to Kemble presages the f­ uture for he would take up the role in earnest three years l­ ater, but h ­ ere it is a rhetorical transition t­ oward a scathing attack on William “Gentleman” Smith’s per­for­mance in the lead role.9 I ­will turn to that attack shortly, but for the moment it is impor­tant to think through the implications of the reviewer’s double reference to Garrick’s per­ for­mance “seventeen” years e­ arlier. Garrick s­ topped playing the role in 1768 ­after Hannah Pritchard’s death and to say that it was hardly his signature role would be to ignore his impor­tant interpretations of Hamlet, Lear, and Richard III, not to mention players like Henry Mossop and Spranger Barry who frequently played Macbeth in recent times.10 But within this review’s deployment of “busy memory” it is Garrick’s per­for­mance that is invoked and Pritchard’s per­for­mance that haunts the scene. Pritchard had developed a particularly fearsome interpretation of the role and on 24 April 1768 she gave her last per­for­mance as Lady Macbeth four months prior to the public acrimony over the Stamp Act, a po­liti­cal prob­lem that marked the beginning of the American crisis. ­W hether the act of reminiscence discussed above implicitly brings one back to this po­liti­cal moment is doubtful, but on its own terms the review is obsessed with losses and traces of the past. The curious doubling of “seventeen” marks the double loss of Garrick and Pritchard: she is ghosted by the review, subtly evoked but not named. This is impor­tant ­because we know from Siddons’s own remarks on the role and from accounts of the early per­for­mances that audiences w ­ ere haunted by Pritchard’s e­ arlier 11 per­for­mance. ­Here that feeling is registered as the condition of engaging with the play and then the review turns away from this loss to attack Smith in a manner that instantiates a search for a surrogate tragic hero. At the time of Siddons’s g­ reat leap forward in the role of Lady Macbeth, she was effectively playing without a Macbeth.12 Smith played the role to universal disapprobation ­until 1788 when Kemble permanently took over the role: “The truth of criticism compels us to pronounce the character of Macbeth entirely out of Mr. Smith’s line of playing.—­Happy in personal figure, and martial gallantry, he wants ­those greater requisites, which are essentially necessary to do justice to the vari­ous passions, which agitate the soul of Macbeth” (MC, 3 October 1785). Deemed monotonous and without depth, the paper concludes that he should “devote himself entirely to the ser­v ice of Thalia” (MC, 3 October 1785). Gallant but shallow, in this par­tic­u­lar historical

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moment such an embodiment of martial inefficacy would have had disturbing po­liti­cal connotations that ­were already potentially activated by the invocation of the moment “seventeen” years ago when ­things started to go wrong, both for the play and for the empire. That said, I think it is the satirical remark on Smith’s suitability for comedy that warrants more serious attention. The opening-­night review in the Morning Chronicle spends a full paragraph disparaging Smith’s per­for­mance before stating, The Lady of Macbeth was, what it should not be—­a nd what a performer equal to the part of Macbeth it could not be—­t he first character in the play. In the hands of such an actress as Mrs. Siddons could it be other­wise than impressive? Could it be other­wise than sublime? Could it be other­wise than terrifick? If, where all was excellent, we should be tempted to point out what we thought most excellent, we should fix on the candle scene, where the compunctious visitings of nature ­were pourtrayed in a style of such inimitable horror, as wrung the hearts of e­ very individual in the h ­ ouse. (MC, 3 October 1785) ­ ese are the earliest recorded words of praise for Siddons’s per­for­mance as Th Lady Macbeth. As Heather McPherson has exhaustively documented, sublimity would become the byword for Siddons’s per­for­mance in this role.13 But ­here the reviewer is arguing that her excellence distorts or perverts the tragedy. That “should” in the first sentence has a crucial moral valence for it suggests that Siddons’s success in the role—­a nd Smith’s “monotony”—­t raduces the play’s generic integrity. This means that the sacrosanct memory of Garrick’s and, by extension, Pritchard’s per­for­mances in the play are being overwritten by a dangerous innovation.14 As Laura Rosenthal shrewdly observes, Siddons herself would come to argue for the reconception of the play as Lady Macbeth’s tragedy.15 What­ever the merits of Siddons’s retrospective argument for a re­ orientation of the play’s center of gravity in Campbell’s Life, in 1785 Siddons’s very excellence posed a serious prob­lem. Subsequent discussions of her per­for­mances in the press hold her in universal acclaim, but without a Macbeth the play c­ an’t signify anything more than terror and disequilibrium. This is a ­matter of some consequence ­because it amounts to a generic devolution in the play generally assumed at this point in the eigh­teenth ­century to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest achievements in tragedy, a work at the apogee



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of En­glish art and lit­er­a­ture. With Smith seeming to have walked in from a comedy at Covent Garden, the play verges on tragicomedy or, worse, a pastiche of itself. To put this provocatively, Siddons’s presence on stage in this part threatened not only to reinscribe the play as a lesser she-­tragedy but also to fix Shakespeare’s and Garrick’s greatness fully in the past. As the reviewer for the Morning Chronicle indicates, this activates cognate feelings of alienation from the past and terror about the f­ uture. Thus far, the suggestion has been that the feelings of alienation and terror elicited by the 1785 Macbeth ­were, in the most literal sense of the term, circumstantial and thus suited to the moment. Siddons’s “sublime” strength and Smith’s “happy” weakness skewed the show; but, as Siddons herself indicated late in life, her preparation for the role was extensive. We have an unusually rich archive regarding her per­for­mance and, ­because her character appears in a very ­limited number of discrete scenes, we can analyze her internal negotiation with the repertoire. Judith Pascoe has provided an extraordinary discussion of Siddons’s voice and specifically how it played in this part.16 I want to draw attention to Siddons’s gestures.17 In e­ very scene, Siddons staged a break with the past that was concentrated on the interface between her hands and stage properties. The letter, the daggers, and, most impor­tant, the candle, distilled audience attention to build a coherent argument about time itself that resonated with the play’s untimeliness. That is a complex sentence and I want to digress briefly in order to show how the per­ for­mance’s engagement with cultural anxiety was built into that to which we have the least access—­namely, gesture and, by now, long-­missing stage properties—­but to do so means that we w ­ ill have to cast forward to reminiscences of Siddons’s per­for­mances and backward to Pritchard’s legacy. Visual repre­sen­ta­tions and textual accounts of Siddons’s per­for­mance focus primarily on three scenes: act 1, scene 5, the letter scene; act 2, scene 1, the dagger scene; and act 5, scene 1, the sleepwalking scene. Her per­for­mance in the banquet scene was no less innovative, but it met with far more equivocal response and inspired only preliminary sketches by Romney (Figures 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5). Romney’s drawings themselves are vigorous, intense, and above all focused on Lady Macbeth’s physical actions. She restrains Macbeth in one, she forces herself between Banquo’s ghost and her husband in another, and she appears to be leading him away from the specter in the third. Taken as a ­whole, what strikes one is that her hands are ­either holding Macbeth or struggling to contain him. In all but one, where her arms are flung in the air to block his vision of the ghost, she is effectively holding Macbeth down or in

Figure  2.3. George Romney, 1734–1802, British, MacBeth: Banquet Scene, undated, Graphite on medium, moderately textured, cream wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Richardson Dilworth, B.A. 1938, B1979.12.209.

Figure 2.4. George Romney, 1734–1802, British, MacBeth: Banquet Scene, undated, Graphite on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Richardson Dilworth, B.A. 1938, B1979.12.207.



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Figure 2.5. George Romney, 1734–1802, British, MacBeth: Banquet Scene, undated, Graphite on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Richardson Dilworth, B.A. 1938, B1979.12.212.

place. The gestural vectors of the drawings are directing all motion to the floor, literally bringing us back to earth. The sheer energy expressed h ­ ere resonates with Siddons’s theorization of the scene, printed in Campbell’s Life, where she argues that the exhaustion exhibited by the character at the end of the scene foreshadows her final act of somnambulism in act 5.18 But zeroing in on Siddons’s touch in this scene signals its anomalous status. In this scene, Lady Macbeth touches her husband; her hands are engaged with another living body and thus her touch folds into an economy of care. This frantic scene of touching Macbeth’s body marks her difference from prior per­for­mances of the role that tended to pre­sent her as a virago and cancel her femininity. Romney’s sketches are intriguing ­because Lady Macbeth exhibits an undeniable physicality—­which could be interpreted as a certain masculinization—­except that this muscular effort substitutes maternal protection for conjugal love. As Rosenthal emphasizes, “The compromising masculinity of Lady Macbeth had been a theatrical given; Siddons, however,

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added to this an intense femininity as well,” and I would argue that the specific per­for­mance of gender difference was crucial.19 As in Isabella, Siddons’s touch is imbued with maternal connotations. With someone as weak as Smith on the receiving end of a touch this freighted with meaning, Siddons’s efforts would have exacerbated his tremulous passivity. Lady Macbeth’s maternal care, that which could make life, gets shunted ­toward death: the biopo­liti­cal imperative discloses its thanatopo­liti­cal other. Siddons’s amplification of the maternal tilts the 1785 production away from a drama of sovereignty t­ oward the biopo­liti­cal and renders the play “modern” in Foucault’s terms.20 Lady Macbeth’s per­for­mance of maternal attachment is without an object and thus it is perversely directed to the husband. Some sense of this perversion is captured in Siddons’s commentary on this scene, for she rhetorically implies that he takes up the power of that attachment and channels it t­ oward death: “Her frailer frame, and keener feelings, have now sunk ­under the strug­gle—­his robust and less sensitive constitution has not only resisted it, but bears him on to deeper wickedness, and to experience the fatal fecundity of crime.”21 The collocation of death and reproduction in Siddons’s meta­phor of “fatal fecundity” to describe Macbeth’s crime suggests that the play is now being understood less as a drama of sovereign usurpation than as a biopo­liti­cal tragedy, a play in which the deployment of sexuality is out of joint rather than one in which gender roles are simply inverted or canceled as in ­earlier per­for­mances. Siddons activates a startling transference in which Macbeth experiences what it means to be fecund, to be ripe, for the production of death. In her remarks on the infamous “I have given suck” speech, Siddons states “It is only in soliloquy, that she invokes the powers of hell to unsex her. To her husband she avows, and the naturalness of her language makes us believe her, that she had felt the instinct of filial as well as maternal love.”22 As Rosenthal comments, “For Siddons, then, the drama of Macbeth lies in Lady Macbeth’s agonizing ambivalence between ambition on the one hand, and her power­f ul filial, conjugal, and maternal feelings on the other.”23 I would contend that that ambivalence is made physically manifest in the distinction between the way she touches her husband in act 3, scene 1, and the way she h ­ andles props in her other scenes.24 This is why Siddons’s negotiation with the three stage properties is so decisive. The letter, the daggers, and the candle are handled in fundamentally dif­fer­ent ways and Siddons’s hands tell us a story that signifies something beyond this par­tic­u­lar set of dramatic incidents. In act 1, scene 5, the letter tells



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Lady Macbeth what has tran­spired with the Witches, but every­t hing about its use points to the f­ uture—­a fact well in keeping with the transmission of prophecy. Boaden explic­itly indicates that the entire drive t­ oward a foreseen ­f uture was made manifest in Siddons’s first appearance with the letter: The first scene of Lady Macbeth is decisive of the ­whole character. She lets out in a few lines the daring steadiness of her mind, which could be disturbed by no scruple, intimidated by no danger. The occasion does not change the nature ­here, as it does in her husband. ­There is no strug­gle a­ fter any virtue to be resigned. She is as thoroughly prepared in one moment, as if visions of greatness had long informed her slumbers; and she had awaked to meditate upon e­ very means, however dreadful, that could secure her object. When Mrs. Siddons came on with the letter from Macbeth . . . ​ such was the impression from her form, her face, her deportment—­ the distinction of sex was only external—­“ her spirits” informed the tenement with the apathy of a demon . . . ​She read the w ­ hole letter with the greatest skill, and, ­after an instant of reflection, exclaimed— Glamis thou are, and Cawdor—­and SHALT BE What thou art promised. The amazing burst of energy upon the words shalt be, perfectly electrified the ­house. The determination seemed as uncontrollable as fate itself.25 Boaden’s analy­sis attends closely to the way futurity is enacted in her speech, but I would contend further that the movement from past to ­f uture is distributed across two distinct yet related gestures being enacted by each of Siddons’s hands. All of the visual repre­sen­ta­tions of the scene show her seizing the letter with her left hand and pressing it to her breast—­t he significance is clear, she has fully internalized the prophetic narrative that ­will destroy her husband and herself. But the other hand is no less impor­tant for it mimics the actions to come. Richard Westall’s Lady Macbeth in the Letter Scene gives a hand reaching out of the picture plane, grasping the hilt of an invisible dagger (Figure 2.6). George Harlow’s Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth would at first appear to be less aggressive—­t he right hand is b ­ ehind her twisted body—­but the pose is remarkably active: That right hand is at its back-­most extension and is about to be propelled forward (Figure 2.7). The dagger is not yet being

Figure  2.6. James Parker, ­after Richard Westall, Lady Macbeth in the Letter Scene, engraving (1800). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 2.7. Charles Rolls, ­after George Harlow, Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, engraving (1829). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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grasped, but it ­will emerge if this figure keeps on moving and of course it does when we next see Lady Macbeth in act 2, scene 1. The incorporation of the message from the letter generates a desire for the very object that w ­ ill make Macbeth into “what thou art promised.” And I think we can see how this scrambles Boaden’s “distinction of sex,” b ­ ecause as Siddons draws the letter to her breast with one hand, the other hand figures forth her husband’s dagger: the letter’s narrated past activates desire in her body for the per­for­ mance of her husband’s actions that crucially we w ­ ill never see. Siddons’s own body performs a bridging function from thought to action, from w ­ oman to man, from past prophecy to f­ uture scene, and for that reason she is “electrifying” beyond her delivery of the lines. Regardless of the compositional strategies deployed by ­t hese paint­ers to register Lady Macbeth’s violent phantasmatic desires in her right hand, Siddons’s hold on the letter—­both the intensity of her grasp and the crucial need to press it to her breast—­describe a relation to the past, to what has already occurred. This is no small ­matter ­because what has occurred contains the seeds of what is to come. For audience members brought up on the Garrick-­ Pritchard Macbeth that which is to come means only one t­ hing and that is the stunning confrontation between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth over the daggers in act 2, scene 1.26 This was, according to all accounts, the emotional zenith of this famous e­ arlier production. H ­ ere is Thomas Davies: The repre­sen­ta­t ion of this terrible part of the play, by Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard, can no more be described than I believe it can be equalled. I ­will not separate t­ hese performers, for the merits of both are transcendent. His distraction of mind and agonizing horrors ­were finely contrasted by her seeming apathy, tranquility, and confidence. The beginning of the scene a­ fter the commission of the murder was conducted in terrifying whispers. Their looks and action supplied the place of words. You heard what they spoke, but you learned more from the agitation of mind displayed in their action and deportment. The poet ­here gives only an outline to the consummate actor.—­I have done the deed!—­Didst thou not hear a noise?—­When?—­Did you not speak?—­ The dark colouring, given by the actor to t­ hese abrupt speeches, makes the new scene awful and tremendous to the auditors! The wonderful expression of heartful horror, which Garrick felt when he shewed his bloody hands, can only be conceived and described by ­those who



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saw him! The expression of “sorry sight!” is certainly not happy now. Words, which ­were highly expressive and energetic above one hundred and fifty years since, have, by length of time, lost their importance.27 What interests me h ­ ere is how Davies tracks the movement of affect from the sound of the actors’ speech to the emphatic movement of the daggers: Mrs. Pritchard’s action, before and ­after the commission of the horrid deed, was strongly characteristical; it presented an image of a mind insensible to compunction, and inflexibly bent to cruelty. When she snatched the daggers from the remorseful and irresolute Macbeth, despising the agitations of a mind unaccustomed to guilt, and alarmed at the terrors of conscience, she presented to the audience a picture of the most consummate intrepidity, in mischief. When she seized the instruments of death, and said, GIVE ME THE DAGGERS!—­her look and action cannot be described, and ­will not soon be forgotten by the surviving spectators.28 Davies’s reminiscences indicate that it was the play of Garrick’s frantic gestures and Pritchard’s resolute demand—­both in words and actions—­for the knives that crystallized the sense of horror. Knowing full well that she would have only a memory of Garrick and Pritchard to play off, I believe that Siddons learned a g­ reat deal from the movement of the daggers in this scene.29 We are fortunate to have two impor­tant renderings of the scene, both based on the 1766 production, that give a sense of how t­ hese props moved across the stage. If we look at Henry Fuseli’s Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth ­After the Murder of Duncan, we find Garrick staring in horror at the daggers in each hand with Pritchard forcefully, yet coolly, demanding the knives (Figure  2.8).30 This drawing was executed shortly ­after seeing Garrick and Pritchard perform, yet it remained the basis for his ­later prints and paintings of the scene. It is notable that over a forty-­ year span Macbeth’s pose remains constant, but that of Lady Macbeth changes to register Siddons’s intervention (Figure  2.9).31 With Johann Zoffany’s David Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in Macbeth (1768) the knives have changed hands (Figure 2.10). The distinction between two hands and one is every­thing ­here; the former signifies lack of control and incipient remorse—we could almost call this Garrick’s métier—­t he latter indicates surety but also cold

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Figure 2.8. Johann Heinrich Füssli (Henry Fuseli), Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth ­After the Murder of Duncan, black pen, black and gray wash (1766). Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings, donated by Paul Ganz, 1938.

calculation. The transit of properties maintains and consolidates the respective characters. Garrick’s per­for­mance of horror only deepens when he gives up the knives; Pritchard’s per­for­mance of resolve is only hardened.32 This stands in contrast to Siddons’s surprising h ­ andling of the daggers as rendered in Thomas Beach’s John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (1786) (Figure 2.11). ­Here we have Siddons with a dagger in each hand like Garrick in the Fuseli picture apparently exiting to the left, but the space of the picture does not afford an escape route as in Zoffany’s painting. The painting was poorly received, and Heather McPherson suggests that this was “­because it represented the most disturbing and least palatable aspect of Lady Macbeth’s character—­t he moment when she literally bloodied her hands.”33 This may be, but this d ­ idn’t seem to have prevented Fuseli’s and Zoffany’s pictures from being admired. I think ­there is something

Figure 2.9. Print a­ fter Henry Fuseli, “I have done the deed,” original drawing (1766); engraving (1804). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare L ­ ibrary.

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Figure  2.10. Johann Zoffany, David Garrick and Mrs.  Pritchard in Macbeth (1768). Garrick Club.

more at stake ­here that has to do with Garrick’s legacy. If we divide the picture in half, Siddons operates much like Garrick in the Fuseli picture and Macbeth, seemingly disengaged from his wife, is almost a mirror image of Garrick in the Zoffany picture. The painting doubly ghosts Hannah Pritchard and, in her absence, Lady Macbeth becomes a surrogate Garrick and Macbeth becomes a shadow Garrick. Substitute and shadow seem trapped in a Gothic hall of mirrors from which ­t here is no escape from the past. It is hard not to remember the feeling of being entrapped by Garrick’s legacy in the reviews of the first Siddons per­for­mances. We could argue that the Beach picture is the perfect realization of the anxiety registered at the outset of the Morning Chronicle review of 3 October  1785 with Kemble standing in for the even more disturbing Smith.



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Figure 2.11. Thomas Beach, John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth (1786). Garrick Club.

And this indicates why, I think, the picture was so poorly received, b ­ ecause Siddons had devised a way past the impasse depicted ­here, a way past Garrick’s legacy that involved an explicit break with Pritchard’s per­for­mance protocols. This picture is untrue to Siddons’s intervention in the repertoire. By taking the daggers in both hands, she was ­doing what Pritchard did not do. This literalized the desire figured in the letter scene and brought vio­lence

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into the “now” of per­for­mance. If clutching the letter to her breast was an act of retroactive anticipation, holding the daggers in separate hands was an act of realization that put the past—­both in the narrative and in the playhouse—­ behind her. And that act of realization established the logic of care that would imbue the banquet scene, for she was now drawing up some of the self-­ examination that Garrick infused into Macbeth into her portrayal of Lady Macbeth. What becomes evident ­here is that each of the key object scenes marks a par­tic­u­lar engagement with time: The letter scene is about how the ­f uture is embedded in the past, about retroactive anticipation; the dagger scene is about the realization of the pre­sent that comes with vio­lence; and the sleepwalking scene is about a very par­tic­u­lar engagement with futurity. So, when Siddons enters in act 5 with a candle, what better a stage property to be working with than something that is itself a time-­piece, a manifestation of transience. As is well known, Siddons’s most palpable repudiation of Pritchard’s per­for­ mance of the role came when she set down the candle in act 5, scene 1, so that she could use both hands to act out her guilt. Audience members immediately saw this as a refusal to monumentalize past per­for­mance protocols and thus as an implicit critique of the repertoire. Much of the discussion of this famous scene focuses on Siddons’s declared interest in somnambulism and the suggestion that setting down the candle is an act of proto-­ naturalistic acting. My sense is that this is a retroactive rationalization that does not do justice to what tran­spired. Siddons first enters holding the candle and then sets it down; this is crucial, for it rehearses Pritchard before leaving her ­behind. It feints ­toward adherence to the repertoire and then breaks ­toward the ­f uture. All of Siddons’s innovations in this role revolve around her ­handling of props. We have already seen how intensely the reception of the 1785 Macbeth was linked to feelings of loss, and particularly to the loss of actors. In the face of actors’ mortality, properties survive. The daggers wielded by Garrick and disposed of by Pritchard in the 1760s may well have been the same objects handled by Siddons in the 1780s—­t here is a remarkable resemblance across the visual rec­ord. But a candle is a peculiar prop in that it mimics the movement t­ oward death, the movement away from liveness. It can never be carried over from show to show; it is distilled transience. Setting it down liberates the player from both the repetition of the repertoire and the finality it portends.34 At a moment in which the past is haunting the pre­sent so insistently, and in such an unresolved fashion, could we not suggest that what was needed



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was a certain untimeliness, a movement away from “busy memory” and the sense of time winding down? I think we can perceive a similar untimeliness in Siddons’s hands in Reynolds’s painting of the tragic muse that I ­will take up in the next chapter. ­These hands dwell in possibility. With possibility, of course, comes uncertainty. It is this sense of uncertainty about pre­sent per­for­mance that animated Sheridan’s attempt to change Siddons’s most extravagant departure from prior per­for­mance protocols in the sleepwalking scene. ­Here is Siddons’s account as presented in Thomas Campbell’s Life of Mrs. Siddons: It was with the utmost diffidence, nay, terror, that I undertook it, and with the additional fear of Mrs. Pritchard’s reputation in it before my eyes. The dreaded first night at length arrived, when, just as I had finished my toilet, and was pondering with fearfulness my first appearance in the g­ rand fiendish part, comes Mr. Sheridan, knocking at my door, and insisting, in spite of all my entreaties not to be interrupted at this to me tremendous moment, to be admitted. He would not be denied admittance; for he protested he must speak to me on a circumstance which so deeply concerned my own interest, that it was of the most serious nature. Well, ­after much squabbling, I was compelled to admit him, that I might dismiss him the sooner, and compose myself before the play began. But, what was my distress and astonishment, when I found that he wanted me, even at this moment of anxiety and terror, to adopt another mode of acting the sleeping scene. He told me he had heard with the greatest surprise and concern that I meant to act it without holding the candle in my hand; and, when I urged the impracticability of washing out the “damned spot,” with the vehemence that was certainly implied by both her own words and by ­t hose of her gentlewoman, he insisted, that if I did put the candle out of my hand, it would be thought a presumptuous innovation, as Mrs.  Pritchard had always retained it in hers. My mind, however, was made up, and it was then too late to make me alter it; for it was too agitated to adopt another method. My deference for Mr. Sheridan’s taste and judgment was, however, so ­great, that, had he proposed the alteration while it was pos­si­ble for me to change my own plan, I should have yielded to his suggestion; though, even then, it would have been against my own opinion, and my observation of the accuracy with which somnambulists perform all

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the acts of waking persons. The scene, of course, was acted as I had myself conceived it; and the innovation, as Mr. Sheridan called it, was received with approbation. Mr. Sheridan himself came to me, ­after the play, and most ingenuously congratulated me on my obstinacy.35 As an explicit affront to Pritchard and to the repertoire, Sheridan singled out this moment in per­for­mance for concern. What about this par­tic­u­lar scene generated such fear in Sheridan? Clearly, his fear is that the audience would not accept such a deviation from past per­for­mances. But such a deviation was inevitable—­both Pritchard and Garrick w ­ ere gone—so Siddons recognized all too well that mere repetition was also not a v­ iable option for it would merely reinscribe what was missing. As is well-­recorded, the deviation from Pritchard’s example instigated a dif­fer­ent kind of fear altogether. Almost ubiquitously referred to as a scene of “terror,” we might ask what distinguishes Sheridan’s fear for the audience and the audience’s ac­cep­tance of a dif­fer­ent affective register. Sheridan’s fear is that the audience w ­ ill feel too forcefully the loss of the past, that the audience w ­ ill be bereft in a time of cultural instability. What Siddons seems to have understood, and the audience seemed open to, was that such a fear could be displaced onto a pre­sent act of horror. By drawing the audience to her hands, Siddons was drawing them away from their memories. That which pertained to the past but which was felt in the pre­sent was temporarily interrupted by the contemplation of physical actions in the play­house that pointed to a potential f­ uture beyond the current cultural and social predicament. I say “potential” b ­ ecause that ­f uture could not be realized ­until an adequate Macbeth could be found and the play could be brought back within the generic protocols of tragedy. ­After Siddons’s first per­for­mance, Macbeth played in a generic space just adjacent to that normally held by tragedy. Each ensuing per­for­mance was an experiment of sorts in which history slowly found its genre and which genre slowly approached its historical function. We could see Siddons’s lingering desire in her “Remarks” for the play to be Lady Macbeth’s tragedy as a belated response to generic discomfort generated by t­ hese early per­for­mances. That such a “solution” shifts attention away from the dramatic usurpation of sovereign power to focus on the frustration and perverse migration of maternal attachment, on the horrors of barrenness, means that in Siddons’s hands Macbeth could be envisioned as a biopo­liti­cal tragedy. We could be more precise ­here and suggest that tragedy inheres in the pos­si­ble divergence between sovereign power and biopo­liti­cal power; this si­mul­ta­neously



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positions biopolitics as other to sovereignty—­t hat is, it can never be fully sovereign—­and indicates that both forms of power are mutually transformed by the emergence of biopower. Siddons’s remarks allow for this retroactive reading and allow us to see why the 1785 Macbeth is so historically impor­tant, but at the time the press’s recurrent meditations on this performative experiment addressed this issue by focusing on Macbeth’s masculinity. ­These concerns are crystallized by a very revealing critical debate regarding Macbeth’s character.36 We already have a sense of the press’s concerns with Smith’s per­for­mance and the newspapers ­w ill have a ­g reat deal to say about Macbeth’s character when Kemble permanently assumes the role in 1788, but in the interim Kemble was prompted to offer his thoughts on the character by a pamphlet by Thomas Whately. In Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare (1785), Whately offered what amounted to a comparative close reading of Macbeth and Richard III in order to delineate between two dif­fer­ent tragic forms of masculinity. Carefully navigating his way through the play, Whately shows how Macbeth’s “sensibility,” “tenderness,” and “natu­ral timidity” are overcome by ambition.37 Macbeth’s interactions with the Witches and with Lady Macbeth are crucial to this act of overcoming and thus to his treason. For Whately, it is precisely the many equivocal moments where Macbeth has to overcome his “constitutional timidity” with “acquired courage” that reveal his tragic complexity.38 With a rather weak Macbeth on stage at this moment, Whately was building an argument that seemed to integrate masculine inefficacy into the part. I would argue further that, since Smith was widely held to be imitating Garrick, Whately’s reading was sanctioned by Garrick’s per­for­mances in the role. This argument is subtly presented, yet it prompted an unsubtle response from Kemble who declared in no uncertain terms that Whately had impugned Macbeth’s courage and, by extension, his masculinity. Employing Whately’s own tendency to deploy textual evidence, Kemble’s Macbeth Reconsidered, an Essay Intended as an Answer to Part of the Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare (1786) quotes extensively from act 1, scene 2, where Macbeth is introduced by the Sergeant as a fearsome fighter.39 For Kemble, Macbeth’s reputation as a warrior is decisive, therefore any suggestion of his cowardice is incoherent. It is a singularly unconvincing argument ­because it fails to account for the reservations, equivocations, and regrets that Whately so carefully tracks through the remaining acts. What interests me h ­ ere is that Kemble felt it necessary to defend Macbeth’s courage but had to rely on the

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fleeting report of a minor, military character. Kemble puts forth a version of the play that not only was not being performed at this historical moment but also had not been performed for some time.40 Martial masculinity was everywhere in tatters, and from what we can glean from reports of Smith’s per­for­mances, ­t here was ­little hope for martial courage from that quarter. Garrick’s Macbeth was hardly the epitome of courage; Smith’s even less so. Kemble seems to be yearning for a Macbeth suitable to the kind of per­ for­mance his ­sister was instantiating. That Macbeth is one of unrestrained ambition mobilized by husband and wife, but it would be rendered historically anodyne by being ever more forcefully placed in the past. As we ­will see, Kemble’s assertion of masculine authority in an era of suspect masculinity came at a cost, for it had to be contained in the mists of stage historicism. Kemble’s desire, like that expressed in the reviews, was grounded on a historical lack, first, of a v­ iable Macbeth and, second, of a per­for­mance of tragedy adequate to the times. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s diagnosis of Britain’s cultural predicament from as early as 1778 remained operative.

Martial Tragedy: Masculine Efficacy and the 1788 Macbeth That diagnostic argument reached its interim conclusion ten years ­later, in the fall of 1788, when John Philip Kemble permanently replaced Smith in the role of Macbeth. Kemble had played the role opposite Siddons intermittently since March  1785, but now that he was managing Drury Lane Theatre he was able to stage the play according to his view of the script. Significant changes to design and costuming, as well as the introduction of highly choreographed ­battle scenes contributed to an integrated ­whole.41 Kemble’s Macbeth was far more martial than e­ ither Smith’s or Garrick’s. This in itself is instructive, for his most impor­tant interventions in the play had to do with costume and gesture. Unlike his pre­de­ces­sors, Kemble entered wearing a tartan sash, si­mul­ta­neously signaling his ethnicity and his chronological and geo­g raph­i­cal distance from present-­day London. “Historical” costuming placed the play in the past thus allowing Siddons’s unsettling of masculinity and Kemble’s undecidable accession to martial prowess to unfold without activating recent memories of loss and imperial humiliation. For rather dif­fer­ent reasons, this historical distancing would be increasingly impor­tant in the 1790s when post-­American anx­i­eties would be subsumed into the cultural b ­ attles instantiated by the French Revolution.



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Without strong markers of historical displacement, regicide would become all but unplayable.42 The reviews ­were rapturous and yet oddly still contending with memories of the repertoire: The Stage, last night, did all that the Stage can do, Intellectual or Moral; to expand the Mind, to purify the Heart. All excellencies ­were indeed combined—­t he BEST POET’S BEST PLAY, with the BEST PLAYING in the World! The Art, we fear, can go no further—­In Macbeth, it certainly never has gone so far. As Mrs.  PRITCHARD was not so well as Mrs. SIDDONS, we do not in least hesitate to say, KEMBLE is better than GARRICK. If it be asked how? We answer readily, and as we think truly, in ­every requisite—of Look, of Deportment, of Imagination, of Judgment, Passion—in short—of Effect. If it be asked where?—­again we answer—in the Dagger scene; yet more, much more in the BANQUET—­but in the Fifth Act, most of all. (W, 17 October 1788) It is notable that the World is still judging the play according to memories of Pritchard and Garrick. The Morning Chronicle was also laudatory and singled out the same scenes for praise but ridiculed the critic in the World for preferring Siddons and Kemble to Pritchard and Garrick. A similar reassertion of Pritchard’s and Garrick’s pre­ce­dence is declared in Hester Thrale’s journal: “Kemble is an agreable [sic] Actor, a very sensible & pleasing Man, I love him & his charming ­Sister sincerely, but have more Sense than to take them for Garrick & Mrs. Pritchard—’Tis a Shame even to hear them compared. Mrs. Pritchard was incomparable, her Merit overbore the want of Figure, her Intelligence pervaded ­every Sense.”43 The longevity of this comparative engagement is remarkable and suggests that many audience members found themselves constantly assessing the fact of historical change through the repertoire. This somewhat strange b ­ attle between past and pre­sent Macbeth’s at Drury Lane in many ways continued the debate between Whately and Kemble b ­ ecause the criticisms of Kemble, although very minor, turned on his excessive activity and on his singular declamation of some of the speeches. The Gazetteer is particularly cutting:

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On Mr.  Kemble’s Macbeth the public have de­cided.—­Not having organ for so g­ reat a part, it is throughout a piece of artful management; in which he husbands his powers, and ingeniously recurs to the exercise of legs and arms, that the eye might be filled if not the ear. His nice readings of some brief passages had beauty, and perhaps truth. They tickled the ear at least, if they did not always satisfy the judgment. We ­were dissatisfied even to disgust with the manner in which he delivered the short speech on the death of Lady Macbeth, “To-­morrow, and to-­morrow, and to-­morrow.” On his third to-­morrow he bounded like a Harlequin, and the speaking of the w ­ hole speech was described by himself in the last line; “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In what word or letter of this sober moralizing descant on life he can find argument for his rant, we know not. We think, in such a character, Mr. Kemble should covet to be calm where he might be so. (GNDA, 17 October 1788) This harsh reproval is precisely at odds with the World’s praise: “and the last of the three To-­morrows, in obvious spleen and scorn. As ­every word in the context verifies—­Creeping in a petty pace—­and Fools lighted even by Yesterdays” (W, 17 October 1788). What Kemble did with that third to-­morrow was notable in part b ­ ecause it was singular and in part b ­ ecause it was divisive. Unlike Siddons’s intervention in the sleepwalking scene, which seemed to draw the audience to her, Kemble’s divagation from his pre­de­ces­sors turned them into factions. As we ­will see in ­later chapters, this was to become a hallmark of Kemble’s practice. At this moment in 1788, even ­those critical of Kemble saw him as an improvement on Smith, but the simultaneous satisfaction and dissatisfaction generated by his per­for­mance may have less to do with his acting than with the audience’s uneven response to martial masculinity at this historical moment.44 As I have argued with regard to Reynolds’s martial portraiture in the late phases of the war, the equation of martial masculinity with sobriety, good judgment, and virtuous courage was not a s­ imple proposition.45 ­There ­were too many notorious examples of the failures in masculine efficacy lurking about the play­house as well as the public memory of the war years. Martial masculinity itself was still precariously unstable and thus susceptible to quite radically dif­fer­ent interpretations. For the critic at the World, Kemble’s per­ for­mance in act 5 was the pinnacle of tragic acting; for the critic at the



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Gazetteer, the same acting seemed more suitable to pantomime. For the former, the desire for martial efficacy was mirrored by the latter’s skepticism regarding its fulfillment. That both judgments are registered in terms of the fulfillment or contravention of generic expectations is the most impor­tant observation h ­ ere, for it shows the degree to which Siddons’s per­for­mance continued to raise the question of genre at the very moment that Kemble’s per­ for­mance strove to resolve the conundrum posed by her sublime contravention of it. By zeroing in on Macbeth’s soliloquy a­ fter the death of Lady Macbeth, the Gazetteer is urgently asking the question, “Is this player suitable to the part?” ­because this is the question posed by Siddons herself. Can Kemble stand on his own? Can the play be brought back to Macbeth? The answer is clearly no, ­because even the most positive reviews see them as a pair. This perfectly suits Kemble’s reading of the play—­every­t hing in the play coalesces around shared ambition for Kemble—­but it ­doesn’t answer the lingering questions posed by Whately. What are we to make of Macbeth’s sensibility, his timidity, his tenderness? For Whately, ­t hese characteristics, and Macbeth’s attempts to keep them in check, render him susceptible to the prophecy of the Weird ­Sisters and his wife’s admonitions. Whately sees the play’s generic integrity as inseparable from the vicissitudes of fractured masculinity. Could we not suggest that in a world where martial masculinity was in crisis that Whately’s reading of the part—­and, by extension, Garrick’s past per­for­mance of it—­was akin to tweaking a raw nerve? How e­ lse to make sense of Kemble’s emphasis on bodily fortitude in print and per­for­mance? Certainly, an athletic, martial Macbeth would put both Whately’s and Garrick’s interpretations of the character in abeyance, and thus open the way forward to a new equilibrium. The prob­lem is that the forceful assertion of power can at times look like overcompensation. The reviewer for the Gazetteer may have a point when he suggests that “Mr. Kemble should covet to be calm where he might be so,” for at the key moment in act 5 with Lady Macbeth offstage dead, and thus Siddons fully nonpresent, Kemble had the chance to be still and allow the full import of Shakespeare’s words and thus the overall significance of Macbeth’s tragedy itself to be registered (GNDA, 17 October 1788). He had the opportunity to enact tragic, fractured masculinity in a fashion that would fully capture the world-­weariness of the post-­ American era. That some audience members ­were willing to find this in his sheer mobility suggests that the contours of a new kind of tragic masculinity w ­ ere beginning to inhere—­a kind of mercurial hero for a new age. But, significantly, that man would not be Kemble; it would be Edmund Kean.

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Kemble was admired in Macbeth, but it remained Siddons’s show both in its immediate reception and in the memories of ­t hose who wrote about the play in the nineteenth c­ entury. Boaden and Campbell barely mention Kemble in Macbeth. In ­t hose parts where Kemble came to the fore, such as Coriolanus and Cato, he developed a style of statuesque gravitas; stillness would come to be his métier. We ­will be looking at Coriolanus in Chapter 4 and Cato in my conclusion to this book, but in order to fully assess the intensity of the discomfort activated by Siddons one needs to look past this moment of productive conflict/détente in Macbeth to its rather strange remediation in the following years.

Macbeth’s Sword: No Siddons, Not Now Shortly ­after Kemble permanently took over the role of Macbeth, the newspapers w ­ ere celebrating the opening of Alderman Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Henry Fuseli’s painting of Macbeth and Banquo’s encounter with the Witches in act 1, scene 2, was unveiled when the gallery opened in 1789 (Figure 2.12). Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery was a complex multimedia endeavor. It was both a collection of paintings of famous scenes from Shakespeare to be exhibited in commercial spaces at 52 Pall Mall and a vast scheme to sell engravings, both bound and unbound, based on the paintings. The importance of Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery has recently come into focus through the efforts of Rosie Dias, Janine Barchas, and Thora Brylowe.46 As Luisa Calè has argued with regard to Fuseli’s equally impor­tant Milton Gallery, t­ hese proj­ects remediated the cultural patrimony in symptomatic ways, and their impact on how the public read Shakespeare and Milton was profound.47 The question of reading is impor­tant b ­ ecause the artists working for Boydell, both paint­ers and engravers, ­were given a very specific remit. Boydell appears to have assigned scenes to the artists and the repre­sen­ta­tions of the plays ­were not to be based on per­for­mance but rather on readings of textual se­lections. The bound versions of the engravings that ­were sold by subscription paired images with textual excerpts. Likewise, the cata­logs sold at the exhibition provided the text for each picture. Part of the impetus ­here was to avoid theatrical portraiture, and thus to develop a cultural identity for Boydell’s proj­ect that was separate from that of the patent theaters. This allowed the artists commissioned by Boydell greater license with the scripts and opened up room for repre­sen­ta­tions of the plays that w ­ ere not constrained by the physical



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Figure 2.12. James Caldwell, ­after Henry Fuseli, The Witches Appear to Macbeth and Banquo, engraving (1798). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

limitations of the play­house. Th ­ ere emerged a rather paradoxical situation in which the pictures aspired to a kind of supra-­t heatricality in the very act of distancing themselves from specific per­for­mances. In numerous statements regarding the gallery, Boydell emphasized that the paint­ers and engravers ­were imaginatively rendering the fictional world conjured not by the repertoire but by the archive.48 That said, it is difficult to imagine that the repertoire played no role in the paint­erly decisions, even if they took the form of negation. A complex understanding of the repertoire requires that we not simply look for verisimilitude—­t hat is, for embedded portraits—­a lthough, as we w ­ ill see in Chapter 4, some likenesses made their way into the Boydell images. The paintings also need to be understood in relation to the memory of per­for­mance. That both Fuseli and, l­ater, Reynolds focused their attention on the encounters

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between Macbeth and the Witches is intriguing.49 A survey of the newspaper reviews of Macbeth per­for­mances from the mid-­century onward indicates a per­sis­tent dissatisfaction with the repre­sen­ta­tion of the Weird ­Sisters on stage (MC, 1 January 1789). B ­ ecause the Witches w ­ ere often played by men, t­ here are frequent remarks on the unsuitability of their costumes that reflects an increasingly common critical position that actually presenting the Witches was a lapse in and of itself. This discomfort with their otherworldliness, w ­ hether arising from the difficulty of making it work in per­for­mance or from a sense that the audience did not need them to be literalized for the tragedy to operate, is nowhere evident in Fuseli’s and Reynolds’s pictures.50 In fact, their pictorial decisions embrace precisely t­ hose aspects of the Witches’ “presence” that most challenge stage effect. In Fuseli, the Witches come at Macbeth and Banquo—­and, by extension, the viewer—­from above, from the sky and thus exceed the capacities of the h ­ uman. Their movement through space becomes a figure for their capacity to travel through time: Their prophecy is given a pictorial analog. Reynolds’s picture keeps the Witches firmly on the ground but chooses to manipulate light in a fashion that allows the otherworldly to permeate pictorial space (Figure 2.13). Light in Reynolds’s painting does not come from any one coherent source but rather seems to illuminate regions of the painting as though the Witches and the visions that crowd the scene are themselves glowing. It seems an obvious point, but Fuseli, through composition, and Reynolds, through light, do what could not be done on the stage without provoking ridicule. This supplementation of the real is, of course, apt. Shakespeare’s text calls for it—­and for many this was a defect—­but it comes with a dif­fer­ent supplemental gesture, one that reveals a rather dif­fer­ent discomfort with the play. As Karen Junod argues, Fuseli transforms Macbeth into an epic hero and tilts the entire scene ­toward the sublime. Working from Fuseli’s own anonymous account of his painting in the Analytical Review and his theorization of epic in his writings, she demonstrates both “Fuseli’s intention to elevate Shakespeare to the pantheon of epic poets” and that “the movere of dramatic invention is abandoned in favour of the ‘astonishment’ of a sublime or epic painting.”51 That Fuseli was aspiring to the sublimity of epic is evident: This is a sublime scene and the figure of Macbeth uncommonly ­grand: a character too g­ reat to be daunted by an extraordinary event betrays no sign of fear or even astonishment; the slumbering fire of ambition is roused, and the firmly-­nerved hand of power raised to command



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Figure 2.13. Robert Thew, ­after Sir Joshua Reynolds, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I, a Dark Cave, engraving (1802). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

t­ hose to stay and say more, from whom a dastard would have fled. At this moment only one passion agitated the soul of Macbeth: a daring hope was laboring for birth in a shape he had but a glimpse of; as the ­bubbles melted into air, in a moment, he reflected, undisturbed by jarring emotions, and darted ­towards his ­future grandeur. The figure and attitude of Banquo appear rather strained and inferior to the rest of the composition, which, like the stupendous feature in nature, seizes the ­whole mind, and produces the concentrated calm of admiration, instead of the vari­ous dilated pleas­ur­able sensations which arise from contemplating grace and beauty.52 The heavi­ly Burkean language implies that this Macbeth has l­ ittle to do with sensibility; and the contrast with Banquo rehearses Kemble’s refutation of

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Whately’s suggestion that Macbeth is scared of his friend and rival. Remember that ­t hese w ­ ere the very terms on which the debate regarding Macbeth’s masculinity was being staged. But Fuseli, in both his composition and his description of it, makes one t­ hing evident. This vision of Macbeth as epic hero separates him from the realm of tragedy; he is as otherworldly as the Witches that come at him out of the sky. Furthermore, the classicizing nakedness of Macbeth and Banquo separates them from the pre­sent, ­whether that is conceived as the historical time of the play or the time of viewing the picture in 52 Pall Mall. As Junod aptly states, “They do not refer specifically to the dramatis personae of the play but represent any h ­ uman individual. They acquire a universal, time-­transcending dimension.”53 Fuseli’s anachronism, if we can call it that, tells us something about Kemble’s theorization of the role ­because his hypostatization of martial valor partakes of precisely this contravention of genre and history. By hyper-­ masculinizing Macbeth, both Fuseli and Kemble are transforming tragedy into epic, from a genre that explores the complex weakness of subjectivity to one that consolidates masculine heroism. D ­ oing so required Fuseli to fully re-­territorialize the role, to locate it in some general stormy landscape populated by vaguely ancient heroes. Kemble’s decision to historically locate the play in the Gothic past, to give it the physical signs of ancient Scottishness, partakes of a similar reinscription. This is necessary both ­because Siddons’s avowed sublimity in the role of Lady Macbeth instantiated a desire for a similarly sublime Macbeth and b ­ ecause culturally Britain was searching for some kind of fantasy through which masculine efficacy could be reconsolidated. We can read Fuseli’s painting as a response to the desire activated by Siddons’s per­for­mance: a masculine sublimity that could match her own. And what Fuseli’s painting allows us to see in all its stark power, is that that desire was for an epic, not a tragic Macbeth, for a Macbeth that was not Macbeth at all. That Fuseli is, in a sense, providing what Kemble theorized but could never enact is all the more telling ­because it folds all of this complex realignment of the cultural patrimony into a widespread recalibration of masculinity that also surfaces in Fuseli’s influential depiction of Satan in the Milton Gallery, but which also animates much of Byron’s engagement with epic repre­sen­ta­tion twenty years ­later. This is nowhere more palpable than in the painting/engraving’s central “props.” Macbeth and Banquo’s broadswords, which are even more central to Fuseli’s drawings for act 4, scene 1, are decidedly not the daggers of regicide that captivated the play’s audiences and w ­ ere so crucial to Siddons’s preparatory



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work for the role of Lady Macbeth. In contrast to the transit of the knives in act 2, scene 1, Fuseli’s blades h ­ ere are securely handled. Macbeth’s grasp of the hilt is a metonym for martial valor, but directing the vio­lence at the phantasms before him is a complex gesture. Does it signify fear or re­sis­tance to the otherworldly or a combination of the two? The suggestion that he is trying to keep the otherworldly at bay is significantly at odds with Macbeth’s ac­cep­tance of their prophetic words. As Mary Jacobus argues, this complex negotiation between the real and the unreal becomes the play’s key legacy for William Words­worth, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and other Romantic authors.54 But equally significant, I think, is the degree to which the picture shifts attention away from Siddons’s virtuoso manipulation of stage objects to the pictorial repre­sen­ta­tion of swords in masculine hands. That said, it is apparent that Siddons is h ­ ere. Although Lady Macbeth is not represented in Fuseli’s painting, it captures well what must have passed through her mind when she reads the letter in act 2, scene 1. In that sense, it is a repre­sen­ta­tion of Lady Macbeth’s phantasmatic investments. ­There is ample evidence of her disappointment that her husband is not an epic hero in the Homeric or Fuselian mold but a mere man. But I think this decision to leave Lady Macbeth out of it is not incidental, nor a m ­ atter of mere coincidence. As we have seen, Lady Macbeth, as manifested by Sarah Siddons—­ and by Hannah Pritchard, for that m ­ atter—­was deeply unsettling to fantasies of masculine efficacy. In the case of Siddons, the script’s own focus on Macbeth’s manhood and the ongoing sense that irresolution was central to British failure in Amer­i­ca generated a mutually reinforcing crisis at the core of the play. That crisis precipitated remarkable aesthetic and po­liti­cal effects. A form of performative sublimity altered what audiences believed was pos­si­ble on the stage and yet this very sublimity seemed to generate corresponding fantasies of masculinity and imperial power that far exceeded any form of po­liti­cal experience on the ground. In short, Fuseli’s painting shows just how far national fantasy was willing to extend in order to accommodate Siddons’s performative intervention. But crucially, that fantasy of reattaining masculine authority could only be articulated through her exclusion from the scene. I have already suggested that Fuseli’s picture would seem to correspond to Lady Macbeth’s ideal version of her husband, thus our place before the picture is curiously also hers—­perhaps the most intense homage Fuseli could have made to her per­for­mance. To invest in the epic Macbeth is to identify with him in spite of knowing full well what that did to Lady Macbeth. Although the Boydell paintings ­were not supposed to represent par­tic­u ­lar

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performers, it seems to me that Siddons established the very conditions of possibility explored h ­ ere and thus she, although very much alive, haunts the scene of exhibition much as Pritchard haunted her own engagement with the repertoire.

The Historical Vitrine: Kemble’s 1794 Macbeth By any mea­sure, Kemble’s production of Macbeth in the spring of 1794 in the new, vastly enlarged Drury Lane Theatre was a major event in British theater history. As numerous commentators have stated, the expansion of the play­house had a demonstrable effect on acting, dramaturgy, and sociability in the patent theaters.55 The intimacy that was so crucial for the affective needs of the repertoire was increasingly a ­thing of the past. The production was also a watershed of sorts for the staging of Shakespeare and for the interpretation of this play in par­tic­u­lar. None of this significance was lost on the press. Extensive notices about the reopening of the theater on 21 April 1794 filled the papers. ­After the opening-­night reviews, which I ­will turn to shortly, a lively debate ensued about Kemble’s specific innovations. This was the first time that Banquo’s ghost did not appear in the banquet scene: no doubt responding to long-­standing critical objections to having Banquo haunt the scene covered in white powder. Kemble, playing Macbeth, responded to the ghost as if it ­were solely a construction of his imagination. This was a significant divergence not only from the script but also from the history of the play’s per­for­ mance.56 Whereas the past embodiment of the ghost allowed the audience to “see” Banquo much as Macbeth did, this new, more “psychological” interpretation forcefully excluded the audience from Macbeth’s perspective. Like the other guests at the banquet, the audience was now a witness to, not a participant in, Macbeth’s delusion. This was a significant distancing of the audience from the character that made Macbeth the object of the audience’s scrutiny rather than of their identification. Paradoxically, most of the reviews in ­favor of this change argued that it was a more accurate portrayal of Macbeth’s interiority. A strong separation emerged between watching psychic unrest and being drawn into its orbit. The latter was seen as improbable, thus implying that the audience and Macbeth existed at separate poles of subjectification. This is an impor­tant observation for two reasons. First, this moment of distancing is actually symptomatic of the entire production. As we ­will see,



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the show’s spectacular design was not only seen as another significant innovation but also explic­itly understood as a form of interference that separated the audience from the script and thus from the affective core of tragedy. Second, the show’s overall commitment to distancing worked at cross purposes to Siddons’s continuing virtuosity in the role of Lady Macbeth. As we have seen, her specific innovations in the role brought the audience closer to her interior life to maximize the affective connection between audience and performer. I have argued that this destabilized the play’s generic protocols and ­will argue that Kemble’s 1794 production’s distancing effects ­were activated in order to dialectically control or counterbalance the sublimity of Siddons’s per­for­mance.57 This production met Siddons’s per­for­mance of sublimity with sublime scenographic effects. Set design and painting w ­ ere called upon to keep the affective repercussions of Siddons’s per­for­mance in a box. That this design could only be realized in the vastly expanded Drury Lane Theatre gives some sense of the magnitude of Siddons’s interventions. This pre­sents a curious situation for the repertoire itself b ­ ecause no other actor had so powerfully mobilized the intimacy of the ­house itself in her theorization and per­for­mance of her most impor­tant roles. Audiences accustomed to experiencing Siddons in, say, 1782 or 1785 would have found both her and their own memories of her affective powers alienated in this space, literally encased in a vitrine. And that condition of encasement, I would contend, forced audiences to interact with their own memories of the repertoire in an almost museum-­like fashion. Before returning to the larger question of distancing, I want to pursue this comparison of theater and museum further b ­ ecause the conditions of viewing the artifact in a museum setting have such a palpable effect on how the artifact is interpreted.58 What is so striking h ­ ere is that the “artifact” is a repeated set of per­for­mances, ones that had been fully integrated into the memories of the culture. It has long been a truism of theater history that the space of the theater is itself a signifying regime that physically impinges on per­for­mance at the most basic level. Opening the new Drury Lane gave Kemble the chance not only to inaugurate a new set of per­for­mance and reception protocols but also to realize a tendency in his own interpretation of the repertoire that had been steadily accelerating in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Kemble had experimented with introducing vast pro­cessions and tableaux into a range of tragedies and history plays, but the 1794 Macbeth marked the full convergence of tragedy and spectacle. This was widely recognized at the time and not entirely welcome. As the opening-­night reviews indicate,

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nearly all of the reviewers are thrilled by the new theater and they all praise the set designs, but many of them declare that Macbeth does not need this spectacular casing, that, in fact, the play is diminished by this supplement. And yet, one of the most singular aspects of this show is the highly detailed account of this visual supplement. As Joseph Donohue discussed many years ago, the papers carefully listed the scenes and attributed them to specific scene paint­ers: 1. The Drop Curtain.—­An Inner Court of a Palace with dome and rotunda in perspective, by MALTON. 2. A Heath. 3. Inside view of the Palace at Fores.—­A very fine Gothic apartment by EDWARDS. 4. The Blasted Heath, with Bridge, &c.—­GREENWOOD. 5. Inner Apartment of MACBETH’S ­ Castle at Inverness.—­ GREENWOOD. 6. Outside view of the ­ Castle at Inverness—­ GREENWOOD and ­CATTON. 7. Inner Court at Inverness. 8. Banquetting Room.—­The decorations, &c. by Mr. JOHNSON. 9. The Cave—­Moonlight and Eclipse.—­GREENWOOD. 10. A Park and Lawn.—­GREENWOOD. 11. Birnam Wood.—­GREENWOOD and CATTON. 12. Gothic Apartment at Dunsinane.—­M ALTON and CAPON. (W, 22 April 1794) The descriptions are reminiscent of the kind of list associated with a pantomime like Omai (1785), where the paintings themselves constitute an exhibition of sorts. In Omai, the vari­ous scenes and properties directly corresponded to drawings of Cook’s second voyage and artifacts in the Leverian Museum. ­There was an ethnographic and geo­graph­i­cal imperative ­behind de Loutherbourg’s designs. A similar ethnographic imperative emerges in the reception of the scene painting for the 1794 Macbeth. Suddenly, the paintings and, to an even larger degree, the costumes are being mea­sured against an ostensibly shared knowledge of the Scottish past. Kemble, for instance, was widely praised for the fact that his costume was that of a medieval Scot. This sense of Scottishness was, of course, a fantasy, but it is impor­tant to recognize its historical significance. In much the same way that Johannes Fabian has



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argued about the ethnographic gaze in general, the design of the 1794 Macbeth firmly placed the play in the distant past, effectively short-­circuiting its connection to the pre­sent. For audiences used to reading topical references into the repertoire, this was an extremely significant gesture. At a time when, to use John Barrell’s phrase, “imagining the King’s death” was a national obsession, separating Macbeth’s explicit enactment of and meditation on regicide from the pre­sent moment was crucial.59 One could argue that the vast expense laid out for scene painting was part of a strategy to keep the most impor­tant play in the repertoire playable in a time of renewed po­liti­cal crisis. The scenographic decisions constitute a form of po­liti­cal inoculation. The degree to which the production met ­t hese prophylactic needs is a ­matter of some contention. Could painting ever contain Siddons? Or, more pointedly, could spectacle contain the memories of Siddons in the more intimate space of the now-­m issing Drury Lane of the 1780s? Or would ­Kemble’s efforts only magnify what was gone and thus amplify Siddons’s interventions in the Shakespearean repertoire? That this is staged by the press first as a contest between painting and acting is, I think, significant ­because the sublime operates differently in each medium. H ­ ere is the reviewer for the Oracle and Public Advertiser: THE SCENERY.—­And ­here we beg the Man­ag­er to pause; and before he pursues to any extent the new system, consult the feelings of the ­PEOPLE. If the perpetual curtain is not even ludicrous to ­every sensible man in the ­house, then we have most knavishly misinterpreted our neighbours. They are all exceedingly well painted—­Though, as is usual, anticipation had outrun real­ ity. The GOTHIC Scenery was the best infinitely—­t he borders and wings particularly. (OPA, 22 April 1794) Across the press ­there is a sense that the scenery, however well executed, does not activate the sublime; it did not “seize the w ­ hole mind” or generate “fear and terror.” Th ­ ese qualities are reserved for Siddons’s acting, thus we are presented with a curiously failed dialectic. Siddons carries on as she had been since 1785, transforming violent sorrow into modern ecstasy; Kemble’s redesign of the production encases her per­for­mance with ­g rand scenographic strategies that nonetheless fall short of their aesthetic ambition. It is for this reason that their magnificence is both registered and then relegated

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to the realm of interference or, worse, distraction (as the above remarks on the curtain indicate). But even for t­ hose audience members who eschewed the new staging, its effect was decisive. Siddons would not be seen in Macbeth in dif­fer­ent circumstances ­until much ­later, ­either when she would be ­doing staged readings or when her powers ­were much diminished.60 This means that the Lady Macbeth that was so crucial to the post-­American repertoire and for the l­ ater contemplation of regicide in Words­worth’s The Prelude was always already mediated ­either through the dynamic forces of memory or the more static reminiscences that derived much of their authority from con­temporary sources who saw Siddons perform. W ­ hether encased in her b ­ rother’s custom-­ made vitrine or enclosed in the memories of audience members, one of the most power­f ul cultural practices of the late eigh­teenth ­century was firmly fixed in a way that rendered it susceptible to commentary, reflection, distortion, and remediation in ways that other, equally vital, performative interventions did not. Siddons’s haunting presence in The Prelude is prob­ ably the most obvious case in point, but t­ here is ample proof that her impact on the repertoire outlived the new Drury Lane Theatre itself.

CHAPTER 3

Thalia Inter Alia The Biopo­liti­cal Turn in Post-­American Comedy

Chapters  1 and 2 argued for Siddons’s singular importance to the post-­ American mediascape, but I would contend that our appreciation of her intervention is only increased by a consideration of Dorothy Jordan’s work in comedy over the same period. Over a two-­year span, Jordan and Siddons brought the theatrical system, at least at Drury Lane, into balance. And this complementarity was achieved according to a remarkably similar itinerary. Both Siddons and Jordan perfected much of their art in the provinces, but, more impor­tant, their initial successes w ­ ere in adaptations of post-­Restoration plays. Jordan’s practice during this time frame transformed comedy into a vital conduit for thinking through the ruination of masculinity that would be picked up by Kemble’s fascination with the ruins of the republican state when he took over management of Drury Lane in the fall of 1788. Surprisingly, Jordan and Kemble w ­ ere exploring coeval ruinations, and the internal link between ­t hese two manifestations of decay becomes vis­i­ble through an explicit analy­sis of the affective vibrations of the repertoire, of the way that the pre­sent activated, obviated, or shut down memories of past per­for­mance. Chapter 2 specifically argued that Siddons’s interventions w ­ ere attuned to memories of Hannah Pritchard’s per­for­mances of Lady Macbeth. But, as Fiona Ritchie has argued, Pritchard’s legacy extends well beyond tragedy to the most famous roles in Shakespearean comedy. Her Viola and Rosalind ­were performative touchstones for Jordan’s adoption of ­these roles in 1785 and 1787, respectively. As Ritchie states, “In following Pritchard’s ­career si­mul­ta­ neously, with Siddons taking on her Lady Macbeth and Jordan her breeches parts, the two actresses ­were perceived as dividing their pre­de­ces­sor’s skill in tragedy and comedy. We might, then, see t­ hese two late-­eighteenth-­century

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actresses as part of the pro­cess Joseph Roach has termed surrogation, the attempt by subsequent generations to fill ‘­actual or perceived vacancies . . . ​in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric’ left by the death or departure of the pre­de­ces­sors, a pro­cess he claims ‘rarely if ever succeeds’ ” (134). If we ­were to put this schematically, it would appear that the London stage prior to the War of American In­de­pen­dence was graced with two performers, Pritchard and Garrick, who w ­ ere equally skilled in tragedy and comedy; indeed, it was this ambidextrous quality that made them so outstanding to con­temporary observers.1 During and a­ fter the war, t­ here w ­ ere no players who w ­ ere considered in this way. Frances “Fanny” Abington is closely associated with comedy only; Dorothy “Dora” Jordan, although ­v iable in some tragic roles and herself inclined to play what Ritchie terms “plaintive” parts, attained fame in the 1780s in a series of breeches parts. Kristina Straub and, more recently, Ula Lukszo Klein and Helen E. M. Brooks have begun to unpack the complexity of both breeches roles and travesty per­for­mance in the eigh­teenth ­century. My interest lies in specifying the relationship between travesty and history at a moment when masculinity was u ­ nder intense scrutiny.2 To do so requires that we think not only about Jordan’s relation to Pritchard and Siddons but also to Abington and Peg Woffington, for both actresses ­were very much associated with po­liti­cal crisis and travesty, respectively. It also requires that we attend closely to the fate of post-­Restoration comedy, particularly to the plays of George Farquhar, in the 1780s. As we ­will see, the relationship between ­women and comedy is deeply productive at this moment and affords us some of the most valuable perspectives on the post-­ American situation. The complex re­orientation of middling sexuality in the wake of imperial humiliation was first enacted within a series of comedies once thought out of step with the times. Jordan’s meteoric rise to fame in The Country Girl (Garrick’s adaptation of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife), Farquhar’s The Constant C ­ ouple, The Romp (Lynch’s adaptation of Isaac Bickerstaffe’s Love in the City), Colley Cibber’s To Have and Have Not, and, to a lesser degree, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and As You Like It looks remarkably similar to Siddons’s untimely reactivation of post-­Restoration she-­tragedy. With Frances Abington reprising her key roles of the war years at Covent Garden, Jordan, like Siddons, activated a dormant part of the repertoire in order to address pressing historical prob­lems—­namely, the crisis in post-­American masculinity, moral concern regarding elite sociability, and the lack of confidence in aristocratic governance.



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Jordan’s resuscitation of this part of the repertoire was very much in dialogue with Abington’s complex maneuvers to maintain the commercial and moral viability of “elegant lady” parts, for which she was widely celebrated. Thus, a significant portion of this chapter ­w ill be looking closely at how Abington tried to ward off not only the emergence of a new rival in comedy but also the consolidation of a new form of social power grounded in the class-­based deployment of reproductive sexuality. This ­w ill require a careful assessment of how travesty operated both in Jordan’s overall practice and in one very auspicious benefit per­for­mance of Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem by Fanny Abington. Navigating our way through this rich thicket of unstable gender and class per­for­mance gives a clear sense of the kind of social work that comedy always engages in, but I would argue that the complexity of the rivalry between Jordan and Abington speaks volumes about the urgency of the social insecurities plaguing the post-­American repertoire.

Desire and the Form of “­Woman” In 1786, John Hoppner exhibited his allegorical painting of Mrs. Jordan in the character of the Comic Muse, supported by Euphrosne [sic], who represses the advances of a satyr at the Royal Acad­emy (RA) Exhibition (Figure 3.1). At 238.8 × 146.1 cm (roughly 8 feet by 5 feet), Hoppner’s picture matched the scale, if not the quality, of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (Figure 3.2).3 To understand the import of the inclusion of Hoppner’s painting in the exhibition, we need to consider briefly how Reynolds’s picture engages with the feelings of historical loss and cultural disjunction that suffused all media in the mid-1780s. This sense of the picture as a specifically historical intervention resonates with reviews of the 1784 Royal Acad­emy exhibition where it was first exhibited. Most of the newspapers review the exhibition by genre—­portraits are compared to portraits, landscapes to landscapes, and so on—­but the Public Advertiser for 28 April 1784, ­after a long discussion of Benjamin West’s paintings for the Royal Chapel at Windsor ­Castle, suddenly states: “Among the Historical Pieces may very fairly be reckoned the two following by Sir Joshua Reynolds, viz. No. 177, a Nymph and Cupid; and No. 190, a Whole-­Length Portrait of Mrs. Siddons.” This was not an incidental or passing denomination. James Boaden’s retrospective consideration of the monumental Siddons portrait turns to none

Figure 3.1. John Hoppner, Mrs. Jordan in the character of the Comic Muse, supported by Euphrosne [sic], who represses the advances of a satyr, oil on canvas (1784). Royal Collection Trust.

Figure 3.2. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, oil on canvas (1783–84). Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

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other than Edmund Burke to argue that it accedes to the condition of history painting. Ventriloquizing Burke, he states that in portrait painting [Reynolds] . . . ​communicated to that description of the art, in which the En­glish artists are the most engaged, a variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches. His portraits remind the spectator of the invention of history, and amenity of landscape. In painting portraits, he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend to it from a higher sphere.” Mr. Burke inspected the pro­gress of this picture with his characteristic ardour, and with a SIC AD AS­TRA, pronounced it to be the noblest portrait that he had ever seen of any age.4 ­ ere are numerous accounts both in private correspondence and in the Th press that ­people ­were anticipating this picture, anticipating a reckoning with the past. In part to fill a vacuum left when controversy over the hang meant that Thomas Gainsborough and ­others did not exhibit, Reynolds contributed sixteen pictures to the exhibition.5 Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse garnered ubiquitous praise as did the aforementioned Nymph and Cupid; but the other three paintings of note w ­ ere Reynolds’s famous portrait of the Prince of Wales with his Horse, a three-­quarter-­length portrait of Charles James Fox perfectly timed for the fractious Westminster election, and a small, but highly regarded portrait of Fanny Abington (Figure 3.3). As numerous commentators remarked, the portraits of the prince and Fox ­were perfectly attuned to the unsettled state of domestic politics, but the Siddons-­Abington pair is of no less historical import. Indeed, the London Chronicle devoted equal time to both pictures, declaring the former “a most sublime and masterly per­for­mance, and undoubtedly one of the very best that ever was produced by Sir Joshua” before arguing that Reynolds’s merit lies in the fact that he can be “said to paint the Mind” (LC, 27–29 April 1784 [416]). To elaborate on this point, the exhibition review turns not to The Tragic Muse but to the diminutive Abington canvas: “[Sir Joshua] has the peculiar distinction of giving character to likeness.—­He “embodies thought,” and draws into the features of the face the lineaments of the mind. Who that looks on the portrait of Mrs. Abingdon, does not immediately trace the Muse of Comedy! The witching smile, the fascinating air, the rogu­ish eye, the seductive blandishments of Thalia, are all most critically pictured in her accomplished representative”



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Figure 3.3. ­After Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Abington as Roxolana, engraving (1783–84). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

(LC, 29 April–1 May 1784 [421]). For the reviewer of the London Chronicle, Reynolds was exhibiting Thalia and Melpomene albeit on radically dif­fer­ent scales.6 One could argue that scalar difference testifies to a moment of cultural uncertainty. As Gillian Russell has argued, Abington’s fame is inextricably bound to the war years when her ascendance in comedy was secured whereas Siddons is the emergent force of a new era.7 Furthermore, Abington’s per­for­mances had to be contained within the precincts of distraction and thus Reynolds’s painting seduces the viewer—it is an accomplished diversion. Siddons’s exhausting, emotional per­for­mances required a dif­fer­ent kind of remediation, one that transmitted the sense of despair that characterized the specific repertoire she was reviving. That the Abington and Siddons pictures w ­ ere an asymmetrical pendant pair may not be apparent to modern viewers, but it would certainly have had

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purchase for the original viewers of the RA show.8 Both pictures w ­ ere the subject of advance scrutiny in the press. Prior to the 1783 Royal Acad­emy exhibition, the Morning Herald complained that Reynolds “has not contributed with his usual liberality to the value of the pre­sent exhibition. He has even withheld from the collection a very in­ter­est­ing portrait of Mrs. Abington in the character of the slave in The Sultan (Mannings 1.56). Abington had made the role of Roxolana famous on the verge of the American War, but this is not Abington in 1775. All through December 1782 and January 1783, she was reviving Roxolana at Covent Garden: precisely the period when Siddons was consolidating her hold on The Fair Penitent and Venice Preserv’d. We know from Reynolds’s correspondence that the Siddons picture was begun shortly ­after the opening of the 1783 Royal Acad­emy Exhibition, at the earliest late April but more likely early May, and it was the subject of ongoing commentary right up to its exhibition the following spring. In this light, it is as if Hoppner w ­ ere taking Reynolds’s initial asymmetrical pendant pair of Abington and Siddons and altering both subject and scale of Thalia to indicate not only equivalence but also succession. Hoppner was boldly displacing Abington and heralding the emergence of a new Thalia no less than a new era. In d ­ oing so, Hoppner was getting ahead of himself in more ways than one.9 The 1785–86 season was remarkable by any standards. The advent of Siddons’s Lady Macbeth sent shock waves through the culture that would resonate for years to come. Words­worth would still be wrangling with her legacy in the 1805 Prelude; Hazlitt was still trying to pro­cess what she had done well ­after she had left the stage. But, in terms of immediate impact on the repertoire, an equally complex strug­gle was underway between Abington and Jordan about the nature of comedy and the power of celebrity in the patent ­houses. And that strug­gle involved two mutually constitutive issues: first, the viability of e­ arlier scripts in the post-­American milieu, and, second, the relationship between costume, gender, and the performing body in an era of shifting sexual norms. In 1785, two surprising comedies ­were revived ­after a long absence from the stage that would become the mainstay of Drury Lane’s repertoire for the de­cade. Farquhar’s The Constant C ­ ouple had not been performed since 15 April  1763 when it was remounted at Covent Garden in March 1785. The play was ineluctably associated with Peg Woffington’s per­ for­mance of Sir Harry Wildair in travesty in the 1740s and 1750s, but in the postwar per­for­mances Wildair was played by William Lewis. Jordan would accede to that same role at Drury Lane in 1788, but by that time she was already well established as a breeches performer.



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On 18 October 1785, Jordan appeared for the first time at Drury Lane as Miss Peggy in The Country Girl. Garrick’s adaptation of Wycherley’s The Country Wife suppressed much of the sexual and moral edge of the original but retained a crucial scene of cross-­dressing in act 3. The play had not been performed in that theater for twelve years and apparently Jordan lobbied hard for the role.10 The Country Girl would become one of the most performed plays in ­either patent theater for the next ten years and Jordan’s most famous part. In November, as if following a natu­ral unnatural progression, she made her first appearance as Viola in Twelfth Night to similar acclaim. ­There w ­ ere concerns in the press that the actress who embodied Miss Peggy’s simplicity in The Country Girl “was not calculated to deliver the delicate sentiments of Shakespeare’s amiable Viola,” but, as the same paper reported, “her per­for­ mance, which was at once chast[e], correct, and animated, added to a perfect knowledge of the author, she spoke with a degree of feeling that excited admiration, and demanded applause” (MH, 12 November  1785).11 In the 1785–86 season, Jordan played Peggy and Viola fourteen and eleven times, respectively. Add to that thirty-­five per­for­mances as Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp, T. A. Lloyd’s adaptation of Bickerstaffe’s Love in the City; seven per­ for­mances as Miss Hoyden in A Trip to Scarborough, Sheridan’s adaptation of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse; and five per­for­mances as Hyppolita in Cibber’s To Have and Have Not, and it was clear that Drury Lane was staking a large wager on the turn of Jordan’s calf.12 Abington’s 1785–86 season was no less notable. She was still commanding large audiences at Covent Garden in an intriguing roster of plays that hearkened back to her dominance of the stage during the 1770s. Her first appearance, on 5 October, was by command of their majesties as Charlotte Rusport in The West Indian. As I have argued elsewhere, Cumberland’s play was regularly commanded by George III during the War of American In­de­ pen­dence to shore up a fantasy of empire that was being shredded before his eyes.13 Its prominence in the war­time repertoire as a form of wishful thinking would have made it nostalgic at best in the postwar years. That it focused on Britain’s remaining colonial possessions in the Ca­rib­bean meant that, like the massive public cele­brations for Admiral Rodney’s face-­saving victory at Les Saintes in the final year of the war, the play could divert attention away from global loss to a vestige of imperial continuity. A similar set of historical resonances was activated in Abington’s second per­for­mance of the season on 10 October. Lady Bab Lardoon from John Burgoyne’s The Maid of the Oaks was one of Abington’s most famous roles and it was her primary vehicle

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throughout the season. It allowed her to showcase two aspects of her femininity—­t he knowing ­woman of fashion who masquerades as the ingenuous country girl—­a nd this was crucial to her success b ­ ecause, as Felicity Nussbaum and Gillian Russell have shown, much of her celebrity had to do with her mastery not only of wit on stage, but also of the fashion system in the Town.14 Abington’s repeated per­for­mances in The Maid of the Oaks throughout the 1785–86 season is curious. Although it shames Francophilic masculinity, the play itself was the subject of censure for its deployment of ostensibly French innovations in ­music and dance.15 Its patriotism, and that of Burgoyne’s fête champêtre which it reenacts, ­were impugned before the war and must have been even more strange in the wake of Burgoyne’s disastrous loss at Saratoga and Britain’s final failure at Yorktown. How do we read the resilience of The Maid of the Oaks in the repertoire? One could argue that, as with The West Indian, which was also repeated throughout the season, audiences could engage in a form of denial that was especially potent for being located in the plays most closely associated with the failed prosecution of the war. It is as though Abington’s celebrity would be enough to force a disjunction between culture and history and thus f­ ree up comedy from the affective predicament of the postwar era. Abington’s celebrity had the power to beat back visceral feelings of loss and humiliation in the very scripts most likely to activate ­t hese emotions. It was the ultimate declaration of Thalia’s autonomy. Significantly, Abington’s other roles in the 1785–86—­Estifania in John Fletcher’s To Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Charlotte in The Hypocrite, Clarinda in Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband, Mrs. Sullen in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, and Lady Sadlife in Cibber’s The Double Gallant—­were all parts that she had performed at Drury Lane following Hannah Pritchard’s retirement. In that sense, the roles are surrogative in that they continue and commemorate her ascendancy in comedy, but for Abington watchers the se­lection of parts is telling. Neither of her most famous roles, Prue in Love for Love or Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal, ­were on offer at Covent Garden. Both roles, but especially the latter, defined theatrical experience during the war years. Congreve’s Love for Love was inextricably tied to Abington’s condensation of fashion and theatrical per­for­mance; The School for Scandal was, of course, integral to Sheridan’s theatrical critique of imperial policy and fash­ion­able life.16 ­Because Abington was trying to maintain her celebrity in the wake of the war, both plays posed a significant prob­lem for her per­for­mance of material femininity. As the critique of the fash­ion­able



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world gained traction in the mid-1780s, casting Abington as Prue or Lady Teazle would have generated a performative contradiction: her celebrity was inextricable from her status as fashion icon, but ­t hese plays forcefully link excessive consumption to the cultural decay that had ostensibly undermined the British war effort.17 Even though The West Indian and The Maid of the Oaks raised significant historical and generic questions, appearing as Charlotte and Lady Bab Lardoon was paradoxically less of a prob­lem b ­ ecause both characters direct their actions t­ oward reforming errant masculinity, w ­ hether it be colonial “impulsiveness” in the case of Belcour, or Francophile dissipation in the case of Dupely.18 One could argue that it was precisely this correction that was not effected during the war that led to catastrophe; thus, continuing t­ hese plays a­ fter the war allows for a consideration of the road not taken. In this context, Abington’s other 1785–86 roles all ironically cast her as w ­ omen who have been passed over or rendered pathetic by a sex-­ gender system caught in varying degrees of libertinage or dissipation. Taken as a ­whole, Abington was enacting a form of femininity in line with increasingly mainstream critiques of fash­ion­able society while at the same time maintaining her status as a fashion icon.19 Walking this fine line required a very careful and considered engagement with the repertoire. What it required above all was Roxolana. The power­f ul, headstrong En­ glish captive in Bickerstaffe’s The Sultan was, a­ fter Lady Teazle, arguably Abington’s most celebrated role. It is the role Reynolds painted her in for his portrait of her as the Comic Muse in 1783–84 and she played the role repeatedly in 1785–86, sometimes on nights when Siddons was playing Lady Macbeth, thus bringing the pendant pair of the 1784 Royal Acad­emy exhibition to life. Roxolana is at once irreverent, hilarious, and the embodiment of ethnocentric En­glishness. B ­ ecause it was one of the most nationalist roles in the repertoire, it is easy to see why it would continue to appeal in an era when nationalism was on shaky footing.20 But, most impor­tant, Roxolana’s En­ glishness is consolidated by shaming and ultimately reforming the dissipated Sultan of the play’s title. The deployment of racial difference ­here is significant. By shifting the self-­consolidating other from France to the generalized fantasy of the Orient, the play maintained the critique of dissipation so crucial to the attack on fash­ion­able life but distanced itself from the specter of French enmity and French fashion.21 With e­ very per­for­mance of The Sultan, Abington could both suppress disturbing memories of France’s active part in American decolonization and mystify Abington’s significant sartorial investment in French dress. This double suppression and mystification

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was as impor­tant to her hold on Thalia’s mask as ­were her demonstrable performative skills. This contention allows us to return to Jordan’s per­for­mances in the 1785– 86 season with more specificity b ­ ecause her meteoric rise as Miss Peggy in The Country Girl and Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp also engaged with the repertoire in quite specific ways. Both adaptations took scripts that w ­ ere deemed morally unsuitable for the mid-­century stage and made them playable again. A careful reading of The Country Girl indicates how it could be folded into an emergent biopo­liti­cal definition of the middling ranks; and The Romp affords an opportunity to recognize the racialization of class relations that attends this biopo­liti­cal turn. The preface to the edition of The Country Girl that lists Jordan as Miss Peggy makes two related declarations that turn on figural and literal legs. First, its description of Garrick’s adaptation states that “the usual taint of the time in which [Wycherley] wrote had so infected the ­whole mass, that Mr. Garrick found himself reduced to the necessity of lopping off a limb (Horner) to save the w ­ hole from putrefaction.”22 Garrick’s version does indeed eliminate Horner and thus elides his strategy of pretending to be impotent to gain adulterous access to the wives of all his acquaintances. Libertine and eunuch, predatory and emasculated, Horner condenses the extremes of heterosexual masculinity into one unacceptable figure. Doubly toxic, he must be negated or satirized; Garrick chose the former strategy, but Horner’s most unsettling characteristics become all the more vis­i­ble in other characters in the play. Horner’s impotence is subsumed into Sparkish’s foppish stupidity and is thus doubly ridiculed; but dealing with the more aggressive aspects of heterosexual desire proved to be more decisive for the adaptation. Garrick restructured the Pinchwife/Margery relationship from husband and wife to guardian (Moody) and young charge (Miss Peggy), thus Miss Peggy’s break away from Moody’s jealous imprisonment of her is not adulterous; rather, it is an escape from quasi-­paternal/matrimonial tyranny. Significantly, Garrick does not tone down the threat posed by Moody; he retains the notorious threat to cut Peggy’s face with a penknife and brings the conflict between Moody and Miss Peggy to the point of attempted murder. In this regard, Moody embodies Horner’s predatory qualities. Contained in this fashion, the play suppresses the notion that Horner’s libertine qualities could be desirable to w ­ omen, and it does so by making Moody’s desires inseparable from physical aggression. It is Peggy’s quick wittedness, along with her servant Lucy’s enabling advice and her lover’s sentimental commitment that allows her both to shame



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Moody and to attain conjugal happiness as Belville’s wife. At the play’s end, she would seem to transcend both country innocence and city stratagem: she emerges ­free of the taint of cosmopolitan worldliness that Wycherley implies is Margery’s ­f uture.23 And the play does so by introducing a form of masculinity as distant from Moody’s bellicosity as it is from Sparkish’s effeminacy. Belville, conspicuously uninterested in Miss Peggy’s fortune, figures for a type of middling masculinity that was not only unavailable to Wycherley but also the normative rejoinder to the failed forms of masculinity associated with the war years.24 Garrick’s shifting of the play’s sexual economy was consistent with shifts within the British sex-­gender system in the mid-1760s,25 but the play gained an added po­liti­cal and historical resonance ­after Jordan took on the role and I would argue that it was her way of embodying Miss Peggy that brought Garrick’s script so forcefully to the pre­ sent moment. Chopping off the gangrenous Horner-­limb focuses all of the play’s attention on the health of Miss Peggy’s limbs in act 3. The entire idea of adopting men’s clothes as a way of hiding Miss Peggy in plain sight is transferred from the third act in Wycherley to the end of act 2. Lucy suggests to Moody that Peggy wear his godson’s clothes so that she can see the sights: Peg. And so s­ hall I too, Lucy, I’ll put’em on directly [­Going, returns.] Suppose, Bud, I must keep on my petticoats for fear of shewing my legs. Moody. No, no, you fool, never mind your legs. Peg. No more, I w ­ ill then, Bud—­This is pure. [Exit. Rejoiced.] (2.2.35) A lovely piece of meta-­t heatrical commentary on Garrick’s part ­because the assertion that “this is pure” addresses the very predicament posed by adapting Wycherley’s script. Audiences familiar with the original would have been well aware that the famous Exchange scene where Horner dis­appears with Margery, who Pinchwife has dressed as a young man, only to return her to her husband bearing a basket of oranges, signaled that Pinchwife had been cuckolded. As with the “China scene” (4.3), Wycherley had made very clear that leaving the stage with Horner in The Country Wife was to have sex with him. Garrick’s adaptation would use this same on-­stage/offstage device to secure the reputation of the Country Girl—­both character and play—­for Miss Peggy is constantly in view. Garrick relocates the entire act to St. James’s Park

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and for all but a fleeting moment Miss Peggy, dressed in breeches and white stockings, comes on and off stage with Moody and his ­sister Althea.26 Harcourt and Belville kiss Miss Peggy repeatedly ­after the “French-­style”—­t hat is, as a male salutation. At the very end of act 3, scene 1, it is Moody who goes offstage and thus allows the disguised Miss Peggy and Belville to leave. Moody returns to find them gone, but the scene quickly shifts to find Belville professing his love to Miss Peggy. In other words, Margery’s offstage sexual dalliance with Horner is replaced by Peggy’s on-­stage eroticization. In fact, it is her very presence on stage in breeches, the visibility of her legs, that testifies to her feminine “purity.” As Brooks argues, Peggy’s failure to perform masculinity—no one is fooled but every­one goes along with the fiction to torment Moody—­means that adopting breeches amplifies her femininity.27 In a complex re-­territorialization, bodily display, which had ­until this time signified consumption and extramarital accessibility, now signified non-­consummation and the attenuation of desire. Indeed, act 3, scene 2, concludes with Peggy si­mul­ta­neously resisting Belville’s immediate plan for elopement and encouraging him to displace Moody as her ­f uture husband in some more legitimate fashion. As the preface to the reprint of Garrick’s adaptation states, “The excellence of Mrs.  Jordan in the Country Girl is so power­ful—­every girlish trick so minutely and naturally delineated, that we pronounce to be her chef d’ oeuvre, and as­suredly the boast of modern acting.”28 Accordingly, the press was at pains to state that Garrick’s adaptation would not “wound the ear of modesty” and thus was suitable for the ladies, for it “shews the virtuous their own features, and exposes the foibles and absurdities of an old guardian in a very ridicu­lous manner” (MC, 18 October 1785; MP, 19 October 1785). But the fact that the press had to assert this before the play’s re­introduction to the stage meant that Garrick’s version, for all its hygienic imperative, did not inhabit the repertoire ­free from moral concern. The following remark from the St. James’s Chronicle is typical: “[Jordan in the role of Miss Peggy] is agreeable, lively, playful; and her Simplicity does not seem to be the forced Grimace of a Mind experienced in the License and Artifice of coquettish Intrigue” (SJC, 18–20 October 1785).29 This is why all of the reviews of Jordan’s early per­for­mances as Miss Peggy touch on her rectitude. The most extensive review comes from the Morning Post and it is worth quoting at length to look at how it keeps the question of her body in play and at bay: “Her person and manner are adapted for representing the peculiarities of youthful innocence and frivolity. . . . ​The author has blended in the character an affected simplicity with a commendable discernment; and



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Mrs. Jordan pourtrayed his ideas with a vivacity and colouring that arrested the attention, and drew reiterated bursts of applause from a polite and crowded audience. In the Park and letter scenes, she gave testimonies of uncommon merit; and ­t hose parts of the play ­were conducted without the least apparent embarrassment” (MP, 19 October 1785). The letter scene in act 4 is where, ­under the explicit threat of vio­lence from Moody, Peggy is forced to write a letter to Belville denouncing him forever. But, as with the scene in the park, Peggy takes advantage of Moody’s movement offstage to write a letter testifying to her love that her guardian ­will then take to her beloved. The paper foregrounds the two scenes in the play where Peggy’s erotic potential is left in plain sight for the audience while her guardian’s ability to read her is obscured e­ ither by his absence or his vio­lence. The paradoxical disclosure of Peggy’s “purity” through her breeches is matched by a similar reversal of impropriety in the letter scene. Just as Moody forced her into pants, so too does he force her into the disreputable act of writing to Belville. But Jordan’s per­ for­mance turns what is essentially an act of erotic agency into concern for Belville’s feelings and good manners. The latter is coded into not only her commentary on the rudeness of the manner of address dictated for her by her guardian but also her repudiation of his example. The need to rewrite The Country Wife would seem obvious, but it is impor­ tant to recognize further that Bickerstaffe’s Love in the City had also been publicly censured for its immorality thirteen years before its revival as The Romp in the 1785–86 season. For all her success in The Country Girl, Jordan was even more popu­lar in The Romp, so she is receiving universal praise in two plays that operate just on the near side of respectability. She appears to have devised a way of coming to that line without ever crossing it and the reviews are at pains to emphasize that nothing untoward was happening. Her fa­cil­i­t y with inhabiting this morally ambiguous zone is marked by a similar ambiguity in her gender pre­sen­ta­tion. H ­ ere is the Public Advertiser’s most extensive discussion of her per­for­mance of masculinity: Mrs. Jordan’s per­for­mance of the Romp is certainly one of the most complete pieces of comic acting that has ever been exhibited to the town.—­Indeed, if this Priscilla Tomboy continues gaining upon our good opinion at this rate, we scarce know where her ambition may end. For a w ­ oman to assume the male garment with propriety, requires a symmetry of person and perfection of shape, which our modern confined fashions w ­ ill scarce permit any ­woman to enjoy.—­Mrs.  Jordan

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fortunately is an exception to this observation; for to a careless easy manner she excites the most perfect elegance of form; so that while we admire the actress, we are equally captivated by the w ­ oman. (PA, 29 November 1785) The precision of this observation is notable. The implicit suggestion is that for a ­woman “to assume the male garment with propriety” relies on the “symmetry” and “perfection” of her body that is all but impossible to achieve ­because of female fashion’s reliance on stays and other artificial contrivances aimed at constructing a feminine shape. Th ­ ese ele­ments of fash­ion­able dress are implicitly associated with Abington, and the critic is at pains to indicate that Jordan is an exception to this rule: she assumes the male garment with propriety in spite of her body’s lack of symmetry and perfection of shape. Her “perfect elegance of form” is a function of her “careless easy manner” and it is this far more transient quality, her bodily deportment as it ­were, that marks the emergence of a new style of femininity. This easy manner si­mul­ta­neously evokes “admiration” for the actress and “captivation” with the ­woman. The act of admiration seems clearly directed at her masculine imposture; but what does “­woman” mean ­here and what is so captivating about her? “­Woman” clearly has the connotation of embodiment, but I think the distinction being made has to do with the difference between idealization—­and hence artifice—­ and a much more corporeal sense of her performing body. This is the earliest indication that Jordan was captivating her audience with a fantasy of natu­ral femininity.30 Within the context of the productive rivalry between Jordan and Abington, her breeches parts countered Abington’s manifestation of fash­ion­able aristocratic femininity both on and off the stage with the disclosure of the female body itself as a mystified sign of natu­ral “ease.” That this disclosure should be effected in “male garment” indicates precisely how tight Abington’s hold on material femininity had been and would be. Jordan’s engagement with masculinity provided an ave­nue for articulating a dif­fer­ent set of feminine norms whose value lay in the immaterial qualities of naturalness, ease, and mobility, which are often associated in her per­for­mances with speed, “sprightliness,” and action as opposed to Abington’s beauty, elegance, and wit. But Jordan’s innovation in t­ hese parts was contending with more than Abington’s clear and pre­sent rivalry. She was also differentiating herself from the prior example of Peg Woffington’s more earthy adoption of male dress. Woffington’s travesty roles w ­ ere all about displaying the symmetry and perfection of her shape. Having famously risen from the



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lower ranks, she was not only associated with but also embraced charges of impropriety and sexual license.31 I ­will return to the legacy of Woffington’s per­for­mance as Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant ­Couple ­later in this chapter, but for the moment it is enough to recognize that Jordan was navigating between the Scylla of Woffington and the Charybdis of Abington to find her way to a new mode of femininity suitable to the post-­American era. We’ve already seen how she steered clear of the dangerous shoals of Abington’s fashionability, but no less impor­tant was her careful distancing from Woffington’s adoption of the masculine traits of the female soldier. As Felicity Nussbaum has demonstrated, Woffington’s adoption of male dress was crucial to her per­for­mance of anti-­Jacobite patriotism.32 Calling out an e­ arlier instance of collusion with France, Woffington’s female soldiers, often featured in prologues and epilogues, directly challenged the masculinity of her male audience members. The complexity of breeches parts has every­t hing to do with the history of male bodies. Marcia Pointon summarizes the situation as follows: “­Until the advent of trousers, the shape of men’s legs was hard to disguise. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men wore breeches or trunk hose that ended well above the knee and revealed large expanses of stocking clad leg. As Susan Vincent remarks, b ­ ecause ‘sartorially speaking, only men had legs, the bifurcated clothing that covered them w ­ ere the defining garments of gender.’ In the eigh­teenth ­century, when the three-­piece suit was ­adopted and cavaliers boots discarded, it was men’s calves that ­were on display. Stockings w ­ ere, therefore, an essential accessory.”33 In this light, to adopt breeches and stockings paradoxically draws attention to the artifice of gender distinction ­because in fact most or all h ­ umans have legs. Pointon’s key recognition is that within eighteenth-­century portraiture stockings are crucial indicators of masculine privilege, of rank, and ultimately of racial superiority.34 ­Women in breeches had the potential to destabilize ­these tenuous claims to power and, in a sense, this type of per­for­mance was contained ­either by an overt gendering of the female player or by her sexualization. As Brooks argues with re­spect to breeches roles, “Foregrounding the ‘true’ femininity of its heroine, The Country Girl therefore points to the increasing cultural conditioning of the gendered body as ‘natu­ral,’ reinforcing the alignment of gender and sex into two incommensurate bodies, and resisting the mutability of gender. By reasserting constructs of heterosexual desire and an essential femininity moreover, The Country Girl, like other breeches plays, inhabited and created an explic­itly heterosexual, normative space.”35 Travesty’s

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more complex challenge to masculine privilege was met through the hyper-­ sexualization of the travesty performer. In Woffington’s case, audiences fully ­imagined and invested in her as the object of both men’s and w ­ omen’s desire. Brooks’s strong distinction between breeches parts and travesty roles is impor­tant ­because “for audiences . . . ​it was the mutability and instability of gender identity presented by Woffington’s [travesty] per­for­mance which was so enjoyable.”36 Careful scrutiny of the reception of Jordan during her inaugural 1785–86 season at Drury Lane shows the degree to which her adoption of masculine dress was carefully disciplined to keep it at a distance from martial qualities on the one hand and any taint of sexual impropriety on the other. A concerted effort was being made in per­for­mance and in the puffs and reviews to separate her from Woffington’s legacy in travesty roles. Especially revealing is the following praise/warning from the Public Advertiser: Of the low comedy of Mrs. Jordan—­and her person at once puts other views away—of her low comedy we cannot say too much in its praise. Let her avoid an indulgence, however, in too much buffoonery.—­In a ­woman t­ hese t­ hings are only bearable by the galleries—­whose judgement is very fatal. Nothing can be more playful or pleasant than “her ­little Watt, “I’ll tell you what” Her boxing off the stage is somewhat too masculine.—­Correct this, and please the boxes—­and remember that the “chaste actress” alone can satisfy the improved taste. (PA, 5 December 1785) The Public Advertiser is concerned about her success in The Romp and suggests that she stay away from any hint of masculine activity. The brief scene of boxing was too close to violent physical prowess, and it is telling that the reviewer is presenting his objection in terms of class distinctions. To reinvoke my Homeric allegory, on one side lies the constellation of vio­ lence, sex, and bodily display that ostensibly characterized the lower order’s predilection for Woffington’s female soldiers; on the other lies the dangerously alluring blend of fashion, artifice, and wit that made Abington the embodiment of aristocratic bearing. And the Odysseus-­like Jordan was



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quickly inventing a new style of femininity that was si­mul­ta­neously shedding overt ties to sexual plea­sure and material artifice in order to enact, not embody, a style of per­for­mance suitable to the moral and economic ascendancy of the middling ­orders. In much of the discourse surrounding Jordan, this style is called “nature,” but what it r­ eally enacts is the forceful emergence of biopower. ­Under the veil of masculine garb, Jordan, who would become as famous for her extraordinary fertility as for her mirth, quickly sketched the viability of, and eventually became, the Thalia of the middling ranks. As we ­will see shortly, Abington’s extraordinary riposte to Jordan’s breeches parts in the spring of 1786 showed not only the explicit recognition of ­t hese competing styles of femininity as salient cultural signs but also just how closely Jordan’s “naturalness” was tied to an emergent sense of the middling ­orders’ “natu­ral” claims to authority. Before turning to Abington’s challenge, however, it is impor­tant to recognize that Jordan’s embodied per­for­mances of middling sexuality in The Country Girl ­were supplemented by the specifically racist per­for­mances of Priscilla Tomboy in The Romp. Priscilla is very rough edged and her “masculinity” is ineluctably tied to her creole identity. Visiting Old Cockney from the West Indies with her black “servant” Quasheba to improve her education, Priscilla is rich but far from genteel. Her lack of gentility is figured in part by her hoydenish deportment and by her explicit racism. The play’s opening scene establishes this almost immediately: Pris.  . . . ​Quasheba, get out—­I want to talk to Miss Penny alone— no, stay come back, I ­will speak before her—­But if ever I hear, hussy, that you mention a word of what I am g­ oing to say, to any one e­ lse in the h ­ ouse, I ­will have you horse-­whip’d ‘till ­t here is not a bit of flesh left on your bones. Pen. Oh, poor creature! Pris. Psha! what is she but a neger? If she was at home in our plantations, she would find the difference: “we make no account of them t­ here at all: if I had a fancy for one of their skins, I should not think much of taking it.” (1.1.8) It also marks the milieu in which she is currently traveling as the middling world of shop­keep­ers and tradespeople. Priscilla is in love with a captain named Sprightly and clearly aspires to a condition above that of the City, but his suit is rejected by her U ­ ncle Barnacle who has no patience for demobilized

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gentleman officers. ­After declaring that officers like Sprightly have already cost him too much, he threatens to marry her himself or ship her back to Jamaica.37 In the second act, Priscilla flatters Young “Watt” Cockney into ­running off with her and suggests that even if his u ­ ncle disapproves, he can always “go with me to Jamaica,” where “­we’ll live very comfortably among the negers.” But this is all a ruse; the plan is for Sprightly to abduct Priscilla and elope with her to Scotland the next day once Young Cockney has got her out of the ­house. The plan largely succeeds, but Young Cockney discovers Priscilla ensconced at the lodgings of the aunt of her friend Miss La Blond. Priscilla beats him off in the famous boxing scene referred to in the reviews and through a series of reversals U ­ ncle Barnacle eventually sanctions the marriage between Sprightly and Priscilla and decides to marry Miss La Blond instead of his charge. It would not have been lost on anyone that the play’s happy conclusion involves the u ­ nion not only of a planter’s d ­ aughter and an officer on half-­pay but also of a rich En­glish tradesman and a French milliner. What was a happy ending following the Seven Years’ War had only become more amplified in the post-­A merican situation where retention of Jamaica and restored commerce with France w ­ ere crucial ways forward. Unlike Peggy in The Country Girl, ­t here is no point in The Romp where Jordan ­adopted male clothing; her accession to masculinity takes place at the level of comportment, gesture, and countenance. And yet it is clear that ­these aspects of her character, especially during the beating of Young Cockney, revealed her legs in white stockings. Note how in this caricature of Jordan in The Romp, her “stance” is set in horizontal opposition to “­actual” masculinity in its commercial and martial manifestations and in vertical opposition to the fash­ion­able garments on the floor (Figure 3.4). To rephrase Susan Vincent’s remark, Priscilla both did and d ­ idn’t have legs: sartorially, she exists beyond the either/or gender difference. And, significantly, her escape from Young Cockney into Sprightly’s arms left the tradesman holding the long sash of her dress. This undecidability is a figure for the uncertainty inherent in creole identity. What is crucial is that the per­for­mance of whiteness in the character of Priscilla refers to and is perhaps troubled by the body of the actress. To restate the critic’s discussion of Jordan’s per­for­mance in The Romp, “While we admire the actress, we are equally captivated by the w ­ oman.” This type of statement is necessary to forestall the possibility nascent in Priscilla’s status as a creole ­woman that she may not be “white” and that the play’s conclusion, like the postwar realignment of class norms, may not be as straightforward as expected. The instability of whiteness means that The



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Figure 3.4. Rushworth, The Romp, engraving (1785). Trustees of the British ­Museum.

Romp needs The Country Girl and vice versa. And yet all of this complex racialization of class relations can only ever be discussed in relation to the per­for­mance of gender. Femininity becomes a blurry surface that occludes the dynamic interplay of emergent norms of race and class; and the celebrity female body suddenly has the capacity to absorb the affective charge of historical change.38 Aside from suggesting just how fragile notions of masculinity ­were at this juncture, it strikes me that the scrutiny of Jordan’s gender insubordination in the press indicates the degree to which Drury Lane in 1785 was engaging with the deployment of masculinity from the Garrick era in order to reconstitute some form of masculinity from its ruination during the war years. In her famous remarks on devising the role of Lady Macbeth, Siddons emphasizes that the character is the apogee of feminine grace and beauty: “In this astonishing creature one sees a ­woman in whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the characteristics of ­human nature; in whose

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composition are associated all the subjugating powers of intellect, and all the charms and graces of personal beauty. You w ­ ill prob­ably not agree with me as to the character of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion w ­ ill be entirely attributable to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging itself from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been so long accustomed to contemplate.”39 ­Here Siddons explic­itly indicates that it is memory of the repertoire, specifically Pritchard’s per­for­mance of Lady Macbeth, that prevents pre­sent audiences from “seeing” natu­ral femininity. Thus, her break with Pritchard’s per­for­mance protocols is in part aimed at resuscitating Lady Macbeth’s “feminine loveliness.” As she states, According to my notion, it is of that character which I believe is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex,—­fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile—    “Fair as in the forms that, wove in Fancy’s loom,    Float in light visions round the poet’s head.” Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth,—to seduce him to brave all the dangers of the pre­sent and all the terrors of a ­f uture world.40 Much of her innovation in the role turns on the transit from this manifestation of feminine beauty to increasingly violent acts of masculine resolve. The sleepwalking scene, among other ­t hings, returns her to a state of femininity radically dif­fer­ent from that on offer e­ ither in Pritchard’s interpretation of the role or in Abington’s per­for­mances in the other h ­ ouse. The simplicity of Siddons’s white dress in the sleepwalking scene was deeply significant, for it seemed to signal bare life.41 But, as with Jordan’s dynamic engagement with race, we have to recognize the importance of whiteness not only to Siddons’s theorization of Lady Macbeth’s transformation but also to her own accession to normative femininity. Much turns on the repeated use of “fair” in the above passage from Campbell’s Life and we need to register first the degree to which asserting Lady Macbeth’s fairness and her femininity was an audacious or



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counterintuitive move at this moment. For Siddons, this was a break with the repertoire. Pritchard and her pre­de­ces­sors w ­ ere unquestionably white actresses, but Siddons h ­ ere is emphasizing that t­ here is a link between fairness, femininity, fragility, and her own manifestation of tragedy that makes her white in a dif­fer­ent way. The citation does impor­tant work h ­ ere b ­ ecause it appears to align her with some past script, but it appears that it is Siddons’s own verse.42 We need to consider that Siddons is saying that she is “fair” in ways that actresses before her ­were not. She famously requested that Reynolds “not heighten that tone of complexion so exquisitely accordant with the chilling and deeply concentrated musing of Pale Melancholy” and, according to numerous accounts, she was extraordinarily proud or sensitive about the whiteness of her skin, forcefully abjuring any suggestion that she wore make-­up.43 Indeed, it is difficult to think of another portrait in which the sitter’s whiteness is so much a function of the brownness of the rest of the canvas. Heather McPherson has written extensively on Siddons’s “tragic pallor” and on many points I agree with her analy­sis, but I would suggest that Siddons’s self-­fashioning, her very engagement with “fair” femininity cannot be easily separated from emergent biopo­liti­cal discourses that deploy “brownness” to align whiteness with h ­ uman normativity. Jordan’s engagement with masculinity is in some ways similar, for her 1785 roles start with the per­for­mance of feminine simplicity and then proceed, through the adoption of male attire, to disclose a form of natu­ral femininity that is strikingly complementary to what Siddons was fashioning in act 5, scene 1, of Macbeth. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that both Siddons and Jordan would eventually be so closely linked to maternality, both on stage and in life. In the post-­American milieu, the referential relation between the “pallor” or the “colouring” of the character and the whiteness of the actress becomes an active performative trope. In this regard, Jordan’s im­mense success in The Country Girl comes into focus. Just as Siddons was engaging with Pritchard’s legacy, Jordan was confronting Garrick’s complex regulation of sexuality in Wycherley’s play. Unlike Margery’s explicit fascination with the worldliness of the Town, Garrick’s adaptation promulgates a nativist fantasy of En­glishness rooted in country innocence. Jordan’s strong advocacy for this role and her instant success in the part revealed that t­ hese nationalist overtones remained portable even a­ fter the American War. Unlike Woffington’s travesty, which linked gender ambiguity to patriotism, Jordan’s modification of Peggy’s part in The Country Girl—­a part at one time performed by Abington—­used masculine dress as a

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way to naturalize gender normativity and nationalist fantasy. This may sound paradoxical, but Jordan’s cross-­dressing was aimed at displaying her body not as something to be consumed but rather as something that produces a new set of social relations. The national overtones of Garrick’s script w ­ ere still operative, but in the Manichean strug­gle with Abington in the 1785–86 season, what was at stake was the relation between gender, appropriation, and reproduction. Abington, and Woffington before her, had thoroughly explored both the po­liti­cal and commercial possibilities of their self-­commodification ­either as fashion icons or as sexual subjects/objects. But the social and theatrical economy in which this exploration took place had been shaken by the war. At the very least, fashion’s constitutive place in the theatrical system was in need of supplementation. Jordan’s enactment of productive female sexuality of the middling sort is that supplement: it extends and expands the place of w ­ omen in comedy (and society more generally) to encompass middling reproductive power and it indicates what had become painfully obvious during the war—­namely, that fantasies of aristocratic power, w ­ hether they be enacted in the realm of geopolitics or on the boards of the patent theaters, ­were unable to address civil war in the Atlantic imperium. From ­here, The Romp’s function as afterpiece also becomes more clear: its explicit pre­sen­ta­tion of the racial dynamics of colonial power and middling ascendancy are the constitutive outside that maintains the purity of Jordan’s mainpiece roles. Peggy’s normative whiteness is supplemented by Priscilla’s creole exceptionalism. That the press was able to address the relationship between the “actress” and the “­woman” in its discussion of The Romp is telling ­because the play itself makes the politics of embodiment central to its scenario and to its denouement. Drawing attention to her whiteness and thus raising the possibility that she may well not be “pure,” Priscilla in a way emphasizes that the normativity of Peggy’s whiteness relies on its invisibility, on its very non-­performativity. Priscilla’s whiteness affords life to herself through her almost casual recognition of the necropolitics of the plantation economy that consigns racialized populations to death; and the same could be said about Miss Peggy b ­ ecause both roles are linked by the performing body of Dorothy Jordan, by her whiteness.44 This helps to explain why the press felt that it had to warn Jordan about the limits of class propriety in The Romp but preemptively took this concern off the ­table in the preshow puffs for The Country Girl. That Jordan played The Romp thirty-­five times that season, more than all of her other famous parts combined, is instructive, for it



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demonstrates that the normative whiteness of natu­ral femininity requires the constant maintenance of its constitutive outsides, both in the form of the embodied on-­stage “blackness” of Priscilla’s servant/slave Quasheba and in the form of the racial and sexual uncertainty of her hoydenish “creole” identity. For The Country Girl to quietly make its normative biopo­liti­cal turn, The Romp needs not only to loudly declare the existence of racial difference but also to imply that bodies may secret difference within themselves. The latter implication drives the need for the former declaration ­because it carries with it the anxiety of “pure” definition. The Country Girl obviates or quells this anxiety by absorbing it into the per­for­mance of natu­ral femininity. The two plays are in this sense mutually constitutive. It is impor­tant that we hear the legacy of Jordan speaking Priscilla’s racist lines and recognize that understanding their import requires that we attend to gender norms as subtle indicator signs.45

Abington’s Stratagem, or Celebrity Circa 1786 Before specifying how Jordan elaborated on this performative intervention in the gendered dynamics of the post-­A merican repertoire, I want to look closely at Abington’s response to Jordan’s claims on her audience. ­Because of the war, Abington had not had a benefit night for ten years. On benefit nights, the proceeds from the box office w ­ ere directed to a named performer and audiences would come to honor par­t ic­u ­lar players. That the most famous celebrity on the London stage had not been recognized in this way for a de­cade generated im­mense speculation regarding her benefit, which was scheduled for 10 February 1786. What part would she play? She chose to appear in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, not as Mrs. Sullen, a part that she had been playing for many years to broad acclaim and had played three times already that season, but rather as Scrub, the rough and tumble male servant. The Morning Herald attributed the packed ­house to her “becoming . . . ​a character so remote from t­hose she has hitherto pourtrayed” (MH, 11 February 1786). She was a consummate man­ag­er of her own celebrity; the advertisements stressed that she would play Scrub “for that night only” (MC, 10 February 1786). Rumors w ­ ere circulating that it was part of some mysterious “wager” and the Morning Chronicle ­later reported that her “benefit had the greatest receipt ever known; the exact amount was 405l” (MC, 21

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February 1786). What she did on that night is one of the most revealing test cases for the politics of celebrity that I am aware of and, above all, it demonstrates the degree to which the apparently subtle manifestations of history’s affective dimensions w ­ ere widely recognized and engaged. Appearing as Scrub was an extraordinarily daring move. When Abington had played in travesty before, she had been cast in roles that displayed her form. Playing Scrub traduced class bound­aries at the same time that it controverted the per­for­mance of gender identity: Though we live in a period of theatrical novelty—­public curiosity was perhaps never so much excited as it was last night. Mrs. Abington, who hitherto has deservedly taken the lead in the first walks of genteel and sprightly comedy, in gratitude for past favours, determined to shew the uncommon variety and contrast of her powers, by appearing in Scrub in the comedy of the Beaux Stratagem; a character where she was, for the occasion, not only to put off the ­Woman of Fashion—­but the entire ­Woman, and, ­under this extreme metamorphosis, to exhibit the low cunning and ideot simplicity of uncultivated nature. (PA, 11 February 1786) The extremity of Abington’s transformation stands in stark contrast to the way that Jordan’s per­for­mance of masculinity was discussed. As noted ­earlier, Jordan’s transit from masculinity to femininity, from admiration for her acting ability and captivation with her person, was nearly instantaneous. As one commentator put it: “The writer of this article does not wish his observation to be taken in a ludicrous light, when he remarks that Mrs. Jordan moves with uncommon ease in her transformation from ­woman to man; and yet it is but justice to admit that this excellent actress, so deservedly the admiration of the town, in assuming this masculine attire, by no means offends her spectators with the smallest trait of indelicate deportment” (GEP, 13–15 December  1785). Abington’s per­for­mance as Scrub negated “the entire ­Woman” and thus interrupted “captivation” with her person. By performing at a distance verging on absolute from her conventional adoption of aristocratic femininity, Abington was maximizing admiration of her skill and minimizing consumption of her body. Abington’s celebrity allowed for this move: through self-­negation she was arguably making her audience even more aware of what they prized in her.



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This is evident in the divided response to her appearance as Scrub, for both ­t hose deliriously in ­favor of and ­t hose seemingly offended by her per­ for­mance declared that this stepping away from herself instantiated desire for “Abington”: The audience being nearly assembled, and tolerably composed, the curtain drew up, and the play went on from scene to scene in excellent order, till the favourite d ­ aughter of Thalia, D’Eonized into Scrub, came forward. Her entrée was honoured by repeated plaudits of considerable duration. She was at length enabled to proceed, and we are happy to say that the fullest expectations we entertained of her per­for­mance, w ­ ere justified in e­ very scene. . . . ​—­Mrs. Abington in no instance, that we observed during the play, gave room for censure, on the score of departing from chaste acting, which is surely the highest proof of merit. Mrs. Abington’s figure became the metamorphose, it possessed symmetry and form in a perfect degree; and she was dressed in a style to produce a ludicrous effect. (MH, 11 February 1786) ­ ere the negation of her femininity is linked to the Chevalier d’Eon’s “real” H transvestism and thus implies that she has pushed beyond artifice into a form of per­for­mance derived not from the stage but from life.46 I think the impor­ tant ­t hing h ­ ere is that Abington is transforming travesty in a radically dif­ fer­ent way from the way that Jordan was changing breeches roles. With Jordan, masculine dress disclosed an emergent form of reproductive femininity, but Abington used gender and class masquerade to reactivate the discredited forms of artifice most associated with aristocratic dissipation. The invocation of d’Eon is crucial h ­ ere, but so is the deployment of Farquhar and of witty comedy from the past. Abington had dominated this social and theatrical world and she is specifically beating back Jordan’s threat not only to her celebrity but also to the social and comic modes of exchange in which she had operated. I think this is why the negative reviews of Abington’s per­for­mance stress her deviation from “delicacy,” the term so insistently attributed to Jordan’s per­for­mances in breeches. The following review offers the most fierce criticism and it is clear that the per­for­mance of Scrub’s low qualities was the most shocking aspect of the show:

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The STRATAGEM of last night may have benefited the POCKET, but certainly did must prove a considerable drawback on the REPUTATION; we ­s hall be at a loss to account for such a scrubby attempt, ­unless indeed we give credit to the prevailing report, that a considerable wager was depending on the per­for­mance of the part; for certainly Mrs.  Abington’s interest and abilities did not require such a deviation from delicacy, to attract an audience equally brilliant and crouded with that which honoured her Benefit last night; nothing in our opinion can justify such a metamorphosis, but the most urgent necessity, or a transcendency of characteristic abilities, neither of which pretensions are ascribable to Mrs. Abington in the per­for­mance of Scrub. (MP, 11 February 1786) The reviewer h ­ ere rightly understood that Abington’s claim to Thalia’s mask had more to do with her style of aristocratic femininity than with femininity as such. What the reviewer failed to comprehend was that the per­for­mance was an extraordinarily canny tactical maneuver in the strug­gle for “It.” Joseph Roach’s term for that complex amalgamation of qualities that contributes to celebrity is valuable ­here ­because every­thing about Abington’s per­for­mance was about maintaining “It” in the late stages of her c­ areer.47 She did this in three ways. First, and most obvious, by so strongly negating “Abington”—­t hat is, by becoming her opposite in a play with which she was so widely associated—­she inculcated the desire not only for Abington, the very embodiment of elegant lady parts, but also for the repertoire in which she made her name. This desire was fulfilled the same eve­ning for she appeared as Lady Racket in the afterpiece Three Weeks A ­ fter Marriage. As a “strong contrast to poor Scrub,” the Morning Herald declared, “characters of gaiety, elegance, and fashion . . . ​most properly belong to her province. We never witnessed greater applause than was given to her exertions in this part” (MH, 11 February 1786). The same review reports that a­ fter the show Abington addressed the audience and hoped “that what­ever opinion might be formed of that night’s attempt, . . . ​that her Racket rises, undebased by Scrub!” The result of this careful management of her parts was a flood of requests for more of this kind of comedy and ­t hese kinds of roles. She appeared in only two mainpieces a­ fter her benefit night that season: once again as Charlotte Rusport in The West Indian and then in Steele’s The Conscious Lovers. She had effectively maximized the desire for a style of comedy that Jordan did not excel at.



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Second, her per­for­mance as Scrub countered her most immediate rival not simply by beating her at her own game but by irreverently underlining that travesty is inextricably bound to low comedy, to the lower social o ­ rders, and ultimately to indelicacy. She was resisting Jordan’s re-­territorialization of travesty as an indicator of the “naturalness” of middle-­class ascendency largely b ­ ecause her success and her celebrity w ­ ere inextricably tied to fashion and aristocratic sociability. With Elizabeth Farren recovering from a long illness and Siddons retreating from the stage for her lying in, Abington and Covent Garden ­were attempting to recast Jordan’s incredibly successful 1785–86 season as both a narrow band of entertainment and a deviation from a long tradition of wit and elegance. And, fi­nally, Abington made herself scarce by embarking on a tour of Ireland where her c­ areer had begun.48 If the press is any indication, her tactical move was entirely successful. Jordan’s coverage in the press was reduced to minimal notices, in part ­because she was being used in the same roles over and over again, and e­ very movement of Abington following her benefit night was a source of extensive commentary. Furthermore, Abington’s reassertion of her star power came in two steps: her unconventional travesty in The Beaux’ Stratagem is inextricably tied to her highly unusual collaboration with Siddons two weeks ­later. On 25 February 1786, both Siddons and Abington performed at Covent Garden for the benefit of the wife and ­family of John Henderson who had died suddenly on 25 November 1785 at the age of thirty-­eight. It was extraordinarily rare for players from both patent ­houses to appear in the same theater on the same night. Siddons and Kemble reprised their highly successful version of Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and Abington again played Lady Racket in Arthur Murphy’s afterpiece Three Weeks A ­ fter Marriage. Siddons, who also gave a prologue in honor of Henderson, was universally praised, as ­were the visiting Drury Lane players; Abington was equally applauded for her “liberality.” As argued above, Abington’s benefit constituted a re­sis­tance to Jordan’s innovations: it both contained and exceeded the emergent player’s revolution in breeches parts. Henderson’s benefit, however, was as much a homage to a beloved actor as it was an occasion for Abington to leave Scrub’s clothing ­behind to send up the superficial foibles of a parasitic and bored aristocrat. The choice of Lady Racket was perfect ­because the play satirizes the Rackets, whose marriage disintegrates over a conflict over cards, while at the same time ridiculing the vulgarity and snobbery of the merchant Drugget and his wife. The reviews emphasize that the foursome of Abington, William Lewis, Elizabeth Wilson, and John Quick worked the fine line between receding and

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emerging social power to perfection. As the Public Advertiser declared, “Lewis’s Sir Charles Rackitt gained its usual applause: indeed so much so, that Mrs. Abington and he in the quarrelling scene about the cards, read a practical lecture on the sudden interchangeability of contrasted passions—as the same eyes which ­were scarcely dried from participating in the distresses of domestic life, now ran over with laughter at the follies of a new married ­couple” (PA, 27 February 1786). This notion of the afterpiece constituting “a practical lecture on the sudden interchangeability of contrasted passions” not only marks the sudden affective shift from the tragedy of Venice Preserv’d to the farcical pleasures of Three Weeks A ­ fter Marriage but also draws a startling line of equivalence between the plays. By describing the audience’s reception of Venice Preserv’d as “participating in the distresses of domestic life,” the paper signals Siddons’s remarkable gravitational pull on a script that is conventionally thought of in po­liti­cal terms. Siddons’s overwhelming per­for­mance of Belvidera, like her per­for­mance of Lady Macbeth, redirects the play t­ oward “domestic” relations and thus makes it comparable to Abington and Lewis’s comic enactment of marital discord. The afterpiece is explic­itly understood by this reviewer as a supplement that reveals a continuity between tragedy and comedy that allows for the same audience to make the transit between other­wise contrasting passions in a single eve­ning. And that sequence is impor­tant, both to the paper’s argument and to Abington’s strategy, for it is this sequential continuity that elicits the declaration that she had been seeking: “Saturday night last presented a spectacle at this Theatre, as splendid to the eye as grateful and instructive to the sensibilities of the heart—­viz. the two Theatrical Goddesses, Melpomene and Thalia (Mrs. Siddons and Mrs. Abington) entering the lists, not only to exhibit a specimen of their g­ reat abilities—­but joining with a brilliant and crouded audience for the nobler purpose of d ­ oing honour to the memory of a departed ­brother, and wiping away the tear of sorrow from the eyes of the ­widow and the fatherless” (PA, 27 February 1786). With Jordan momentarily pushed aside or contained two weeks before, Abington could reclaim or reassert the status that Reynolds afforded her in the 1784 Royal Acad­emy Exhibition. Once again, an asymmetrical pendant pair, Thalia operates as the supplement to Melpomene, and the afterpiece not only shows the singularity of the mainpiece but also operates as its constitutive outside. In a remarkable sleight of hand, Abington gives a “practical lecture” on how Siddons’s affective power relies on Abington’s long-­standing and ongoing mastery of an entirely dif­fer­ent emotional repertoire. That this was publicly



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enacted in a sentimental tribute to the deceased Henderson, his grieving ­family, and the theatrical system itself forcefully brought the entire eve­ning ­under the banner of “domestic life” and demonstrated that it was in this realm that a recalibration of the cultural patrimony and a restoration of the social fabric was being engaged.

Jordan’s Constancy, or Masculinity Circa 1788 Abington’s extraordinary coup de théâtre all but demanded that Hoppner exhibit his painting of Dorothy Jordan as The Comic Muse at the Royal Acad­ emy exhibition that spring and it is useful to return to his painting in the light of the preceding discussion (Fig. 3.1). Hoppner painted Jordan in masculine attire on numerous occasions in the 1790s, but this painting is an exercise in feminine idealization. The Morning Post, in its scathing review of the painting, asked, “What can be the meaning of this allegorical ­jumble? What satyr hath been laying his violent hands on poor Mrs.  Jordan?” (MP, 10 May 1786). The answer to the first question is hardly difficult to ascertain, but it requires that we not jump too quickly to the second. By pairing Thalia with Euphrosyne, Hoppner was making a subtle, yet telling argument, for it is exceedingly rare for the Graces to be represented as anything other than a trio.49 Playing on Thalia’s double status as the Muse of Comedy and as one of the three Charites or Graces, Hoppner’s picture doubles Jordan’s femininity. Holding the mask indicates her theatrical preeminence, but the pastoral setting, the flowers in her hair, and her embrace with Euphrosyne signal abundance and fecundity, the traits associated with the Grace Thalia. The picture perfectly conjoins comedy and biopower, and it does so by distancing t­ hese two depicted Graces from their absent ­sister Aglaea, the goddess of beauty, splendor, glory, magnificence, and adornment. That list of Aglaea’s attributes describes Abington to the letter and thus we can now see Hoppner’s picture as a repudiation of Jordan’s chief rival. In her place, Hoppner provides a rather unsatisfied looking Satyr, thus bolstering Jordan’s respectability by metonymically associating the missing Aglaea/Abington with phallic libertinism. In the light of Abington’s link to both magnificent adornment and scripts that swirl around aristocratic dissipation, Hoppner’s allegory was apt. And yet, the picture is also a careful remediation of Jordan’s “simplicity” in the role of Miss Peggy. Although audiences w ­ ere most intrigued by Jordan’s masculine attire, Hoppner and George Romney, in a roughly con­temporary

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painting, stress three related signs of her femininity: her s­ imple white dress, her sash, and her abundant flowing hair (Figure 3.5). All three pictorial ele­ ments point to Reynolds’s earliest painting of Abington as the Comic Muse from the 1760s, but what distinguishes ­t hese pictures of Jordan is a sense of movement, e­ ither away from us in the case of Romney or across the picture plane in the case of Hoppner. And that movement figures for the freedom and vivacity repeatedly invoked in the early descriptions of Jordan’s per­ for­mance of masculinity. Gil Perry has persuasively demonstrated that Jordan’s abundant, sometimes tangled, hair was a synecdoche for her ­“naturalness” (Figure  3.6).50 Thus its deployment in Hoppner and Romney was also about separating her from Abington’s artifice. But as Perry also stresses, Jordan’s hair became a crucial sign of her own style of femininity. In the numerous images we have of Jordan in breeches parts, as Viola, Rosalind, and Sir Harry Wildair, it is her hair that ultimately secures her sexual identity beyond the part she is playing. Perry goes some way to demonstrate that Jordan made this link between naturalness and sexual identity indexical by rigorously appearing in her own hair, eschewing wigs and gravity-­ defying hairstyles. Not averse to extensions, it is clear that Jordan, like Hoppner and Romney, recognized that flowing hair, like flowing sashes and gowns, accentuated the motion of her body and ultimately came to figure for ease, the quality repeatedly associated with her par­tic­u­lar embodiment of masculinity. So curiously, Jordan’s natu­ral hair both secures her feminine idealization and sustains her per­for­mance of masculinity: to use terms from our ­earlier discussion, it si­mul­ta­neously elicits admiration for her per­for­ mance of masculinity and captivation with the female body. Hoppner’s picture thus crystallizes much of the complex response to Jordan’s emergence in London in 1785 and to her strug­gle with Abington throughout the 1785–86 season. Hoppner’s and Romney’s pictures are useful stopping points b ­ ecause their feminization of Jordan required almost immediate revision. As Jordan’s ­career unfolded, her breeches roles became much more complex. As Miss Peggy or Priscilla Tomboy, her adoption of masculinity was in the ser­v ice of bringing her to the proper object choice. Dressing as Moody’s godson is a temporary way to bring her together with Belville, and since the play stresses that Harcourt and Belville immediately recognize her disguise, t­ here is never a sense that Belville is kissing a man in act 3, scene 1. The same cannot be said for her per­for­mance of Viola and Rosalind, where she uses male attire to gain access to ­women. Long-­standing knowledge of Shakespeare meant

Figure 3.5. John Ogborne, a­ fter George Romney, Dorothy Jordan as Peggy in The Country Girl, engraving (1788). Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 3.6. Anonymous, Dorothy Jordan as Sir Harry Wildair, engraving (1788). The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-­ Champaign.

that this could all unfold without charges of impropriety, but nevertheless it meant that erotic encounters ­were being staged between ­women. What­ever the sapphic frisson inherent to ­these per­for­mances, and that is fleetingly registered in some press notices, it is Jordan’s resuscitation of Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar’s The Constant C ­ ouple in 1788 that warrants our most serious at51 tention. This was not a temporary interlude in breeches; rather, it was a complete travesty: she was cast as a man. Thus far, I have been careful to maintain a distinction between breeches parts and travesty roles. The adoption of masculine dress in The Country Girl, The Romp, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and To Have and Have Not, Jordan’s primary vehicles at Drury Lane, was always resolved within the narrative



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logic of the play.52 Her per­for­mance in breeches was framed by scenes in ­women’s dress, thus the paradoxical disclosure of natu­ral femininity during interludes of masculine per­for­mance was carefully sutured to a sartorial style radically dif­fer­ent from Abington’s fash­ion­able artifice. It was this suturing effect from s­ imple, relatively unadorned dresses to breeches and back again that made her manifestation of biopower such a power­ful intervention in the per­for­mance of class on the London stage. Although Farquhar’s The Constant ­Couple would become a staple at Drury Lane the next season, Jordan’s first appearance as Sir Harry Wildair came as a benefit night for herself on 2 May 1788. It is hard not to see her decision to appear in a Farquhar play h ­ ere as a reprise of Abington’s daring travesty in The Beaux’ Stratagem two years’ ­earlier, only ­here the adoption of male attire came not with a devolution in rank but rather with an elevation to a station she rarely ­adopted. If we understand Abington’s ­earlier travesty as a strategy for maintaining “It,” she was clearly shifting gender and class identity to foreground the absence of the je ne sais quoi that defined her celebrity. Through this negation, class was used almost dialectically to reassert the distinction between the patricians and the plebs, a distinction that E. P. Thompson has demonstrated was foundational to British custom. But in 1785, this was clearly a rearguard action, an effort to conflate middling and lower ranks into one amorphous mass against which aristocratic bearing and fashion could be made that much more vis­i­ble. Maximizing that visibility was crucial to Abington’s celebrity and to her very practice on stage. Jordan’s per­ for­mances embodied a third position that was increasingly distinguishing itself from the “vulgar” lower ­orders and the “dissipated” aristocracy. If we consider her benefit night in The Constant ­Couple as a critical replay of Abington’s benefit in The Beaux’ Stratagem, then what we see is Farquhar deployed for radically dif­fer­ent ends. I would contend that just as Abington had attempted to draw the emergent social ­middle into the lower ranks, Jordan refashioned the aristocrat Sir Harry Wildair so that he became a middling hero.53 What happened on that eve­ning and in subsequent per­for­mances was a power play in which the claims of patrician superiority w ­ ere modified and subsumed into middle-­class identity. But, as with Abington, this was only one part of a two-­pronged intervention: as we w ­ ill see, the second step had searching po­liti­cal implications for martial masculinity and imperial ideology. The Constant C ­ ouple was a curious vehicle for Jordan. The play features four flawed male characters all pursuing the same beloved: Lady Lurewell is a highly ­adept courtesan who claims to hate the entire male sex and thus

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loves nothing more than playing them off one another to their endless torment. In act 4, we discover that her misandry is the direct result of her seduction by a young Oxonian when she was but fifteen years old. Having just returned to London ­after a con­spic­u­ous string of intrigues in Paris, she is beset by the corrupt Alderman Smuggler, the aging fraud and hypocrite; his nephew Vizard, an equally unscrupulous businessman and rake; Col­o­nel Standard, a recently demobilized soldier who fought against the French in the War of Spanish Succession; and the irreverent beau Sir Harry Wildair, who has also fought on the continent when uniforms ­were in fashion, but who is much more interested in pursuing his libertine desires through wit, dancing, and intrigue. The play is sexually frank and all the characters develop complex strategies to destroy each other’s pursuit of happiness. The men plot against each other and Lady Lurewell plots against all the men pursuing her. The most disreputable plot is activated by Vizard. He aims to distract Wildair by suggesting that he offer Angelica, a chaste w ­ oman who has scorned Vizard, a large sum for her sexual ­favors, persuading Wildair that she is a famous whore and that her chaperone, Lady Darling, is her bawd. Wildair and Angelica speak at cross purposes for much of the play ­because Vizard has informed Lady Darling that Wildair is a serious suitor and that he would make an excellent husband. Angelica is partial to Wildair, but when it is revealed that he believes her to be a prostitute, she publicly declares that Wildair is dishonorable. Wildair’s only way to remain a man of honor is to marry her, which he does to his ultimate satisfaction. On the way to this happy marriage, Wildair sets an elaborate trap for Vizard and Smuggler and they are publicly shamed. This is hardly a surprise; both Cits are derogated from the outset of the play. Col­o­nel Standard poses a dif­fer­ent prob­lem. He seems an honorable and respectable man. He gets caught up in Lady Lurewell’s games with Wildair and he challenges Wildair to a duel. We ­will be returning to the duel shortly, for it is one of the play’s most satisfying, yet historically fraught, set pieces. Wildair refuses to fight, saying that no w ­ oman is worth it—­a telling rehearsal of Lady Lurewell’s disdain for all men. The most impor­tant plot turn emerges shortly a­ fter Wildair’s wedding to Angelica b ­ ecause Lady Lurewell discovers that Standard is her seducer. Standard’s entire military ­career has been an attempt to make up for his dishonorable action as a young man. With the revelation of his identity, he, like Wildair, immediately proposes to Lady Lurewell in order to reconstitute his honor and make amends to her. At the play’s end, both Lady Lurewell and Wildair are in a sense corrected by their ­unions with Standard



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and Angelica. Past dissipation, both female and male, is accepted and redirected by the combined forces of honorable martial masculinity and chaste femininity t­ oward happy conjugal life. And t­ hese marriages among the play’s elite characters, unsurprisingly, consolidate the incomes of both ­couples. As mentioned above, this all comes as a result of the shaming of Vizard, Smuggler, and the Clincher b ­ rothers, all of whom are tied to e­ ither mercantile endeavors or failed claims to gentility. Farquhar’s play is very much of its time and thus poses an immediate question: How did this play signify in the spring of 1788? The papers universally praise Jordan, albeit in very specific terms, but lurking ­behind all the reviews is a question regarding the play’s reentry into the repertoire. Abington’s turn as Scrub was a singular event and advertised as such; Jordan’s adoption of Sir Harry Wildair seemed to pose the question about ­whether this should or would happen again. When it did reappear the following season, not every­one was pleased: The Constant ­Couple, the worst of Farquhar, from some unusual artifice of acting, the Public might once bear—­that aid withdrawn, and upheld merely by its own powers, the Play cannot be borne much longer. Sir H. Wildair, to say the least of it, is, at any rate, but obsolete absurdity—to see it all, is but bad—it is worse to see it played by a ­Woman. Mrs. Jordan has much original genius—­She abounds, when the Scene suits her, in the most popu­lar captivations. In Sir H. Wildair, except the few bars of a Ballad which she sings, ­there is very ­little indeed, from whence she can, or should expect any good display. (W, 19 September 1788) This critique proved to be out of synch with the times.54 As with the adaptation of The Country Wife, a number of the papers indicated that the more raunchy lines needed to be excised; they marked the “indelicacy” of some of the players, but “from this censure, however, we must excuse Mrs. Jordan herself, who, to all the spirit and vivacity of the character, united the strictest propriety and decorum” (MC, 5 May 1788). The push and pull ­here is intriguing: some players w ­ ere indelicate, Jordan was not, so what of the play’s moral tenor? The Morning Chronicle predicted it would return to the list of stock plays, but the script itself was not restructured, and on the night of Jordan’s benefit it appears that the play’s numerous sexual

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jokes and double entendres ­were enacted. Other venues saw ­little hope for the play or the part for dif­fer­ent reasons: “We cannot, however, admit that ­there is any hope of the long lost character of Sir Harry Wildair being restored to the Stage: though Mrs. Jordan is agreeable, she is not striking; and we can scarcely expect to see any modern nearly equal in merit to Mrs. Woffington” (OSGWA, 7 May 1788). This concern with Woffington’s legacy is impor­tant. ­After Robert Wilks’s famous owner­ship of the role of Sir Harry Wildair in the play’s earliest productions, The Constant ­Couple surfaces intermittently in the repertoire throughout the eigh­teenth ­century with two l­ater productions garnering im­mense cultural attention and theatrical receipts. In both cases, Sir Harry Wildair was played in travesty: first by Peg Woffington in the 1740s and 1750s and then by Jordan from 1788 to the early 1790s.55 Jordan’s benefit was engaging with the immediate rivalry with Abington and her subsequent success in the role negotiated with memories of the most famous Sir Harry Wildair of all—­namely, Peg Woffington’s spectacular and long-­running embodiment of the role. What becomes clear in the press is that Jordan’s per­for­mance essentially parses the repertoire to gain access to or re­ orient dormant ele­ments of the play. She ceded ground to Woffington on some points, specifically ­those physical qualities where she ­couldn’t compete with Woffington, and laid claim to other aspects of the role eclipsed by her pre­de­ces­sor’s overt sensuality: “In point of figure we must give the preference to Mrs. Woffington, who many years ago was a g­ reat favourite of the town in this character. In other parts of the per­for­mance we think Mrs. Jordan much superior” (PA, 17 May 1788). That superiority would be grounded on the implicit moral reformation of Wildair. The way that the two actresses are being distinguished h ­ ere is impor­tant and more complex than it seems. At one level, it would appear that for a certain portion of the audience the memory of Woffington’s body was indelible as was her very par­tic­u­lar way of enacting Wildair’s rakish elegance. This is nowhere directly stated but can be gleaned from how Jordan distinguished herself from this memory: “Mrs. Jordan last night made her second appearance in Sir Harry Wildair, and though her per­for­mance of the character was by no means critically just—it was certainly very pleasant. This actress assumes the virile character with much ease, but, in all parts not absolutely of the hoyden cast, ­t here is a graceful freedom of deportment necessary which she has not yet attained. In the dialogue of Wildair she was neat and arch, but the negligent elegance and sprightly carelessness of the part ­were wanting” (MP, 17 May 1788). The very quality for which Jordan was praised in her



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breeches parts, namely “ease,” was so much a part of Woffington’s per­for­ mance that Jordan played against her own strength: “Her per­for­mance of the lively Baronet, maugre a certain formality of deportment not consonant to the easy elegance of the character, was arch and pleasant in a high degree” (MP, 19 September 1788). Just as Abington had negated herself in Scrub to crystallize her elite style, so too did Jordan subtly move t­ oward a “formality of deportment” in order to more forcefully articulate the je ne sais quoi of middling “It.” As Brooks notes, Woffington was celebrated for her lack of “stiffness” in travesty, a quality that had been ascribed to ­women’s discomfort with playing men.56 With Jordan’s “freedom” and “vivacity” already well established, one can venture that she was marking a divergence from Woffington’s prior example, but its significance was to be felt in the precincts of masculinity itself. What interests me ­here is that Jordan’s more “formal” per­for­mance in travesty was widely understood as a divergence from Farquhar’s script. The per­for­mance was pleasant, but not critically just: “Mrs Jordan possesses so much comic genius that if her per­for­mance of any part is not distinguished by characteristic accuracy, she exhibits so many incidental graces, and touches of luxuriant humour, that the audience are perhaps more delighted than they could be by the most appropriate precision. This is the case with her SIR HARRY WILDAIR; it is certainly not what the author intended, but it is fraught with pleasantry, whim and originality” (MP, 14 February 1789). This suggests that Jordan’s Sir Harry Wildair explic­itly refashioned the masculine deportment of the beau monde and did so by moving away from ease to control, from openness to continence, even in the delivery of dialogue. A similar shift was recorded with regard to Col­o­nel Standard: in Richard Wroughton’s per­for­mance he was both “manly” and “highly respectable” (PA, 17 May 1788). As ­these reviews suggest, this change d ­ idn’t happen overnight. In her first two seasons in the role, Jordan’s Sir Harry Wildair was a work of constant revision. But what is so fascinating is that her intervention was widely understood to be at odds with the par­ameters of Farquhar’s comedy. Her alteration of per­for­mance protocols was transforming the generic contours of the play. But ­toward what exactly? Unlike Siddons’s early per­for­mance as Lady Macbeth, Jordan was surrounded by strong per­for­mances and perhaps most importantly Wildair’s chief rival, Standard, afforded the opportunity for the staging of heroic martial identity. Farquhar’s script lends itself to the veneration of Standard and I think it is crucial to Jordan’s adoption of the role. My

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sense is that what emerges by mid-1788 is a play with two remarkable male characters. Standard, the manly soldier, returns to correct a sexual wrong from his past; Wildair, the beau, reemerges in a more restrained form, amusing but not dissipated. The marriages of both characters to the wronged Lady Lurewell and the insulted Angelica, respectively, are signs of the double reformation of masculinity. One character atones for his past rapacious qualities and the other sheds his fecklessness.57 That Standard is described throughout the press as “manly” is crucial. Martial masculinity is being realigned with masculinity as such a­ fter a period of concern regarding masculine agency, resolve, and efficacy. To invoke our discussion of martial masculinity in Chapter 1, Standard seems to be gravitating ­toward many of General Eliott’s qualities. And we should remember that it is during this season that Kemble begins to amplify Macbeth’s martial valor. That Wildair is being re­imagined by and as a ­woman is perhaps even more consequential ­because, as with the alignment of femininity and biopower in Miss Peggy, Jordan’s enactment of decorum and control sets out norms for polite sociability itself across the middling and upper ­orders. Jordan’s Wildair is out of place in Farquhar ­because he is not on the make in the same way: he d ­ oesn’t demonstrate the ease of dissipation but rather embodies propriety and good deportment. And it is by disclosing the actress’s persona beneath the character that Jordan clinches this remarkable blurring of class distinction.58 Who better to reform suspect masculinity than a w ­ oman repeatedly praised for her character? For a large part of the audience, the best fash­ion­able gentleman was a middle-­class professional ­woman. In this context, the shadow of Woffington is impor­tant ­because she is so insistently negated, and yet memorialized, by Jordan’s per­for­mance. As Brooks states, “Drawing on the foreknowledge of her biological sex and of her other female roles, whilst concurrently embodying masculinity, Woffington cultivated a camp sensibility which playfully brought into tension and queered cultural notions of masculinity and femininity.”59 Woffington was better at Farquhar’s Wildair, her camp Wildair was more alluring, but as the World stated, s/he was an “obsolete absurdity” and Jordan was brokering something new, something inaccurate to the play, but perhaps right on target for her audience’s desire for a reconstitution of masculinity and sociability (W, 19 September 1788). This effectively consigns a very specific kind of erotic manifestation of travesty to the past and posits a dif­fer­ent erotic economy.60 It is intriguing that in the benefit-­night per­for­mance the players surrounding Jordan indulged in the sexual possibilities of Farquhar’s



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script while she made her first attempt at this more restrained Sir Harry Wildair. The sense of disjunction or interruption would have been that much more acute, as though a respectable wo/man found him/herself navigating a world of Vizards, Smugglers, Clinchers, and Lurewells. As the play re­entered the repertoire, it seems that this harsh discord became less necessary—­ interruption is a practice that cannot be in­def­initely sustained. Toning down the sexual language would bring the play closer in line with a Cowley or even an Inchbald comedy. But, unlike the competition at Covent Garden, the chief character in need of reform does it to him/herself by adapting the per­for­mance strategies of her most daring pre­de­ces­sor. In effect, Jordan was performing a cascading critique of Woffington’s unabashed sexuality, of the plea­sure elicited through the queering of gender roles, and of the character’s loose morality. In fact, Jordan seems to have been targeting looseness across the board and the concomitant desire in her audience for the consumption of Woffington’s “form” and for the emulation of Wildair’s predatory “ease” by invoking the memory of ­these desires in the audience’s memory of the repertoire. If anything, this would have generated a demand not for what was unequivocally gone but for the remnants of ­these dispositions in her own work in The Country Girl, The Romp, and Twelfth Night. And this is, in fact, what we see in the 1788–89 and 1789–90 seasons, The Constant C ­ ouple operates in a productively symbiotic manner with t­hese other plays and thus keeps the demand for Jordan alive and the negotiation with masculine reform in constant play. This was necessary b ­ ecause this reformation of masculinity had not yet come to pass; Jordan and Wroughton ­were pinpointing a desire and perhaps even showing the way t­oward its resolution. Of crucial importance ­here is the play’s duel in act 4, scene 1. As Donna Andrew has shown, dueling was, by the mid-1780s, beginning to be seen as the aristocratic vice perhaps above all ­others that marked the obsolescence of elite masculinity.61 Thus the moment when Wildair persuades Standard to put down his sword has dif­fer­ent connotations than when Wilks played the role or when Woffington effectively reversed its meaning. As Felicity Nussbaum has argued, Woffington used the scene for patriotic ends: the play was perfect for the post-­ Jacobite moment in part ­because it relied on the preexisting containment and defeat of Catholic insurgency.62 My sense is that Jordan’s per­for­mance of Wildair is inventing a new style of patriotism no less than a new sexual economy. This patriotism arises from a situation in which France has successfully aided and abetted the fragmentation of the British imperium. Thus,

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patriotic identity cannot be simply staged in terms of a self-­consolidating other. In the wake of civil war, what remains has to devise a new mode of self-­ definition. This is why Wildair’s “ease” is obsolete, for on numerous occasions his ease is associated with his Pa­ri­sian interludes. I want to conclude this chapter by turning to another aspect of Jordan’s constancy, which in many ways materializes much of the argument thus far. Jordan’s earliest appearances in The Constant C ­ ouple coincide with a period of almost constant pregnancy. When she first appeared in the play in the spring of 1788, she was pregnant and was still pregnant when the play opened in the fall of 1788. She gave birth to a son who died in childbirth in October or November. We have notices of her playing Wildair again in early 1789, but she was no doubt pregnant with her ­daughter Lucy in the spring. Tomalin notes that while she was on tour, audiences in Leeds w ­ ere scandalized by seeing her perform Wildair while visibly pregnant (92). If audiences in the provinces w ­ ere uncomfortable with this, we c­ an’t say the same for London. ­There is a four-­year interval between when she returns to the stage in 1790 and the birth of her first child with the Duke of Clarence on 29 January 1794, but from that point onward Jordan is performing while pregnant nearly e­ very season u ­ ntil the spring of 1807. Chelsea Phillips and ­others have begun to plumb the complexity of how w ­ omen’s reproductive l­ abor impinged on their theatrical ­labor, but Jordan’s specific case is remarkable.63 Jordan’s pregnant body was constantly on display ­because she was constantly pregnant with the Duke of Clarence’s ten illegitimate ­children. We know that the c­ ouple was the focus of endless scrutiny in the 1790s and early 1800s, and ­t here is much to be said about the contours of their public relationship.64 But for our purposes we need to ask what it means for Jordan’s reformed version of Sir Harry Wildair to be visibly pregnant. Throughout this chapter, we have been stressing that Jordan’s breeches roles paradoxically inscribe a form of natu­ral femininity whose cultural significance is ultimately biopo­liti­cal. In the roles of Peggy and Priscilla Tomboy, Jordan’s adoption of masculine attire and demeanor is transitory. But her accession to the full travesty role of Wildair coincides with her first appearances on the London stage pregnant and thus her per­for­mance of his newly constrained masculinity is coeval with her reproductive ­labor. This materializes the re-­ territorialization of the character and of the play for that m ­ atter. Out of Farquhar’s libertine comedy comes a spectacle of the actress’s pregnancy that audiences would gravitate t­ oward for the next fifteen years.



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The intensity of “Jordan” as a spectacle of reproductive ­labor would reach its most profound manifestation in The Spoiled Child. Jordan first appeared in the farce on 22 March 1790, shortly ­after she gave birth to her ­daughter Lucy. Throughout the 1790s, audiences flocked to see Jordan play L ­ ittle Pickle, the mischievous l­ittle boy of the title; more often than not she played the role pregnant. That Jordan played Wildair only four times a­ fter the advent of ­Little Pickle suggests that travesty itself was now ­doing dif­fer­ ent cultural work: the ­woman as boy would replace the more critical possibilities inherent in w ­ omen playing men.65 Perry and o ­ thers have quizzically asked how audiences reconciled the body of the actress and the role, but I would suggest that ­Little Pickle is the perfect condensation of the biopo­liti­ cal turn in post-­American comedy itself for h ­ ere reproductive ­labor is subsumed into the product of reproduction. That Jordan’s per­for­mance of masculinity is so intimately linked to realignments in the sex/gender system helps us understand how the ­mother could so seamlessly dissolve into the son. Across ­t hese first three chapters, we have seen the spectacle of maternal care in Siddons’s on-­stage appearance with her son in Isabella reconfigured into Lady Macbeth’s ethic of care for her husband; but with Jordan, the spectacle of pregnancy itself becomes indistinguishable from the child. As we ­will see in the final three chapters of this book, the child ­will play a profound role in the articulation and assessment of corrosive solace in a range of impor­tant productions in the ensuing de­cade.

PA R T I I Interrupted ­Futures

CHAPTER 4

Interrupted Histories Henry the Eighth, Coriolanus, and the Disclosure of Biopolitics

The previous three chapters have explored parallel developments in the most impor­tant tragic and comic per­for­mances of the mid-1780s to understand how the post-­American condition was articulated and engaged in the repertoire. This has involved complementary interventions in the cultural memory that ­were activated and felt at the level of affect and that gave form to complex changes in the social fabric. In times of collective distress t­ here is a tendency to turn to the familiar for solace. It was crucial for British audiences that the cornerstones of the cultural patrimony—­familiar plays and forms—­ could be reengaged for the pre­sent moment. B ­ ecause of its nocturnal repetition, theater’s ritual qualities became vital scenes of reparation. But, as we have seen, the per­for­mance protocols so deeply associated with she-­tragedy, with Shakespeare, and with post-­Restoration comedy w ­ ere altered in ways that fundamentally transformed their affective dynamics. Within the precincts of familiar scripts, Siddons and Jordan re-­territorialized the familiar itself: the sexual arrangements that played such an impor­tant role in the allegorization of politics in ­these e­ arlier plays ­were redirected ­toward emergent norms of middling domesticity and this allowed for dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal ­futures to be felt and ­imagined. That this re-­territorialization was happening through the interplay of tragedy and comedy at Drury Lane is, I think, impor­tant, for when we look at the mutually supplementary relations between Siddons’s and Jordan’s interventions, we begin to see how the repertoire systemically manifested and activated historical change. But the solace afforded by the repertoire was also corrosive. Audiences found comfort and consolation that loss could be reconfigured as gain—­that Garrick and Pritchard’s disappearance could be met by the advent of Siddons,

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Jordan, and Kemble, that the loss of Amer­i­ca would eventually be met by vastly expanded imperial rule in India—­but, in the pro­cess, the very changes they welcomed stripped away obsolete yet nonetheless cherished forms of sociability and po­liti­cal identity. Corrosive solace had two chief targets within the repertoire that had been allegorically linked throughout the ­century—­namely, aristocratic martial masculinity and republican virtue. Siddons’s per­for­mances in Jane Shore and Jordan’s per­for­mances in The Constant ­Couple rechanneled the sexual and po­liti­cal implications of the scripts ­toward emergent norms of conjugal domesticity and Tory notions of post-­American po­liti­cal consensus. Neither of ­these social or po­liti­cal transformations was complete or uncontested in 1788, but the careful management of both Siddons’s and Jordan’s offstage personae supplemented their performative interventions in the repertoire. Both w ­ omen ­were increasingly seen as the embodiment of maternal virtue and even the open secret of Jordan’s long-­standing affair with the Duke of Clarence was less a sign of scandal than of loyalty.1 As corrosive solace did its incremental work, the celebrity of ­these ­women stabilized in ways that aligned them with emergent social norms to the point where James Boaden could equate Siddons and Pitt many years l­ ater. This no doubt came at a cost for both w ­ omen, both psychically and at the level of the body. Siddons performed only intermittently in the 1789–90 season and did not resume her regular place in the com­pany ­until January 1792; the increased reliance on comedy meant that Jordan was overworked. The unfinished po­ liti­cal work of corrosive solace—­t hat specifically pertaining to the recalibration of republican virtue—­lay with Kemble. In the wake of the War of American In­de­pen­dence, new po­liti­cal fantasies had to be refashioned from the notion of civitas that had featured so prominently in British po­liti­cal life and the repertoire of serious plays. Kemble’s celebrity was never as secure as his s­ ister’s, but that has a g­ reat deal to do, first, with the prob­lem of salvaging masculine efficacy at this moment and, second, with the dissolution of virtu as the driving princi­ple of national and imperial politics. George III’s increasingly absolutist gestures following the collapse of North’s ministry exerted substantive pressure on traditional notions of King-­ in-­Parliament. The authoritarianism of Pitt’s ministry decried by all manner of Whig politicians in the 1780s became explicit following the French Revolution and had a power­f ul impact on the repertoire. From the Regency Crisis in the fall of 1788 to the revolution in France to the suspension of habeas corpus in 1793 and the passage of the “Gagging Acts” in 1795, Britain became a very dif­fer­ent place than it was in 1788 when Siddons and Kemble



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starting playing regularly together as husband and wife in Macbeth and Dora Jordan first appeared as Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant C ­ ouple. The solace manifested in the way that ­t hese shows domesticated the repertoire was itself supplemented by a dif­fer­ent kind of affective dynamic in explic­itly po­ liti­cal plays and venues. Siddons’s and Jordan’s complex acts of reparative consolation maintained their cultural efficacy and ultimately generalized their personae within the sex/gender system itself. Kemble’s work from 1789 to 1795, although successful and profound in its own ways, frequently led to performative impasses and interruptions, interruptions that revealed an imperial nation moving from one form of governmentality to another. Plangent interruption becomes as impor­tant to this second post-­revolutionary repertoire as corrosive solace was to the immediate reactivation of per­for­mance culture at the end of the American War. Boaden’s claim that “the most impor­tant season that the Theatre has, perhaps, ever known, was that of 1782–3,” was felt by audiences in the pre­sent of its unfolding: we can and have pointed to widespread affective recognition that historical change was finding its form.2 At the very least, 1782–83 supplied Siddons with the she-­tragedy roles that would sustain her ­career. The 1788–89 season, the focus of this chapter’s enquiry, is in my opinion no less impor­tant, but its effects would be perceived far l­ ater: it was a season for the ­f uture. The prominent new vehicles for Siddons and Kemble staged this season, Henry the Eighth and Coriolanus, generated uneven, equivocal reactions in the pre­sent, but the afterlives of ­t hese plays w ­ ere crucial to the l­ ater celebrity of both players.3 Filling the vacuum caused by the departure of Thomas King, Kemble suddenly found himself managing Drury Lane Theatre in the fall of 1788. Significantly, Boaden argues that the change in management occurred ­because Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the proprietor of Drury Lane, was far too involved in the impeachment of Warren Hastings to find a replacement for King.4 Kemble was faced with a significant prob­lem that has been neglected by theater historians. The Drury Lane com­pany possessed the two most celebrated actresses of their generation. Dorothy Jordan was a consistent draw in a wide range of roles, but the same cannot be said of the greatest actress of her age. In Isabella, Jane Shore, The Grecian ­Daughter, The Fair Penitent, Venice Preserv’d, and Macbeth, Siddons dominated the public imagination, theatrical receipts, and, to this day, critical attention. But audiences and critics alike found her poorly suited to comedy and to parts that required the per­for­ mance of “softer” emotions. In fact, finding new roles for Siddons proved

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to be a prob­lem. In the 1787–88 season, four new pieces ­were brought forward, including two new tragedies written expressly for Siddons: Thomas Hull’s Henry II and Hannah Cowley’s The Fate of Sparta. Both ­were failures. This did not bode well ­because, as Russ McDonald has argued, Siddons’s Shakespearean repertoire was also l­imited; many roles she only ever performed in the provinces and some, including Ophelia and Desdemona, failed to generate much excitement.5 In an attempt to broaden her Shakespearean roles, she was cast as Cordelia in a new production of Nahum Tate’s King Lear (it had not been acted at Drury Lane for nine years when it opened on 21 January 1788), but it only survived for three nights in January with a single reprise in March. Siddons never fully took up the role. Upon acceding to management at Drury Lane the next fall, Kemble immediately set about expanding Siddons’s usage and the 1788–89 season featured two con­spic­u­ous Shakespearean revivals that would eventually provide defining roles both for himself and for his ­sister. Both ­were considered history plays and thus the past was being staged to imagine pos­si­ble ­f utures. When Kemble staged a lavish production of Henry the Eighth in the fall of 1788, the play had not been performed at Drury Lane since 2 November 1761, so in a sense Siddons and Kemble ­were devising something new. Siddons’s fame would become synonymous with the role of Queen Katherine, but her initial per­for­mances ­were met with lukewarm notices, prompting explicit questions in the press about ­whether she had exhausted her appeal. The 1788 production closed fairly quickly and received only intermittent per­for­mances between 1792 and 1796 when it was shelved.6 It was not ­until the early 1800s that Siddons’s per­for­mances in the role received universal approbation. I would venture that it was not ­until the solidification of a certain kind of Tory understanding of the polity a­ fter the passage of the notorious Two Acts—­ legislation that effectively interrupted Britain’s constitutional legacy—­and ­until the construction of a specifically Siddonian fantasy of maternal suffering w ­ ere in place that per­for­mance and play coalesced into the form of proto-­ nationalist theater that dominated Kemble’s and Siddons’s late style. And it is this late style that is so powerfully evoked by Boaden, Hunt, Lamb, and Hazlitt. A similar alteration over time happens with Kemble’s production of Coriolanus. His first version of the play in 1789 was of singular importance to the development of the Shakespearean repertoire in the post-­revolutionary era, but its complexity has been fully veiled by the monumental remount of 1811. This ­later production has dominated both popu­lar memory and



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scholarly discussion, but my primary concern in the second section of this chapter is with the version that played alongside the Regency Crisis in 1789. As an emergent imperial form was shedding itself of a now obsolete po­liti­cal logic, the king’s illness both reactivated many of the anx­i­eties that had beset the nation at the end of the War of American In­de­pen­dence and demanded careful scrutiny of how politics had been mutating ­under and alongside Pitt’s ministry. We have to think about Kemble, and specifically his engagement with republican po­liti­cal theory, in a more subtle and sustained fashion to comprehend how Britons reconstituted themselves and their empire in the wake of the American War. During this period, Kemble’s practice is marked by two dramaturgical tendencies. Many of his engagements with the repertoire involve cutting and hybridizing extant scripts. This collage-­like approach was not unusual. Garrick had frequently come at Shakespeare with scissors in hand, but Kemble’s cutting and pasting often had complex po­liti­cal effects that highlighted or exacerbated his predilection for interrupting narrative with vast tableaux on the one hand or strained declamation on the other. Th ­ ese two tendencies evince a willingness to interrupt the repertoire and thus draw attention to its recombinative power. When t­ hese kinds of interruptions work, they allow for a complex historical argument to unfold that uses the repertoire to consolidate a fantasy of a stable, productive ­future. But the moment when the audience is asked to recognize how pre­sent per­for­mance is replicating, altering, or recombining past per­for­mance also affords opportunities to imagine dif­fer­ent ­f utures, alternative forms of predication if you ­will. Interruptions staged in one context had the potential to activate very dif­fer­ent responses as they ­were repeated, especially when the po­liti­cal and social landscape was in a state of upheaval. In this chapter, my interest is in moments in which interruption suddenly reveals the coexistence of vestigial and emergent aesthetic and social formations. In the pauses, we can feel and, ­because so many of Kemble’s tactics are visual, see what was waxing and waning. We are given a snapshot of historical change. Both Henry the Eighth and Coriolanus afforded ample opportunity for visual display: both plays have two elaborate pro­cessions that lend themselves to Kemble’s penchant for pageantry.7 But, as impor­tant, they provided very specific types of roles for Siddons. Experience with Macbeth had demonstrated that Siddons’s fierce emotional power was most effective when concentrated into a few tightly composed scenes. In Macbeth, she is only on stage for five scenes, but to all accounts this only maximized their effect. In Henry

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the Eighth and Coriolanus, her presence is even more distilled and arguably more amplified. We could argue that in both plays, pageantry and “Siddons” operate in dramaturgical counterpoint, interrupting scripts that are other­ wise focused on the use and abuse of power between men. This raises the other crucial issue about t­ hese two plays. Both address significant po­liti­cal dynamics affecting the realm in much the same way as the she-­tragedies of 1782–83 engaged with the immediate postwar mediascape. In fact, Kemble’s managerial decisions tend to presume three criteria for success in serious drama. Substantial investment went into shows that (1) provided vehicles for Siddons and himself; (2) lent themselves to pro­cessions, pageantry, and other forms of visual spectacle; and (3) addressed ­matters of topical concern. This is especially palpable in Henry the Eighth and it is my contention that its dramatization of Cardinal Wolsey’s abuse of power and its pre­sen­ta­tion of a king reformed are in direct dialogue with the ongoing impeachment of Warren Hastings, the recently recalled governor general of Bengal, for high crimes and misdemeanors. As I have argued in Staging Governance, the trial of Warren Hastings was a spectacle like no other and it casts a long shadow on British culture, especially in the winter and fall of 1788. Part of my argument h ­ ere w ­ ill turn on the script’s own deployment of India and the way that the play operates as a cautionary tale. But this topical po­liti­cal argument is supplemented by another kind of politics that is all but synonymous with Siddons’s ­career. Working from the script’s preexisting cele­bration of reproduction, Henry the Eighth lends itself to the emergent biopolitics of post-­A merican E ­ ngland. As we w ­ ill see, Siddons’s ­f uture in the play relies on a remarkable slippage in the deployment of sexuality that melds Britain’s imperial f­ uture in India into a new style of reproductive femininity. If we could argue that Henry the Eighth’s long hiatus from the repertoire meant that Kemble and Siddons ­were working with a clean slate, then Coriolanus was another ­matter. Kemble’s adaptation of the play was very much in dialogue with ­earlier adaptations from the mid-­century onward, but it was also a template for the spectacular productions that would dominate his practice a­ fter moving to the vastly enlarged Drury Lane Theatre in 1794. In this regard, it offers an auspicious site for analy­sis in part ­because we see Kemble devising a way of meeting Siddons’s im­mense affective power with the signifying potential of scenographic design, mass pro­cession, and m ­ usic. However, ­because Coriolanus is such a manifestly po­liti­cal play and b ­ ecause Kemble’s first production was staged in the m ­ iddle of a major po­liti­cal crisis,



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Kemble’s interruptions in the script, themselves adapted from precursors in the repertoire, allowed competing understandings of the po­liti­cal to be si­ mul­ta­neously disclosed. One was firmly grounded in the long history of British parliamentary history and its frequent invocation of Roman po­liti­cal concepts; and one was grounded in the affective and bodily dispositions that Siddons had been exploring since the 1782–83 theatrical season. The onus of the second part of this chapter is to explore the implications of the disclosure of ­t hese coexistent po­liti­cal forms, one constitutional and one biopo­liti­cal and link them to a very specific moment of social insecurity in the realm. In the pro­cess, we can see how the work of corrosive solace was momentarily vis­i­ble, temporarily memorialized, and then, as in Macbeth, subsumed into an altogether dif­fer­ent national and imperial ­future. In my readings of Henry the Eighth and Coriolanus, we see not only how Kemble’s dramaturgical interruptions draw attention to the body public and to the maternal body as a sustaining po­liti­cal force but also how Siddons distilled that force into a recognizable sign of history.

25 November 1788: The T ­ rials of Henry the Eighth It is difficult to overstate how fully the impeachment of Warren Hastings permeated all media in the late 1780s, especially as the proceedings started in earnest on 13 February 1788 when the trial moved to Westminster Hall.8 The debate over the corruption of the East India Com­pany had been ongoing for many years with key flash points around the inquiry into Lord Clive’s conduct during the Bengal Famine of 1770 and the fractious debate over Fox’s India Bill in 1783. The Crown’s interference in the passage of that bill was one of the constitutive moments in the rise of William Pitt, and it amplified Whig re­sis­tance to the theoretical and practical prob­lems posed by the East India Com­pany (EIC) for the governance of the imperium. Edmund Burke put his formidable powers to work at mastering the labyrinthine m ­ atters of Indian affairs and he built a compelling case first for the recall of Hastings from India and then for his impeachment. Pitt’s vociferous defense of Hastings offered an opportunity for the Whigs to undermine the prime minister by linking him to the corruption of the com­pany. Burke and his primary Whig associates, Sheridan, Fox, and Charles Grey, w ­ ere faced with a number of hurdles in convincing the Commons and the public that impeachment was warranted. Chief among ­these was that Hastings and the East India Com­pany

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more generally ­were being indicted for offenses that occurred halfway around the world. Most Britons and certainly most parliamentarians w ­ ere becoming aware that Indian affairs ­were of significant import in the wake of the War of American In­de­pen­dence. But if Britain’s imperial f­uture lay in the East, in the mid-1780s very few Britons beyond t­ hose working directly with the EIC had much sense of how the com­pany worked, the alliances that enabled colonial rule, the complexity of revenue extraction that was enriching the colonizers, or even of the major players and regions involved. Impeaching Hastings would require educating parliament and the public about this foreign world. This education was largely enacted through extraordinary oratorical per­for­mances that the public, through the press, followed with rapt attention. Recognizing its performative qualities, the press and visual satirists covering the trial emphasized its spectacular qualities. For our purposes ­here, understanding the two-­pronged rhetorical approach ­adopted by Burke and Sheridan in their multiday speeches w ­ ill illuminate the way that certain speeches and scenes in Henry the Eighth engaged with this pressing material. Burke’s concern with Hastings’s activities, and the rapacious practices of the com­ pany more generally, w ­ ere not simply confined to specific transactions. His worry was that the kind of corruption and tyranny that he had excavated from the East India Com­pany rec­ords would become a governmental norm that would eventually make its way back to Britain. The vast wealth of returning com­pany officials granted them im­mense financial power and, increasingly, ­t hese figures w ­ ere beginning to populate both the House of Lords and the Commons. Understanding full well that the economic vitality of the empire underwrote that of the realm, especially a realm that had just lost its colonial holdings in Amer­i­ca, Burke’s oratorical assault on what he referred to as “geo­graph­i­cal morality”—­namely, the willingness to countenance tyranny in India simply b ­ ecause it was a distant colony—­was primarily aimed at preserving the governing princi­ples of the metropole from the kind of corruption routinely accepted and promulgated by Hastings during his tenure as governor general. In short, Burke’s intervention was aimed at preventing colonial governmentality from undermining the legitimacy of metropolitan politics. As we w ­ ill see, this prob­lem of the colonial possession redefining the colonizer in its image is precisely where Henry the Eighth starts. Burke presented this argument piecemeal in the Commons, but once the trial began in February 1788, he wrought this argument into the four-­ day “Speech on the Opening of the Impeachment” that to all accounts overwhelmed both his immediate audience of parliamentarians and the



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reading public. Burke’s po­liti­cal concerns focused on the princi­ples of governance, yet he recognized that the horrors of despotism had to be made palpable. On the third day of his speech, Burke’s litany of torture, rape, and mutilation perpetrated by Hastings’s minion Devi Singh at Rangpur enacted its own kind of sublime vio­lence on its audience, and it was through this aestheticization of terror that Burke hoped to foreclose on evidentiary prob­ lems that would likely acquit Hastings.9 Burke’s oratory was deemed one of the greatest per­for­mances of the age, but it was overshadowed by Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s even more affecting “Speech on the Begams Charge” in June. Burke’s “Opening Speech” was an intellectual tour de force of Ciceronian proportions, but the man­ag­ers knew from their prior experience in bringing Hastings to account that it would take more than a legalistic or constitutional argument to convict him. His guilt had to be made emotionally tangible, and Sheridan pulled out all the stops to make the treatment of the Begams of Awadh at the hands of the com­pany an exemplary case of moral turpitude and unnatural perversion. Sheridan charged that the com­pany both instigated and abetted the disappropriation of the Begams by their son Asaf ud-­Daulah, thus legitimating not only the displacement of t­ hese power­f ul and elite w ­ omen (who not incidentally had supported Chait Singh’s rebellion against the com­pany) but also myriad acts of indignity against the w ­ omen of the Begams’ h ­ ouse­holds. Sheridan specifically argued that the com­pany ­under Hastings’s rule not only countenanced the defamation of elite ­women but also struck at the very bonds of nature by encouraging a son to disgrace his ­mother. And ­t hese “unnatural” acts ­were all aimed at lining the coffers of the com­pany. Whereas Burke’s invocation of w ­ omen’s pain as a trope for despotism revolved around the narration of sexual vio­lence, Sheridan moved to far more sentimental territory pertaining to the sanctity of the ­family, maternal femininity, and filial piety—­precisely the affective zones so thoroughly explored in the theater of corrosive solace discussed in the opening chapters of this book. In this regard, Sheridan’s speech was more deeply in tune with the affective dynamics of the post-­American repertoire than with Burke’s complex engagement with the post-­American imperial predicament. Siddons’s per­for­ mances of suffering in Isabella and Jane Shore ­were always already a template for the affective condition Sheridan was trying to conjure to make his listeners feel for the Begams of Awadh. A more sensational oratorical per­for­mance could not be ­imagined and again the specifics of Sheridan’s speech resonated with Henry the Eighth in that a noble and elite ­woman is

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dispossessed through the machinations of a governmental proxy. In a strange way, Siddons’s subtle retooling of Queen Katherine for this par­tic­u­lar moment in the fall of 1788, for a brief moment, made this tendentious equivalence even more pointed. The high points of the first “season” of the impeachment of Warren Hastings—it was to continue for seven years—­came in February and June of 1788. No other event had received the kind of media attention garnered during this period, and ­t here was much anticipation regarding the trial into the fall when parliament was due to reconvene. But George III’s failure to travel from Windsor to town on 31 October 1788 quickly activated a blaze of gossip regarding his health that had been smoldering since the summer. Within a week, it was common knowledge that the king was grievously ill. On 8 November, the illness was diagnosed as an “absolute mania, distinct from and wholly unconnected with fever.”10 As John Derry argues, the extremity and variability of George III’s symptoms ­were themselves catalysts for anxiety. The king was at times violent—it was reported that he had physically assaulted the Prince of Wales—at other times, he was in a stupor. Aside from ­these disturbing shifts in personality, he was exhibiting a host of conflicting physical symptoms. It is now commonly accepted that George III was suffering from porphyria, but for the rest of the fall and much of the winter Britons ­were confronted with the fact of ­either a ­dying or a mad king and the prospect of a deeply divisive regency. On 20 November 1788, ­after prorogation had expired, the Commons and the House of Lords ­were to recommence the Hastings trial, but the sudden illness of George III meant that the opening of the session was delayed ­until March 1789 and the trial itself did not resume ­u ntil 21 April 1789. The Regency Crisis substantially diminished public interest in the trial and the advent of revolution in France in July  1789 pushed it well onto the back burner. If not for the crisis precipitated by the king’s madness, Henry the Eighth would have opened on 25 November 1788 at nearly the same time as the recommencement of the impeachment of Warren Hastings with the nation still very much preoccupied with corruption in India. Henry the Eighth, like its companion in the 1788–89 season Coriolanus, is specifically about the use and abuse of power and the play’s first scene immediately raises the question of Britain’s relation to India. The play opens with Buckingham asking Norfolk for reports of the diplomatic cele­brations known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Weeks of masquing, tournaments, and other spectacles that attended Henry VIII’s meetings with Francis I of France are



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condensed into Norfolk’s extraordinary description. Informing Buckingham that his illness prevented him from witnessing “earthly glory,” Norfolk states: . . . ​Men might say Till this time pomp was single, but now married To one above itself. Each following day Became the next day’s master, till the last Made former won­ders its. ­Today the French, All cliquant, all in gold, like heathen gods Shone down the En­glish; and tomorrow they Made Britain India. E ­ very man that stood Showed like a mine. Their dwarfish pages w ­ ere As cherubims all gilt; the madams, too, Not used to toil, did almost sweat to bear The pride among them, that their very ­labour Was to them as a painting. Now this masque Was cried incomparable, and th’ensuing night Made it a fool and beggar. The two kings Equal in lustre, w ­ ere now best, now worst, As presence did pre­sent them. (1.1.14–30) Bernadette Andrea has demonstrated the importance of both the historical masques performed at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 and Shakespeare’s indirect pre­sen­ta­tion of Holinshed’s account in Henry the Eighth to Jacobean imperial aspirations.11 In their initial context, E ­ ngland had no imperial standing and was just as likely to be among the colonized; at the time of James I’s reign, Britain was only just beginning its Atlantic empire and thus the desire both to rival France’s burgeoning empire and to “own” India was a projection. The ambivalence nascent to this projection is subtly registered in this scene b ­ ecause the distinction between colonizer and colonized is blurred throughout this speech.12 In the fall of 1788, the play of figures in Norfolk’s speech brings us right to the core of Burke’s argument regarding the relation between colony and metropole. In the series of competing masques, the French, clad in gold, shone down the En­glish like heathen gods. The simile invokes religious alterity yet maintains a crucial grammatical boundary—­“ like” prevents immediate meta­ phorical substitution—­and thus the meta­phorical relationship is grounded on metonymic contiguity to gold costume. As it turns to the corresponding

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En­glish masque, Shakespeare’s script eschews simile—­“and tomorrow they / Made Britain India”—­only to retroactively assert some level of distinction with the supplementary simile—­“­Every man that stood / Showed like a mine.” This speech, in this new context, encapsules Burke’s chief concern, for in its imperial competition with France, Britain is India.13 The commutability inherent to the meta­phor enacts Burke’s fear that the East India Com­pany’s tyrannical practices would eventually destroy the parliamentary princi­ples at the heart of the British constitution. That the supplemental qualification ties this commutability to the riches of the East only drives the point home. Thirty lines into the play, at the very moment when the impeachment proceedings ­were to have resumed, Norfolk is essentially recapitulating in one highly evocative rhetorical figure Burke’s overall analy­sis of the implications of East India Com­pany corruption. I am stressing both the intense saturation of the mediascape with all ­t hings pertaining to the East India Com­pany and the con­spic­u­ous timing of Henry the Eighth’s opening night ­because Buckingham’s response to this description attacks Cardinal Wolsey, the architect of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, on two fronts. He argues that the masquing is excessive, thus drawing attention to the problematic meta­phorical equation of Britain and India; and he suggests that the peace it was designed to celebrate came at too g­ reat a price, thus raising the question of diplomatic losses and gains (1.1.52–57; 1.1.73–93). Within this topical frame, Wolsey figures for both Hastings and Pitt, who at this moment in the late 1780s ­were two sides of the same coin. With Wolsey linked to Hastings in this opening speech, the doubling of Pitt and Hastings is visibly enacted by the cardinal’s first appearance on stage. In act 1, scene 2, the king enters leaning on Wolsey, a fitting emblem for Henry’s overreliance on his adviser no less than George III’s overreliance on his prime minister. This parallel fully establishes the play’s topical gambit in the fall of 1788 ­because Henry the Eighth establishes the threat of corruption in the first three acts and then tracks Henry’s growth into a fully autonomous sovereign who ultimately establishes the ­future stability of the realm, first by dismissing corrupt advisers and second by grounding imperial power in a fantasy of efficacious ­future sovereignty, h ­ ere figured by the infant Elizabeth. Significantly, Wolsey’s corruption is linked repeatedly to his ties to Papal Rome, and the play explic­itly suggests that he has ambitions to become the pope and thus subsume the king’s rule into his own. At this level, Henry the Eighth declares the emergence of an autonomous Protestant nation, but in the fall of 1788 the play reiterates, in a cautionary fashion, that true



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sovereignty must target excessive influence and financial corruption to avoid becoming subservient to foreign wealth and power. It is the revelation of the latter that ultimately opens the king’s eyes to Wolsey’s crimes, but within the structure of the play his noble queen Katherine fully educates the audience in Wolsey’s perfidy well before the cardinal’s fall in act 3, scene 2. In this play, politics is an internecine ­battle between men, but it is Queen Katherine who raises doubts about Wolsey’s motives during Buckingham’s trial and who fully rejects the cardinal’s abuse of power in her own trial. Her dignified critique of Wolsey is crucial precisely ­because it operates in advance of the king’s. Much like the man­ag­ers of the impeachment who deliberately tried Hastings in the public sphere, Queen Katherine’s critique of Wolsey in ­t hese t­ rials sways the audience well before the terms of that critique have an effect on the king. Henry w ­ ill eventually come to see the cardinal as she does, and it is for this reason that she is esteemed a­ fter her displacement, b ­ ecause the king co-­opts her ethical position. When he fi­nally turns on Wolsey and deals with Gardiner, he effectively avenges the wrongs done to Katherine while retaining Anne as his wife. It is this amalgamated character that constitutes true sovereignty. Katherine’s continuing presence in the play ­after her displacement by Anne Boleyn serves as a reminder of the affective cost of corruption. As nearly ­every review indicates, the 1788 Henry the Eighth is a play not only of ­trials but also of pageants, and they are all conducted in dif­fer­ent registers to dif­fer­ent ends. As the Morning Post summarized, “The Banquet, the Trial of Catherine, the Pro­cesssion, and the concluding assembly in the Chapel, w ­ ere all highly magnificent and conducted with suitable decorum” (MP, 26 November 1788). The first pageant, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, is not shown, but its description yields both an unstable figural relation between Britain and India and a meta­phor for costly peace with France. The ambivalence coded into t­ hese figures resonates with issues explic­itly and implicitly active in the impeachment of Hastings as the play dramatizes the destruction of Buckingham and the annulment of Katherine’s marriage in the first two acts. ­These two trial scenes are separated by the first spectacular scene listed above, “The Banquet” of act 1, scene 4. We first encounter Anne Boleyn in this scene, but the spectacle is provided by a group of masquers—­t he king and his men in disguise—­t hat interrupt a scene of bawdy colloquy at Cardinal Wolsey’s banquet. Bernadette Andrea speculates that in its earliest per­ for­mances this was a scene of orientalist display ­because it alludes to a historical masque in which Henry VIII appeared at court à la Turk brandishing

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a scimitar.14 None of the reviews of the 1788 show mark this exoticism, but ­t here is no question that the king’s masquing is aligned explic­itly with the excessive consumption of Wolsey’s entertainment and with the hyper-­ sexualization of the entire scene. Both of t­hese tropes w ­ ere mobilized frequently as shorthand for Sultanic rule and they played a prominent role in the visual satires of Hastings’s impeachment. During the impeachment, Hastings was regularly satirized as a sultan, and in many satires he is seen feeding diamonds to a similarly debauched king (Figure  4.1). In this regard, critiques of George III during this period also figured him as a debauched and vindictive eastern potentate. B ­ ecause Henry’s desire for Anne dramatically starts h ­ ere, it has an impor­tant influence on the ensuing trial scene for, despite protestations that the annulment is about m ­ atters of conscience, it can never be fully disassociated from possessing Anne. This question of possession is impor­tant ­because the next spectacular scene in the Morning Post’s list is Queen Katherine’s trial in act 2, scene 4, in which she is effectively dispossessed. The way that pageantry and Siddons’s impassioned per­for­mance come together is crucial b ­ ecause the scene dramaturgically establishes wealth and power before Siddons even enters and then we watch as she refuses to take part in a pro­cess utterly corrupted by Wolsey and Cardinal Campeius’s machinations. She loses wealth and status but retains her dignity. The pro­cession of trumpets, scribes, bishops, cardinals, and royalty with all their attendants and rich accoutrements of power was “a ­grand Spectacle” (SJC, 25 November 1788) that was “perhaps, historically exact even to the Tapestry, and the Candle of Hollingshead” (W, 26 November  1788). But Siddons’s Katherine was to most accounts scathing in this scene, upholding the greater claims of morality, religion, and just sovereignty, as she rejected insinuations that her prior marriage to Henry’s b ­ rother had indeed been consummated. The script ­here plays to all of Siddons’s strengths and the shift to the more private encounter with Wolsey and Campeius in act 3, scene 1, and her final vision and envoi in act 4 allowed her ample opportunity to condemn the cardinals’ corruption and to enact her suffering concern both for her child Mary and for her now dispossessed w ­ omen. Katherine’s concern for the care of her female attendants in her penultimate speech makes up a considerable section of her scene in act 4 (4.2.133– 58) and I would argue that it has impor­tant topical overtones in this context ­because Burke and Sheridan had made such a point, albeit in radically dif­ fer­ent ways, about the dishonor facing elite ­women dispossessed by Hastings’s minions. By strange historical circumstance, Katherine’s ­house­hold in its

Figure 4.1. Anonymous, The Diamond Eaters, Horrid Monsters!, ­etching (1788). Trustees of the British Museum.

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unraveling bears resemblance to that of the Begams of Awadh and to the confiscation of the property of Panna, ­mother of Chait Singh.15 Sheridan and Burke’s treatment of ­these humiliations implicitly equated high caste ­women in India with w ­ omen of elevated rank in E ­ ngland, a crucial tactic in making their audience feel the enormity of Hastings’s crimes. This topical resonance was, of course, fleeting—­I suspect that with Hastings’s trial on hold, it barely registered—­but it fits the broader deployment of the Indies not only in Kemble’s production but also in the play itself. As Andrea has argued, all of the queens in this play are “blackened” in dif­fer­ent ways.16 Katherine’s reputation is blackened by Wolsey’s calumny even though the king refuses this derogation. Burke and Sheridan’s strategic strug­gle to maintain equivalency between ­women of rank in E ­ ngland and India—­a strug­gle largely doomed to failure by the incipient racism of their audience—is also enacted figuratively by Henry VIII. At the very moments that he seeks to legitimate Katherine, his possession of Anne trumps all, and he finds himself at an impasse. Cranmer, and to a lesser degree ­Cromwell, are enjoined to retroactively protect Katherine’s reputation while ratifying Anne’s legitimacy. Anne’s marriage pro­cession, the next major spectacle in Kemble’s production, turns on another “sign” of India. Shortly a­ fter the pro­cession of Anne and her vast retinue from her coronation in act 4, scene 1, the Second Gentleman describes the new queen as an “angel” and declares that “Our King has all the Indies in his arms, / And more, and richer, when he strains that lady” (4.1.45–46). In this scene, the figural economy shifts: Anne, not Britain, is India and that subtle jump from meta­phor to personification is an impor­tant distinction. With Anne, the king owns the Indies, but the none-­ too-­subtle play on “strains that lady” in the ensuing line implies that Queen Anne makes riches: her value lies in her productivity, which, as she makes her way from Wolsey’s banquet to the marriage pro­cession to the christening of Elizabeth, is to say that it lies in sexual reproduction. Henry elevates Anne and thus Elizabeth is his creation, but the play’s earthy treatment of Anne’s rise keeps the question of reproduction in the foreground. In its historical context, this was all about the biological imperative of succession; within the context of the deployment of sexuality and gender in the Hastings trial, this aspect of the play dovetails with the emergent biopolitics that was inflecting so much of the repertoire. This is brought to a triumphant conclusion with the play’s final spectacle, the pageant of consensus in act 5, scene 4. Unlike the grandeur of Katherine’s



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trial, or the sexualized riches of the marriage pro­cession, this pro­cession is anticipated by the play’s most con­spic­u­ous invocation of “the p ­ eople” raucously giving their assent to an Elizabethan and, by extension, Jacobean ­future. Now that the king has rid himself of Wolsey, and suspended Gardiner’s ambitions, proper sovereignty has been restored. In the terms I’ve been arguing h ­ ere, this is what broad-­bottomed consensus would look like if the king distanced himself from Hastings’s and Pitt’s corrupt influence. The king, now working autonomously with the guidance of less ambitious and interested advisers, secures “the ­people” and “India”—­both mystified entities at this point—­without the taint of “geo­graph­i­cal morality.” And he does so not for himself but for the f­ uture. This is a view of the imperium without the corrupting influence of the East India Com­pany operating between the Crown and its colonial holdings, a version of the ­future that would only come to pass with the advent of the British Raj in 1858. The proximity of this allegorical staging of Henry the Eighth to the manifest desires of Burke and Sheridan at this point in their ­careers is striking but perhaps not surprising. Sheridan, ­after all, owned Drury Lane at this point, but, more impor­ tant, securing this f­ uture, one of po­liti­cal consensus and imperial plenitude ­after a generation of fractious imperial decline, was the desire of most Britons. If the Hastings trial had recommenced, the show should have been a crowd pleaser; but the suspension of the proceedings muted its topicality and less satisfying aspects of the production became nakedly vis­i­ble. This par­tic­u­lar fantasy offered wishful thinking dressed up as moral rejuvenation ­because Anne’s reproductive capacity is subsumed into Katherine’s ethical resilience to yield Elizabeth’s embodiment of imperial power. As Samuel Johnson argued, it is Katherine’s role not Anne’s that warrants close attention, so we have less a progression than a figural sleight of hand.17 It was precisely this aspect of the show that proved difficult to fully endorse. The reviews all recognized the importance of the aforementioned spectacles, and many noted that Mrs. Farmer, who played Anne, was suitably lovely, but their understanding of Katherine’s role was vexed (W, 26 November 1788). None of the reviews ­wholeheartedly endorse Siddons’s per­for­mance; some condemn it utterly. The Public Advertiser is the most damning when it states that “the w ­ hole was too labored—­particularly the Tryal Scene, where the words came so slow and mea­sured, that they seemed to be distilled—­she struck fire however out of some passages—­but it was only to make darkness vis­i­ble” (PA, 29 November 1788). Other papers recognize virtuoso moments in the trial

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scene in less backhanded ways, but they suggest that she is not well suited to the more plaintive scene of domestic concern in act 4, scene 2. ­A fter questioning the value of the play itself, the St. James Chronicle’s opening-­night review cast serious doubts on Siddons’s capacity for rendering “tender Passions”: “The few Occasions offered in the Part of Catherine, for the strong and impetuous Manner of Mrs. Siddons, ­were seized and improved; Where soft and compassionate Feelings ­were to be interested, she, as usual failed:—at least, no Impression was made on us” (SJC, 26 November 1788). That “as usual” is damning, but the World was even more precise. ­After praising Siddons’s per­for­mance in the trial and in the ensuing interview with Wolsey and Campeius, the reviewer turned to act 4, scene 2: “Her scene with ­Cromwell we did not feel, and therefore we ­shall not say that we did. Impression at exhibited woe is not voluntary; if it was, who would be without it? From Truth, however, t­ here is no dispensation; and therefore we must say, we at this passage tried in vain to be impressed” (W, 26 November 1788). The precision ­here is impor­tant b ­ ecause the critical consensus faults Siddons for being unable to elicit the complex emotional condition of dispossession, including the empathy for the now displaced female members of her h ­ ouse­hold. It is in this scene where the play’s performative, rather than figural, relation to the impeachment of Warren Hastings was to have been enacted ­because the scenario so closely resembles that evoked by Sheridan in his speech on the Begams Charge. Although Sheridan was able to generate some level of empathy for their dispossession during his own oratorical per­for­mance, it quickly dissolved. Faced with the task of making the audience feel for the coeval loss of the stature of Katherine and her h ­ ouse­hold, Siddons failed to the degree that reviewers started to question w ­ hether she could elicit “tender Passion.” And this specific failure meant that she would not have reactivated memory of Sheridan’s affecting oratorical per­for­mance six months ­earlier. With her audience not feeling compassion in the pre­sent, the topical link to the recent past was short-­circuited. My sense ­here is that we are dealing with more than a specific failure of acting. We know from other plays that the demands of act 4, scene 2, lay within Siddons’s emotional range. I believe the limits of empathy ­were strained at this historical moment by the politicization of sentimental affect in the Hastings trial. That the production had the potential to capitalize on the topical potential of key tropes and scenarios in the play meant that Siddons’s per­for­mance carried an excessive historical burden. And yet it was a burden that was interrupted by the deferral of the Hastings trial ­until a­ fter



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the king’s illness had passed and that ultimately dissolved when public interest in the East India Com­pany’s corruption was displaced by concern over events in France. What we have ­here then are the traces of what happens when topical references fail to reach their destination: reviewers ­were left with a sense of incomplete affective engagement that then foregrounded the play’s pageantry. No longer balanced by the confluence of emotion and politics, the pro­cessions emerged as mere spectacle and Kemble’s triadic r­ ecipe for success in serious drama became a one-­note production. The now obsolete topical allegory also gives us purchase on another key point of confusion among the reviewers. Nearly all the reviewers ­were puzzled as to why Kemble cast himself in the minor role of C ­ romwell when he was more suited to Wolsey. Setting aside the uncharacteristic possibility that Kemble did so out of modesty, we can discern that the play’s topicality in the fall of 1788 would have meant that Kemble was unwilling to become Hastings’s avatar. It is a subtle sign that the play’s cautionary history flows alongside con­temporary events and situations in a way that does not ratify Whig actions in the pre­sent but imagines what it would be like for the Crown to retain its imperial f­ uture in India f­ ree of the corrupt past that consolidated its power. In this regard, the play’s failure is a sign that this moment has not come to pass. Just as Sheridan’s audience ultimately did not feel sufficiently for the Begams of Awadh and parliamentarians did not yet see a way beyond com­pany rule, so too did the audiences of the 1788 Henry the Eighth find themselves waiting for a moment when they would feel Katherine’s pain and when they would feel unambiguous joy in the promise of imperial rule in India. That moment would come, of course, but it required that this production of Henry the Eighth be detached from the initial topical resonances in which it was first conceived. When Siddons returned to the part of Queen Katherine four years ­later, the complex interplay of colonial politics and gender was less active. That specific f­ uture was past. Siddons’s first benefit night a­ fter a significant absence from the stage in the early 1790s was in a per­for­mance of Henry the Eighth on 26 March 1792. The benefit was successful largely ­because audiences ­were excited for Siddons’s return, but the play was not. Henry the Eighth was performed twice a season u ­ ntil it was fi­nally shelved on 15 January 1796, but the play returned with a vengeance in the early nineteenth ­century to become one of Siddons’s most impor­tant roles. Campbell’s extraordinary praise for Siddons’s per­for­mance as Queen Katherine, although located in his chapter on the 1788–89 season, derives its specifics from

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second­hand accounts of her ­later per­for­mances of the play.18 The play returns to the London stage a­ fter Kemble becomes man­ag­er at Covent Garden with numerous per­for­mances, starting on 22 September 1806.19 Queen Katherine’s trial, freed of the specter of the Hastings impeachment, could simply become about dignity, calumny, and, most impor­tant, loyalty to a vision of an uncorrupted realm (Figure 4.2). Playing this role to a war­time audience, its primary signification becomes national not imperial. It is at this moment that Kemble starts to play Cardinal Wolsey, for the nationalist dimensions of Katherine’s re­sis­tance only increases as she overpowers the most revered tragedian of his generation.20 By shedding one history, we could say that history came to Henry the Eighth and in so ­doing provided Siddons with one of her most iconic roles. Furthermore, Kemble’s pageants became occasions for nationalist spectacle, the play’s anti-­Catholic narrative could be easily

Figure  4.2. A ­ fter Henry Harlow, The Court for the Tryal of Queen Katherine, engraving (1818). Trustees of the British Museum.



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integrated into prevailing anti-­French sentiment, and thus the play began to fire on all cylinders.

7 February 1789: Pro­cessing Coriolanus On 7 February 1789, at the height of the Regency Crisis, Kemble made his first appearance in the role of Coriolanus. Although very distant from the original, it would become arguably his most impor­tant Shakespearean role. As Coriolanus was in rehearsal, a ­bitter strug­gle erupted in Parliament regarding the ­future of the monarchy. When it became clear in early November 1788 that George III could not govern, Fox was in Italy, but on his return he fully supported Grey’s policy giving the Prince of Wales full rights of regency, with no conditions being set by the Commons. Pitt broke with Tory tradition and put forth a bill severely limiting the regency. The prince—­and Fox, for that ­matter—­were the embodiment of precisely the kind of dissipation ­under such fierce scrutiny in the post-­A merican era: the prince’s secret marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert was only the most recent sign of his profligacy, and Fox’s gambling debts ­were the topic of endless concern in the press. But the prince was Foxite through and through, and thus supporting his regency was tantamount to reversing the Whigs’ electoral defeat of 1784 and ending George III’s ostensible despotism.21 Fox’s motives w ­ ere clear and he strongly opposed any limits on the regency’s prerogative. For the public, Fox’s denial of the right of the Commons to set terms was radically at odds with the man who styled himself “the man of the p ­ eople.” By obviating the power of the Commons, the Foxites ­were startlingly close not only to traditional Tory views of kingship but also to Coriolanus’s desire to accede to the consulship without engaging the citizens of Rome. Coriolanus’s first per­for­mance in more than twenty years came in the wake of Fox’s disastrous speech refusing any parliamentary limits on the regent’s prerogative, and I believe any assessment of the play’s politics needs to be mea­sured against the factional response to the king’s madness.22 As Hazlitt remarked of Kemble’s late productions of the play: “Coriolanus is a store­ house of po­liti­cal commonplaces. Any one who studies it may save himself the trou­ble of reading Burke’s Reflections, or Paine’s Rights of Man, or the Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or our own. The arguments for or against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and

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the abuse of it, peace and war, are h ­ ere very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a phi­los­op ­ her.”23 Hazlitt’s way of recording history ­here is intriguing. Events following the French Revolution are worthy of specificity: Burke’s Reflections and Paine’s Rights of Man are named to disambiguate them from equally apposite works by the same authors, such as Thoughts on the Pre­sent Discontents or Common Sense. The phrase “or our own” relegates the period from 1640 through 1790 to a condition of generality so vague that it almost silences this period of robust po­liti­cal thought in Britain. Hazlitt’s rhetorical diminution of pre-1790s British po­liti­cal theory specifically separates Kemble’s post-1806 productions of Coriolanus from this tradition, but the very gesture subtly indicates that such a separation is a misprision, for Kemble’s initial engagement with the play not only predates events in France but also explic­itly engages with “po­liti­cal thought in the English-­speaking Atlantic from 1760–1790.”24 I am adopting J. G. A. Pocock’s historical designation advisedly in part to contextualize the po­liti­cal reading that follows and in part to add nuance to the critical tradition surrounding this play. Jonathan Sachs, Michael Dobson, and ­others have devoted significant time to Kemble’s reimagination of Coriolanus to argue for both its po­liti­cal import and its impact on Hazlitt’s theorization of the imagination.25 Much Romantic theater scholarship reads the play through Hazlitt’s criticism, but I want to bring us back to its initial reception and remediation.26 The play that opened so brilliantly in the winter of 1789 was not the same as the monumental production remounted in 1811 a­ fter being pulled from the stage for close to fourteen years. Of Kemble’s post-1811 per­for­mances, Sachs argues that “the image of Rome that Kemble presented was imperial and aristocratic, a power­f ul projection of the rightness of patrician rule and thus a defense of the established order.”27 Sachs attends closely to surviving images and commentary on the design of the 1811 production that presented Rome at the height of its imperial grandeur. As Odell states, “The Rome of his [Kemble’s] Coriolanus was of marble—­the Rome of the Caesars—­but granting the anachronism, it was very fine.”28 The crucial piece of evidence is Hodgkin’s scene drawing of the Roman Forum (Figure 4.3).29 The purple/brown chosen for the columns signals porphyry, the rare stone ineluctably tied to Roman imperial power. Imperial porphyry, found in a single quarry in Egypt and imported at extravagant cost, was decreed by Emperor Tiberius to be the exclusive property of the Imperial ­family. It is the material sign of the empire at its apogee and is ­here deployed to figure for Britain’s imperial



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Figure 4.3. Henry Hodgkin, “The Roman Forum; set drawing for 1811 Coriolanus,” watercolor drawing. Trustees of the British Museum.

ascendancy. E ­ ngland in 1811, with a mad king safely sequestered and a resurgent military state firmly in place, was porphyric in more ways than one. The interpretation that follows diverges from Sachs’s argument that, unlike Macbeth, Coriolanus is imbued with the “neutralizing effect of antiquity”: “Coriolanus makes it pos­si­ble to explore relationships of power and hierarchy in a structured but non-­monarchic pre-­Christian setting.”30 Rome was anything but an anodyne historical setting for eighteenth-­ century Britons; fundamental debates regarding virtue, patriotism, republican governance, and imperial corruption ­were haunted by Roman princi­ples and examples. And the shifting place of Coriolanus in the eighteenth-­century repertoire is pegged to ­t hese debates. As Sachs notes, and as some audiences at the time complained about with regard to the 1811 Coriolanus, misrecognizing the Roman republic as the post-­Augustan imperium does considerable vio­lence to the play’s politics and to traditional British understandings of the po­liti­cal. The theorization of republican virtue

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is at the core of both eighteenth-­century British po­liti­cal thought and Kemble’s earliest alteration of the script. Unlike with Macbeth, Kemble’s conception of the play and Siddons’s specific per­for­mance as Volumnia ­were not haunted by Garrick and Pritchard—­ the play was only staged by Garrick for one season, with Mossop in the title role. Repertoire thinking moves differently h ­ ere. Kemble’s 1789 adaptation went by the title Coriolanus, or The Roman Matron, a Tragedy, but in ­later productions it was designated A Historical Play.31 That shift in generic designation is significant b ­ ecause the nineteenth-­century productions operate more like hegemonic assertions of patrician rule than tragic explorations of the conflicted status of patriotism in a corrupt state. The play’s generic status—­ its capacity to be experienced as tragedy rather than history—is ineluctably tied to the uncertain status of the realm when it first opened, a nation with urgent questions about the health of its king and its empire. Kemble’s adaptation is based largely on Thomas Sheridan’s successful 1755 Smock Alley redaction of the play that played frequently at Covent Garden in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Kemble’s version differs from Sheridan’s in impor­tant ways, but both scripts radically simplify the Shakespearean text by reverting to James Thomson’s Patriot Whig adaptation for their denouement. Thomson’s adaptation of Coriolanus was written in 1746 u ­ nder the patronage of Patriot Whig’s Pitt the Elder and George Lyttelton immediately following the Jacobite rebellion. Neoclassical in design, it observes the unity of place—­firmly situated among the Volscians, all Roman events, including Coriolanus’s banishment, are summarized in retrospective speeches ­either by Coriolanus himself or by observers such as the servant Titus. Perhaps not surprisingly in the light of its pedigree, the play focuses on virtuous conduct in the face of corruption. In Thomson’s hands, both tribunes and senators ­either abet or fail to recognize the virtuous mandate of a patriot king in the making and Rome is thrown into disarray. Within the terms set by Thomson, the play turns on the vexed status of friendship within a social order grounded on honor and military virtue and thus the relationship between Coriolanus and Tullus is a constant preoccupation. Veturia (Thomson diverges from Shakespeare by restoring the historical name of Coriolanus’s ­mother and transferring the name Volumnia to his wife) dissuades Coriolanus from laying waste to the city by threatening to make herself the first victim of his treason; Coriolanus’s capitulation to the bonds of filial love saves Rome, but his continued adherence to a strict code of honor ensures his death



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for treason at the hands of the Volscians. Importantly, Tullus, his friend and patriotic mirror, does not raise arms against him, and his former host, Galesus, is left to offer the concluding encomium to patriotism: “Then by this Truth the Star by which we steer; / Above Ourselves our Country should be Dear.”32 Like its severe limitations on dramatic action, Thomson’s play works with a highly ­limited set of po­liti­cal princi­ples derived from the Patriot milieu in which he traveled. But the play’s complex treatment of friendship and hospitality proved to be of less interest for ­f uture audiences than Thomson’s reconfiguration of the pleading scene between Coriolanus and his ­family and the swift move to his assassination. Sheridan and Kemble retained Thomson’s forceful drive to closure, but they significantly expanded the play’s reach and dramatic interest by restoring select scenes from Shakespeare. In Sheridan, the first two acts take place in Rome and, with the exception of act 4, scene 2, in which the tribunes are shamed, the final three acts take place in the Volscian camp much as scripted in Thomson. The function and staging of the Roman matrons’ intercession changes with each subsequent adaptation and ­t hese changes in signification are intimately tied to subtle changes in how Rome’s po­liti­cal landscape is presented. Although the restoration of Roman scenes in Sheridan’s play allows for the much vaunted Ovation following Martius’s victory at Corioli, his cuts to Shakespeare are extensive.33 As Ripley summarizes, Sheridan’s subordination of the play’s politics to a cele­bration of heroic individualism demanded a radical lowering of the plebians’ profile. With the disappearance of 1.1, in which the citizens critique the power structure and advance their own alternatives, they become merely passive and inarticulate tools of the tribunes. Thanks to the cuts in the Voices scene . . . ​t hey dwindle into ­little more than the good-­ natured targets of Martius’s disdain. . . . ​On their final appearance, in Sheridan’s conflation of 4.6, 5.1, and 5.4 the citizens are more flatteringly portrayed than in Shakespeare. They do not obsequiously laud the tribunes . . . ​they decisively opt to expiate their past errors by throwing the tribunes from the Tarpeian rock . . . ​[but] agree to suspend their anger u ­ ntil the result of the matrons’ suit is known. All in all, the underclass is neutrally treated: They are allowed no po­liti­cal status, but neither are they held up for ridicule.34

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This neutralization allows for a further simplification: the tribunes become corrupt representatives acting from selfish motives and “the blame for Martius’s defection belongs exclusively to Sicinius and Brutus.”35 The patricians are similarly contained. On the Roman side, Menenius, without the fable of the belly, is reduced to a hedonistic oligarch; on the Volscian side, Galesus, the Volsician host only referred to in Shakespeare but prominent in Thomson, is retained to critique the perversion of virtue into bellicose vengeance and to condemn treason while nonetheless eulogizing Coriolanus. As Tullus’s adviser—­Thomson’s Bolingbroke figure—­Galesus’s prudential patriotism provided just the kind of po­liti­cal mystification necessary to see the play through the 1760s. This summary of Sheridan’s neutralization of the play’s po­liti­cal implications allows us to more fully appreciate Kemble’s adaptation. Kemble’s version, unlike Sheridan’s, does not start in the domestic sphere with Veturia/Volumnia expatiating on the selflessness of martial virtue. Rather, it opens outdoors on “A Street in Rome” by restoring Shakespeare’s act 1, scene 1. The play begins with open rebellion; mutinous citizens are demanding the right to set the price of grain in a time of shortage. Food rioting was not a solely Roman phenomenon; it was arguably the most vis­i­ble form of po­liti­cal dissent among the British lower ­orders for much of the eigh­teenth ­century. Especially prominent during times of war, food riots had broken out as recently as the American War and they would erupt again in the early phases of the wars with France. But the vari­ous citizens are not simply a mob: calls for the extirpation of Marcius by Citizen One are countered by Citizen Two’s assessment of his ser­v ice to Rome. They want repre­sen­ta­tion in the Senate. The newly appointed tribunes Brutus and Sicinius cynically see that Caius Marcius’s disdain for the unruly power of the p ­ eople can be used to undermine his power and to amplify their own. The politics of Kemble’s version remains significantly less complex than Shakespeare’s, but the inclusion of this scene demonstrates both the power of the demos and the tribunes’ willingness to channel that power to serve their selfish interests. This restoration of the p ­ eople is consistent throughout Kemble’s alteration to Sheridan’s script: the plebians are ­t here in order to further magnify the corruption of their representatives. That corruption is matched by the inefficacy of the patricians. Cominius’s panegyric and Menenius’s interventions in the Senate fail; armed with in­effec­tive advice, Coriolanus’s stark vision of a Rome ruled by virtuous patricians is rendered both anathema to the ­people and eventually recognized by himself as no longer applicable to the realpolitik of Rome. It is this double



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obsolescence that allows both the ­people, ­under the auspices of the tribunes, to banish Coriolanus and for Coriolanus to banish himself. No patrician can effectively answer what amounts to a historical recognition that Rome is corrupt for they are themselves complicit in the erosion of Roman values. For this reason, Rome’s trou­bles cannot be resolved through po­liti­cal negotiation between men; rectification can now only come at the level of the ­family and that relies on the retention of Thomson’s version of the intercession of the Roman matrons. ­Women, led by Siddons’s Volumnia, save Rome. Before attending to Siddons’s intervention, it is impor­tant to recognize that Kemble’s restoration of the ­people embeds Coriolanus’s fall within a recognizable constitutional scenario. Within British po­liti­cal history, the relationship between the king and Parliament and the corruption that attended the emergence of parties had been the topic of nearly endless debate. At one level, we could see Coriolanus’s discomfort in the Voices scene as a rejection of Lockean arguments for the right of subjects to cashier their king. Coriolanus is remarkably uncomfortable with consent even when he has it. ­There are also aspects of Coriolanus’s character that align him with Bolingbroke’s patriot king. His staunch embodiment of virtue, his contempt for parties and corruption, and, above all, his commitment to a vision of Rome without the tribunes looks very much like the kind of mythic figure Bolingbroke ­imagined would return E ­ ngland to the original Revolution settlement. Both of t­ hese aspects of his character are notable b ­ ecause they w ­ ere prominent ele­ments of American re­sis­tance to British imperial rule. As Liddle argues, from the accession of George III u ­ ntil 1774, colonists overwhelmingly hoped that he would become a patriot king and rescue the blue-­water empire from the depredations of a corrupt ministry. By the onset of the war, the colonists w ­ ere disabused of this nostalgic construction, but it had a complex afterlife in the Constitutional Congress of 1787, for the presidency is in many ways a republicanized version of patriot kingship. In Britain, the legacy of patriot kingship was more strange.36 David Armitage argues that radical constituencies in Britain in ­favor of conciliation also tried to mobilize this fantasy to imagine a kind of imperial kingship.37 This was a complex sleight of hand b ­ ecause, as Pocock demonstrates, t­ here ­weren’t many models for confederacy to make this accommodation between empire and realm feasible. When the court tried to align itself with amor patriae, radicals and moderate reformers began to recognize the specter of Tory absolutism. In the wake of the war, with all attention focused on restoring the coherence of the realm, the same fantasy of a patriot George III embraced

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by the colonists in the 1760s tallied well not only with the cultural attempts to restore the Crown’s mythic status but also with the hegemonic actions taken in the early phases of Pitt’s ministry. I have argued elsewhere that the Handel Commemoration of 1784 re-­inaugurated George III by misrecognizing him as a virtuous warrior king, and we could suggest further that, like Bolingbroke’s patriot king, the “re-­inaugurated” George III moved swiftly to clear the ministry of corruption, con­ve­niently embodied in the libertine character of Charles James Fox. In both the positive and negative senses, the consolidation of Tory power ­under Pitt that prompted such fierce re­sis­tance from Whigs and radicals alike, for a brief period looked a lot like what Bolingbroke had in mind. We could even argue that the economic recovery of Britain in the postwar years, especially its India policy, fits Bolingbroke’s blue-­water script. The Regency Crisis challenged the efficacy and, indeed, the very existence of this broad-­bottomed consensus, not only b ­ ecause it threatened to replace the virtuous patriot king with the incarnation of vice, but also ­because Fox’s advocacy of unlimited prerogative made explicit what had been implicit in the mutual efforts of George III and Pitt to keep the Whig oligarchy away from power. Kemble’s 1789 Coriolanus is si­mul­ta­neously a critique of the despotic tendencies imputed to George III and the ministry by Foxite Whigs and of t­ hose same Foxites’ sudden advocacy of no limits on the regent’s prerogative. Both ­were dangerous innovations on the constitution. The king’s threat to the constitution, publicly decried by the Whigs during the contretemps over Fox’s India Bill, was now quietly folded into Pittite governance; Foxite regency policy loudly declared that the prince regent, and his chosen minister, should operate u ­ nder a similar understanding of the prerogative. The difference between Pitt’s s­ ilent enactment and Fox’s public advocacy of such a vision of the constitution not only vitiated Fox’s po­liti­cal consistency—­ already in tatters a­ fter the co­a li­tion with North—­but also demonstrated what he and other Foxites had been saying all along—­namely, that Patriot kingship was the ultimate form of corruption. By resisting Fox, Pitt was able to pretend that his own ministry, with the king’s support, had not been driving t­ oward this form of autocracy all along. That pretense would explode in the wake of the French Revolution, but for the moment Pittite consensus could operate ­under a veil of constitutional legitimacy.38 The per­for­mance of consensus and dissensus is, I believe, the crux of Kemble’s Coriolanus, but, unlike Thomson’s version, his engagement with po­liti­cal issues occurs less in the dialogue—­the audience is not subject to



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sustained colloquy on ­matters of patriotism or party—­than in the per­for­ mance of ritual. This is why the Sheridan script is so crucial for Kemble ­because Sheridan’s addition of the ovation in act 1 provided the model for Kemble’s spectacle in act 2, scene 2. Sheridan’s ovation was his most spectacular innovation—it involved a pro­cession of 118 players—­but it was also the subject of a significant disambiguation in his “Advertisement”: Ovation was a lesser sort of triumph. It had its name from ovis, a sheep, which was sacrificed on this occasion, instead of a bull, used in g­ reat triumph. The ovation was granted upon any extraordinary success against the ­enemy, in gaining a ­battle, taking a town, some remarkable exploit, or making an advantageous peace to Rome. But a triumph was never obtained, u ­ nless a kingdom was entirely subdued, and added to the Roman territories. They differed in form from each other principally in this, that in the Ovation all marched on foot, but in the triumph the victor was carried in a chariot drawn by h ­ orses, and followed by horse-­men, which makes the repre­sen­ta­tion of the latter, on stage, impracticable.39 For Sheridan, the ovation’s appeal is primarily antiquarian—­the printed text explains its place in Roman politics and carefully lists its components. In Kemble’s adaptation, Sheridan’s ovation is magnified into a triumph in all but name. The key issue is scenographic. Well aware of the distinction ­because he is working from Sheridan’s script, Kemble nonetheless confuses ­matters by calling for “A Triumphal Arch” in act 2, scene 2. Furthermore, the number of players involved radically increases, in some reports to as many as 240 players, and the entire scene is less about a specific victory than about the enactment of mass consensus. The sheer excess of Kemble’s amplified ovation amounts to a symptom of Rome’s corruption, for a partial victory over the Volscians is being mapped onto an architectural meta­phor for complete subjugation. This helps to explain why Coriolanus is uncomfortable with the misrecognition—he both nostalgically wants it but knows that its pre­sent expression is false. That discomfort both with the architectural sign and the mass ovation signals what the audience and Coriolanus know all too well from act 1, scene 1—­namely, that this kind of performative consensus is a fragile, momentary expression of enthusiasm. That enthusiasm was concentrated in two aspects of the ovation pro­ cession. A ­ fter the pro­gress of four separate divisions—­two military, one

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religious, and a full chorus—­Siddons emerged at the head of the final party. Her remarkable per­for­mance in the ovation pro­cession was discussed in ­every review and remembered by Charles Young as follows: “With flashing eyes and proudest smile, and head erect, and hands pressed firmly against her bosom . . . ​[Volumnia] towered above all around her, and rolled, and almost, reeled across the stage” (Young 1.63, qtd. in Ripley 342). With hands on her breasts, her gesture prefigures the importance of maternality to her intercession in act 5, but her extravagant gait conjures ancient ritual. With the enactment of an almost pagan inspiration, Siddons embodied ancient Rome itself in a fashion that not only underwrote her greeting of her son but also foreshadowed her self-­transformation into a symbol for the republic in act 5. Even at this early point in the play, she both emblematizes and takes part in the per­for­mance of consensus that ­w ill quickly become indistinguishable from the mythic past. The po­liti­cal valence of that pastness was made very explicit b ­ ecause Kemble had Coriolanus enter, just b ­ ehind Volumnia, to the strains of Handel’s “See the Conquering Hero Comes” from Judas Maccabaeus. With the exception of Rule Britannia, ­t here is no more po­liti­cally significant piece of ­music in the period, not only ­because of its complex allegory, but also ­because it was so prominently utilized in the revival of Handel’s ­music all through the 1780s to celebrate George III’s kingship.40 Originally composed to celebrate the Duke of Cumberland’s victory at Cullodon, Judas Maccabaeus allegorizes the Jacobite rebellion in order to repudiate the larger threat of French aggression and to argue for the necessity of purging not only schism but also forms of po­liti­cal reform that threaten to make incursions on traditional notions of En­glish po­liti­cal liberty. This “natu­ral liberty” not only was enshrined in legislation that reflected the intimate connections between liberty, private property, and law, but also was supported by the continuing constitutional investment in the Protestant monarchy.41 What becomes portable, therefore, in subsequent per­for­mances of this air, is its ability to call forth the anxious specter of French aggression and the supposedly dire consequences of po­ liti­cal reform. The former connotation would prove invaluable to post-1811 productions, but it is the latter that resonates through the theater in the winter of 1789. In this context, the triumphal arch itself becomes a fascinating historical sign. Triumphal arches postdate the republic, but ­here we have one that both predates Marcius’s victory at Corioli and allows that local victory to be misrecognized as an act of imperial conquest. This kind of retroactive anticipation,



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which misrecognizes the desired ­future as the existing past, not only captures precisely the most tendentious attempts to reinaugurate George III in the wake of the War of American In­de­pen­dence but also their phantasmatic vulnerability. Hitherto undiscussed folios of scene drawings for the 1789 production by Thomas Greenwood, de Loutherbourg’s protégé at Drury Lane and Kemble’s principal scene painter, in the Folger Shakespeare Library give some sense of how the triumphal arch’s status as a kind of imposed po­ liti­cal sign was made manifest.42 In many of the drawings, it is clear that Greenwood is explic­itly working from Piranesi. Many of the interior designs can be traced to Piranesi’s On the Magnificence and Architecture of Rome and the most likely candidate for the opening scene of act 2’s “A Street in Rome” is derived from Piranesi’s engraving of the Via del Corso from Veduta di Roma (Figures 4.4 and 4.5). But the only triumphal arch in the folio is shown as an overlay of this Piranesi-­i nspired backdrop b ­ ecause as a piece of built-up scenery it would have been drawn into place in front of the streetscape painted on the

Figure 4.4. Thomas Greenwood, from Collection of Drawings of Theatrical Scenery, d19, 60r11. (1788). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Figure  4.5. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “Veduta, nella Via del Corso,” ­etching (1760–78). Trustees of the British Museum.

backdrop (Figures 4.6 and 4.7). At the end of act 2, scene 2, it would have been pulled into the wings in two separate sections to reveal the “Street in Rome” needed for act 2, scene 3.43 In a similar gesture, the Senate h ­ ouse needed for act 2, scene 4, would be drawn into place and then removed for the closing street scene needed for act 2, scene 5.44 The street stays constant throughout the act and the arch and the Senate ­house would be overlaid in a fashion that would have been quite spectacular but also quite artificial. They literally come and go while the world of politics out of doors, the city, remains in place. That transience and the associated artifice make it pos­si­ ble scenographically to undermine the arch as a sign of imperial conquest and the Senate as a site of governmental stability. This sense of po­liti­cal institutions and signs in motion is both endemic to the play and to the times. Something as ­simple as temporary illness or, in the case of Kemble’s adaptation, a momentary lapse into anger is enough to throw every­ thing into disarray.

Figure 4.6. Thomas Greenwood, from Collection of Drawings of Theatrical Scenery, d21, 124r. (1788). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 4.7. Thomas Greenwood, from Collection of Drawings of Theatrical Scenery, d20, 152r. (1788). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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From this perspective, we can see that Kemble scenographically organizes Sheridan’s script to mark a changing po­liti­cal landscape. The first “Street in Rome,” in act 1, scene 1, is the setting for the enactment of po­liti­cal dissensus among the ­people. The second “Street in Rome,” in act 2, scene 1, is a zone of consensus and it is the backdrop for the vast built-up scenery for the triumphal ovation in act 2, scene 2. However, by the end of act 2 that consensus begins to fracture u ­ nder the pressure of the tribunes’ corruption and Coriolanus’s patrician chauvinism. Act 3’s “Street in Rome” is the setting for both the unraveling of Coriolanus’s consular ambition and the deception of the ­people by the tribunes. Fittingly, the banishment happens in the Forum, for the most famous of republican spaces is the setting for the disintegration of Rome from within. Unlike Hodgkin’s 1811 design for the Forum, the most con­spic­u­ous building in Greenwood’s design seems to correspond to a view, still looking westward, but from a position further to the east, showing the ­Temple of Vesta, the circular structure that was the most sacred building in the Republican Forum (Figure 4.8). Antiquity is signaled in the design by a blend of building materials especially in the background basilica—­t he roofs seem to be of wood and the ground is clearly not paved in marble or any other stone for that ­matter. Greenwood’s Forum captures the perilous state of the republic at the end of act 3. In February 1789, the simplicity of Hodgkin’s ­later alignment of one empire with another was untenable: the realm was in a state of radical uncertainty ­because the primary po­liti­cal concern remained corruption at home. Thus act 4 goes to the “Street in Rome” twice: first, to show the failure of the patricians’ envoy to the Volscians and, second, to shame the tribunes Sicinius and Brutus for their failure to understand both Coriolanus’s virtue and the place of that virtue in preserving the structure of Roman governance. Act 5 takes place wholly in the Volscian camp, but, as we ­will see, the Roman matrons make their own way and their complex pro­cession both negates the scenographic rendering of politics that is so con­spic­u­ous in acts 1 through 4 and overwrites it with the signifying potential of a pro­cession of maternal bodies: biopolitics overwrites traditional spatial understandings of the po­ liti­cal. With no more Roman streets, the Roman matrons chart a new path that is no less spectacular than the ovation in act 2, scene 2. In both Thomson’s and Sheridan’s versions of Coriolanus, the Roman matrons advance in mourning from upstage between diagonal files of Volscian soldiers. Kemble retains



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Figure 4.8. Thomas Greenwood, from Collection of Drawings of Theatrical Scenery, d20, 76r. (1788). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

this structure and we might ask what it means for the ­mothers of Rome to bisect the Volscian ranks. Coriolanus’s (self-)banishment in Kemble’s version of the play is not simply an isolated decision; it emerges from a constitutional crisis precipitated in part by the corruption of the tribunes, in part by Coriolanus’s refusal to observe the norms for acceding to the consulship, and in part by the failure of the patricians to suppress plebian dissent. With the interruption of SPQR, Roman virtue is AWOL. The intercession of the matrons means that once the constitution fails and the very embodiment of Roman virtue is made alien to Rome, the constitution cannot be restored except by a return to the state of nature—­here figured by the ­family and by the fact of outright war. The Volscian threat is Hobbesian to the letter. Coriolanus cannot exist in isolation; he can only offer his martial ser­vices to Aufidius in order to enact vengeance. But neither can he remain within the precincts of Volscian governance b ­ ecause, as Aufidius eventually recognizes, the martial prowess of the exiled Roman has already placed him above ­t hose

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he serves. Victory over Rome w ­ ill precipitate civil war among the Volscians or force them to accept Coriolanus as their sovereign. This is why all three versions of Coriolanus end in a bloodbath on Volscian soil. But this is not the only state of nature in play. War between and within nations is averted by the invocation of the natu­ral bonds of filial obligation.45 As we have already noted with regard to the ovation pro­cession, this has an immediate impact on Siddons’s approach to the character of Volumnia. In the pro­cess of devising Macbeth, Kemble and Siddons had learned that Siddons was most effectively used in discrete, highly charged scenes, almost as a tableau of embodied emotion. Kemble applied the same performative rules to himself h ­ ere: his most famous moment in the play was to unveil himself next to the statue of Mars in Aufidius’s ­house. But even in his capitulation to his m ­ other’s embassy in act 5, Kemble’s per­for­mance of emotion was less dynamic than that of his s­ ister. Siddons enters act 2, scene 2, and act 5 as part of highly ritualized pro­cessions and, although the ovation pro­cession is ostensibly in honor of Coriolanus, Siddons’s highly stylized attitudes made her into a surrogate sign of “Rome” in its past glory ­because it is through her emotional expressivity that her son’s achievement at Corioli is being accorded po­liti­cal and historical meaning. Out of strict adherence to Roman virtue, Coriolanus refuses to do this emotional work himself. Thus when Volumnia goes to Antium, her threat of self-­murder is in fact a threat to Rome itself. By taking the dagger, she co-­opts Coriolanus’s enmity and demonstrates that it is more than self-­directed. Patriotism is now a ­family ritual, but it is one that operates beyond patrilineal structures. Thomson, Sheridan, and Kemble emphasized the importance of Volumnia to their adaptations of Coriolanus by giving it the subtitle The Roman Matron. The pro­cession that opens act 5 is specifically one of m ­ others clad in mourning. Before any arguments are put forward, Volumnia shows Valeria and young Marcius, Coriolanus’s wife and son, as examples of a specific kind of matrilineal bond. It is an impor­tant preparatory gesture, for she then takes on the role of m ­ other and hails her son in a manner that renders maternal attachment a fierce unwielding weapon, one that supersedes any form of martial prowess, for it w ­ ill obliterate the maternal self regardless of Coriolanus’s actions. As she states, Vol. Think with thyself, How more unfortunate than all living w ­ omen, Are we come hither. For ­either thou



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Must as a foreign miscreant, be led With manacles along our streets, or ­else, Triumphantly tread on thy country’s ruin, And bear the palm for having bravely shed Thy wife and ­children’s blood. (72) Volumnia sketches two f­ utures that devolve into one disastrous outcome, ­because this is how martial honor and maternal attachment work when the state fails: they are contraindicated. Much like the American crisis, war ­here is civil war and the meta­phorical matrix is ineluctably familial. Kemble’s 1789 Coriolanus figures the constitutional crises precipitated by the regency as replays or echoes of the American War understood as a civil conflict: failed surrogacy threatens to fracture the national ­family, to destroy filial loyalty, and to unleash the destructive forces of faction. In ­later per­for­mances of Coriolanus, the threat ­will become externalized in the form of the French or British plebeian other while in 1788–89 it is still coming from within the ruling order. With this repetition now manifest, Volumnia offers a third f­ uture, one in which Coriolanus reconciles Romans and Volscians through the prosecution of peace by building on his honorable attachment with Aufidius. But Coriolanus fails to see the potentiality of such a confederacy b ­ ecause he sees that Rome is not worthy: Mar. ­Those walls contain the most corrupt of men, A base seditious herd: who trample order, Distinction, justice, laws, beneath their feet; Insolent foes to worth, the foes of virtue. (73) In this significant divergence from Shakespeare, Kemble retains Thomson’s lines and thus starkly places recognizably British po­liti­cal discourse next to the claims of maternal attachment, and it is clear that this assessment of Rome’s weakened state is by now beside the point. Conquering Rome ­because it is a corrupted state ­will only precipitate civil war between Coriolanus and Aufidius, thus Coriolanus’s treason ­will plunge every­one into a Hobbesian nightmare. And Volumnia has already shown that this ­will result in the attrition of all attachment. When she draws the dagger and literalizes the double threat to herself as ­mother and herself as symbol of Rome—­what she rightly deigns a double-­parricide—­she simply emblematizes a double-­bind

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that ­doesn’t simply arise from within any par­tic­u­lar character flaw in her son but rather traces it back to the constitutional degradation that alienated him from his and Rome’s proper self. Suddenly the competing claims of constitutional and biopo­liti­cal consensus are made starkly vis­i­ble. The loss of the former describes precisely the situation facing Britons during the Regency Crisis and in that aspect the play rigorously warns against any deviation from Britain’s tradition of king in Parliament. But the power of the latter, its embodiment in act 5, makes vis­i­ble an emergent form of governmentality that was less theorized than felt. In a strange way, Volumnia’s intercession allegorizes Siddons’s own intervention in the post-­American repertoire ­because it activates maternal emotion to shift the ground of politics from the well-­worn prob­lems of honor, virtue, corruption, party, and war to a form of politics grounded in the primal attachments of the reproductive f­amily. At the very moment that the ­f uture life of Rome is being addressed, that ­f uture is being re-­territorialized in biopo­liti­cal terms. And, with that shift, Volumnia explic­itly sees a ­future for peace, affiliation, and confederacy. The term confederacy is crucial b ­ ecause it is precisely this issue that eluded British po­liti­cal thought in the Atlantic world from 1760 to 1790. Without any ­v iable theory of confederacy, ­there was no way for the divergent definitions of imperium and realm to be accommodated.46 For American colonists in 1774 the choice between “A Patriot King or none at all” tilted t­ oward the latter option, but as citizens of the United States they would bring back a modified version of the former. In the wake of the American War, the same choice operated surreptitiously in British politics u ­ ntil suddenly the choice was made vis­i­ble during the Regency Crisis. The prob­lem is that Kemble’s subtle modification of Sheridan and Thomson’s assassination scene strips the play of precisely the forms of attachment needed to imagine a new way forward. Coriolanus’s friend Galesus is cut from the script, and even though some of his lines go over to Aufidius, Kemble’s version forces their friendship into a form that leaves no room for a f­ uture not structured by an obsolete fantasy of masculine virtue. Aufidius tries to save Coriolanus and thus enable precisely this resolution of Rome/Britain’s po­liti­cal nightmare, but Kemble’s cautionary tale is ruthless—he dies at the hands of the representatives of the Volscian p ­ eople, and the fearsome prospect of invasion or internal disintegration is put on the ­table for consideration. It is the former prospect that made the play so vexed in the immediate wake of the French Revolution, but in February 1789 it spoke more to the



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latter questions of factionalism and internal threats to the constitution than to threats to national sovereignty. Perhaps the strangest ele­ment of Kemble’s adaptation is that it simply stops with Aufidius’s expression of sadness over the death of a noble man. All that is left is for the vast number of bodies on stage to exit in a solemn death march. Left in a protracted state of melancholia, bereft by the loss not simply of the man but also of the values he lived by, the audience is offered no po­liti­cal resolution to the events in the play. Consideration of the corruption of Rome and the Volscian desire to be ­free of Roman expansionism is simply suspended in a state of plangent interruption. This state of suspension seems to me especially apt for the eve­ning of 7 February 1789 when British politics was itself in a state of suspension. Throughout the Regency Crisis, William Pitt used what­ever parliamentary strategies he had to buy time. A parliamentary committee was formed to review the doctors’ reports on the king’s health; he then adjourned Parliament for two weeks so that a separate committee could establish pre­ce­dents. When the issue fi­nally came to debate on 10 December, “Fox incautiously overplayed his hand by claiming that the Prince had an inherent right to become regent and parliamentary approval was not needed. Pitt pounced on this and depicted Fox as an ­enemy of the constitution; on 12 February 1789 he secured the passage through the Commons of the Regency Bill, with restrictions on the Regent’s powers, by a majority of sixty-­four.”47 The spectacle of Fox arguing against parliamentary oversight of the surrogate monarch would have been very much on the mind of Kemble’s opening-­night audience for Coriolanus. In the light of this protracted debate on the regency, the complex commingling of mourning, melancholia, and maternality in Siddons’s per­for­ mance si­mul­ta­neously captures the anxiety regarding a vulnerable king and demonstrates the power nascent in a preexisting form of obligation—­that woven into the emotional bonds of familial life. In this regard, her per­for­mance acts as a reminder or a rehearsal of the affective work she had already performed in 1782–83, at a moment of similar vulnerability and factional dissensus. What has changed is that the interruption precipitated by the Regency Crisis offered a moment in which the repertoire’s work could coalesce into a recognizable sign of history. As a performative moment, the sudden appearance of Siddons’s place in the emergence of biopolitics was akin to a dialectical image—­t he historical stakes ­were fleetingly disclosed.48 But as the run unfolded, a rather dif­fer­ent set of circumstances emerged and the image faded, although one could argue that it was memorialized by

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Anne Damer’s stunning basso-­relievo sculpture of the ovation pro­cession and by Gavin Hamilton’s rendering of the pleading scene for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). As with all the Boydell commissions, Damer’s rendering of the ovation scene was engraved and widely circulated thus guaranteeing an afterlife to Siddons’s per­for­mance. Damer’s sculpture was much anticipated in the press and, in spite of Boydell’s proscription against portraiture, the bas relief was declared to be likenesses of Kemble and Siddons in all of the newspaper notices. The dyadic composition of the scene strands Coriolanus between the legionnaires on the left and his ­mother and wife on the right and thus concretizes the competing claims of martial honor and familial attachment. But this monument would not be unveiled u ­ ntil 1790. In the 1803 engraving of Hamilton’s picture, Coriolanus and Volumnia bracket the illuminated ­mother and child at the center of the composition. The pictorial space is or­ga­nized in a fashion that keeps the viewer affectively cycling from the highly expressive Volumnia, representative of Roman tradition, to the inwardly turned Coriolanus, symptom of Rome’s pre­sent predicament, to the pleading child, icon of futurity. If anything, the play’s

Figure 4.9. William Satchwell Leney, a­ fter Anne Seymour Damer, Basso Relievo: Coriolanus, engraving for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1803). Trustees of the British Museum.



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Figure 4.10. James Caldwell, a­ fter Gavin Hamilton, Coriolanus, Act V, Scene III, engraving (1803). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

biopo­liti­cal resonances are even more amplified. But this arguably had more to do with the pro­gress of Siddons’s persona than with the immediate fate of Kemble’s 1789 production.49 Shortly ­after Kemble’s Coriolanus opened, the king’s illness, to every­one’s surprise, began to abate. On 19 February, news of his recovery was circulated and the Regency Bill, now lodged in the House of Lords, became unnecessary. With the king’s return to health and the further consolidation of Pitt’s power, ­t hose aspects of Coriolanus pertaining to the corruption of the tribunes could be firmly aligned with Foxite policy, and Aufidius’s panegyric to the nobility of Coriolanus could be simply transferred to George III’s mythic kingship. The dissolution of the Regency Crisis allowed for a complete mystification of the play’s engagement with corruption, patriotism, and virtue. A ­ fter George III’s recovery, the play could simply signify crisis averted. Suddenly the pro­gress of autocracy could be further normalized as

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a species of patriotism and the emergent biopo­liti­cal imperatives disclosed by Siddons’s per­for­mance could return to the substratum of steadily increasing normativity. The king would not make a public appearance ­until 23 April, but by late February both patent ­houses ­were ­running a steady stream of ­music by his patriotic avatar. On 27 February, Drury Lane ran A Prelude, On the Happy Recovery of His Majesty, featuring the choirs of the Chapel Royal, St. Paul’s, and Westminster Abbey. The program stitched together se­lections from Handel and Arne, and the afterpiece, The Triumph of Truth, featured an aggregation of Handel’s ­music by Dr. Samuel Arnold. Not to be outdone, Covent Garden ran The Coronation Anthem, God Save the King, and Handel’s Messiah on the same eve­ning. Similar programing extended through March and April, with Arnold’s Redemption, a pasticcio of Handel’s oratorios, inevitably emerging on 11 and 18 March. Subtle changes w ­ ere integrated into the pasticcio, with certain arias being switched out for o ­ thers. Conspicuously interrupting the veritable sea of “Handel” ­were repeated per­for­mances of Kemble’s Coriolanus. George III and his h ­ ouse­hold w ­ ere fully cognizant of the po­liti­cal advantage to be gained and used all the power of monarchical spectacle to consolidate his kingship. Overruling the Archbishop of Canterbury and some of his advisers, George took to the streets on St. George’s Day (23 April) in an auspicious carriage ­ride to St. Paul’s Cathedral (Figure 4.11). Thomas Rowlandson’s The ­Grand Pro­cession to St. Paul’s gives a sense of the mass spectacle and Kenneth Baker’s commentary captures the scene: “The crowds sang ‘God Save the King’; Pitt was cheered; the Prince of Wales was jeered; and Fox was hissed. George was visibly moved when several hundred c­ hildren of the charity schools in the City ‘set up their ­little voices and sang part of the Hundredth Psalm.’ ”50 Are we to read the deployment of t­ hose c­ hildren as heartwarming or the very height of cynicism? Rowlandson himself played both sides of the crisis, producing prints in ­favor of Pitt on the one hand and of the prince and his Foxite associates on the other, but this print seems to slice t­ hings right down the m ­ iddle between loyalist joy and subtly registered signs of ministerial tyranny. That is Pitt on the lead h ­ orse, thus the print suggests that the weakened king is now to be led around by his minister. Rowlandson’s cheering crowds are as much a sign of relief as they are of hegemony.51 That may well be the point, for the activation of anxiety during the king’s illness was a necessary affective condition for the manufacture of broad bottom consent that sustained George III through the early phases of the French



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Figure 4.11. Thomas Rowlandson, The ­Grand Pro­cession to St. Paul’s, engraving (1789). Trustees of the British Museum.

Revolution. What had been imaginatively articulated in the Handel Commemoration in 1784 and repeatedly reiterated by its Handelian offspring in late February and March was now coming to pass, but it had required incursions on the body of the king itself. The king had recovered, Pitt had prevailed, and the Foxites ­were in the wilderness. Kemble’s intense engagement with the Regency Crisis had been both an aesthetic and a po­liti­cal sensation eclipsed only by the king’s own spectacular interventions in the streets of London. However, the shift from a searing exploration of the cost of corruption to a patriotic account of crisis averted could not be sustained in part b ­ ecause the production not only exposed the tenuousness of national consensus but also recalled the tumultuous memories of dissensus within the empire. In a sense, the play’s continued viability relied on enthusiasm for the recovered king and a lack of interest in the increasing authoritarianism of Pitt’s ministry. As John Barrell has demonstrated, neither this enthusiasm nor lack of interest lasted long.52 In the wake of revolution in France, po­liti­cal consensus in Britain dissolved and the despotism of Pitt’s ministry became manifest. On 23 February 1793, Kemble’s adaptation of Coriolanus began to generate significant re­sis­tance in the audience. As the Thespian Magazine stated: “The ­Grand Triumphant entry would have disgraced a barn; the dis­plea­sure in the audience was broadly manifested in it” (TM, March 1794). Kemble’s 1789 production was now out of step with the times. All through the rest of the 1792–93 season, Kemble tried to ­counter the runaway success of Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault at Covent Garden—to which we w ­ ill turn in the next

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chapter—­with conspicuously loyalist plays. ­After the uneven response to Coriolanus, Kemble ran Venice Preserv’d and Henry the Eighth against ­Every One Has His Fault before having one last go with Coriolanus on 21 May. ­After this, the play was shelved ­until 1806. As Inchbald remarked of the play, “When the circumstances of certain periods make certain incidents of history most in­ter­est­ing, t­ hose are the very seasons to interdict their exhibition. Till the time of the world’s repose, then, the lovers of drama w ­ ill, prob­ably, be compelled to accept of real conspiracies, assassinations, and the slaughter of war, in lieu of such spectacles ably counterfeited.”53 Inchbald recognized that Kemble’s Coriolanus was not aesthetically flawed. She emphasizes that the public was fractured and the play’s specific hailing of assent to aristocratic preeminence in the ovation in act 2, scene 2, was unplayable. By 1793, the discourse of patriotism had been co-­opted to such an extent that the play became a monolithic enactment of dominant Tory ideology and, as such, Kemble’s Coriolanus could not help but incite re­sis­tance. The play’s hegemonic success meant that it had to be suppressed. We should not be surprised that in the very same month, John Thelwall and his radical associates mounted their first attempt to steal Venice Preserv’d from the Tory repertoire by rapturously applauding Pierre’s curse on the Senate in the name of the “­People.” Within a year, a similar campaign would force the ministry to revoke the license for Venice Preserv’d, and thus at a time when the government was attempting to shore up patriotic support for the war, it effectively stole one of the most loyalist plays in the repertoire from itself.54 Kemble and Siddons’s Venice Preserv’d would not return u ­ ntil the winter of 1803. Although Kemble would publish a further adaptation of Coriolanus in 1806, audiences would have to wait five more years for it to return to the stage. In the post-1811 productions of Coriolanus, monumentality, ­whether it be a feature of “Rome” or of Kemble himself, became the primary locus of the play. Siddons fades from view and Kemble’s nobility becomes increasingly fetishized. With a new spectacle of masculine efficacy in place, biopolitics would operate in the decidedly unspectacular realms of domestic life and bureaucratic regulation.

CHAPTER 5

What Unhappiness Does The ­Futures of Post-­Revolutionary Comedy

Kemble’s first productions of Henry the Eighth and Coriolanus ­were explic­ itly about the use and abuse of power, but their treatment of virtuous po­liti­ cal affiliation between men is vexed. In Henry the Eighth, the sovereign is reformed by his being separated from corrupt advisers such as Wolsey and Gardiner, but Henry is most vividly himself when masquing with his friends at Wolsey’s banquet: it is through this homosocial connection that he comes into Anne’s orbit. As he slowly sheds Wolsey, Katherine, and this former sociable self, all that he retains is Anne and, of course, her child. The tightly wound fantasy that overlays right sovereignty, sexual reproduction, and imperial plenitude comes to fruition only by uneasily abjuring past love, friendship, and association. As the play ends, the king fades into the past even as he lives, and the emotional intensity of the scenes between Katherine and Wolsey is replaced by monarchical spectacle. ­These sociable and affective losses are counterbalanced by Anne’s fertility and by Cranmer’s emergence as the selfless and patriotic friend. When the king reconciles the venomous Gardiner and the virtuous Cranmer at the end of the play—­a moment when Cranmer conspicuously weeps—he aligns a new sense of common cause with friendship (5.3.210–11). With the play’s imperial aspirations condensed in the infant Elizabeth, its nationalist sense of cohesion is figured by Cranmer’s tears. The play registers both of ­t hese figures, the infant child and the loyal friend, as occasions for happiness, or, rather, happiness finds its object in them, and they ­will be of vital importance to our consideration of The Stranger late in this chapter and Pizarro in the next.1 And yet ­t hese signs are only effective as promises: it is hard to imagine what ­future friendship between Gardiner and Cranmer ­will entail, and the desired imperial ­f uture embodied in

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the infant Elizabeth, in both its Jacobean and its late Georgian milieu, is not yet a constitutive fact. This is what happiness does and “friendship,” even when its contours are so vaguely sketched, is crucial to the anticipation of desired ­f utures. If friendship is a happy cipher at the end of Henry the Eighth, then Coriolanus is less sanguine about the stakes of homosocial attachment, both within the play and in the broader po­liti­cal world it so vividly evokes. In classical understandings of po­liti­cal connection grounded in virtue, such as ­those invoked between Coriolanus and Aufidius and ­those mobilized by Burke in Thoughts on the Pre­sent Discontents (1770), friendship is crucially a ­matter of efficacy.2 We come together to achieve our purpose. In Kemble’s Coriolanus that purpose poses a prob­lem. If the object is to rid Rome of corruption, then friendship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is not treasonous ­because the new Volscian state ­will exemplify ­t hose aspects of Roman virtue that Rome has allowed to wither. If not for Coriolanus’s desire for vengeance, his friendship with Aufidius has cosmopo­liti­cal potential that Volumnia explic­itly proposes as a solution to the po­liti­cal crisis faced by the republic. That Volumnia names this ­future is significant ­because it arises from a maternal ethic of care that neither leader can see b ­ ecause the codes of martial virtue foreclose the possibility of this kind of empathic attachment. The biopo­liti­cal ­f uture promised by maternal care is simply unrecognizable to the adherents of sovereign power. With that foreclosure, the mutual recognition of virtue that grounds the friendship of Coriolanus and Aufidius devolves into failed vengeance on the one hand and melancholic envy on the other. What­ever happens ­after the intercession of the Roman matrons happens in spite of Coriolanus and Aufidius. With the dissolution of their affiliation both characters are relegated to a zone of po­liti­cal inefficacy that implicitly cancels their masculine authority. Ultimately, the po­liti­cal status remains unresolved: Coriolanus is a traitor to both the Romans and the Volsci, but he is venerated for his prior nobility; Aufidius mourns and awaits censure. In both cases, we are in an ethical and a temporal impasse. The per­for­mances addressed in the previous chapter left the question of homosocial politics unresolved or answered it too quickly. At one level, this chapter is about the per­for­mance of po­liti­cal affiliation—­both its Burkean and its more radical forms—in the wake of the French regicide when ­t hese issues gained a renewed level of urgency and visibility. During this period, certain scripts became unplayable. Two of Kemble’s most complex adaptations dis­appeared from the repertoire. Kemble’s highly regarded production



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of Coriolanus was withdrawn by the management of Drury Lane in 1794 and did not reappear ­until 1811. ­After the government and the loyalist press imputed that an attempt on the king’s life was somehow abetted by per­for­ mances of Venice Preserv’d in the fall of 1795, the license for the play was revoked by the Lord Chamberlain and it was not performed again in London ­until early in the nineteenth c­ entury. Many of Kemble’s strategies developed in the staging of the 1789 Coriolanus—­especially the tableaux that interrupted the action—­were incorporated into his production of Venice Preserv’d in the newly enlarged Drury Lane Theatre. As with the 1794 Macbeth, this had a significant impact on Siddons’s function within the drama. One of Siddons’s crowning achievements in the 1782–83 theatrical season was rendered less affectively coherent. The play’s corrosive solace was interrupted both internally by Kemble’s predilection for spectacle and externally by radical audience members who applauded ­those conspiring to overthrow the Venetian senate. ­These convergent interruptions amplified po­liti­cal dissensus, drew attention away from Siddons’s domestication of the plot, and jeopardized the play itself. I have written extensively elsewhere about the theft of Venice Preserv’d by John Thelwall and his associates, and the newspaper account of how the audience turned the script to its own po­liti­cal ends remains a valuable case study for the intermedial analy­sis of the press and the theater.3 In the early phases of the wars with France, the patriotic import of ­these loyalist scripts was short-­circuited, interrupted by complex social and po­liti­cal forces that preceded events in France. Kemble’s adaptations of Coriolanus and Venice Preserv’d incorporated interruption as an aesthetic practice and that had a con­spic­u­ous relation to the interruption of George III’s reign by madness, to the rupture between Fox and Burke that rocked the Whig Party, to the French regicide, to i­ magined regicide at home, and to the interruption of the constitution itself by the Two Acts.4 With ­these disruptions in the tragic repertoire lurking in the background, this chapter looks at how three impor­tant new comedies dealt not only with the interruption of po­liti­cal and social affiliation but also with the interruption of the repertoire itself. In the final de­cades of the c­ entury, a host of new forms of entertainment, new venues, and new per­for­mance strategies changed the theatrical landscape. The proliferation of new generic designations in the 1790s has been explored extensively by scholars of theatrical illegitimacy, melodrama, hippodrama, pantomime, and the circus.5 The phenomenal run of Colman’s Blue-­Beard in the final three seasons of the ­century was a harbinger of much to come.6 The explosion of hybrid

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entertainments r­ eally took off in the first de­cade of the nineteenth c­ entury, but in this chapter I am interested in subtle changes to arguably the most normative genre in the period—­namely, five-­act comedy. By the c­ entury’s end, Frederick Reynolds and Thomas Morton had risen to prominence, but Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and Richard Cumberland dominated this genre in the 1780s and early 1790s, and the latter two figures, along with Sheridan, are crucial to understanding comedy in the 1770s. Sheridan ­will be making his return in the next chapter, but it is impor­tant to note the high cultural profile of Inchbald, Cowley, and Cumberland in this period. All of their plays ­were highly anticipated. Cowley was quite regularly portrayed with Thalia in engravings. Inchbald’s work, both in five-­act form and in afterpieces, was popu­lar and critically praised and was closely imitated by Reynolds.7 And yet neither Inchbald nor Cowley was ever distant from controversy. Cowley’s The World as It Goes (1781) was damned and A Day in Turkey’s (1792) obvious send up of Charles James Fox raised charges of impropriety that she deftly handled. Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault provoked a firestorm in the press that we ­will be discussing shortly, but, like Cowley, Inchbald was remarkably ­adept at navigating factional ­waters while remaining resolutely topical. Cumberland’s import is often overlooked, but Jean Marsden has recently drawn much-­needed attention to The Jew.8 This highly successful comedy was chosen by Kemble as the first new play for the new Drury Lane Theatre and it remained popu­lar over multiple seasons. But its success was short-­lived next to The Wheel of Fortune, a play that provided, perhaps improbably, Kemble with one of his most beloved roles. We tend not to think of Kemble and comedy, but Roderick Penruddock is an impor­tant figure for considering Kemble’s ongoing negotiation not only with the mystification of republican ideals in British po­liti­cal culture but also with the interruption of Coriolanus and Venice Preserv’d in the repertoire. In part ­because new plays ­were taking up more of the programming at both patent h ­ ouses, ­Every One Has His Fault and The Wheel of Fortune had extended runs. As we ­will see, however, each of ­t hese plays thoroughly engaged with ­t hose aspects of social relations and of theatrical form that ­were losing their purchase. Both comedies assume the legacy of corrosive solace that animated much of theatrical culture in the 1780s but engage with the realignment of repertoire in quite dif­fer­ent ways. Inchbald’s comedy focuses on the corrosion of martial masculinity and the breakdown of male friendship in the aftermath of the War of American In­de­pen­dence, and the solace it offers is explic­itly tied to the reproductive power of the middling ranks.



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The biopo­liti­cal concerns that Siddons and Jordan had been excavating from the repertoire w ­ ere now being drawn out of unexplored possibilities within the generic structure of five-­act comedy. Beyond establishing the singular importance of Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault to the post-­ American repertoire, it is impor­tant to recognize that the play’s surging popularity at Covent Garden was immediately contemporaneous with audiences’ increasing dissatisfaction and ultimate re­sis­tance to Kemble’s Coriolanus at Drury Lane. Coriolanus casts a long shadow in this chapter b ­ ecause my analy­sis of The Wheel of Fortune explores the surprising way that Cumberland and Kemble worked around the performative impasse that consigned Coriolanus, Cato, and Julius Caesar to temporary oblivion. Th ­ ese plays would become synonymous with Kemble’s ­later fame, but his Roman-­ness was kept alive in the character of a choleric En­glish squire. And that collocation of squire and Roman is remarkable on many levels. Cumberland’s play was written for Kemble’s manifestly non-­comic demeanor so that through a canny bit of casting Penruddock makes his transit as a tragic foreigner through London’s fash­ ion­able world—­t he setting of so many of the c­ entury’s five-­act comedies—in much the same way that William “Gentleman” Smith’s propensity for comic per­for­mance had made him an alien to Macbeth roughly ten years e­ arlier. Smith’s displacement was met with disapprobation, but Kemble’s strange presence in The Wheel of Fortune was universally praised. Kemble was a tragic refugee in comedy and attending to his status as a generic expatriate reveals that much more is at stake ­here than the tired strife between country and city. Penruddock’s specific status as a “phi­los­o­pher” and his exilic identity have significant po­liti­cal implications that resonate not only with the vexed status of friendship discussed in Chapter 4 but also with the mystification of the republican princi­ples that had animated much po­liti­cal discourse at home and featured so prominently in the lit­er­a­ture of the first British Empire. Kemble’s rather unusual transit through The Wheel of Fortune allows us to see a similar dramaturgical strategy at play in Benjamin Thompson’s The Stranger (1798), a translation of Kotzebue’s Menschenhass und Reue. Like Kemble’s unlikely success as Penruddock, Siddons’s controversial per­for­ mance of the adulteress Mrs. Haller became one of her signature roles and arguably her only acclaimed comic part. And yet the manifest strangeness of The Stranger arises from its extraordinary familiarity. The eponymous title character, played by Kemble, is another version of Penruddock, an apparent misanthrope who has withdrawn himself from society; Mrs. Haller is

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eerily reminiscent of both Isabella and Jane Shore. The Stranger manages to embed Siddons’s tragic per­for­mances from the post-­A merican repertoire within a post-­revolutionary “comedy.” Comedy is in scare quotes b ­ ecause this act of embedding requires a formal deformation that renders the play’s genre all but undecidable when the curtain suddenly drops at the end of act 5 and leaves the audience to ponder how this drama might be resolved. This narrative interruption provides a vantage point from which to view the pro­gress of corrosive solace and to make some provisional arguments about the affective recognition of historical change before turning to yet another adaptation from Kotzebue, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro, in the final chapter. The Stranger allows us to see how the advent of proto-­melodrama is deeply entwined with the consolidation of a very specific fantasy of the reproductive ­family and, most impor­tant, with a fetishization of the child. This latter development in many ways concretizes much of my argument regarding the deployment of sexuality in this book and thus we w ­ ill be according ­great significance to the body of the child on stage both in The Stranger and in Pizarro. I hope that by bringing ­these comedies together we can see how the affective experience of historical change was being given form in a dif­fer­ ent genre. By the early to mid-1790s the complex transition from one form of social and imperial organ­ization was being explic­itly thematized. Unlike in the previous chapter where that transition was suddenly made vis­i­ ble in moments of performative interruption, Inchbald, Cumberland, and Thompson/Kotzebue ­were involved in a historiographical pro­cess that narrativized interruption. Th ­ ese plays not only tell a specific historical story that is pegged to chronological events of ­great import to the 1770s and 1780s but also posit in plain terms resolutions to social and geopo­liti­cal prob­lems inherited from this era in order to avoid a second descent into corruption and imperial collapse. ­These plays resolve t­hese prob­lems through the mechanisms of comedy, but it is comedy subtly repurposed. What I hope ­will be apparent by the end of this chapter is that the historical crises that ­were felt viscerally in the aftermath of the American War w ­ ere finding their generic resolution in part ­because the complex formal experimentation in the repertoire had dispensed with obsolete social dispositions and in part ­because the empire itself was taking on a new, recognizably consolidated form. Although it is a coincidence, it is strangely apt that Warren Hastings was acquitted at roughly the same time that Kemble had transformed himself into Roderick Penruddock. It is perhaps less of a coincidence that the mutineers at Spithead



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and the Nore w ­ ere executed and leaders of the Irish rebellion w ­ ere u ­ nder arrest before the curtain came down on Mrs. Haller.

The American Friend: Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault Originally scheduled to open on 23 January 1793, ­Every One Has His Fault was in rehearsal when the Edict of Fraternity was passed; it opened eight days ­after Louis XVI was executed and three days prior to the declaration of war with France.9 As Katherine S. Green has noted, on opening night “the com­ pany in the boxes and pit [was] entirely in mourning.”10 It is difficult to imagine a more politicized theatrical space than the Covent Garden play­house on that eve­ning. Inchbald’s play provides a valuable case study not only ­because it was, as Gillian Russell has demonstrated, the occasion for po­liti­ cal per­for­mance in the audience, but also, as Jane Moody has shown, the object of direct censure by the royalist press.11 Significantly, Boaden would ­later designate the play as a transitional script in the history of comedy: We ­were making hasty strides to realize the new species of comedy. On the 29th of this month [January], the tragi-­comedy of ­Every One Has His Fault, by Mrs. Inchbald, was acted with ­great applause at Covent Garden. The interest h ­ ere is in a Captain Irvin, who, having married the d ­ aughter of Lord Norland, betakes himself to Amer­i­ca to repair his circumstances, and comes back desperate at his ill success. His mind s­ ettles upon suicide, and he goes to a coffee-­house to commit the act; but his better genius holds his hand, and in his way back to his lodging, he merely robs his father-­in-­law of his pocket-­book, and a large quantity of stage bank-­notes which it contains. But he is as irresolute as to property he had been with regard to life, and returns the stolen goods by a servant. . . . ​The peer is relentless, and resolves to prosecute. . . . ​­After many vain attempts to reconcile this unhappy ­family, Mr. Harmony succeeds by a pretended letter from the ­daughter, announcing her husband’s death. The old blockhead repents of his cruelty, and poetical justice is achieved by a compromise of the felony.12 As the sarcastic tone ­here suggests, Boaden saw the incorporation of tragic incident within five-­act comedy as a prelude to the rage for German drama

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and the inception of melodrama that would “­settle us in a region of monstrous incidents and false morals, from which our escape is ­little to be expected.”13 Despite Boaden’s insinuation that the British theater was being contaminated by foreign ele­ments, Inchbald’s play is rigorously in dialogue with the internal transformation of the repertoire in the 1780s. If “unhappiness” can be posited as an alien presence in comedy, then much is to be gained from looking carefully at what unhappiness does. Of all the new plays staged following the War of American In­de­pen­dence, Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault explic­itly addresses the ongoing sense of social insecurity precipitated by the loss of the thirteen colonies. It is also the play that most powerfully subsumes Jordan’s and Siddons’s activation of middling identity into a sustained argument about how to move forward. The play works with the generational pattern of most eighteenth-­century five-­act comedies. The happiness of the principal characters in the younger generation, Lady Eleanor Irwin and her husband Captain Irwin, is blocked by her ­father’s refusal to recognize the marriage and thus confer the fortune they need to survive. ­After Irwin’s ser­v ice in the American War fails to secure his fortune and his ­family descends into poverty, he contemplates suicide but instead commits the desperate act of robbing his father-­in-­law Lord Norland. The other characters in the play are in less perilous circumstances, but they ­either are trapped in dysfunctional marriages or enact forms of sociability at odds with pre­sent social norms. All of t­hese unhappy characters come with baggage from the American War, and Inchbald explores t­ hese post-­American legacies in an explicit fashion in order to implicitly address the ongoing events in France. Inchbald’s play stands out b ­ ecause it thematizes many of the ruptures and affective impasses that could only be indirectly addressed in the 1780s. In this regard, the play has a historiographical function, for it tells a story about the emergence of middling biopower and the recession of aristocratic vice; in the pro­cess, it hails the audience into a new social and po­liti­cal world that would no longer be haunted by the diminishment of empire in the Atlantic. Much of the play’s intervention in the debate surrounding the morality of Britain’s war with France hinges on the utterance of four words: “Provisions are so scarce.” The reviewer for the newly operative True Briton immediately objected to allusions “to the dearness of provisions in this Metropolis,” and declared that “in several sentences the Demo­crat displays a cloven foot” (TB, 30 January 1793).14 The Morning Chronicle’s retort to the “lynx-­eyed sedition-­hunter” was quick and withering: “Certainly; any compassionate



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allusion to the distresses of the poor, at a time when an impending war threatens to aggravate them all, may be very good treason by construction; and we trust Mr. REEVES and his associates w ­ ill look to it, or at least send an anonymous letter against the Author to the Secretary of State” (MC, 31 January 1793). Driving the point home the next day, a contributor to the Morning Chronicle named “Philo Briton” offers the following bit of close reading of the scene in question: I cannot but express my astonishment, to find in a newspaper, now on the t­ able before me, a most unjust accusation of Mrs. Inchbald, imputing to her an ill-­founded charge. I w ­ ill state the very words of the play as they ­were spoken on Tuesday night. “­There is not a fraud, a theft, or hardly any vice committed, that you do not take the criminal’s part, shake your head and cry, ‘Provisions are so scarce!’ And no longer ago than last Lord-­mayor’s day when you w ­ ere told that Mr. Alderman Ravenous was ill with an indigestion, you endeavoured to soften the ­matter by exclaiming, ‘Provisions are so scarce!’ ” Could anybody imagine that t­ hose words, would be so misunderstood, or so warped as to induce any man of sense or candour to find in that passage a demo­cratic sentiment? The ­whole context imports the very reverse; it is a nice stroke of satire on t­ hose who see many men guilty of actions of an evil tendency, and yet have some cant phrase, by which they hope to varnish over the conduct of the wrong doer. (MC, 1 February 1793) This call for contextual reading is curious not only ­because it implies verbatim knowledge of an as-­yet-­u npublished play, but also ­because it elides both the immediate context for the utterance and the broader implications of Inchbald’s intervention.15 ­ These lines are spoken by Miss Spinster, who is hardly a neutral conduit of information about Mr. Harmony. In her eyes, “All this pretended philanthropy renders [Mr. Harmony] ridicu­lous” and she ultimately “condemn[s] that false humanity, which induces [him] to say many ­things in conversation which deserve to stigmatize [him] with the character of deceit”(1.2.33–45). Although the cruel Mr. Norland is critiqued throughout the play, his traditional limitation of legitimate feminine roles in act 3, scene 1, to “­w idow, maid and wife” reflects a broadly held opinion regarding the nonnormativity

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of “spinsters.” Inchbald’s position regarding unmarried older ­women may be more complex, but throughout the scene Miss Spinster is ridiculed for her vanity, for her unsociability, and for her severity t­ oward her servants. In fact, her critique of Mr. Harmony’s philanthropy is explic­itly tied to class relations: Miss S. I ­will not forgive you for thus continually speaking in the behalf of e­ very servant whom you find me offended with. Your philanthropy becomes insupportable; and instead of being a virtue degenerates into a vice. Har. Dear Madam, do not upbraid me for a constitutional fault. (1.2.1–6) The pun on “constitutional” clearly marks his politics, so why is the Morning Chronicle, the voice of Foxite opinion, “varnishing over the conduct” of both Mr. Harmony and Elizabeth Inchbald? Is it simply a m ­ atter of ensuring that the play stays on the stage while skewering the anti-­Jacobin True Briton in the pro­cess? Or does Inchbald’s intervention engage more troubling po­ liti­cal concerns that both sides of the press would like to see dis­appear—­albeit in dif­fer­ent ways? Inchbald’s deployment of the phrase “Provisions are so scarce” raises the specter of unrest among the poor and refers directly to pos­si­ble po­liti­cal actions staged by anti-­government factions protesting the scarcity of provisions resulting from the war effort. Throughout the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury, protesters carried loaves of bread wrapped in black cloth to signal the onset of “riots” wherein the poor took control of the marketplace and forced a fixed price for provisions.16 The phrase “Provisions are so scarce” carried the implicit threat of an entire tradition of food rioting.17 The year 1795 is, of course, the year most frequently associated with ­these protests, but the po­ liti­cal conjunction of scarcity and antiwar sentiment infused both the press and the street not only during the final phases of the American War but also in the lead up to war with France. Both radicals and the poor intimately tied famine at home to the taxation required to fund not only Pitt’s misplaced bellicosity but also George III’s greed. The mere utterance of t­ hese words by Mr. Harmony brings a particularly incendiary form of street theater into the state-­regulated domain of Covent Garden.18 As the play unfolds, however, the utterance “Provisions are so scarce” acquires connotations that significantly alter any reading of the play’s politics. ­A fter Miss Spinster’s critique of Mr. Harmony’s past use of the “cant



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phrase,” it is used to rationalize Captain Irwin’s descent into criminality. However, the press, with the exception of the True Briton, was sympathetic to Irwin’s predicament. H ­ ere is the adumbration of this section of the plot from the Lady’s Magazine: ­ fter an absence of eight years, Irwin and his wife return to London, A without money, friends, or resources: his ­uncle Mr. Solus, refuses to relieve him; her ­father continues obdurate, and at length driven distracted by the wants of his ­family, and the ingratitude of his friends, he resolves to destroy himself—­Meeting Lord Norland, in a paroxysm of his derangement, he stops and robs him—on the return of his senses, shocked at the act he had committed, he gives the pocket-­ book, with its contents, to a servant of Lord Norland’s to return it to him, but who, to gain the reward offered for his apprehension, gives information of the theft. (LM, February 1793, 92) Despite the almost universal abhorrence of suicide, the General Eve­ning Post was willing to argue that “The Irwins are as perfect as nature can make mortals.—­Norland is as imperfect as f­amily pride can make nature” (GEP, 29–31 January 1793). As we w ­ ill see, the invocation of nature h ­ ere is crucial, but for the moment it is enough to realize that a significant portion of the press was willing to accept Lord Norland’s cruelty t­ oward his d ­ aughter as a mitigating ­factor for Irwin’s actions. When Lord Norland declares to Mr. Harmony that “it is amazing that we cannot put a stop to such depredations,” Mr. Harmony responds that “Provisions are so scarce!” (3.1.115–17). Harmony’s rationalization puts Norland’s “unnatural” familial arrangement aside and focuses on broader socioeconomic ­factors driving Irwin’s “desperate act.” This effectively shifts the cause of Irwin’s desperation from his wife’s familial predicament to the reverses in his military c­ areer. He is a military man on half-­pay and a veteran of the War of American In­de­pen­dence, and it is precisely this conjunction of crime and military subjectivity that occasions charges of “improbability” from the True Briton. The audience already knows that it is Norland’s own act of withholding money from his ­daughter b ­ ecause she has married one inferior in rank that contributes to the need for theft; but Harmony’s speech emphasizes that the Irwins’ difficulties are more than simply familial, they are tied to an unresolved crisis in national subjectivity following the American War, and specifically to Irwin’s inability to sustain his ­family. We should not be

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surprised that this plot ele­ment set off the True Briton, but neither should we be surprised by the almost complete erasure of the nonfamilial reasons for the Irwins’ poverty elsewhere in the press. Both responses are divergent strategies for eliminating Inchbald’s simultaneous critique of non-­normative familial relations and the emasculation of military men in the same plot. Mr. Harmony’s moral objection to scarcity resonates with British traditions of food protest, but it also activates a host of associations with debates in po­liti­cal economy that ­were integrally tied to differing opinions regarding events in France. The most intriguing of t­ hese was the enduring interest in French physiocracy. Arguing that land and its products w ­ ere the only true and reliable forms of value, the physiocrats divided the social order into “fertile,” or productive, farmers and “sterile” manufacturers whose actions only redistribute the surplus. This type of economic thought was in tatters by the late 1770s, largely due to the efforts of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), but its figural and ideological appeal was enduring.19 Paine had already defended the physiocrats in Rights of Man against Burke’s invective in the Reflections, and his Agrarian Justice of 1795 is deeply tied to the work of François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. It is not unlikely, therefore, that arguments such as t­ hose put forward by Mr. Harmony, as his name suggests, would have been understood as inherently connected to notions of physiocracy and Painite opinion. Inchbald’s key move h ­ ere is to apply notions of po­liti­cal economy to sex. Mr. Harmony’s actions focus on the play’s sexual economy: all of his interventions are aimed at restoring normative marital and familial relations among the characters. The play’s critical stance regarding unmarried men and ­women is figured forth in the title’s isolation of “One” from the word “Every­one.” In this play, ­every single entity, or “One,” has his fault by virtue of not being “Two.” The play rigorously critiques all the characters who are living singly. Mr. Solus, Miss Spinster, Miss Wooburn, and Mr. Harmony himself are instances of errant sociability. This is most tangible in Norland’s critique of Miss Wooburn’s nebulous status: “What are you now? Neither a ­widow, a maid, nor a wife. If I could fix a term to your pre­sent state, I should not be thus anxious to place you in another” (3.2). As Betsy Bolton recognizes, this inability to fix Miss Wooburn is a prob­lem in and of itself.20 Once we recognize the errant status of “One,” then Mr. Harmony operates as a constitutive outside: one who must remain unhappy—­that is, unmarried—to ensure the happiness entailed by comic resolution. When Norland attempts to marry him to Miss Wooburn, t­ here is a real chance that the amelioration of



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all the other social relations in the play ­will fail. He must remain unmarried ­because he is the single man needed to ensure that all the other “ones” are attached in conjugal or familial relations. If the conjugal, or “Malthusian,” ­couple is understood as the ideal conjunction of social production and sexual reproduction, then Mr. Harmony’s regulatory function is aimed at maximizing social “fertility” and, by extension, the biopower of the nation. That maximization involves not only a very specific suturing of class identity but also an extremely impor­tant engagement with imperial anxiety. In order to see the link between food, sex, and value, it is impor­tant to remember that “Provisions are so scarce” is spoken three times in the play. In the first instances noted above, the class strug­gle enveloping the nation suddenly erupts from the stage, but in the final appearance of the phrase, that politics is redirected in quite startling directions. ­There is a tropic shift in which a widely recognized po­liti­cal utterance pertaining to the scarcity of food is transformed into a novel figure for the scarcity of marriageable ­women: [Enter Solus, leading on Miss Spinster] Solus. Mistress Solus [introducing her] Harmony. [Starting] My Relation! Dear Madam, by what strange turn of fortune do I see you become a wife? Mrs. Solus. Mr. Harmony, it is a weakness to acknowledge; but you can never want an excuse for me, when you call to mind “the scarcity of provisions.” (5.3.157–63) This shift is both rhetorical and po­liti­cal. First, t­ here is a shift from one figure to another—­t hat is, from bread to w ­ omen—­t hat entails a shift from production to reproduction. And, second, t­here is a shift from the locus of working-­class po­liti­cal organ­ization and activism against the state to the primary concern of middle-­class social amelioration—­namely, the pursuit of biopower through carefully regulated marriage practices. This shift makes Mr. Harmony, despite his name, the source of dramatic tension in the play ­because, even though he is amelioration incarnate, he declares late in the play that amelioration works b ­ ehind the backs of the socius—it is a species of deceit. As Anderson states, Harmony “lies to do good.”21 This implies that the biopo­liti­cal imperative of the middling ranks operates most effectively when it operates beyond the purview of repre­sen­ta­tion. Harmony makes an argument for the necessity and value of hegemony, but in ­doing so draws

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attention to how consent is manufactured and thus renders it an object or a transaction for consideration in the theater among the very ­people who are hailed into its operation. Significantly, the Morning Chronicle objected to the inclusion of this scene as a descent into farce, but I would like to suggest that its presence in the script is disquieting not ­because it contravenes generic norms, but rather b ­ ecause it makes the biopo­liti­cal turn in the play too tangible. In the face of explicit censorship in the theater and direct intervention in the per­for­mance of politics in the street, the po­liti­cal playwright in the patent ­houses can only expose the theater’s complicity in the state’s repression of po­liti­cal liberty and its depredations against the poor. This explains why Harmony’s status within the play is so undecidable.22 Is he being ridiculed for attempting to avert social conflict, h ­ ere figured in terms of familial and sexual discord, and thus preventing the revolutionary overthrow of the cruel Lord Norland and the ejection of Sir Ramble’s libertinism? Harmony’s actions forestall the violent ejection of both t­ hese representatives of aristocratic excess in ­favor of their eventual reform. The fate of Irwin is crucial b ­ ecause he figures for the po­liti­cal affiliation between the discontented middling ­orders and the poor. The fact that he is a military man crystallizes the worst nightmare of royalist factions, for loss of control of the military would lead to the fall of the state.23 He adopts the violent strategies of street politics to acquire, through the robbery of Lord Norland, the very support he feels is due to his ­family not only for his exemplary ser­v ice to the nation, but also ­because it conforms to the natu­ral flow of filial love between f­ather and ­daughter. The po­liti­cal issue raised by Irwin’s robbery is w ­ hether vio­lence or excessive passion are justified in the face of “unnatural” social oppression and the immorality of Norland’s desire for “justice without mercy.” The question is w ­ hether revolution is justified by social and po­liti­cal injustice. The perverse resolution of ­these issues in act 5 must have come as a shock to t­ hose audience members not only sympathetic to Irwin’s plight but also in ­favor of the agitation against Britain’s war with France and its ensuing domestic deprivations. Irwin is acquitted of his crime ­because his long-­lost son tampers with the evidence against him and thus precipitates a reconciliation between Norland and his ­daughter’s ­family (5.1.90) The child comes onto the stage and quite literally precipitates a comic resolution that simply interrupts the pro­gress of “unhappiness.” But it is not a formal disjunction; rather, it is a narrative trope. The child’s intervention, indeed his very embodiment on stage, aligns comic resolution with the product of heterosexual reproduction:



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it is the child that saves the man and his wife. As we ­will see, the deployment of the child on stage ­will become a decisive ­matter in The Stranger and Pizarro, but ­here the sense of unhappiness that lingers in spite of this biopo­liti­cal deus ex machina is handled by Harmony. The very character who is so concerned with the “scarcity of provisions” defangs the politics surrounding this po­ liti­cal utterance. In this light, the play is about the betrayal of working-­class politics by the middling ­orders who decide in the time of crisis to restore legitimacy to the play’s aristocratic characters. Even in the case of Irwin, Harmony effects a harmonization of the aristocracy and the military. If we step back to consider the entire ­house as a scene of per­for­mance, then Inchbald sets the stage for the eruption of a class politics, famously described by E. P. Thompson, which pits the plebs against the patricians and then forces precisely the interruptions downplayed by Thompson’s analy­sis—­ namely, the re­orientation of the po­liti­cal field by the m ­ iddle ranks.24 This has the effect of figuring forth the social m ­ iddle and demanding that they account for their tangible and largely undisclosed agency. The middling audience members e­ ither make Harmony the object of satire and recognize the necessity of violent conflict for the overthrow of oligarchical aristocratic power or they accept Harmony’s manufacture of consent b ­ ecause such a move ­will broker a power sharing arrangement between vestigial aristocratic power and emergent, yet quiet, middle-­class domination of the social, economic, and governmental affairs of the nation. The former reading takes the reading proposed by “Philo Briton” in the Morning Chronicle—­t hat is, that Inchbald is satirizing Harmony for “cant phrases”—­and carries it to its logical conclusion: something that many po­liti­cal commentators ­were ­doing to Whig—­and especially Fox’s—­endorsements of the French Constitution. In the latter reading, the social ­middle works ­behind the veil of hereditary power and thus substitutes mystified “tradition” for capital accumulation as the source of social legitimation. This takes many of Burke’s key mystifications of tradition in the Reflections and makes them not only explicit but also operative. Where Inchbald fits in relation to the ethical decision demanded by t­ hese divergent readings can be gleaned from Miss Wooburn and Mrs. Irwin. Miss Wooburn’s rejection of Ramble’s aristocratic libertinism is overcome by Harmony’s deception and by Ramble’s explicit threat of domestic incarceration. Mrs. Irwin decides to go with her husband and break her filial ties to her ­father. Edward ratifies this move by making the same decision. Both ­women opt for normative marital relations at ­g reat cost to themselves. Are we expected to believe that Norland’s reformation is anything but deceit? When

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both ­women ultimately behave as good wives, what are we to make of the explicit enactment of vio­lence, cruelty, and deception on the part of Norland, Ramble, and Harmony? The ethical decision demanded by the play is most insistently staged around t­ hese moments of acquiescence and coercion. Thus far, much of the analy­sis of Inchbald’s play has focused on po­liti­cal topoi pertaining directly to the national crises precipitated by the war with France, but it is impor­tant to recognize that the play’s most troublesome conflicts are haunted by the unresolved fallout from the American War. Inchbald is careful to emphasize that the Irwins’ prob­lems are directly related to the loss of the American colonies. Captain Irwin does his duty in Amer­i­ca, but when the war is lost he is forced to return to London and suddenly finds himself indigent and, most significantly, “friendless.” As a refugee from previous bad military and foreign policy, Irwin is a figure for the damaged empire (remember, in 1793, Indian affairs are only just beginning to turn around) and thus his vio­lence is tied to larger po­liti­cal errors. This is why Irwin represents his country’s lack of regard for his ser­v ice to be a corruption of civility whose effects are worse than that of savagery: “Is this my native country? Is this the hospitable land which we describe to strangers? No—­We are savages to each other; nay worse—­The savage makes his fellow-­savage welcome. . . . ​W hile in this civilized city, among my own countrymen, even among my ­brother officers in the army, and many of my nearest relations, so very civilized they are, I could not take the liberty to enter ­under one roof, without a ceremonious invitation, and that they w ­ ill not give me” (2.1). At one level, the invocation of “savage” hospitality resonates with Rousseau, but more impor­tant for the play’s reception in the theater, the speech also mobilizes the anxious rhe­toric surrounding the misgovernment of colonial affairs. The common figural link between “American” and “savage” suggests that Americans may well be the “True Britons” and the Britain that Irwin fought for has become a perversion of civil society far more dangerous than the new manifestation of British liberty across the Atlantic. Deploying the discourse of savagery, Inchbald appears to agree with Burke and Fox’s assessment of the American War in the late 1770s and perhaps suggests, like many prominent Whigs in the early 1790s, that a similar set of miscalculations w ­ ere driving Pitt’s French policy. Irwin’s derangement is not the only fallout from the War of American In­de­pen­dence. Mr. Placid (Col­o­nel Placid in the Larpent text) is figuratively emasculated by his American c­ areer: he is ruled by his wife ­after returning from Amer­i­ca and the play attempts to work through his unhappiness.



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Placid’s name means peace, and if we understand his h ­ ouse­hold as a figure for the nation then ­there is unresolved conflict in the domestic state of peace between the wars.25 Divorce is not an option for Placid ­because his marriage is En­g lish, so he considers a permanent separation. This is effected, on Ramble’s dubious advice, by expressing a love for subjection to Lady Placid’s rule. She is expected to ­counter the explicit adoption of this nonnormative arrangement that is already at work in the h ­ ouse­hold. In other words, Placid speaks truth to power. But what if “separation” ­here figures for an explicit repression of Britain’s humiliation in the American War—­something that Dror Wahrman and ­others have argued haunts late eighteenth-­century British politics and national self-­stylization. What Placid, and arguably Irwin as well, wants is a separation from his psychic loss of domination in the Atlantic world. This desire is a fundamental prob­lem in British politics from 1785 onward and arguably drives Pitt’s militarism and the myriad masculinist fantasies that emerge from and sustain it. In the play, this desire is averted by a strange reconciliation within the Placids’ marriage. It becomes Lady Placid’s responsibility to allow Placid to accede to a fantasy of domination in the domestic state. Thus an artificially contrived accession to patriarchal power in conjugal marriage is seen as a compensation for cracks in imperial masculinity. This helps to explain why biopower (­here, like elsewhere in Inchbald’s work, figured by conjugality and sexual reproduction) becomes the focus of Harmony’s suspect and clandestine actions.26 Solving the provision prob­lem besetting the working poor is pushed aside in f­avor of a complex long-­term strategy aimed at shoring up imperial subjectivity and middle-­class reproductive power. A national crisis in class relations is subordinated to a larger imperial crisis in the self-­ stylization of a par­tic­u­lar class identity.27 Or, to put it differently, in ­Every One Has His Fault the eruption of a national crisis is interrupted by the middling ranks as they work through an imperial wound. We can infer from this that for Inchbald neither the streets of London (or of the nation for that ­matter) nor Parliament is the ultimate locus of politics. ­These traditional national loci of po­liti­cal action and anxiety are now hostage not only to an ever-­present subcurrent of imperial desire but also to an emergent form of governmentality whose target is population, not citizens.28 And that conjunction of desire and governance is embodied by a new accommodation between the state, the aristocracy, and the middling classes that we now recognize as global capital. What is best for global capital is Harmony and I do not think I need to belabor how that may not be best for the

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­ eople or for the characters trapped in this script. We need only look to Miss p Wooburn and Mrs. Irwin to gauge the social and sexual cost of harmonization. A ­ fter all, it is across their bodies that social production and reproduction converge in one overwhelming fantasy of amelioration.

Squire Mar[c]ius: Richard Cumberland’s The Wheel of Fortune Kemble attempted to c­ ounter the success of ­Every One Has His Fault at Covent Garden by ­running conspicuously loyalist scripts on competing nights, but the strategy backfired. Public re­sis­tance to Coriolanus eventually rendered the script unplayable. The demise of Venice Preserv’d in 1795 was even more notable ­because interventions by factions in the audience transformed a mainstay of the loyalist repertoire into a bellwether of radical politics. Thelwall’s “theft” of the play forced the government to steal it from themselves. In the wake of the revocation of the license for Venice Preserv’d, the press charged the ministry with attempting to damage the finances of Drury Lane Theatre.29 Significant sums had been invested in t­ hese productions and they w ­ ere star vehicles for both Kemble and Siddons. The shortfall was met by playing to the new theater’s massive size: spectacular productions such as Alexander the G ­ reat, Lodoiska, The C ­ astle Spectre, and Blue-­Beard kept the theater profitable. But none of t­ hese spectacles provided much in the way for Kemble’s or Siddons’s talents. Boaden puts a positive spin on the situation by arguing that, with the triumph of D’Egeville’s Alexander, “Mr. Kemble had now realized his plan of acting the sterling old plays with a perfection never before attempted; and of directing the appetite for noise and show to objects, in which the refined taste found even superior gratification to that enjoyed by the crowd, for whose amusement they had principally been designed.”30 Siddons’s celebrity would carry her through, but Kemble’s most characteristic roles had become unplayable. As Michael Dobson reminds us, Kemble’s desire for a Roman avatar knew few limits. Drawn to toga roles, much of our visual sense of Kemble on stage comes from Lawrence’s famous paintings of Kemble as Coriolanus and Cato. Reminiscences of Kemble and critical accounts of his acting style repeatedly invoke his classical learning, his statuesque manner, and his stoicism. ­These invocations come with negative and positive connotations: the former often descend into veiled attacks on his wooden delivery and lack of dynamic range;



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the latter often align Kemble’s Roman qualities with unparalleled patriotism and rectitude. Dobson’s description of the “knowingly anachronistic” designs for the 1812 Julius Caesar are true of Kemble’s Rome more generally: “Rather than depicting a par­tic­u­lar city at a par­tic­u­lar historical moment, the thirteen im­mense sets presented a perfect, super-­Roman Rome in which buildings erected only in the time of Augustus and ­later ­were clearly and unashamedly vis­i­ble.”31 Although the beginnings of this trend can be traced to the 1789 Coriolanus, this is especially true for the period ­after the 1790s when Coriolanus, Cato, and Julius Caesar could be restored to the repertoire ­after periods of po­liti­cal retirement. We have already seen how Coriolanus fell into disfavor; it would not become a regular part of repertoire ­until its triumphant return in 1811. Cato’s strong association with the American cause made it anathema ­until the early nineteenth ­century: ­there are only a few per­ for­mances between the War of American In­de­pen­dence and Kemble’s revival of the play in 1811. And Julius Caesar’s enactment of regicide ensured that it would not regain the stage ­until 1812. In the meantime, what was Kemble the Roman to do? Kemble and Siddons’s experiments in the repertoire ­were very much works in pro­gress. Although Siddons’s per­for­mance in Macbeth was immediately acclaimed, the play was constantly being reworked; and it took some time for Siddons’s portrayal of Queen Katherine in Henry the Eighth to attain universal approbation. In Kemble’s case, ­there is a staging ground between the examination of republican governance in the 1789 Coriolanus or the 1795 Venice Preserv’d and the manifestly imperial fantasies of his Roman plays of the second de­cade of the nineteenth c­ entury. That staging ground was Richard Cumberland’s wildly successful comedy The Wheel of Fortune.32 The first full season in the new Drury Lane Theatre, 1794–95, was notable for spectacular productions of Alexander the ­Great and Lodoiska, both fitted up to take advantage of the theater’s vast scale, and two Cumberland comedies, The Jew and The Wheel of Fortune. The former had opened in the spring of 1794 to wide praise and the subtle treatment of sentiment turned the question of toleration into popu­lar entertainment.33 The Jew’s sentimental appeal guaranteed twenty-­t wo per­for­mances in the subsequent season, but that would be overshadowed by the even more lasting success of Kemble in the role of the choleric recluse Roderick Penruddock (Figure 5.1). The Wheel of Fortune ran for eigh­teen nights in the 1794–95 season, but, more impor­tant, had significant runs in nearly e­ very subsequent season of Kemble’s c­ areer—­the role became one of his signature per­for­mances.

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Figure 5.1. Edward Scriven, a­ fter De Wilde, Mr. John Kemble as Penruddock in The Wheel of Fortune, engraving (1809). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The play itself is remarkably ­free of incident; most of the impor­tant events happen before the play’s action. The Morning Post’s summary lays out the situation: The Scene opens with the Cottage of PENRUDDOCKE, a Gentleman, who for twenty years, had secluded himself from the world, in consequence of being disappointed in a Love Affair. Woodville and Penruddocke having been educated together, the latter entreats Woodville to be his friend, and solicit the hand of Mrs. Woodville for him before her marriage; but the false friend, enamoured of her beauty, deceives Penruddocke, whom he represents as a profligate and worthless



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character, and through the aid of treachery, misrepre­sen­ta­tion, and a good fortune, obtains for himself the hand of his friend’s mistress. This breach of confidence almost drives the unsuspecting Penruddocke to madness. He resolves to sequester himself from the world, becomes an inflexible Misanthrope, and suffers no com­pany to obtrude on his meditations, but his Books. Woodville in the interim commences a Gambler, and loses the w ­ hole of his fortune to George Penruddocke, who immediately dies, and bequeaths his property and estates to his rusticated relation. Possessed of such riches, revenge, avarice, and all the bad passions strug­gle in the breast of Penruddocke, but are surmounted by his Philosophy, and ­every ­t hing magnanimous ensues. (MP 2 March 1795) Misrepresented by Woodville, Penruddock’s happiness has been destroyed doubly: his love for Arabella has been severed by the deception of his friend and thus he is also friendless. Bereft of attachment, he embarks upon a nonsociable life. Significantly, he sees this as a way of not descending into insanity, but ­every character in the play initially reads his misanthropy as a form of madness and recoils from him. As the comedy progresses, characters who are initially offended by his antisocial demeanor come to understand its necessity and its implicit critique of both specific be­hav­iors and more general norms. Kemble’s per­for­mance of pain, isolation, and anger—­a ll emotional states honed in the world of tragedy—­was crucial to the comedy’s structure. Boaden’s account of The Wheel of Fortune reads like an account of Siddons in she-­tragedy: I was now very frequently with him, and know the g­ reat pains he took with the character of Penruddock . . . ​one of the most perfect impersonations that had ever excited h ­ uman sympathy. He had fashioned ­every sentence of the part to his own organs, so that it seemed a de­cided real­ity; and his personal manner was so ­little disturbed, that the spectator, by an easy delusion, almost fancied Mr.  Kemble was relating some striking misfortunes that had happened, in early life, to himself. I most seriously affirm, that, for identity, Penruddock would hardly admit of competition. . . . ​I saw in his walk, and occasionally in his countenance, the image of that noble wreck of treachery and love, which was shortly to command the tears of a w ­ hole ­people.34

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Boaden’s sense of Kemble’s affective power in The Wheel of Fortune locates his pain and desire for vengeance in private misfortune. The intensity of that emotional damage draws sympathetic tears from the audience (­here hyperbolically understood on a national scale), but Cumberland cleverly establishes that affective dynamic in order that it be overcome in the next generation of characters. Penruddock remains in isolation at the end of the play, but his personal agony and former attachments drive the play to comic conclusion, just not for him. He must go through the play as the constitutive outside for a new social order, thus he is neither shamed nor integrated but rather simply returned to social exile ­because his unhappiness does crucial social work. Despite Boaden’s emphasis on Kemble’s per­for­mance of private misfortune, the drive ­toward generic closure has startling public ramifications. Once Penruddock inherits his ­brother’s vast fortune he has Woodville entirely in his power: he now owns every­t hing that his former friend lost and owed to George Penruddock. The play’s rigorous critique of gaming demonstrates how Woodville’s losses compromise not only his own standing and reputation but also the ­f uture of his wife and son and the ­woman his son wishes to marry, Miss Emily Tempest. When Penruddock comes to London in act 2 to exact revenge on his former friend, he finds that he cannot destroy his former lover and the ­f uture of her son. The son, Henry Woodville, is a soldier and former prisoner of war—­t he war is not specified, but one assumes it is some part of the French revolutionary wars—­and his interchanges with Penruddock are the most strenuous encounters in the play. In his first meeting, he ­doesn’t know who Penruddock is and condemns him as a “gloomy misanthrope . . . ​ hardened into savage insensibility” who “issues like a hungry lion . . . ​to ravage and devour” his ­family.35 Penruddock asks him to be more temperate and to meet him a second time where he identifies himself and tells Henry what his ­father did to warrant his vengeance. Henry is aware that his ­father is profligate, but he is shocked by ­these actions. Penruddock insists that Henry confront his ­father to confirm ­whether his story is true. The allegations are confirmed by Woodville’s unwillingness to discuss them and by Arabella’s indication that Penruddock has been wronged. Horrified not only by his ­father’s despicable be­hav­ior and by his own insult to Penruddock’s honor, Henry immediately asks for forgiveness. The play’s turning point comes when Penruddock suggests that Henry go to seek the hand of Emily Tempest. Henry is caught off guard. It is very quickly disclosed that Penruddock has taken the ­legal steps to restore all of Woodville’s forfeited estate to his son and this provides the fortune for Henry to honorably seek the hand of Emily. Thus



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Penruddock not only divests himself of the ill-­gotten fortune without restoring Woodville himself but also devises a way to return to his secluded life. Within the social landscape of the play, Penruddock’s outsider status allows him to mediate between two types of men. In one zone, we have the world of fashion: a world of excessive and suspect expenditure, gaming, and frivolity represented by the deceased George Penruddock and the dishonorable bankrupt Woodville. In another, we have the world of national and imperial ser­vice: two generations of military men represented by Lord Tempest, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War and a former colonial governor in Senegambia, and Woodville’s son, a young officer of fortitude, candor, and honor. Penruddock has no dealings with Sir David Daw, Emily’s ridicu­lous Welsh suitor, other than to ensure indirectly that Tempest looks favorably on Henry’s suit and thus consigns Daw to the country. Cumberland was universally criticized for his caricature of Welsh life and, as many reviewers indicated, the shaming of Daw was not necessary for the plot, but, as we ­will see, Daw has an impor­tant ideological function. The only other man in the play is the affable Sydenham, a man of modest means who is a friend to every­one and able to slide smoothly through all social arenas w ­ hether it be the salon or the dueling fields. Like Harmony, Sydenham is amelioration writ large and he wants to ensure that Arabella, Emily, and Henry come through unscathed. In this sense, he is the antisocial Penruddock’s sociable mirror. Neither men of fashion nor military men, both characters exist outside the two primary modes of sociability in the play and their outsider status enables them to mediate between ­t hese divergent worlds. When we look at the play in this way, we can see that George Penruddock’s w ­ ill forces both forms of sociability to interact with their constitutive outsides. And how that outside is conceived is as much structural as historical. Roderick Penruddock’s misanthropy arises from Woodville’s treacherous infraction of the codes of honor and of the norms of friendship. Woodville’s marriage to Arabella propels husband and wife into the world of fashion, but it is emphasized that his deception has primarily to do with discrediting Penruddock’s financial solvency. Woodville convinces Arabella to forego her conjugal ties to Penruddock in f­avor of a more prudential marriage of alliance. True to form, Woodville’s be­hav­ior from this point onward is a study in aristocratic dissipation and thus his first response to news of George Penruddock’s death is to confront Roderick and seek to resolve belatedly the conflict between them in a duel. Every­thing about Cumberland’s construction of the Woodville marriage ties it to outmoded

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social norms and, although Arabella is not the direct object of censure, Cumberland makes Woodville the embodiment of aristocratic vice. As Donna Andrew has argued, by the 1790s dueling was increasingly seen as an obsolete form of social regulation plaguing the upper o ­ rders and the critique of gaming was perhaps at its zenith.36 But for Woodville’s deception, Penruddock and Arabella would have formed a happy marriage in line with middling understandings of conjugal affection. Significantly, Penruddock does not choose in the first—or the last—­instance to resolve his conflict with Woodville in terms of honor. Rather, he rejects the entire social assemblage in f­ avor of detachment and poverty. He accepts and practices unhappiness as a way of life. By abjuring aristocratic norms, Penruddock exhibits a form of masculinity distinct from that of his ­brother and his former friend. He lives in unhappy exile from his f­ amily and his class and his desires. We could say a similar ­thing about his relation to the military men. Cumberland is at pains to indicate that although Penruddock re­spects Henry Woodville and Tempest he does not presume to understand martial life. When Henry discusses his obligations as a soldier, Penruddock states that he knows nothing of this but indicates that he can see moral princi­ples at work. Tempest, played by the boisterous Mr. King, is even more forcefully distinguished from Penruddock on the grounds of education: as his name suggests, he is a man of action and impulse who has stormed about the world, whereas Penruddock is a man of reading and contemplation who has barely ventured beyond his cottage. Tempest knows the world as it is; Penruddock knows the world as it was from his extensive reading in Roman history, especially Plutarch’s Lives. That reading is signaled throughout the play and its specifics are crucial to Kemble’s effectiveness in the role. We w ­ ill return to Kemble’s per­for­mance shortly, but it is impor­tant to recognize that Tempest and Penruddock are both second sons who, ­because of diminished fortunes, have been forced as young men out of the mainstream of aristocratic life into what we could call alternate c­ areers, and t­ here is much to suggest that “phi­los­o­pher” and “soldier/colonial administrator” are parallel ventures. Penruddock enters his seclusion twenty years prior to the pre­ sent of the play. From Tempest’s account of his life, we find that he too is out of “society” at roughly the same time: “First I was turn’d into the army, t­ here I got broken bones and empty pockets; then I was banished to the coast of Africa, to govern the savages of Senegambia; ­t here I made a few blunders in color, by taking whites for blacks and blacks for whites; but before my enemies could get hold of me, Death laid hands upon them, and I triumphed



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over their malice by the mortality of the climate” (2.1.20). With the invocation of Senegambia, audiences w ­ ere on familiar ground b ­ ecause colonial activity in this region of West Africa between the Senegal River to the north and the Gambia River to the south plays a prominent part in Cumberland’s most famous comedy The West Indian (1771). A staple in the comic repertoire, it was frequently commanded by George III during and in the immediate aftermath of the War of American In­de­pen­dence for its nostalgic view of the Atlantic empire. In that play, the impoverished Captain Dudley is trying to secure a dangerous commission in the crown colony. Part of the region was captured during the Seven Years’ War and, in 1765, Britain formed the Senegambia Province in order to further river access to ivory, ebony, and slaves from the interior. During the American War, the French captured key sites in the province in 1778 and the Treaty of Versailles, although recognizing British claims, dissolved the province altogether, thus returning the region to territorial rivalry between the French and British. In The West Indian, Dudley is eyeing a dangerous but potentially lucrative opportunity; in The Wheel of Fortune, Tempest is reflecting on how he escaped “banishment” to a nightmare world. How that nightmare world is described is noteworthy. He was to govern the “savages” of Senegambia but indicates that he made errors by taking whites for blacks and blacks for whites.37 The suggestion is that he ruled against savagery ­whether it be practiced by whites or blacks and thus disassociated be­hav­ior from race in a way that earned him enemies. The only way he survived their enmity was by outliving them. In short, Tempest is stationed at one of the hubs of the Atlantic slave trade and is demonized for attempting to mitigate or perhaps even short-­circuit the terms on which the trade was based. In mid-1795 with calls for abolition on the rise, Tempest suddenly steps forward as one who knew it was wrong all along. Late in the play, Sir David Daw attempts to cast aspersion on Tempest’s rejection of his suit by saying that he w ­ ill not be handled like Tempest’s “black negro slaves in Africa” (4.3.59). Daw’s declaration si­mul­ta­neously insists on his racial superiority and aligns him with ­those white “savages” who Tempest had to deal with in Senegambia. This is no small ­matter b ­ ecause the portrait of marriage that Daw puts forward and which Emily resists is similarly hierarchical and tyrannical and, within the play’s progressive temporality, equally obsolete. Cumberland deploys “Senegambia” in The Wheel of Fortune in a fashion that overwrites the tacit ac­cep­tance of slavery in The West Indian. In so ­doing, he was participating in the slow consolidation of “moral capital” that would

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allow Britons to distinguish liberty-­ loving Britons from slave-­ holding Americans—­a fantasy crucial to British reassertion of pre­ce­dence in the Atlantic world especially in the nineteenth c­ entury.38 This question of obsolescence—­whether understood in terms of geopolitics, sociability, or sexuality—is impor­ tant ­ because the play’s two “madmen,” Penruddock and Tempest (in Tempest’s first appearance on stage, Emily questions her f­ather’s relation to “reason”), are remnants of the past social regime albeit profound critics of it. Penruddock’s misanthropy is an indictment of the corruption of forms of aristocratic identity based on honor and virtue. Tempest rules errantly in a place where the only honorable way to rule is to break with the norms of colonial society; and he is lucky to have survived. Across a similar chronology, both characters resist the corruption of imperial society and Cumberland insists that their re­sis­tance has to do with their adherence to Roman modes of thought. Penruddock is versed in Roman republican history: his models for be­hav­ior are found in Plutarch. For example, when he praises Arabella at the end of the play by comparing her to Cornelia, he is implicitly suggesting that Henry is one of the Gracchi—­t hat is, one of the ­great reformers of the republic (5.1.71). Penruddock’s Roman analogies are deployed to make historical judgments. The most telling comes at the beginning of act 5 during a discussion with Weasel, his ­lawyer, about the dispersal of George Penruddock’s h ­ ouse and effects: Penruddock. Thus then it stands—­This h ­ ouse, and all that its voluptuous owner had amass’d within it, we doom to instant sale; some modern Lucullus w ­ ill be found to purchase it; the mourners in black, and the mountebanks in their parti-­ colour’d jackets, must be paid their wages and dismiss’d. (3.3.46) Lucullus was known principally for two ­things: as a ­great soldier, he won decisive and lucrative victories in the easternmost regions of the Roman Empire; upon his return to Rome, he spent exorbitant sums on building proj­ects and culture. “Lucullus” is Penruddock’s term for “Nabob” and, with the invocation of Eastern luxury, Cumberland is aligning the geopolitics of the play with a very specific moment in British imperial history. Poised as it is between the diminishment of the imperial activity in the Atlantic and the eventual control of India affairs by Parliament, The Wheel of Fortune’s critique of luxury and nabobery goes hand in hand with arguments to curtail the power



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and corruption of the East India Com­pany. That critique, like Foote’s The Nabob twenty-­five years e­ arlier, focuses on how metropolitan sociability is being corrupted by the injection of wealth acquired in India, but Cumberland’s analogy is more complex and subtle.39 Lucullus was no Sir Matthew Mite; he was renowned both for his military prowess and for his innovative deployment of imperial wealth in the realm of culture. For audience members versed in Plutarch, the new owner of George Penruddock’s h ­ ouse may well be a harbinger of imperial expansion and a cultural re­nais­sance. Tempest’s relation to Rome is to be derived less from explicit analogies to classical lit­er­a­ture than to his actions. Tempest’s governance of Senegambia appears to run into trou­ble b ­ ecause he is willing to recognize colonized subjects as citizens—­a strategy developed during the early phases of the Roman republic for integrating the subjects of conquered lands. As he states, this is out of step with the times no less than Penruddock’s harsh, almost stoic, manifestation of Catonic virtue. If we are to follow the play’s chronology, then Penruddock’s self-­exile and Tempest’s natu­ral republicanism happen in the mid-1770s when the British Empire is expanding in India and, of course, beginning to fray in the thirteen colonies. They survive through a period of social corruption and temporary imperial humiliation. And ­here they are, as the wheel of fortune turns again, ready to intervene not on their own behalf or even on behalf of their own generation but on behalf of the ­f uture marriage of Emily and Henry. With a dif­fer­ent kind of territorial empire emerging most obviously in India, a certain kind of sociability needs to be washed away and a new set of norms needs to be inaugurated. The Morning Chronicle referred to this quite pointedly as a return to “Reason in Comedy,” implying that the reconstitution of ­t hese social norms correlates to the reconstitution of genre. But what we need to register is the degree to which ­these norms are activated from their constitutive outside. That which remains outside the social and outside comedy—­namely, Penruddock and tragedy—­ must come together in the body of John Philip Kemble to ensure the ­union of that which can be sal­vaged from aristocratic dissipation—­t hat is, Emily’s civility—­and that which must be restored to martial masculinity—­Henry’s sense of virtue. Without Kemble, this cannot happen. I am stating the case in this way ­because the body of the actor and his history on the stage are crucial ­here. Kemble was perfectly suited to play Penruddock ­because his character displays all of ­t hose qualities associated with his per­for­mance of Coriolanus. He is choleric, vengeful, decisive, and, in the end, susceptible to the words of a ­mother. And, like Coriolanus, he does not

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change. At the end of the play, he returns to a state of detachment outside of society. With Coriolanus now off the stage, Cumberland and Kemble devised a way of bringing the Roman general into a dif­fer­ent world in order to do dif­fer­ent kinds of affective work. But if this was not evident from his gestures, from the way characters react to him, then the most reliable character in the play made the comparison explicit: Sydenham . . . ​I saw it in his looks: if you would paint a head of Caius Marius in his prison, he was the very model for it: It chill’d benevolence to look upon him; Spitzbergen cou’d not freeze me more effectually than his marble face. (54) Sydenham clearly has Plutarch in mind ­because his Life of Marius opens with the description of the fearsome bust of the consul. Gaius Marius was one of Rome’s greatest generals and a seven-­time consul, but he is invoked ­here for his part in Rome’s first civil war. Late in his ­career, Marius rashly attempted to relieve his former quaestor, but now rival, Sulla of command in Pontus. Sulla responded by taking the unpre­ce­dented step of commanding his legions to seize Rome. Marius and his allies fled the city and w ­ ere sentenced to death in absentia, but when Sulla took his legions out of Rome, fighting broke out between Sulla’s supporters and Cinna over the right of Italians to vote. Cinna too was forced to flee, but he quickly mobilized ten Italian legions. Marius returned from exile in Africa, raised legions in Etruria, and joined Cinna to retake Rome. Faced with t­ hese combined forces, the senate had l­ ittle choice but to open the gates of the city and Sulla’s supporters ­were massacred. Sydenham’s comparison quickly inscribes Penruddock in a narrative of banishment, exile, and revenge, but by zeroing in on this aspect of Marius’s history one c­ an’t help but notice the similarity to another g­ reat exiled general poised to take revenge on a corrupted city. Coriolanus is also derived from Plutarch’s Lives, and Caius Marcius’s exilic threat closely resembles this episode in the life of Gaius Marius. Marius’s willingness to serve ­under Cinna, who was leading non-­Roman legions against Rome, perfectly replicates Coriolanus’s alliance with Aufidius. At this point early in the play, Sydenham fears that Penruddock’s return from exile ­will result in a social massacre of all attached to his rival Woodville, but the threat of civil unrest bears an uncanny resemblance to the situation at the end of act 4 of Coriolanus. Audiences ­were all too familiar with the now unplayable tragic resolution



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to this scenario; Cumberland devised a way of resolving the civil conflict, now understood in social and familial terms, by embedding the scenario in a comedy. Sydenham’s comparison shows us precisely where Penruddock came from: he is Coriolanus transported to a dif­fer­ent set of circumstances where his desire for vengeance can be checked not by his ­mother but by his own sense of what is best for the ­f uture of his homeland. It is a place and time where his republican virtue can literally bequeath the means to get past the corruption that has plagued Britain/Rome for a period of twenty years and re-­inaugurate a state of happiness for all but him. And ­t hese means take the form of a financial/legal transaction and of a specific per­for­mance of character. It is this latter issue that all the reviews picked up on b ­ ecause it was Kemble’s per­for­mance that was deemed both an “original invention” and a return to “classical reason.” As Inchbald argued, the times made it increasingly impossible to stage Coriolanus, but freed from its specific speeches and scenarios Coriolanus could emerge in exile as it ­were in The Wheel of Fortune. The affect mobilized through Penruddock’s character was a summa of the expressive strategies devised by Kemble to enact Coriolanus’s solitary rage. But it was po­liti­cally necessary ­because the entanglement of virtue as a po­liti­cal concept and imperialism as geopo­liti­cal practice was long standing and c­ ouldn’t be simply severed. Rather, the knot had to be disentangled in a way that allowed virtue to be redirected and realigned. This is what is at play not only in the subtle transposition of anti-­Nabob discourse to the invocation of Lucullus but also in the chimerical blend of Caius Marcius and Gaius Marius. In both cases, we get a misprision in which republican tropes are re­ imagined with dif­fer­ent ­f utures. In the Lucullan transposition, the critique of nabobery more typical of Foote shifts to a view, importantly situated at a ­future moment, when the flow of luxury from the East w ­ ill ground a cultural and social efflorescence. With “Caius Marius” we see something more extraordinary: Sydenham’s comparison of Penruddock to Caius Marius at this point, like that of the reader just starting Plutarch’s Life, relies on outward impressions. More sustained engagement makes such summary judgment impossible. In the next scene, Henry apologizes and Penruddock sends him to Tempest to ask for Emily’s hand. In the transit from Sydenham’s terrifying comparison to the new détente between Penruddock and Woodville, the specters of treason, civil war, and authoritarian ambition that haunt the names Coriolanus and Marius vanish to leave only the positive qualities of ­t hese historical figures.

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Kemble’s body becomes the screen onto which a new ­future of martial reform and imperial expansion is misrecognized. And, crucially, it is this unhappy man who brings together Emily and Henry. Their happy ­union of wit and learning on the one hand and martial prowess and moral rectitude on the other is the dream of eighteenth-­century comedy writ large, although very few comedies actually result in this kind of marriage. Far more often, eighteenth-­century comedy results in the promise of reforming the rake or restoring the fortune of the bride or a return to the pastoral country. In this regard, the newspaper’s suggestion that The Wheel of Fortune is a return to “classical reason” in comedy is itself a misprision ­because the marriage that concludes this comedy is directed far more at a nineteenth-­century ­f uture. Cumberland’s “return,” like Penruddock’s exile, detaches from the pre­sent to retroactively anticipate a new social and po­liti­cal world in which the biopo­ liti­cal norms of the ­middle class work in unison with an increasingly global fiscal-­military state. It is apt then that Kemble found such a solid ­f uture in this role, for, like his other Roman avatars, his ostensibly “republican” roles—­ including Penruddock—­would become his most imperialist mystifications.

Unhappy Comedy: The Stranger It w ­ asn’t only Kemble who suffered from the loss of Coriolanus and Venice Preserv’d from the repertoire: Siddons’s electric per­for­mances as Volumnia and Belvidera w ­ ere relegated to temporary oblivion. From the winter of 1795 to the winter of 1798, Siddons reprised her other famous roles of the 1780s: with six per­for­mances in the 1796–97 season, Isabella was still ­going strong. Her other significant role that season was Millwood in The London Merchant, which opened in November 1796 and ran for eleven nights. Her only previous appearance in the role was in Liverpool in 1776, and it marks an impor­tant shift for Siddons. In her she-­tragedy roles, she had excelled at redirecting the abjection of compromised elite ­women in a way that consolidated middling forms of sociability. Now cast as a prostitute for the first time on the London stage in a thoroughly bourgeois tragedy, Siddons’s per­for­mance was less involved with scouring away obsolete aristocratic norms from the repertoire than with embodying an external threat to the social ­middle.40 Millwood’s unrepentant critique of patriarchal society signals the need for the vigilant reform of middle-­class masculinity from within. With her off-­stage persona now so strongly identified with moral



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exemplarity, she was perhaps the only actress who could activate Millwood’s critique without having its power mitigated by insinuations of impropriety. As a response to the “immorality” associated with the French revolution, one could argue that this was the logical next step in the pro­gress of corrosive solace largely associated with Siddons herself in the postwar years and it opened the door to new developments in her c­ areer. My sense is that her turn as Millwood in the 1796–97 season sufficiently reactivated Lillo’s place in the repertoire for her to take on the far more dangerous roles of the adulteress Mrs. Haller in The Stranger and the murderess Elvira in Pizarro. Although he greatly admired Kemble’s per­for­mances in ­t hese plays, Boaden would aver that he “never could, without strong reluctance, see the character of Mrs. Haller represented by his s­ ister,” and that “Mrs. Siddons might have scrupled to accept a character so profligate and desperate” had not Sheridan written the latter play.41 For Boaden, ­these roles ­were inherently unsuitable ­because they ran ­counter to the actress’s “chaste and dignified manners,” and, as Russell argues, maintaining this fantasy of gender propriety was ultimately of more importance to Boaden than was Siddons’s transformational role in the repertoire, for her work in the late 1790s actively took up the prob­lem of embodying the constitutive outside of emergent gender norms.42 Mrs. Haller’s and Elvira’s attachments afford ­little solace and in many ways we can discern early glimmers of cruel optimism in their commitment to a f­uture that w ­ ill become ultimately unbearable. In The Stranger, the attrition of Mrs. Haller ­will be inextricably tied to the evisceration of all aspects of her personality beyond that of the ­mother. In Pizarro, Elvira is fully entrapped by her attachment to a fantasy of heroic imperial conquest, which, once revealed for what it is, ­will wither all claims to virtue. What is so fascinating is that the unstable transitional ground between corrosive solace and cruel optimism is evident in the formal and generic deformations of what Boaden disparaged as “­t hese and other foreign affairs.”43 In what was perhaps an attempt to expand Siddons’s narrow range, her most con­spic­u­ous success in the late 1790s came in a part that operated much like Penruddock’s role in The Wheel of Fortune, a part that allowed her to exercise her formidable tragic powers in an altogether nontragic environment. Mrs.  Haller exists as a tragic heroine within the nominally comic world of Benjamin Thompson’s The Stranger, an adaptation of Kotzebue that garnered twenty-­six per­for­mances in the 1797–98 season and remained a strong draw for the rest of Siddons’s c­ areer. One could even argue that just

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as Kemble reactivated ele­ments of Coriolanus within Cumberland’s script, so too did Siddons dip into the very she-­t ragedy repertoire that made her famous—­especially the roles of Isabella and Jane Shore—to generate passionate sympathy for Mrs.  Haller. Siddons’s performance—­and Kemble’s for that ­matter—­rendered the play a meta-­commentary on the realignment of the repertoire b ­ ecause Mrs. Haller’s predicament was all too familiar. The historical context for Siddons’s per­for­mance has been brilliantly anatomized by Gillian Russell and it signals a fundamental shift in the public’s understanding of adultery as an aristocratic vice.44 I would suggest that its relationship to the repertoire is no less complex or controversial. Thompson’s translation was one of three versions of Kotzebue’s script printed in 1798. Significantly, in A. Schink’s translation, which went through seven editions, Schink not only insinuated that his version, which he had submitted to Drury Lane only to have it rejected, had been plagiarized by Thompson but also suggested that The Stranger bore more than a passing resemblance to The Wheel of Fortune: “He thought it not impossible that Mr. Cumberland’s very excellent, and deservedly applauded play, THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE, might be supposed, in some mea­sure, to have adapted one of the principal Characters to the En­glish Stage, in a manner far more in­ter­est­ing than any Translation could hope to do.”45 Schink is referring to the remarkable resemblance between the title character and Penruddock (Figure 5.2). With Kemble cast as “The Stranger,” the connection was evident. The play opens on the edge of Count Wintersen’s park, a low lodge on one side of the stage and a peasant’s hut on the other. The lodge is the residence of the Stranger and his servant Francis, whereas the hut is the abode of Tobias, an ailing old farmer whose only remaining son is a prisoner of war. The first scene stages two confluent acts of charity that establish the “true character” of two mysterious figures who have a curious relation to the count’s estate. The Stranger watches as Peter, the bumbling son of the count’s steward Solomon, delivers a charitable gift to Tobias. Peter inadvertently reveals to Francis and the Stranger that it comes from Mrs. Haller, a guest at the count’s h ­ ouse, who is dedicated to the maintenance of the poor in the region. When Tobias emerges from the hut ­after weeks of illness, overjoyed by the charity of an unknown benefactor, Francis extracts the man’s mournful story as the Stranger quietly listens. The Stranger sends Francis on a brief errand so that he can bestow a purse of gold on Tobias expressly to buy the release of his son. I have spent some time on this scene b ­ ecause it both shrouds the Stranger and Mrs. Haller in mystery and yet reveals that they share a fundamental



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Figure 5.2. Richard James Lane, ­after John Boaden, Kemble in The Stranger, engraving (1826). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

commitment to the promise of futurity. Mrs. Haller’s charity is directed at seeing Tobias through a crisis in his health; the Stranger’s charity is directed at reconstituting Tobias’s ­family from the ravages of war, for, as Tobias states, buying his son’s release ­will not only save the farm but also allow his son to marry. Although Mrs. Haller is in internal exile in the count’s ­house and the Stranger is exiled just outside the gates of the count’s park, their confluent acts of charity seamlessly meld private and public care.

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At this early stage in the play, only Francis sees the connection and he ­ ill play a crucial role in bringing the two characters together in the final w act. Prior to that point, Mrs. Haller is aware of but never sees the Stranger. Acts 2 through 4 reveal the identities of ­t hese mysterious figures. Act 2 contains two generative incidents that unlock the plot. First, Baron Steinfort, the countess’s ­brother, meets and falls in love with Mrs. Haller, whom the countess has been kindly harboring first as a ­house­keeper and then as her philanthropic friend without any knowledge of her past. He enlists his ­sister to help with his suit, but when she broaches the issue with Mrs. Haller, she confesses to the countess that she was formerly known as the Countess Waldbourg and, ­a fter being seduced by one of her husband’s friends, “left my children—­ father—­husband—to follow—­a villain” (4.48). Countess Wintersen is at first mortified in part ­because Countess Waldbourg’s adultery was a public scandal, but she quickly recognizes that Mrs. Haller is genuinely repentant and allows her to remain in the ­house­hold. Act 2’s second chief incident ultimately reveals the Stranger’s identity. At the end of the act, he selflessly saves the count’s son from drowning ­a fter Peter ineptly takes the boy on a tour of the park. When the count requests the presence of the Stranger at dinner to thank him, the Stranger bluntly refuses: brusque misanthropic refusals are his forte. Dif­fer­ent embassies from the estate are sent to persuade him to no avail u ­ ntil Baron Steinfort recognizes that he is his old friend Count Waldbourg. Responding to the baron’s enquiries, the Stranger reluctantly relates the ignominy and pain that has enveloped his life ­after his wife’s adultery. He agrees to dine with the f­ amily if only to please his friend and further his suit, but he has already resolved to recall his ­children who have been secretly raised in a nearby village and leave for foreign lands the next day. Act 4 ends with the fateful meeting, Mrs. Haller swoons in the arms of the baron and she is borne off the stage; the Stranger rushes out of the room in a state of “astonishment and horror.” Before turning to how this all gets handled in the final act, it is impor­ tant to observe how the structure of the play affords scenes specifically suited to the strengths of its principal players. Siddons’s confession to the countess and Kemble’s revelation of his anguished love, like their acts of charity, are conspicuously convergent per­for­mances. Each player is accorded a scene that draws from his or her own repertoire: Siddons’s confession scene is entirely reminiscent of her she-­tragedy per­for­mances from the 1782–83 season; Kemble’s revelation of his unhappy past is extremely similar to the scene in The Wheel of Fortune when Penruddock relates Woodville’s seduction of his



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fiancée to his son. Aside from witnessing the affective dynamics of the plot of The Stranger, audiences are ­here confronted with constitutive moments in the consolidation of both Siddons’s and Kemble’s celebrity. With Kemble, memory of his per­for­mance of Penruddock was constantly being refreshed, but it was intertwined with tragic roles now missing from the repertoire. In Siddons’s case, we argued in Chapter 1 that her per­for­mances of Isabella shifted the axis of the gaze such that the audience felt what it means to be controlled and destroyed by corrupt men who do not care for anything beyond themselves. As Isabella’s pain became their pain, it left the stage and manifested itself within the spectators in a fashion that allowed Siddons to emerge from the character as a female agent. In 1782–83, this act of tragic externalization allowed one to cathartically experience the feeling of isolation and alienation that was permeating much of British society in the wake of the American War. It allowed the audience to watch female suffering and watch themselves watching in a way that moved beyond the victimization that is the cost of normativity to a mode of aesthetic experience grounded in mutual recognition. As this role was repeated and its per­for­mance protocols w ­ ere absorbed into the other ­great she-­tragedy per­for­mances of the 1780s, Siddons set the very terms by which corrosive solace would permeate the repertoire. What are we to make of the deployment of this same affective construct ­here in a play replete with the so-­called comic humor of bumbling servants and the pleasing, if somewhat ponderous, songs of Savoyard Girls? One answer ­here is historical. The nadir of the war with France was in 1797–98: Nelson’s crucial victory at Aboukir would not happen u ­ ntil August  1798. For many Britons, the current situation would have evoked memories of similar low points in the American War: Saratoga, Stony Point, Yorktown. The Stranger was first staged on 24 March 1798, roughly two weeks ­after the arrest of some leaders of the Irish rebellion and less than a year ­after the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore.46 The United Irishmen ­were seen as active participants in the naval mutinies, so ­t hese two internal threats to the stability of the empire ­were often conjoined. We have already seen how the Regency Crisis generated significant insecurity within the realm, but the naval mutinies and events in Ireland ­were arguably the most serious threats to the empire since the American crisis. This was why they ­were so ruthlessly put down. For our purposes, however, it is their reactivation of the post-­American predicament as much as their ostensible Jacobin character that warrants attention ­because Siddons’s per­for­mance of Mrs. Haller returns us to the reparative dynamic of the 1782–83 season, but

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this time it is as a sign of resilience and strength. With the mutineers hanged and impor­tant leaders of the rebellion imprisoned by mid-­March, the crisis in Ireland was not over. With the French invasion of Egypt playing out in the background, the rebellion would take place in May and June of 1798; thus, when The Stranger is first performed every­t hing was in a state of anticipation. Suspended in a moment between the naval mutinies and the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland, memories of the inept prosecution of the American War w ­ ere met with decisive deadly action. In this context, solace need not come at the expense of the abject ­woman; hence, The Stranger could draw on the intensity of tragic emotion for a very dif­fer­ent, less corrosive end. Past anx­i­eties could now be staged in order to be quelled, but ­doing so instantiates a level of generic vio­lence that bears comparison to the violent extirpation of the mutineers and the United Irishmen, for the action of The Stranger, like the actions of the rebels, was truncated in a fashion that allows one to e­ ither imagine “reconciliation” no ­matter how unlikely or to believe that the death of individual “criminals” would resolve intractable systemic prob­lems. Both “optimistic” investments recode damage—at the level of character, form, and politics—as hope, and it is for this reason that con­temporary reviews and commentary are so split. The concluding act of The Stranger was unlike anything previously attempted on the London stage. The Morning Post summarized it as follows: As [Mrs. Haller’s collapse and the Stranger’s horrified exit] passes in the presence of the ­family, the story of The Stanger and Mrs. [Haller] is fully known at the c­ astle, and the Baron resolves to reconcile them if pos­si­ble. The Countess Warberg behaves with magnanimity, and spurns the idea of securing her own repose, at the expense of her husband’s honour; but she requests one interview with him. This takes place; and a­ fter much conflict between the conflicting passions of each of the parties, a reconciliation is produced, at the moment they are about to separate for ever, by their ­children (a boy and a girl) being presented to them by the Baron and his ­sister. (MP, 26 March 1798) At the critical moment of reconciliation, the review moves into the passive voice and goes one step too far. The Morning Chronicle indicates both why and how the Morning Post misrepresents what happened: “Their two ­children are introduced. Embracing their c­ hildren, and mutually overpowered by tenderness, they fly into each ­others arms, and the curtain drops” (MC, 26



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March 1798). This sudden interruption was a significant formal innovation ­because, as Gillian Russell argues, it left the pressing question of Mrs. Haller’s adultery unresolved. The Morning Post and, ­later, the Eu­ro­pean Magazine saw reconciliation: “Her breach of matrimonial love is not weakened by the ­pardon which she receives from her husband, who, convinced of her sincere contrition, takes her again to his arms.”47 The Morning Chronicle focused instead on the interruption and the Monthly Mirror opined on the danger of ambiguity: “In a sort of ambiguous reconciliation, that leaves us to imagine—­ whatever we please. . . . ​The moral of this play is unquestionably of a dubious nature; we fear it may tend to make adultery appear less odious than it ­ought—­there is no dramatic justice. . . . ​To represent a wife and a ­mother who had fallen the easy and almost voluntary victim of seduction, restored to her husband and c­ hildren, is a dangerous exhibition.”48 By invoking the term “dramatic justice,” the critic at the Monthly Mirror was invoking the law of genre: reading adultery as inherently the domain of tragedy, that same critic eventually states that “though it would do vio­lence to our feelings, the death of Mrs. Haller is an event that ­ought, by some means or other, to take place.”49 Imagining Mrs. Haller’s death is to refashion The Stranger as a Siddonian she-­tragedy, one in which the abjection of the character is subsumed into the agency of the player. But the spectacular truncation of the play exposes the desire for this kind of resolution as itself part of an increasingly obsolete generic expectation no less than a potentially outmoded understanding of the sex/gender system. With critics and audiences making divergent projections onto the screen of the fallen curtain, we would do well to recognize that the characters do not know how to get beyond the horror of their meeting ­because they have dif­fer­ent understandings of attachment. The Stranger indicates that the damage incurred by his wife’s adultery is primarily personal: he is deprived of his beloved (4.54–55). But Steinfort and indeed Mrs. Haller also emphasize that the damage is social: w ­ ere he to forgive her or even continue to circulate in public he would be derided. The Stranger implicitly comprehends this by his decision to live first in seclusion and then to leave Eu­rope altogether. Francis and Steinfort recognize that t­hese losses are in the past and that the Stranger fails to see that the most impor­tant attachment endangered by the separation of husband and wife is a bridge to the ­future.50 And this is why they conspire to confront the estranged ­couple with their ­children. It is the ­children, indeed their physical embodied presence on stage when the curtain falls, that put the law of genre in disarray and allowed the per­for­mance protocols of tragedy that w ­ ere so thoroughly associated

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with Siddons and Kemble to live on in the “comedy” projected by the audience as they look at the now motionless curtain. The possibility of comedy and the potential of marital reconciliation a­ fter adultery posits a f­uture in which Mrs.  Haller does not die, where the Stranger (unlike Penruddock) does not go into permanent exile, and where the husband and wife come home to their ­children. I use this final unusual construction advisedly b ­ ecause nothing about the open ending of The Stranger suggests that the Count and Countess Waldbourg simply return to where they came from. This is subtly signaled by a shift to their given names Charles and Adelaide throughout act 5. They are neither Count and Countess nor Mr. and Mrs. anymore. Their new identities are fully alienated from their former modes of sociability; they are now fully the possession of “the boy and the girl.” It is only as their parents that The Stranger can accede to the generic condition of comedy. Could ­t here be a more forceful articulation of the normativity of the middling reproductive ­family than the closing tableau’s arrangement of bodies on stage? ­A fter Mrs. Haller declares, “And when my penance s­ hall have broken my heart, when we meet again, in a better world,” the Stranger, accepting that they ­will be reconciled in death, states, “­There, Adelaide, you may be mine again”; but then the two most famous declamatory players of their age are relegated to silence and the specific details of the closing tableau are telling: [Their hands lie in each other: their eyes fully meet each other: they stammer another “Farewell!” and part; but as they are g­ oing, she encounters the Boy, and he the Girl.] ­Children. Dear ­Father! Dear M ­ other! [They press the ­children in their arms with speechless affection; then tear themselves away—­gazing at each other—­spread their arms, and rush into an embrace. The ­children run, and cling round their parents. The curtain falls.] (5.74) The details are significant. Each parent is encountered by the child of the opposite gender, thus forming a cross-­generational heterosexual norm. And note how the second stage direction specifies that the ­children “cling round their parents,” not vice versa. This means that the past rupture is contained by the ­children and they stand before the audience as that which precedes and postdates their parents’ withdrawal from society. It is ­these tenuous, gestural



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signs of continuity on which a new theatrical and social dispensation might be ­imagined. As Russell shrewdly intimates, that unsettling theatrical f­ uture “signals the emergence of melodrama as, in Peter Brooks’s terms, an ‘aesthetics of embodiment’ through which the disempowered might speak.”51 But we need to stay with the scenario, for, while the ­children speak and lay claim to the parents, Siddons and Kemble are voiceless: proto-­melodrama emerges only to interrupt tragedy and posit “comedy” as a form of wishful thinking that consolidates social norms not within the plot but in the body of the exemplary actress. In the pro­cess, Siddons is entrapped in a way that ­will allow her foremost hagiographer to construct sentences such as the following: “Her countenance, her noble figure, her chaste and dignified manners, w ­ ere so utterly at variance with the wretched disclosure she had to make, that no knowledge it was pure, or rather impure, fiction, could reconcile me to this ‘ forcible feeble’; that which was true of the character, was so evidently false and impossible of its ­g rand and beautiful representative.”52 What is the relationship between countenance, figure, chastity, and dignity but one of mystified equivalence that Siddons had to undo with e­ very per­for­mance in order that t­ hese terms could be realigned to support the crushing weight of her persona. Boaden feels no such need to do this with Kemble, other than to offer variations on “the ­silent rec­ord of unutterable anguish . . . ​as he looked and moved in Kemble, was of all exhibitions that I have ever seen the most affecting.”53 His role, that of the unhappy man, was perhaps best left unexplored. Kemble’s exilic layover in The Wheel of Fortune kept a specific imperial fantasy g­ oing u ­ ntil the empire itself would catch up—­his turn as the Stranger simply doubles down on the same performative tropes. For Siddons, rehearsing the abjection of the she-­tragedy heroine within The Stranger was both a radical re-­territorialization of such roles and a deeply normative act—­radical ­because it detached the errant w ­ oman from social death, yet normative ­because her exemplary life was now ineluctably tied to that of the child and, by extension, to her reproductive capacity.54

CHAPTER 6

Utopian Discomfort Pizarro’s Bridge to the Cosmopo­liti­cal F ­ uture

Let us go out on a limb and say that eighteenth-­century theater ended on the eve­ning of 24 May 1799 when the curtain at Drury Lane ­rose on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Pizarro. As the culmination of a ­century of dramaturgical and scenographic innovation, the play points t­oward developments that would define nineteenth-­century theatrical practice. But rather than describing the play as a watershed, I am inclined to see it as a cataract separating two aesthetic and po­liti­cal regimes. Although it is set in the past and allegorizes the pre­sent, Pizarro demands that its audience leap into the f­ uture. This precarious declaration is part of an overall rhe­toric of precarious leaps that takes its inspiration from the play’s most famous and ambitious scene. I am referring to the extraordinary mountain torrent and collapsing bridge that not only stunned audiences during its initial presentation—­and almost killed Kemble and its operators on opening night—­but also lived on in subsequent set designs.1 Unfortunately for theater history, the visual rec­ord of de Loutherbourg’s original scene has been lost and the print descriptions of it that remain are hopelessly vague. I am g­ oing to make a virtue of that loss by arguing that its disappearance is curiously apt, for it is a crucial mechanism in a utopian dialectic whose effectiveness relies on getting beyond the bridge. Explaining that sentence is ­going to take some time and effort. This final chapter attempts to think about the utopian possibilities set into motion by Sheridan’s play by taking up the admittedly utopian gesture of theater history, which attempts to reconstitute, from incomplete evidence, past per­for­mance. To bridge the gap in our knowledge, we can turn to the remarkably thick rec­ord of response to the play. Pizarro was both the most popu­lar and most critiqued play of the age. No play in the late eigh­teenth ­century generated as



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many lengthy reviews, as much criticism, and as much visual satire as Pizarro.2 Much of this printed material focuses on the play’s sensational success as a loyal play in a time of yet another martial crisis, on its complex adaptation of the po­liti­cally and morally suspect Kotzebue for the British stage, and on the rather surprising fact that it should come from the pen of Sheridan who had not written for the stage since The Critic in 1779. The most impor­tant playwright during the War of American In­de­pen­dence was back and his return critically engaged with much that had ensued in the post-­American era. Po­liti­cally, Sheridan was both hailed as a patriot and ridiculed as an apostate or, worse, as a cynic.3 Aesthetically, the critics on opening night praised the play’s innovative integration of tragedy, spectacle, and ­music. For ­others, the play’s generic hybridity signaled a profound threat to theatrical legitimacy and hence to conventional definitions of the British theatrical heritage.4 Sheridan was seen by many as a traitor to the very theatrical and po­liti­cal traditions that his e­ arlier plays and speeches had exemplified. This paradoxical response to Sheridan’s play had its counterpart in the response to his oratory on the G ­ reat Mutiny of 1797. The mutiny of sailors at Spithead and the Nore was arguably the moment of gravest crisis for the nation during the Revolutionary War, and Sheridan’s response to it foreshadows much of his rhetorical strategy in Pizarro. From the outset, Sheridan and Fox w ­ ere deeply and loudly critical of the Admiralty and of the ministry’s response to the demands of the sailors. Unsurprisingly, they and other members of the opposition w ­ ere satirized by the government’s propagandists as ­behind the entire affair.5 When Sheridan made his famous speech of 2 June 1797 in which he supported the government against the sailors, pro-­ government satirists and commentators w ­ ere ­either stupefied or simply continued to impugn the opposition.6 What they could not countenance was a nationalist response to the crisis that was nevertheless critical of the state. In Sheridan’s speech, he calls for all members to join together against the mutiny, but in the same breath states, as he did on numerous occasions before, that the entire affair was of the government’s making.7 If the ministry and Admiralty had dealt with the sailors in a reasonable and conciliatory way, the mutiny would not have escalated. Thus, he paradoxically calls for a unified House to take action against the sailors in order to rectify a situation pushed to the level of crisis by the ministry. In short, he asked all members to join the government to correct the government’s m ­ istake. And this position, although internally contradictory, was completely in keeping with Sheridan’s critique of Pitt’s management of the war.8 The template for this

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critique was honed by the Whig opposition to North’s mismanagement of the American conflict. In his speeches, Sheridan, and Fox for that m ­ atter, repeatedly asserted that the lack of provisions, the escalation of hostilities, the financial encumbrances, and the intractability of the conflict ­were the result of bad policy.9 From this point onward, Sheridan remained rigorously critical of both the threat posed by the Directory (and eventually by Bonaparte) and the threat posed to the nation by the ministry’s incompetence abroad and its incursions on liberty at home. The mutiny thus was read as a symptom of a larger prob­lem that could be solved only through an inconsistent response: in this time of crisis, Whig would have to support Tory and yet maintain an ongoing critique of government policy. This is why Sheridan could both support the ministry on the mutiny and join Fox in secession shortly afterward. Two years l­ater, Pizarro was staged at Drury Lane to g­ reat acclaim and it is, I believe, the next logical, but nevertheless counterintuitive, step in this complex counter-­politics. Pizarro opened on 24 May 1799 and ran for thirty-­one nights before the summer layoff. It reopened again on 11 December 1799 and ran for a further thirty-­six per­for­mances in the 1799–1800 season. In the light of our reading of The Stranger in the last chapter, the timing ­here is significant. Mired in a state of anticipation regarding events in Ireland and war with France, The Stranger backgrounds geopo­liti­cal conflict yet activates anxiety to anticipate indirectly a resolution to crisis. Pizarro comes in the wake of both the naval mutinies and the Irish Rebellion, and Lord Nelson’s victory at Aboukir signaled a turn in fortunes in the war with France. With the nation on the other side of t­ hese events, Sheridan was in a position not only to explore their reactivation of memories of imperial crisis in the 1770s and 1780s but also to bring war directly to the stage.10 The Stranger’s oblique engagement with ­these problematics through the celebrity of its central players was superseded by an over-­the-­top exploration of both the repertoire itself and the affective dynamics that had driven the rise of Siddons, Jordan, and Kemble over the previous fifteen years. The undecidability generated by The Stranger’s truncated closure was the precursor to the myriad ambiguities arising from Pizarro’s prolixity, a play whose very excess would allow for seemingly endless allegorical interpretations. This final chapter, like the first chapter, goes to a very specific moment of per­for­mance in order to understand the complex power of the repertoire to reflect upon historical transformation. Whereas my argument about



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Siddons’s reactivation of the affective potential nascent in she-­tragedy was about how the repertoire could be rechanneled to meet pre­sent needs, my argument h ­ ere shows how Sheridan’s new play drew the performative interventions of Siddons, Jordan, and Kemble into itself in order to scrutinize the cost of what this book has described as corrosive solace. That scrutiny is remarkably specific and extends as much to per­for­mance protocols that emerged in the wake of the American War and which had established themselves as new theatrical norms as it does to po­liti­cal attitudes and formations that had coalesced during the new wars with France. By the time of Pizarro, the realignment of the repertoire was now working in concert with a reconstituted sense of national and imperial purpose. Pitt’s long period of rule with its harsh rec­ord of suppressing radical dissent, the disintegration of Whig opposition, and the need for national cohesion during a new global war had calcified the po­liti­cal life of Britain. Sheridan’s intervention in Pizarro rehearsed ele­ments of the repertoire that sustained and reconsolidated British culture in the 1780s and 1790s not only to question its efficacy but also to mark its potential for imagining a dif­fer­ent social and po­liti­cal contract. Pizarro operates both as a summa of the repertoire and as an attempt to redirect memories of past per­for­mance ­toward a dif­fer­ent ­future. In that regard, it attempts to re-­ territorialize the post-­American repertoire, to radically re­orient the audience’s memories so that they can subtend what Sheridan felt was a more vital and more vibrant habitus.

Of the Po­liti­cal Possibilities of To­night’s Per­for­mance ­ fter taking the town by storm, Pizarro was the occasion of one of the most A auspicious Royal Command per­for­mances in the history of British theater. With the closing of Sheridan and Kemble’s production of Venice Preserv’d in 1795, the king refused to attend a play at Drury Lane for four years. Short of revoking the theater’s license, the king’s boycott was an extreme statement of the state’s disapprobation not only of the theatrical institution but also of Sheridan’s politics. With widespread reports that Pizarro was generating enthusiastic expressions of loyalty from its audiences, the king arranged to return to Drury Lane on 5 June 1799. The following report from the Star gives a detailed account of the king’s per­for­mance and what I would argue is a complex form of counter-­performance managed by Sheridan himself:

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This elegant ­house never possessed a more splendid and numerous audience than last night, drawn together by the double attraction of the presence of the ROYAL F ­ AMILY, and the popu­lar play of Pizarro. The ­whole of the boxes w ­ ere taken before the doors opened, and it was by accident only a single seat could be procured. Some of the first fashion w ­ ere seated up one pair of stairs. . . . ​The lower boxes ­were crowded with Nobility. The difficulties of entering the galleries and pit ­were of course excessive; the crowd was dreadful; several Ladies fainted, and one falling down near the door, was much bruised. On opening the box doors, the crowd was as ­great as on the first night of Pizarro; the railing was burst off; and the win­dows, which had been repaired, ­were again broken to give air. Ladies in full dress ­were struggling to enter, and hundreds less courageous w ­ ere standing in the lobbies and round the doors; and Ladies and Gentlemen ­a fter paying to go to the boxes, clambered over to the Pit. Notwithstanding the confusion was so ­great, and that the ave­nues are none of the best, we ­don’t find that any accident happened, or that any person was injured. The Royal Box, with the stair case and room adjacent, w ­ ere fitted up in a most sumptuous stile, with richest shrubs and flowers.—­The first of the Royal Party that entered ­were the Duke and Duchess of YORK, who seated themselves in one of the private boxes on the KING’s side, amidst the universal greetings of the numerous and splendid auditory. Mr. SHERIDAN immediately followed their Highnesses to pay his re­spects to them, which being observed by the audience, his conduct was warmly applauded by ­every part of the House. Their MAJESTIES and PRINCESSES appeared soon a­ fter in the State Boxes. On their entrance the roar of acclamation from all parts of the Theatre was prolonged for nearly ten minutes. All the principal singers belonging to the Theatre then came forward, and the Duke of YORK’s band being ranged on the stage, sang GOD save the King, which was promptly encored. The loyal and affectionate manifestations having subsided, the Play commenced, the Sentiments of which, appropriate to the times, seemed to make a very deep impression upon the exalted visitors, while they electrified the audience. The patriotic speech of Rolla to his countrymen, in the T ­ emple of the Sun, was interrupted by a thunder of applause, which suspended the per­for­ mance nearly five minutes. Several other passages had a similar effect.



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Where the Peruvian’s attachment to his Sovereign, and that Sovereign’s love for his ­people w ­ ere so glowingly described, the Royal Pair ­were affected even to tears. Between the Tragedy and the Farce, Rule Britannia was sung with ­great effect; and at the conclusion of the Entertainment, God Save the King, was played, while their MAJESTIES ­were departing. . . . ​ Mr. SHERIDAN, Mr. RICHARDSON, and Mr. GRUBB, the Proprietors, walked before their MAJESTIES to their box, with each two candles, and conducted them in the same way to their carriages. . . . ​ No per­for­mance in any Theatre, ever went off with greater éclat than that of last night. (Sr, 6 June 1799)11 I have recorded this review at length in order to draw attention to the carefully managed po­liti­cal per­for­mance of the royal party. The presence of the Duke of York’s band on stage indicates that much of this was got up in advance by the royal ­house­hold. In light of the controversy sparked by the last time George III attended a play by Sheridan—­t his was a per­for­mance of The Rivals at Covent Garden in 1795 that prompted the loyalist press to attack certain actors for not singing “God Save the King” with sufficient vigor—it is not surprising that the royal h ­ ouse­hold attempted to control the per­for­ mance of ­t hese songs.12 From all reports, the Duke of York’s band did its job remarkably well, and it may well be that this was precisely what Sheridan was counting on. When the Crown’s representatives are on stage, the commercial theater’s relation to the state is made manifest and a certain anachronism kicks in. The Star’s account of the per­for­mance indicates that the audience that eve­ning was composed almost exclusively of the nobility. The theatrical space of Drury Lane was transformed into a near simulacrum of court. The qualification is necessary b ­ ecause the review is fascinated by the degree to which the foremost figures in the nation behave in a manner more suited to the mob: ladies and gentlemen are pressing on the stairs and even clambering over the boxes into the pit. Into this confusion, Sheridan, Grubb, and Richardson, carry­ing tapers, lead the king and queen to their sumptuous seats, which are themselves fitted up from the properties of the theater. The entire gathering, entrance, and departure is reminiscent of a court masque, a theatrical form that hypostatized sovereign power not only by allegorizing the benevolence and power of the king but also by transforming the social space of per­for­ mance to enact sovereignty. Is ­there a more accurate characterization not only

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of this scene of per­for­mance but of Pizarro itself? The ­music, the highly intricate allegories, the complex and elaborate sets, properties, and visual effects w ­ ere widely recognized as the epitome of a new form of theatrical spectacle, but that same spectacle has its origins in the court masque. One glance at a con­temporary rendering of the play’s most magnificent set should clinch the filiation (Figure 6.1). The pro­cession and the very scenography of the T ­ emple of the Sun from act 2, scene 2, brings the allegorical types of the king and the ministry into a space of unparalleled grandeur. De Loutherbourg was Sheridan’s chief artistic collaborator on this show, but his primary po­liti­cal collaborator, Charles James Fox, regularly referred to the ministry as “The Court” during this period.13 Much of the criticism of Pizarro has focused on its generic instability and has argued for generic innovation. What happens if we take our cues from Sheridan’s actions in Drury Lane on this eve­ning and think of the play as an anachronism, as a belated masque? Or, more precisely, could Sheridan be staging, if only on this night, a parody of a masque that aims to demonstrate the distance between the historical actors and their allegorical counter­parts? This would imply that George III is less of a constitutional monarch than an absolutist king who is most entertained when he is the focus of all repre­sen­ta­tion both po­liti­cal and theatrical. If so, then the politics of allegory itself, which had been so crucial in a time of intense state censorship, was being mobilized in a new, yet curiously old, way by Sheridan. The primary effect of such an intervention would be to highlight how George III and Pitt not only do not live up to the standards of Atiliba and Rolla but also the degree to which they and the audience are caught in the thrall of a particularly dangerous delusion. This is precisely what is at stake in some of the most biting visual satires of the command per­for­mance. Pizzaro a New Play or the Drury-­Lane Masquerade shows Sheridan dressed as Pizarro leading the king, queen, and princesses to their boxes (Figure 6.2). Along with requests to play “God Save the King” more and more loudly, Sheridan asks that a rather con­spic­u­ous stone marked “Maidstone Loyalty” be moved out of the way “to make room for the best and wisest of sovereigns.”14 The king for his part declares, “No no no Jacobins ­here all Loyal all Loyal. Charming man the Author eh charming man, never saw him in such a good light before” and the princesses state they “never saw that General at Court.” In the background, we see the band and audience members (including Fox) hailing the king. This satire aligns Sheridan with the character allegorically tied to Napoleon in order to undercut his supposed loyalty. Clear signals are

Figure 6.1. Edward Orme, The ­Temple of the Sun, mezzotint (1800). © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure  6.2. S.  W. Fores, Pizzaro a New Play or the Drury-­Lane Masquerade, ­etching (1799). Trustees of the British Museum.

given to the viewer that Sheridan’s loyalty is an act ­either staged for cynical ends (a note in the foreground suggests that he has his eyes on a peerage) or something more sinister. The more sinister possibility is coded into the response of the royal ­family. They ­don’t seem to see that Sheridan is merely acting. The masquerade is the truth in the king’s eyes and the princesses misrecognize Sheridan’s costume as a British military uniform despite the fact that, according to the play’s allegorization of the war with France, Sheridan’s Spanish dress aligns him with Bonaparte. If Sheridan is attacked for pandering, then the king, princesses, and audience are ridiculed for their gullibility. This separates the viewer from the represented audience and asks that they consider both the judgment of the king and the expressions of loyalty to such a monarch. Sheridan emerges as the only character in the satire that needs a costume ­because George III and the audience e­ ither are already masquerading as sovereigns and patriots or, perhaps worse, unable to discern masquerade from real­ity.



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This satire figures the king as a particularly easy mark whose stupidity or narcissism impairs his aesthetic and po­liti­cal judgment. The implications are disturbing, but they seem gentle when compared to the treatment of Pitt in a remarkable print titled Rolla’s Address to the Peruvian Army (Figure 6.3). The print pre­sents verbatim Rolla’s famous speech from the second act of the play, which is itself a rehearsal of Sheridan’s famous “Speech on the Begams Charge” and which was so impor­tant to the early phases of the impeachment of Warren Hastings ten years e­ arlier.15 But the speech is now visually attributed to a highly effeminate Pitt dressed as Rolla before an equally effeminate army of Peruvian/British soldiers. All the figures in the foreground that comprise Pitt’s war cabinet wear rouge, feathers, and earrings.16 On the right of the image, we are presented with Fox and ­others ­under the flag of Libertas on the not-­too-­distant shore of France. The print rather bluntly declares that Pitt is an especially unlikely candidate for the mantle of heroic martial masculinity characterized by Rolla and, by extension, Sheridan himself in an ­earlier oratorical guise. Like the image of the king’s arrival and departure from the command per­for­mance, this satire suggests ­either that Pitt is at best an actor pretending to be Rolla or that the audience, in their approbation for Rolla’s speech, misrecognizes Rolla’s true patriotic sentiment for the persona of the prime minister. Pitt’s reluctance to attend the play may indicate that he recognized the danger of the former repre­sen­ta­tional trap, but what are we to make of the latter aspect of the play’s reception? It suggests that the audience’s expressions of loyalty are not to Pitt but to Sheridan’s ­earlier critique not only of Hastings’s governance in India but also of Tory foreign policy all the way back to the strug­g le over Shelburne’s ministry during the closing phases of the American War.17 This implies that the audience is demonstrating loyalty not to the ministry but to a type of Whig politics that explic­itly projected a form of patriotic commitment to the constitution that was at variance both with the Pitt government’s incursions on po­liti­cal and civil liberties during the mid-1790s and with George III’s perceived flirtations with absolutism from as early as 1783. This is actually thematized in the speech itself in a passage that caught the eye of more than one pro-­government critic. ­After the famous vultures and lambs trope that was lifted ­wholesale from the Begams speech, Rolla declares: “Be our plain answer this: The throne WE honour is the ­PEOPLE’S CHOICE—­t he laws we reverence are our brave F ­ athers’ legacy—­t he faith we

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Figure  6.3. William Holland (pub.), Rolla’s Address to the Peruvian Army, ­etching (1799). Trustees of the British Museum.

follow teaches us to live in bonds of charity with all mankind, and die in hope of bliss beyond the grave. Tell your invaders this, and tell them too, we seek no change; and least of all, such change as they would bring us.”18 As Loftis argues, “The speech is unambiguous in its s­ imple allegorical equation of the Spanish and Pizarro with the French and Bonaparte,” but this lack of ambiguity is partially canceled by the proliferation of allegorical relations.19 As Julie Carlson notes: “At a minimum, Rolla’s speech answers to five alarms of invasion. Besides ­t hose sounding between Peru and Spain, India and ­England, and E ­ ngland and France, Rolla’s speech also raises alarms over the literary invasion of E ­ ngland by Germany in the 1790s and the perpetually immanent invasion of Ireland by ­England in the same years.”20 As Carlson goes



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on to argue, this rallies the audience to two contradictory judgments regarding ­England b ­ ecause E ­ ngland goes from victimizer to victim as the speech passes from the Hastings trial to the boards of Drury Lane. But this contradictory deployment of an us-­versus-­t hem rhe­toric is even more troubled than e­ ither critic suggests. When Rolla talks of serving a monarch who is the ­people’s choice, we are in remarkably anti-­Pittite territory. At the 1798 meeting of the Whig Club, the Duke of Norfolk and Fox himself got themselves in trou­ble making toasts to “Our Sovereign the ­People,” for which Pitt petitioned the king to sanction Fox.21 Within short-­term memory, t­ here is ­little to prevent this utterance from becoming a radical declaration of the ­people’s right to check the actions of their king. Cobbett in fact wrote vociferously against the speech for precisely this reason.22 In a slightly more long-­ term view, this sounds remarkably like the characterization of Fox as “the man of the ­people” in the early 1780s that caused so much consternation during the debate over the India Bill in 1783 and the subsequent election of 1784.23 Rolla’s speech, like its oratorical forebear, is loyal less to George III and Pitt than it is to Foxite notions of the ideal constitutional monarch and to Fox himself in the early years of opposition to Pitt. In other words, Rolla’s speech belatedly pledges allegiance to Whig princi­ples that are h ­ ere mis-­ recognized by large portions of the audience as somehow manifest in ­t hose very figures who most oppose them. The radicalism of Sheridan’s play lies in the fact that an increasingly obsolete form of British po­liti­cal identity, whose pastness is figured by the noble indigeneity of the Peruvians, is called upon to do b ­ attle with George III and Pitt’s corrupt incursions on the constitution. To add to Carlson’s list of invasions, Sheridan posits the pre­sent ministry invading the constitutional past of Britain and figures forth a self-­styled army of Foxite Whigs to defend British liberty. This is precisely the same trope mobilized by Fox himself in his speech to the Commons on 7 July 1782 that we discussed in the Introduction to this book. This was hardly a g­ rand rhetorical leap: Fox and Burke had been impugning Pitt first as Shelburne’s minion and then as the king’s lackey from the outset of his ­career. Ultimately, this reading of the print suggests that t­here is l­ittle separating Pitt and Bonaparte; the former is an internal threat to the po­liti­cal legacy that constitutes the pre­sent state and the latter is an external threat who has emerged from a revolution itself indebted to British notions of constitutionalism. It is remarkable that the audience’s allegiance to the content of Rolla’s speech ratifies a type of po­liti­cal identity that the Tories had been highly effective in discrediting throughout this period. At the time of Pizarro’s first

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per­for­mances, the Allies w ­ ere d ­ oing well on the Continent and the opposition’s fortunes ­were arguably at their lowest point during the war of 1793– 1801.24 Through the power of allegory and a certain belatedness in the audience’s ideas of po­liti­cal liberty, Sheridan was able to not only reinvigorate a type of Whig patriotism that had been effectively dead for some time but also mark the failure of Tory rule to live up to this constitutional standard. But, more impor­tant, Rolla’s speech and its reception suggest that the audience’s patriotic identifications ­were not tied to Pitt’s ministry but rather to a mythic constitutional past that Fox, Sheridan, and, in an e­ arlier guise, Burke argued was the essence of Whig opposition to Tory governance. For Sheridan, this may be all for the good, but it also suggests that the audience was just as much to blame as the ministry itself for the perilous state of the nation. From Sheridan’s position in opposition, the p ­ eople seem unable to discern the true constitution from Tory incursions on it or the real sovereign ideal from the current monarch. Thus, patriotic approbation supersedes po­ liti­cal judgment and that in itself was a dangerous development that I believe Sheridan was attempting to ­counter or at least reveal in Pizarro. If the ­people and the government are unable to discern the history of the En­glish constitution from Burke’s bizarre interpretation of it in the Reflections, then all that is left is the brute force of the state in a time of war. In such a hegemonic climate, even critique is transformed into consent. Such a reading fits the trajectory of Sheridan’s theatrical and po­liti­cal ­career more persuasively than the general charges of apostasy, aesthetic failure, or inconsistency.25 Throughout his c­ areer, Sheridan never wavered from showing the distinction between social and po­liti­cal ideals and their corrupt manifestation. The School for Scandal is a complex demonstration of how one must read the distance between public repre­sen­ta­tion and historical action. Similarly, if ­t here is one ­t hing that unites Sheridan’s po­liti­cal actions and his parliamentary speeches it is a rigorous Whig belief that the gulf between the incumbent leaders of the nation and the idea of sovereignty and governance they are supposed to embody threatens not only the constitution but also the polity at large. By 1799, this carries with it an impor­tant corollary, that the p ­ eople are losing their ability to discern patriotic fantasy from po­ liti­cal real­ity, true Whig patriotism from the charade of Tory pragmatism. Pizarro needs to be understood not only in the context of Sheridan’s Whig oratory, as John Loftis and Julie Carlson have conclusively demonstrated, but also in the context of a new po­liti­cal order in which Whig princi­ples, especially in their Foxite manifestations, no longer have po­liti­cal purchase but



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linger on in vestigial cultural forms. Sheridan’s complex dramaturgical strategies, which occasioned much commentary at the time, are intimately tied to t­ hese specters of Fox.

Miscasting, or The Utopian Politics of the Repertoire The only hesitations regarding the first per­for­mances of Pizarro among reviewers, aside from its ponderous length, pertained to Sheridan’s rather strange dramaturgical decisions. It is h ­ ere that we see most forcefully his re-­ territorialization of the post-­American repertoire. Foremost among t­hese was the apparent miscasting of the chief female roles: “Mrs. SIDDONS and Mrs. JORDAN are evidently out of their places. The latter has, in Cora, stepped beyond the natu­ral limits of her powers and genius. The glowing warmth of parental affection, the transitions from tenderness to madness, despair, disappointed love, and the most violent agonies, do not fall within her province . . . ​— ­Cora would have been a chef d’oeuvre in the possession of Mrs. Siddons, and Elvira would have found an adequate representative in Mrs. Powell.”26 Dorothy Jordan was the foremost comic actress during this period, but the role of the much suffering Peruvian ­mother Cora is anything but comic, so Sheridan chose to cast her against type. Cora was a compendium of the maternal qualities most frequently associated with Sarah Siddons’s acting style. With Siddons on stage in the role of Pizarro’s mistress Elvira, the tendentiousness of Sheridan’s choice would have been evident, especially since Jordan was arguably the most famous mistress of her generation. As Laura Rosenthal has argued, the vast number of satires on her affair with the Duke of Clarence and the very publicity of their liaison, meant that “audiences loved to watch Jordan, but they also loved to watch William watching Jordan; their relationship became incorporated into the eve­ning’s entertainment.”27 Casting Siddons as the ambitious mistress and Jordan as the tragic ­mother is thus almost chiastic in its effect: the very reversal reminds the audience of its artificial divergence from the repertoire. What is so fascinating is that Sheridan’s co-­optation of Siddons’s and Jordan’s own realignments of the repertoire raises questions about the cultural norms they helped craft. One explanation for this decision is that casting Jordan as Elvira would suggest that Pizarro is the type of the Duke of Clarence. Such an insinuation would not only trou­ble the allegorical linkage between Pizarro and Bonaparte

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but also open Sheridan to charges that he was indecorously ridiculing a reasonably popu­lar, if somewhat ridicu­lous, prince.28 But perhaps Sheridan’s decision to have her play Cora—­with the implication that the duke can be aligned with Alonzo—is less defensive and more strategic. Jordan famously had ten c­ hildren by the duke, so it is hardly a stretch to see her as the m ­ other. But it is extremely difficult to see her as the wife. ­There is an irreducible disjunction between Jordan’s social and theatrical identity and the character she is asked to portray. It is basically the same type of miscasting employed by the satirical prints discussed above. Pitt makes a poor Rolla, George III is neither as wise nor as beloved by his subjects as Ataliba, and likewise the Duke of Clarence falls short of Alonzo’s dedication to his country and his wife. Each historical figure shares enough positional similarities with his respective character for a comparison to be made, but t­ hese similarities are mobilized to signal the palpable difference between figure and referent. Much like his po­liti­cal oratory, this allowed Sheridan to be resolutely patriotic, but unbeholden to the pre­sent regime. With some sense of the strategic possibilities in the chiastic casting of Jordan and Siddons, we can turn to the more complex issues raised by the character of Elvira. ­After the first wave of reviews, critics opposed to Sheridan’s play—­and they w ­ ere legion–­were particularly displeased with the character of Elvira. Samuel Argent Bardsley rec­ords his objections as follows: That a cloistered recluse should, on the first mention of Pizarro’s exploits, conceive a violent attachment for his Person and Character, is an extravagant supposition; but that she should afterward be seduced by this illiterate, ferocious, and ­every way unpolished Adventurer— (the murderer of her ­Brother by his sword, and of her ­Mother through Grief) . . . ​—is an outrage against probability, and in contradiction to the best feelings of the h ­ uman mind. None but an abandoned character could have acted like Elvira. Yet she is depicted as possessing sensibility, moral feeling, a high tone of sentiment, and g­ reat powers of Mind!29 Bardsley’s objection turns on what he refers to as the “inconsistency of this heteroclite character.”30 In his estimation, it is not pos­si­ble that the Amazonian qualities attributed to her in the first act could be reconciled with the lofty sentiments of her remorse in acts 3 and 5.



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It is difficult to say how much of this objection is simply a m ­ atter of his discomfort with Elvira’s palpable threat to normative femininity—­she is heteroclite by any late eighteenth-­century standards—­but Elvira’s changing relation to the men and the situations in the play merits further consideration.31 Act 1 of Pizarro establishes the play’s po­liti­cal allegory and the first ­t hing we find out about Elvira is that she is attached to Pizarro not out of desire for material gain but out of “passion, infatuation” (1.1.657). Elvira loves Pizarro ­because his martial masculinity accords with her own preexisting fantasy of male heroism: ELV. When first my virgin fancy waked to love, Pizarro was my country’s idol. Self-­taught, self-­raised, and self-­supported, he became a hero; and I was formed to be won by glory and renown. ‘Tis known that when he left Panama in a slight vessel, his force was not an hundred men. Arrived in the island of Gallo, with his sword he drew a line upon the sands, and said, “Pass ­t hose who fear to die or conquer with their leader.” Thirteen alone remained, and at the head of t­ hese the warrior stood his ground. Even at the moment when my ears first caught this tale, my heart exclaimed, “Pizarro is its lord!” (1.1.658) Elvira’s passion for Pizarro arises from the narration of past actions and thus is mediated by repre­sen­ta­tion. In a speech that follows closely upon this one, Pizarro describes the precipitous attachment between Alonzo and himself in almost identical terms: PIZ. Often I had talked to him of our first adventures—­what storms we strug­gled with—­what perils we surmounted.—­W hen, I say, of t­ hese t­ hings I spoke, the youth, Alonzo, with tears of won­der and delight, would throw him on my neck, and swear, his soul’s ambition owned no other leader. (1.1.659) Both Elvira and Alonzo are drawn to Pizarro’s heroism and thus their primary attachment is to a preexisting fantasy of masculinity endemic to early eighteenth-­century heroic narrative. In Barbara Johnson’s terms, Elvira and Alonzo’s “first reading” of Pizarro misrecognizes him as something “already

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read.”32 This means that ­there is an irreducible gap between the phantasmatic object of desire and the historical or “real” figure to which it is attached. That gap constitutes a point of vulnerability in ­t hese relationships and the play’s multiple narrative strands arise out of two successive ruptures in that attachment.33 Alonzo is the first to break with the seductive power of heroic narrative. ­Under the influence of Las Casas, Alonzo is persuaded “to forego his country’s claims for ­those of ­human nature” (1.1.659), and he attempts to convince Pizarro, through an argument based on “justice and humanity” that “the Peruvians [are] our innocent and unoffending brethren” (1.1.659). Pizarro’s analy­sis of the rupture and his subsequent account of Alonzo’s be­hav­ior is revealing: PIZ. But when he found that the soft folly of the pleading tears he dropt upon my bosom fell on marble, he flew and joined the foe: then, profiting by the lessons he had gain’d in wrong’d Pizarro’s school, the youth so disciplined and led his new allies, that soon he forc’d me . . . ​in base retreat and foul discomfiture to quit the shore. (1.1.659–60) Pizarro’s tale extracts “tears of won­der and delight” from Alonzo, but Alonzo’s pleading tears have no effect on Pizarro. Is this b ­ ecause the former are elicited by heroic narrative and the latter are the product of moral reflection? The rupture between Alonzo and Pizarro is based on competing and irreconcilable definitions of community. For Pizarro and even the potentially traitorous Valverde, the nation constitutes the primary locus of identification and loyalty. For Las Casas and Alonzo, the category of h ­ uman nature trumps all other forms of allegiance and constitutes the ground on which a certain Christian cosmopo­liti­cal identity is forged. And this cosmopolitanism is secured not only by moral and military affiliation between Alonzo and the Peruvians but also by the bonds of blood. The interracial marriage between Alonzo and Cora generates a child such that an idea of ­human commensurability is made flesh. This is why the endangerment of the infant is so crucial to the play’s spectacular dynamics.34 However, in order to secure this nascent cosmopolitanism, the Peruvians need to be refigured not as obdurate heathens but as Christians avant la lettre. In a speech singled out by The Oracle as “one of the finest and most



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impressive in the ­whole Piece,” Las Casas berates Pizarro and his generals for avariciously planning to attack: LAS-­C. A King, in whose mild bosom your atrocious injuries even yet have not excited hate! but who, insulted or victorious, still sues for peace. Against a P ­ eople who never wronged the living Being their Creator formed: a P ­ eople, who, c­ hildren of innocence received you as cherish’d guests with ­eager hospitality and confiding kindness. Generously and freely did they share with you their comforts, their trea­sures, and their homes: you repaid them by fraud, oppression and dishonour. (1.1.661) In its indictment of Eu­ro­pean relations with the colonized, the speech is remarkably similar to passages in Sheridan’s “Speech on the Begams Charge” and Burke’s “Speech Opening the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.” Like his oratorical forebears, Las Casas attempts to render non-­European ­peoples pre­sent by equating other­wise incommensurable social, familial, and cultural structures.35 Peru h ­ ere and elsewhere in the play is the epitome of natu­ral Christian religion in spite of the repeated but almost vestigial presence of the Sun God.36 And yet, it is precisely the “naturalness” of this Chris­tian­ity that prevents Las Casas’s account from becoming anything but an ideal portrait of Britain. It is difficult for even the most fervent patriot to equate Britain with “a P ­ eople who never wronged the living Being their Creator formed” (1.1.661). Thus, the overarching po­liti­cal allegory is ­here qualified in impor­ tant ways. Alonzo, Las Casas, and eventually Elvira first cry for and then act on behalf of an ideal “­People,” the same “­people” who, in Rolla’s speech, choose their king. Just as Rolla is not Pitt, the Peruvians are not Britons—or at least not yet.37 The shift in affective investment from the narrative of Pizarro’s heroism to the ideal p ­ eople figured forth in Las Casas’s speech and subsequently embodied in Rolla and then the endangered child constitutes a shift from one heroic ideal to another. But the shift in attachment from Pizarro to Rolla to child requires an intermediary pro­cess that Las Casas and Elvira call “reflection.” When Elvira refuses to leave the Spanish warriors’ colloquy, Pizarro allows her to remain on the condition that she remain ­silent.38 Her response is, I believe, crucial to both the dramaturgical motive and the po­liti­c al import of the remainder of the scene: “They only babble who practise not

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reflection. I ­shall think—­and thought is silence” (1.1.660). Elvira is ­silent ­until Las Casas’s portrait of Spanish rapacity and Peruvian innocence fi­nally elicits the tears for which Siddons was so famous (1.1.661). Like Alonzo before him, Las Casas cries in his attempt to persuade Pizarro of the humanity of the Peruvians and his tears elicit sympathetic tears from Elvira that resonate not only throughout the play but also with Burke’s famous account of the tears elicited by Siddons in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke frequently mobilizes the power of emotion by conforming historical events to the form of sentimental tragedy.39 Burke’s success in this regard had tangible po­liti­cal effects, for the palpable weaknesses in his constitutional arguments w ­ ere drowned out by the rhetorical effects of sentiment. The repeated scenes of crying in the first act of Pizarro carefully mimic Burke’s argument. Like Las Casas’s teachings, Burke’s narration of the narrow escape of Marie Antoinette from her boudoir elicits contradictory responses. In the Reflections, Burke declares that t­ hese events provoke exultation among Dr. Price and his associates, yet they provoke tears from both the narrator and ­those readers of the tale with whom the narrator affiliates himself. Defending his own tears, Burke argues that he feels for the Queen “­because it is natu­ral I should; ­because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty of h ­ uman greatness. . . . ​We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds . . . ​are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled, ­under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom.”40 This double naturalization insists that “in events like ­these our passions instruct our reason,” but Burke declares the normativity of specific passionate responses in order to pathologize ­those who do not share his feelings of sympathy. It is with such a pathology in mind that Burke admits, first hypothetically and then directly, that he has cried: “Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle ­were exhibited on the stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. ­People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, w ­ ere the tears of hy­poc­ risy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.”41 The attribution of perversion to ­those who exult in a scene that should extort tears needs to be read against the curiously conditional nature of his argument. The opening sentence offers a hy­po­thet­i­cal Burke, one who might cry if he saw such a spectacle on the stage.42 Placing himself in the



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place of Price and o ­ thers, this same Burke would be ashamed if similar events in real life called forth feelings of exultation. For Burke, the shame lies in the inconstancy of the affect, for the tears shed in the theater must not have been the result of natu­ral feelings of sympathy—­since the real events occasion no such affect—­but rather of effeminacy. ­These tears are now a sign of “painted distress” that attests to the effeminate artifice of not only t­ hose enthusiastic for the French Revolution but also t­hose who question the moral significance of sympathy. Through a rather specious attribution of inconsistent response to Siddons’s per­for­mances of the 1780s, Burke uses affective consistency to assert po­liti­cal normativity.43 Throughout act 1, Sheridan stages scenes of judgment similar to ­those employed by Burke to naturalize his po­liti­cal reflections on the French Revolution. And he does so with the very actress whom Burke deployed to make his case. What happens if we read the entire act as a rehearsal of Burke’s po­ liti­cal logic? As Burke suggests, Alonzo and Elvira cry when presented with Las Casas’s repre­sen­ta­tion ­because it is natu­ral that they should—­t he Peruvians are innocent, the Spaniards are cruel and rapacious. But both Alonzo and Elvira demonstrate prior allegiance to the phantasmatic heroism of Pizarro that is itself derived from a passionate response to narrative. And that prior aesthetic response is figured in the play as nonnormative: Pizarro frequently refers to Elvira as more masculine than many of his soldiers—­“In love thou art thy sex’s miracle—in war the soldier’s pattern” (3.2.684). Sheridan is using the sentimental logic of Burke’s argument to discredit sentimentality as a tool for po­liti­cal or social ends. This I believe fits with Sheridan’s long-­ standing critique of sentimental drama and helps to explain why Siddons in par­tic­u­lar is cast in this role. Her deployment by Burke in the Reflections is ­here invoked to haunt his po­liti­cal legacy. When Almagro declares that Las Casas and Elvira cry ­because they are both ­women and thus incapable of constancy of affect, he, like Burke, uses the charge of effeminacy to argue that emotional inconstancy is an explicit symptom of treason. Only this time the audience is witness to “good” treason. This carries with it the implicit charge that Alonzo, whose emotions and actions foreshadow the emotional development and ­f uture actions of Elvira, is no less heteroclite. It is Pizarro and his minions whose po­liti­cal and aesthetic response remains rigorously consistent. Sheridan is demonstrating that Burke’s po­liti­cal analy­sis, or, to use the word used by every­one involved, reflection, can be used to justify “unnatural” ends. By separating nature from moral good Sheridan effectively destroys Burke’s attribution of normative response.44

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For many critics, and not only conservative ones, t­ here was something deeply unsettling about the disjunction between Elvira’s po­liti­cal and sexual inconsistency and the nobility of her speeches and actions.45 The critic at Anti-­ Jacobin Review is predictably the most extreme in his censure, for not only is he aghast that “one of the most reprehensible characters that was ever suffered to disgrace the stage . . . ​goes off unpunished,” but he also maintains that “Elvira is nothing less than a complete Godwinian heroine, stark staring Mary all over!”46 As Donohue states, “This condemnation—­a case of guilt by association with Mary Wollstonecraft—­illustrates the perennial connection in the popu­lar mind between unorthodox po­liti­cal belief and immoral conduct, in this instance between British radicalism and German “immorality.”47 The calls for Elvira’s punishment resonate with re­sis­tance to The Stranger’s generic innovations: somewhat predictably, Hannah More’s critique of this ­earlier adaptation from Kotzebue aligned Wollstonecraft and Mrs. Haller.48 Siddons was rarely, if ever, associated with sexual impropriety off the stage, but, as we have seen, some of her most famous roles subsumed past vice into pre­sent enactments of virtuous suffering. As argued with regard to her per­ for­mance of Jane Shore in par­tic­u­lar, this is crucial to the po­liti­cal overtones of her intervention in the post-­American repertoire from the 1782–83 season onward, and this same set of associations had been reactivated and arguably amplified in The Stranger only the season before. Like many of the tragic heroines in Siddons’s repertoire, Elvira combines vice and virtue into a complexly flawed character. It is the progression from one to the other that draws the audience to her and makes her a compelling dramatic figure. By casting Siddons as Elvira, the implication is that the normative response figured forth by Burke is itself based on po­liti­cal inconsistency ­because only inconsistency can give rise to the tragic affect necessary for the passions to instruct the reason.49 In this light, consistency, ­whether po­liti­cal or theatrical, is the province not only of absolutism and cruelty but also of in­effec­tive theater. And Pizarro is an object lesson in how inconsistency, w ­ hether at the level of character, plot, or genre, can generate affect in what Marsden has described as the theater of feeling. Alonzo and Elvira both turn on Pizarro and Spain, but their treason is justified by an investment in precisely the kind of cosmopo­liti­cal formation based on “right, justice and humanity” that Burke and other conservatives resisted so vociferously—­and, we might add, that can be traced back to the most utopian aspects of the American Declaration of In­de­pen­dence. In the overall trajectory of the play, unwavering allegiance to the nation of the kind



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advocated by Pizarro and Burke is shown to be literally a dead end. Suddenly Elvira’s statement that her reflection ­will be based on “thought” gains po­liti­ cal purchase ­because it implies that her “inconsistency” is a result not of passionate identification with Las Casas’s repre­sen­ta­t ion of the Peruvians but with a reasoned analy­sis of the morality of the Spanish cause. Passion does not instruct her reason as Burke would have it, but rather it constitutes the corruption from which her judgment must be sal­vaged. An impor­tant distinction emerges ­here: Alonzo and Elvira are seduced by a passionate and precipitous identification with narratives of Pizarro’s heroism, whereas their defection from his influence is the result of a pro­cess of moral education, one of the key features of which is the instigation of mea­sures to reform moral evil. This allows Sheridan to elicit patriotic feeling against Pizarro/ Bonaparte—­thereby implicitly prophesying the French leader’s demise—­and argue against the forms of nationalist identification called for by conservative propagandists. This discomforting double argument recognizes that it is crucial that Britain, in overcoming France, not become France, that Pitt or the king not become Bonaparte in order to resolve the war, for such a development would result in a victory for absolutism at home that may not be all that dif­fer­ent from servitude to an autocratic foreign ruler. As we ­will see, the alternative f­ uture lies in the hands of Rolla. If this seems too subtle for a play whose modus operandi is often all too blunt, consider Elvira’s speech in act 3 in which she explic­itly broaches the question of sympathetic response. With Alonzo captured, Elvira attempts to convince Pizarro to ­either release him out of mercy or to “let him arm, and bid him to the field on equal terms” (3.2.682). However, she does not argue, as Alonzo does, that acting other­wise is “inhuman”; rather, she asks only that he be true to the heroic narrative that sparked her infatuation: ELV. Pizarro, I demand not of thee virtue—­I ask not from thee nobleness of mind—­I require only just dealing to the fame thou has acquired; be not the assassin of thine own renown. . . . ​ Do not an act which, howe’er thy pre­sent power may gloss it to the world, ­will make thee hateful to all ­f uture ages—­accursed and scorned by posterity. (3.2.683) Pizarro’s personal hatred for Alonzo threatens to undermine the heroic tale that constitutes the basis of Elvira’s passion for him and is thus doubly damaging. It destroys his story for posterity and reveals that Elvira is committed

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not to the man but to the heroic repre­sen­ta­tion of him. When that is revealed, the scene of moral judgment is presented in terms that specifically mimic Burke’s scene of conditional sympathetic judgment: ELV. Pizarro, scorn not my words—­beware you slight them not!—­I feel how noble are the motives which now animate my thoughts—­who could not feel as I do, I condemn—­who, feeling so, yet would not act as I ­SHALL, I despise! (3.2.685) Is this not precisely how Burke stages his critique of Dr. Price and the Revolution Society in the Reflections? Secure in the nobility of his thoughts, Burke condemns t­ hose who do not feel like he does and despises ­t hose who do but act other­wise. The only prob­lem is that this speech is a prelude not to an act of loyalty or love but to Elvira’s explicit declaration of vengeance. Like t­ hose critics of Burke who perceived an erotic attachment to Marie Antoinette at the heart of his historical analy­sis, Pizarro ridicules Elvira’s commitment to virtue as displaced love for Alonzo. Her response is chilling: ELV. ‘Tis well! ‘tis just I should be humbled—­I had forgot myself, and in the cause of innocence assumed the tone of virtue. ‘Twas fit I should be rebuked—­and by Pizarro. Fall, fall, ye few reluctant drops of weakness—­t he last t­ hese eyes s­ hall ever shed. How a w ­ oman can love Pizarro, thou hast known too well—­how she can hate, thou hast yet to learn. . . . ​—­Come, fearless man—­now meet the last and fellest peril of thy life—­meet! and survive—an injured w ­ oman’s fury, if thou canst. (3.2.685) Elvira’s transformation from lover to vengeful assassin at the end of the third act marks the turning point in the play, for the heroic narrative that instantiated her love has been subsumed into a larger narrative of her hatred.50 But this shift does not entail a rupture with the fantasy of heroic masculinity; rather, her hatred is fueled by Pizarro’s infidelity to that obsolete narrative. As she retells the story of Pizarro’s heroic deeds once again, they are suddenly deployed as evidence of her own potential greatness in overcoming him (3.2.685). Sheridan demonstrates that the conviction with which Burke judges Price and o ­ thers and with which Elvira judges Pizarro is not based on moral



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princi­ples but rather on narratives whose erotic and po­liti­cal investments are not incidental but foundational. Passion for an idealized sovereign such as Marie Antoinette is no less phantasmatic than Elvira’s infatuation with Pizarro and thus we are forced to ask what prevents some reflecting subject from turning on his idealized leader when history or, to use Sheridan’s word, “posterity” ruptures the affective economy. The idealization of George III as Ataliba within this very play stages the po­liti­cal prob­lem quite eloquently for the audience is forced to distinguish the real threat to Britain’s po­liti­cal stability from conservative fantasies of sedition. If the king or his ministry starts (or continues) behaving in a way that “assassinates” the very renown generated by their propagandists and by this play, then the polity or the audience ­will turn on t­ hese characters with hatred and vengeance. Revolution in ­these terms is a response to the Crown’s failure to live up to the ideal of sovereignty. This is what I believe is at stake in the deployment of femininity in the print Rolla’s Address to the Peruvian Army (see Figure 6.3). In this context, Pizarro’s patriotism becomes discomforting and subversive. It occasions loyalty, but it establishes po­liti­cal ideals—in this case, Whig ideals—­t hat w ­ ill become the benchmark against which ­f uture po­liti­cal action on behalf of the Crown ­will be mea­sured. The more effectively the play can draw its audience to the ideal figures, the more forceful w ­ ill be its reaction if the Crown disappoints their patriotic fantasy. Sheridan may be promulgating a form of utopian attachment aimed at destroying the pre­sent state when it fails to live up to the standard of heroic fantasy. This leaves us with two revolutionary paths, now allegorically affiliated with a form of Britishness distinct from Tory nationalism: that followed by Elvira and that followed by Alonzo. They are both occasioned by sympathy with innocence, but the former devolves into vengeance while the latter develops into cosmopo­liti­ cal interracial love. Significantly, both paths need to come together to kill Pizarro and then the former needs to be superseded by a tableau of domestic equanimity.

Spectacular Dialectics, or Bridging the Tragic Whig Past to the Cosmopo­liti­cal ­Future The cross-­casting of Jordan and Siddons opens up a situational reading of Pizarro that can account for the play’s aesthetic, historical, and po­liti­cal inconsistency, but that reading relies on a recognition of the dialectical

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potential not only of utopian narrative but also of generic hybridity. Fredric Jameson has written extensively about the former in Archaeologies of the ­Future and his suggestion that it is not the par­tic­u ­lar vision of alternate po­liti­cal and social arrangements that constitutes the power of utopian thinking but rather the formal disruption of actuality that generates a counter-­ momentum of ongoing critique is germane to this analy­sis of Pizarro. In historical moments when economic and po­liti­cal formations seem to negate the possibility of oppositional positions—an apt description of ­England in 1799—­utopian projections force the audience to “concentrate on the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right.”51 Sheridan does not stage his utopian vision of Britain in the ­f uture but rather adapts it from the work of a foreigner and locates it in a conspicuously non-­ European past. And he is not the first po­liti­cal writer to envisage the Amer­ i­cas as a locus of an alternate po­liti­cal and social order to that of a corrupt Eu­ro­pean state. What interests me is that this utopian gesture is connected to the past, but the significance of that connection ­will not be apparent ­until ­later in my argument. Without discounting the financial motives ­behind adapting Kotzebue, the fact that Sheridan goes to precisely the kind of theater most associated by conservatives with social leveling and moral vice should give us pause. Not only does Sheridan reform this material into what one critic referred to as a “per­ for­mance . . . ​in ­every re­spect conducive to virtue in its princi­ples, feelings, and actions,” he also explic­itly a­ dopted dramaturgical techniques that he himself did so much to discredit in The Critic.52 It is as though Sheridan specifically takes up the prevailing opinions about both Kotzebue’s and his own work and turns them inside out. This same structure of discomforting reversal already identified in both the play’s oratorical citations and the casting of the principal female characters applies to Sheridan’s casting of himself. I have argued elsewhere that The Critic may well be the first post-­American work, so we could say that Sheridan’s reversal of the theatrical and po­liti­cal repertoire is both rigorous and exhaustive. The satires on Sheridan’s supposed defection from the opposition take up precisely this issue, but what one discovers when one looks closely at the attacks on Sheridan is that they are far more equivocal than one might suspect. For example, in Trying on a Turn’d Coat!! (Figure 6.4) Pitt fits Sheridan in court dress, but the lining retains the blue and buff of Whiggery so that Sheridan can turn back when it is to his advantage. But the print also suggests that it is Pitt the tailor who makes it pos­si­ble for Sheridan to turn his coat back and forth. The satire is primarily



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Figure 6.4. William Holland (pub.), Trying on a Turn’d Coat!!, ­etching (1799). Trustees of the British Museum.

on Sheridan for ostensibly changing his po­liti­cal views, but it also attacks the ministry and supposed loyalists for being willing to recognize such an inconsistent client.53 This suggests that po­liti­cal and aesthetic inconsistency are the point of Sheridan’s complex intervention. As we have seen, the play thematizes po­ liti­cal inconsistency, but its very enactment in the field of culture engages with this issue. Pizarro is a play seemingly inconsistent with Sheridan’s past theatrical practice. Its po­liti­cal allegories are internally incoherent, so any attempt to simplify the play’s po­liti­cal message requires a negation of a series of po­liti­cal counternarratives (some of which are associated with Sheridan’s critique of the state and some of which are not).54 As Julie Carlson has indicated, the Britain allegorized in the play is si­mul­ta­neously victim and

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victimizer and disentangling t­hese figural implications does serious vio­ lence to the play’s relation to history. This is most evident in the way that Sheridan’s own po­liti­cal oratory is deployed in the play. It is my contention that all of ­t hese inconsistencies, w ­ hether they be internal to the play or part of the para-­t heatrical world in which it is performed, are activated to force the audience to focus on the break with the pre­sent that is most forcefully felt in the gap between the patriotism elicited by Pizarro and that which is supposed to inhere in the state form. That gap is crucial to understanding the importance of generic, familial, national, and po­liti­cal hybridity at the heart of this play and the way that ­these hybrid ele­ments elicit patriotic identification with a national fantasy that has the potential to hollow out the claims of the Tory state and replace it with something po­liti­cally unrealizable in 1799. It should come as no surprise that con­temporary criticism focused on vari­ous forms of inconsistency and hybridity. A ­ fter Elvira’s moral judgment is staged for the audience and Pizarro enters its final two acts, grandiloquent speeches are subsumed into increasingly spectacular and improbable scenes. For many critics, this shift seriously challenged the play’s claim to be a tragedy and this generic question animated much of the immediate criticism of Pizarro. For example, Bisset’s overwhelming endorsement of the play’s aesthetic and moral value stages its entire argument in terms of naturalness and probability, but the famous bridge scene forces him into an “as if” construction. If we behave as if the bridge scene w ­ ere credible, then we could maintain the play’s status as a tragedy; which is to concede that the play exceeds the narrative limitations of tragic action.55 Dutton’s conservative lampoon of the play’s myriad narrative improbabilities is more direct in its critique. He underscores the improbability of the ­battle scene in which the Peruvians defeat the heavi­ly armed Spanish with sticks; of Elvira’s sudden appearance with just the sword needed for Alonzo to slay Pizarro; and, fi­ nally, of the “tragico-­comico-­fancico repre­sen­ta­tion of the funeral obsequies of Rolla”: “It was, it seems originally intended to close this solemnity with a dance, or Peruvian hop, round the bier; but this part of the ceremony, as being too atrocious a murder of the dignity of the tragic muse to be publicly exhibited, was reserved for private rehearsal ­behind the scenes.”56 Dutton’s discomfort is revealing: by styling the funeral that ends the play as a “tragico-­ comico-­fancico repre­sen­ta­t ion,” Dutton is merely repeating one of Burke’s most memorable critiques of the French Revolution. For Burke, the French Revolution’s historical innovation corresponded to an infraction in the



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laws of tragedy. By cutting itself off from the traditional laws of the ancien regime, France has devolved into the “unnatural” genre of tragi-­comedy: “Every­thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity. . . . ​ In viewing this monstrous tragi-­comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.”57 For Burke, such conflicts in sympathy weaken the ideological links that secure “the g­ reat chain of society” and portend social disintegration. For Dutton, the popularity of Pizarro’s generic innovation is a symptom of social decay. Both Bissett’s and Dutton’s arguments indicate, from opposite critical positions, that the spectacles of the bridge scene, the b ­ attle, the death of Pizarro, and the funeral tableau (act 5, scenes 2, 3, and 4, respectively) have a supplemental relation to the tragic narrative. We have seen this problematic already in Kemble’s deployment of spectacle in the 1789 Coriolanus, the 1794 Macbeth, and the 1795 Venice Preserv’d. Spectacle in Pizarro often clinches the elicitation of tragic emotion and yet, like all supplemental relationships, it also undoes the play’s cathartic claims.58 This paradox is perfectly captured in Dutton’s faux legislation “that, to render a tragedy truly tragic, it is indispensably necessary to murder, not only the principal dramatis personae, but the tragedy itself.”59 ­These critics w ­ ere drawn directly to the paradoxical gap between the play’s ideal objectives as tragedy and the pragmatic necessity of spectacle to suture audience response. Bissett is forced to imagine a more nearly perfect narrative where Rolla’s rescue of the child could be pos­si­ble, let alone probable; and Dutton falls back into a rehearsal of a past argument regarding revolution that can only pathologize the patriotic response to the play. Both critics find themselves ­either enacting or recognizing the possibility of a critique of the pre­sent actuality. Much about this critical situation is resonant, but nothing more so than the auspicious placement of the bridge scene in this supplemental relation. It is literally the bridge between the tragic fable and the scenes that call the play’s generic claims into question. Act 5 opens in the midst of a dreadful storm with Cora, “wild and distracted,” first bewailing the loss of Alonzo and subsequently of her nameless child. Through Rolla’s actions, both her husband and her child are returned to her, but the scene is crucial for establishing the intensity of affective attachment that unites this interracial f­ amily. Cora’s anguish is intended to generate sympathy for her plight and nothing could be more anxiety provoking than the abduction of her child. With the bonds of

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the f­ amily suitably threatened by the Spanish soldiers, it falls to Rolla to save the child of his friend and beloved. If we look at the play’s structure, act 5, scene 1, is the negative repetition of the first scene of act 2. Also set in a “wild wood,” act 2, scene 1, establishes the sentimental bonds of the f­ amily: CORA. Now confess, does he resemble thee, or not? AL. Indeed he is liker thee—­thy rosy softness, thy smiling gentleness. CORA. But his auburn hair, the colour of his eyes, Alonzo–­O! my lord’s image, and my heart’s adored! [Pressing the Child to her bosom] AL. The l­ ittle daring urchin robs me, I doubt, of some portion of thy love Cora. At least he shares caresses, which till his birth w ­ ere only mine. CORA. Oh no, Alonzo! A m ­ other’s love for her dear babe is not a stealth, or taken from the f­ ather’s store; it is a new delight that turns with quicken’d gratitude to HIM, the author of her augmented bliss. (2.2.666) This sentimental dialogue goes on considerably longer and it subtly prepares the ground for Rolla’s citation of the Begams speech in the next scene, for Sheridan’s oration famously turned on precisely this kind of idealization of maternal love and filial piety. But it is striking that the introduction of the exemplary Peruvian ­family focuses so intently on the corporeal manifestation of the child’s mixed parentage.60 To each parent, the child exhibits traits of their beloved and this strengthens not only their love for their son but also the erotic ties between the parents. This both underscores the hybridity of the child and suggests that it is almost a dialectical resolution of the social, cultural, and racial differences that other­wise constitute the grounds for violent conflict in the play.61 Pizarro’s violent attempt to extirpate or enslave the Peruvians contrasts with Alonzo’s amatory conquest of Cora; the former is characterized as destructive and avaricious, whereas the latter is idealized and from this point onward constantly u ­ nder threat. In this context, the interracial u ­ nion of Alonzo and Cora figures forth a po­liti­cal child who is nurtured in a h ­ ouse­hold of natu­ral religion and natu­ral rights but who owes its life to Sheridan’s Whig princi­ples. Taylor powerfully reads this ­union and the child’s hybridity in relation to “Sheridan’s denunciation of Pitt’s proposed Anglo-­Irish Union.



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Sheridan, the Irishman in the British parliament, the ‘transnational’ as one critic has termed him, stages in Cora’s child a prescription of two nations brought together through a shared investment in transcultural humanitarianism.”62 I would add that ­because the allegories are so overdetermined, the child’s po­liti­cal significance is not ­limited to this immediate situation but chains forward to imagine conditions beyond the pre­sent state of national and imperial affairs. The child inherits a kind of politics that is impossible in the pre­sent but which can nevertheless operate as a stance from which to critique the current actuality where more direct dissent has been discredited or criminalized. Alonzo and Cora’s child is an icon not only of a utopian form of cosmopolitanism that has not yet achieved maturity but also of pre­sent vulnerability. The child, in its very potential, proj­ects a cosmopolitan reconciliation of the pre­sent conflict into the ­f uture. And yet the preservation of the possibility for this ­f uture state relies on the intervention of a figure who, in his very words and deeds, embodies past Whig sentiment.63 It is Rolla who saves the ­future and in so ­doing memorializes not only his but Sheridan’s po­ liti­cal past. Rolla’s citation of Sheridan’s oratory links him to a particularly “hot” moment in Whig re­sis­tance to George III’s flirtations with absolutism ­because much of Sheridan, Burke, and Fox’s attack on Hastings was aimed at demonstrating the threat of “arbitrary power” to the En­glish constitution. ­Because Sheridan’s cited speech has a twofold target—it takes aim at both Hastings’s imperial rapacity and the ministry’s tacit ac­cep­tance of this kind of rule—it reads doubly in the play. It is an apt call to arms against conquest that has the capacity to figure forth the French threat to British liberty. And yet it also has the potential to suggest, like Fox and Sheridan did so often in Parliament, that British liberty had long been u ­ nder attack at home. And that critique had its roots in the revolutionary critique of the British Crown’s failures to live up to the ideals of liberty in the thirteen colonies. As John Loftis points out, ­t hese kinds of sentiments are not confined to Rolla: Alonzo justifies his treason by stating, “I have not warred against my native land, but against ­t hose who have usurped its power. The banners of my country, when first I followed arms beneath them, w ­ ere Justice, Faith, and Mercy” (3.3.681). Alonzo could well be George Washington who fought to defend British governmental ideals in the Seven Years’ War; however, when ­t hose ideals w ­ ere progressively quashed in the late 1760s and 1770s, he found himself defending them in the name of Amer­i­ca. That he goes over to the Peruvians makes this all too explicit.

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This po­liti­cal opposition to Pizarro, borne out of an adherence to princi­ ples of justice, faith, and mercy, are the grounds of the highly eroticized and sentimental friendship between Alonzo, Rolla, and Cora. When Rolla is first introduced in act 2, scene 1, he is hailed by Cora as “my friend, my b ­ rother!”; likewise, Alonzo greets him with “my friend, my benefactor! how can our lives repay the obligation which we owe to you” (2.1.667). Alonzo and Rolla share not only a belief in princi­ples of justice and humanity but also a commitment to Burke’s notion of “connexion,” articulated in Thoughts on the Pre­ sent Discontents, which Fox so powerfully mobilized against Burke during debate on the Quebec Bill; they also cultivate their friendship so as to achieve active po­liti­cal ends.64 The play repeatedly emphasizes that the strength of the Peruvian re­sis­tance to the technologically superior Spaniards rests on the combined efforts of Alonzo and Rolla. In this regard, they conform almost to the letter to notions of friendship advocated by Fox and which Burke left ­behind in early 1791. But Sheridan elaborates on the friendship further. Alonzo and Rolla share a homosocial bond based on their shared desire for Cora. It is impor­tant to remember that Rolla risks his life to save first Alonzo and then Alonzo’s child. The obligation referred to by Alonzo above is Rolla’s decision to sublimate his desire for Cora and bless their marriage, but Sheridan leaves the erotic attachment intact throughout the play. Within this friendship, Rolla’s barely suppressed desire for Cora is repeatedly legitimized by allusions to Rolla’s relation to the child. Early on, Cora herself suggests that the child should look on Rolla as his f­ ather (2.1.667), but l­ ater in the play, when acting on Alonzo’s request that he marry Cora should she become a ­widow, Rolla finds himself repudiated: CORA. . . . ​For that love thou seekst; whose blossoms are to shoot from the bleeding grave of thy betray’d and slaughter’d friend!—­But thou hast borne to me the last words of my Alonzo! Now hear mine—­Sooner s­ hall this boy draw poison from this tortured breast—­sooner would I link me to the pallid corse of the meanest wretch that perish’d with Alonzo, than he call Rolla ­father—­t han I call Rolla husband! (3.2.11–17) Rolla is only ever and only ­will be the friend; and it is as a friend and not a husband or a ­father that he ­will die. As a friend, he can figuratively take the place of the ­father, he can even offer care that the ­father is incapable of



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providing, but ultimately Cora declares an irreducible distinction between Rolla and the child that is ultimately biological. This biological distinction is, I believe, meant to figure a po­liti­cal distinction between the nationalist implications of Sheridan’s Whig oratory and the utopian intercultural possibilities deposited in the child. This firmly separates Rolla’s Whig qualities from the child’s cosmopo­liti­cal potential, and yet it also suggests that of all the characters in the play Rolla is the one needed to guarantee the survival of the baby. A Whig representative ­will save the ­future, but the ­future is constitutionally—­ that is, biologically—­distinct from the Whig past and the Tory pre­sent. In fact, the emergence of this new po­liti­cal ideal w ­ ill kill not only Rolla but also Pizarro. And with their demise, the play predicts the necessary death and supersession of both national combatants—­Britain and France in their current absolutist forms—­and both po­liti­cal combatants—­W hig and Tory constituencies as they w ­ ere defined in the late eigh­teenth ­century. This is why Rolla dies, not at Pizarro’s hands but incidentally during an attempt to save the ­f uture, ­here embodied by Cora and Alonzo’s child. That this interracial and cross-­cultural child figures forth a cosmopo­liti­cal reconciliation is paradoxically a return to Fox’s fantasy of a post-­revolutionary Eu­rope based on Whig princi­ples. Sheridan’s key recognition is that such an anticipatory return necessarily involves the loss of the friend and with him the demise of the notion of party on which Whig action is based. Thus the audience is affectively bound to the loss of Foxite politics. Paradoxically, this becomes the core of patriotic identification in Tory times and may well constitute an extraordinary po­liti­cal and cultural victory for what is quickly becoming an obsolete form of politics. Patriotic response and, by extension, consent to Tory rule are negotiated through a kind of spectral Whiggery in which the current government is dead except as it is animated by Rolla’s (Whiggery’s) ghost. This effectively usurps Tory governance and makes it reliant on Whig princi­ples. But the loss of the friend has a further, more radical, connotation. The friendship between Alonzo and Rolla, like the love between Alonzo and Cora, crosses racial and cultural bound­a ries. Male friendship in the play can produce effective opposition to tyranny, but it cannot produce a child. In the figural economy of the play, this suggests that the po­liti­cal affiliation of Alonzo and Rolla cannot produce a way out of the pre­sent crisis ­because it cannot reproduce. In this context, race and sex become crucial po­liti­cal signifiers in the play b ­ ecause they are precisely what prevent Rolla from ever being the ­father to Cora’s child and what ultimately define his po­liti­cal fate.

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In the utopian rhe­toric of the play, interracial friendship is sacrificed to guarantee the survival of a corporeally defined hybridity. This is resonant in the light of Kathleen Wilson’s argument regarding the emergent gap between the once synonymous words race and nation at this historical juncture.65 It is as though Sheridan is suggesting that the only way out of the current po­liti­cal conflict is to hybridize all social difference so that vio­lence cannot be perpetrated on other p ­ eoples b ­ ecause alterity—or, to use the word set into circulation by Las Casas but never fully defined, humanity—­has become the basis of identity. This implies something beyond a nationalist re­sis­tance to the state typical of Fox and Sheridan’s oratory in the 1780s and 1790s. Opposition ­here is taking on the extra-­national quality of cosmopolitanism and in the pro­cess redefining the humanitarian princi­ples of Whig politics. The materiality of the bridge scene itself is an emblem for the contradictions and paradoxes required by the politics of the period. What sense we have of the scene relies on three images, none of which can be conclusively connected to the first per­for­mances of the play. They all pertain to the moment when Rolla seizes the child from the Spanish soldiers. The first is Sir Thomas Lawrence’s famous portrait of Kemble as Rolla holding the baby aloft in his left hand (Figure 6.5). Every­t hing about the strong diagonal composition of the image focuses attention on the baby. The halo of light in which the child is framed is symptomatic of his utopian function in the play: he exists separate and above the dark action in which he is engulfed. And the composition contrasts him to the sword in Kemble’s hand. The visualization of Rolla’s heroism is complex b ­ ecause t­here are distinct visual echoes of Roman costume in this Peruvian warrior. This is true of other images of Kemble in the role circulating at the time (Figure 6.6) and is, I believe, a visual sign of the character’s proximity to any number of tragic heroes in the host of Roman plays that dominated eighteenth-­century engagement with republican po­liti­cal theory. As we have seen, the most con­spic­u­ous Roman plays in the repertoire, Coriolanus, Cato, and Julius Caesar, had become unplayable in the wake of ­imagined regicide at home and ­actual regicide in France. And it is, I believe, significant that Rolla’s Peruvian dress is ­little more than a modified Roman costume, for he is like his tragic forebears not only in his nobility but also in his cultural obsolescence. As I have argued, the model of tragedy, largely enacted in Roman plots in this period, is rendered obsolete in this very scene. This helps to explain the undecidability of Kemble’s gesture as rendered by Lawrence. The sword is curiously poised. Is he about to slash his assailants?



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Figure 6.5. Henry Dawe, ­after Sir Thomas Lawrence, Rolla, mezzotint (1805). Trustees of the British Museum.

Or is the sword pointed at his own breast? The position of the hand, and the dramatic moment, indicate that it is the former. But the composition and overall flow of the scene point to the latter. He ­will die a sacrifice to the child in his other hand and thus the sword pointed t­oward himself captures the overall import of this moment. Lawrence has rendered the very undecidability

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Figure 6.6. Robert Dighton, We Serve a King Whom We Love—­a God Whom We Adore. Pizarro, e­ tching (1799). Trustees of the British Museum.

of Rolla’s character: his gesture figures forth a threat to ­t hose who threaten the child and prefigures the sacrifice of himself that he is about to make on the bridge. The doubleness captures the paradox I have outlined above. Rolla’s heroism ­will both bring the tragic fable to its end and instantiate a new generic economy that undoes tragedy’s civic claims. And out of the undecidable



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Figure 6.7. J. Fittler, a­ fter Pugh, Covent Garden 1804, engraving. By permission of the Mander and Mitchenson Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

moment emerges the utopian sign around which this play’s aesthetic and po­liti­cal challenges to pre­sent practice revolve. The doubleness of Kemble’s gesture and the triangular composition are crucial for understanding the iconicity of the child and they inform the larger design of the scene. In an engraving of the command per­for­mance at Covent Garden in 1804 (Figure 6.7), the bridge and the cataract are in an elevated central position in the background with Pizarro and the Spanish soldiers downstage right and Kemble and baby downstage left. Since Rolla already has the child in his hand, the image illustrates the moment when he threatens to kill anyone who follows him (5.2.699). Presumably, he would have been much closer to Pizarro and the soldiers downstage right for the early speeches of the scene when he is in chains. When Rolla seizes the child, he exits stage

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left, reenters upstage left on the rocks, and is pursued by the soldiers who are ­under strict o ­ rders not to harm him. A ­ fter struggling with some of the soldiers among the rocks, Rolla crosses the wooden bridge over the cataract, pursued by the soldiers who shoot him. Even though he is injured, Rolla “tears from the rock the tree which supports the bridge, and retreats by the back ground, bearing off the child” (5.2.699). He reenters in the next scene to quickly return the child to Cora and die before the ensuing ­battle in scene 4. Some sense of the blocking and the extraordinary effect of the collapsing bridge is captured in an engraving based on a per­for­mance of the play at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh in 1813 (Figure 6.8).66 ­Here we see Rolla escaping with the child and one of the soldiers falling with the bridge into the torrent.67 By placing Pizarro and Rolla opposite one another downstage at the crucial moment when Rolla seizes the child, the scene spatializes the fundamental po­liti­cal opposition in the play. But when Rolla exits and then ascends the rocks to the bridge the audience is left with an absent spot downstage left. All the remaining action occurs at a point above the stage and the triangular effect perfectly captures the dialectical resolution of the opposition between Pizarro and Rolla. At the apex of the triangle, we have Rolla, the child, and soldiers. The soldier’s bullet mortally wounds Rolla as he crosses the bridge. Likewise, the soldiers are killed by the collapse of the bridge. The only survivors ­will be the child, who exits with Kemble upstage right and Pizarro downstage right. The audience is left contemplating an overall movement in which the child is borne aloft and every­one ­else ­either dies on the spot or dies in the ensuing two scenes. The spatial dynamics of the scene, in which a direct opposition downstage leads to the sublimation of the child at the apex of the compositional triangle that is the bridge, materializes the utopian dialectic sketched out in the previous paragraph. The timbers that arch over the cataract meta­phor­ically take us from the past to the f­ uture and the collapse of the bridge figures forth the break with pre­sent actuality, which lies at the heart of a string of utopian gestures in the play. The collapse of the bridge seals the fate not only of ­t hose who threaten the child but also of the one figure who rescues him. This bridge from one po­liti­cal realm to another also marks a bridge from one aesthetic regime to another, ­because de Loutherbourg’s remarkable painting and his ingenious mechanism inaugurate increasingly spectacular stage effects not only in the ensuing scenes but also in subsequent melodramatic productions. The spectacular supplementation of the tragic fable becomes the

Figure 6.8. Anonymous, Scene from Pizarro, John Kemble as Rolla; James Anderson as Cora’s child. Theatre Royal Edinburgh, 1813, illustration from James  R. Anderson, An Actor’s Life (London, 1905).

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most memorable aspect of the play and arguably what saves Pizarro from itself. With this leap over the perilous chasm into aesthetic domains more at home in the illegitimate theater, Pizarro effected an audience response that was, at this moment of extreme state hegemony, beyond the scope of legitimate tragedy. Since tragedy’s capacity to negotiate with social and po­liti­cal crisis was severely hampered by state intervention in both the theater and everyday life, Sheridan a­ dopted a hybrid form of theater—­like Rolla carry­ing Alonzo and Cora’s hybrid child—in order to become something other than himself. Just as Rolla sacrifices himself on the bridge to save the potential nascent in the interracial child, so too does Sheridan sacrifice his past theatrical and po­liti­cal personae in order to generate a counter-­momentum of ongoing critique of the po­liti­cal pre­sent. Pizarro, like Alonzo and Cora’s child, is the product of an intercultural ­union that many observers thought would be treasonous, but which turned out to be more patriotic than conventional patriotism ­because it refuses to sacrifice humanity to the demands of the state. The strange amalgam of Sheridan and Kotzebue, which has so seriously damaged Sheridan’s literary and po­liti­cal reputation, is just one in a string of sacrificial hybridizations thrown up by the play. In this light, the derogation of Sheridan’s last play, like the dismissal of much of the melodrama that followed in its wake, has more to do with models of politics and aesthetics averse to inconsistency, hybridity, and excess. Th ­ ese dismissals, w ­ hether they come from the likes of Cobbett or from recent critics of Sheridan’s oeuvre whose investments remain with a nationally defined lit­er­a­ture, are equally indebted to the very social, cultural, and po­liti­cal identities Sheridan may have been trying to get beyond.

The Remainder, or The Tears of the Crown In this context, it is worth considering what gets left b ­ ehind, the remainder left in the wake of the dialectical moment on the bridge above the perilous chasm. The play gives us two exemplary bodies, both of which die in equally improbable fashion. The oft-­criticized slaying of Pizarro, in which Elvira provides Alonzo not only with a much-­needed sword but also with the opportunity to prevail by interrupting Pizarro’s concentration, elicits two key speeches. Elvira concludes her role in the play with a stirring evocation of Pizarro’s counter-­exemplarity:



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ELV. Cherish humanity—­avoid the foul examples thou hast view’d—­Spaniards returning to your native home, assure your rulers, they m ­ istake the road to glory, or to power.—­Tell them, that the pursuits of avarice, conquest, and ambition, never yet made a ­people happy, or a nation ­great.—[Casts a look of agony on the dead body of PIZARRO as she passes, and exit.] She might be speaking directly to the Directory and, in that sense, she speaks as Sheridan believed the state should at this historical moment. Her utterance is markedly dif­fer­ent from that of the monarch Ataliba: With the words, “My brave Alonzo!” he d ­ oesn’t even offer a full sentence and basically fades from the scene. In terms of the play’s allegory, the current monarch fades away and is replaced by Alonzo to whom the remaining Spaniards look for mercy. Ataliba is dramatically displaced ­until Rolla’s body is brought on stage. This is in­ter­est­ing in the light of Pizarro’s expressed plans to keep a puppet leader on the throne a­ fter conquering the Peruvians. With Pizarro’s military conquest over, Alonzo’s amatory conquest appears to have the same result. The play’s speeches end with Alonzo first speaking for Ataliba and then telling him what to do. In po­liti­cal terms, this points ­toward a post-­Napoleonic world when a largely Whig-­identified character takes charge of the state and the Crown in a fashion that Fox and Sheridan could only dream of. ­A fter Pizarro is killed by the combined efforts of Elvira’s glance and Alonzo’s hand, and a­ fter Alonzo comes into power, tears are extracted from the king when an elaborate pro­cession brings Rolla’s lifeless body on stage (5.4.702). The entire patriotic spectacle focuses on the loss of the benevolent Whig hero. It is an act of memorialization thoroughly traversed by Whig fantasies of the f­ uture b ­ ecause the king, in crying over Rolla’s body, both figuratively and literally cries for Sheridan. By binding Ataliba to Alonzo, Cora, and the child in a scene of sentimental mourning, Sheridan not only has the king weep for one who speaks words from Sheridan’s po­liti­cal past throughout the play but also subsumes the king into a cosmopo­liti­cal f­ uture in which his presence is vestigial at best. It is a f­ uture in which he w ­ ill not speak but ­will merely cry. And the ironic implication of course is that George III cries, as the reviews of the command per­for­mance indicate he did, for a fallen Whig hero who has just memorialized himself. George III’s tears on the night of 5 June 1799 thus become a remarkably paradoxical sign. They may simply be the tears of narcissism. But in the most radical interpretation

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they suggest that he cries ­because in ­going with Pitt and his bellicose ministry, he chose the wrong Rolla and, in so ­doing, failed to live up to the ideal sovereignty envisaged not only by the opposition but also by the audience who shed tears for the fallen hero. They are tears that, like his seeming lack of concern over the ravages of war both at home and abroad, belatedly mark his distance from the polity and open a gap in the pre­sent moment over which it is pos­si­ble to imagine a genuinely new understanding of community. ­After too many years of war, the king’s tears are shed for a f­ uture no longer pos­si­ ble but that nevertheless attests to the possibility of something yet to come. By way of conclusion, we could simply suggest that with Pizarro Sheridan recognized not only how the interventions in the repertoire enacted by Siddons, Jordan, and Kemble had realigned and consolidated the cultural patrimony, but also how the emergent repertoire was complicit with new forms of hegemonic control at the level of both the nation and the empire. Sheridan’s engagement with the repertoire itself both as man­ag­er and now again as playwright enabled him to recognize this problematic and postulate if not its reversal, then a further discomforting realignment. For our purposes, what Pizarro indicates is that Sheridan’s complex interruption and re­orientation of the theatrical and po­liti­cal repertoire relies on the fact that his precursors had aesthetically mediated the affective experience of turbulent historical change ­until it found its formal and generic realization both in the play­house and the polity at large. In this regard, Pizarro’s demonstrable formal and generic leaps testify to the effectivity of the repertoire itself and to its capacity for foreclosing on certain social possibilities, while demonstrating the continued availability of the repertoire for staging critical appraisals of the past, pre­sent, and ­f uture.

  C ONCLUSION

The corrosive solace activated by interventions in the post-­American repertoire in the 1780s incrementally stripped British culture of obsolete social and aesthetic formations in such a way that allowed for middling biopolitics to propagate and eventually align itself with a fiscal/military state more suited to a territorial empire in South Asia (Chapters 1–3). This involved the consolidation of whiteness, of reproductive heterosexuality, and of middle-­class identity within the repertoire itself, and the way that the repertoire handled and made vis­i­ble ­t hese historical changes can be excavated from close attention to post-­revolutionary per­for­mance culture in the 1790s. Of key importance both for scholars of per­for­mance and for cultural historians is that the repertoire discloses historical change in dif­fer­ent ways according to the shifting temporal dynamics of per­for­mance itself. Ruptures in the temporal continuum of per­for­mance ­w ill throw up images of other­w ise subterranean historical forces (Chapter 4); the narrativization of social change enables the retrospective consideration of past instability and the anticipation of plenitude (Chapter 5); and scrambling the repertoire itself w ­ ill allow for a meditation on how t­ hings could have come out other­wise (Chapter 6). It is my hope that the preceding chapters both flesh out ­these claims and model a style of analy­sis that can mobilize repertoire thinking as a valuable strategy for linking affective dispositions to patterns of historical change. With the detailed analy­sis of specific per­for­mances in hand, I want to return to Berlant’s conceptual leap from form to genre in Cruel Optimism first discussed in my Introduction in order to weave together many of the arguments of this book and to look at one last example where every­t hing looked like it might unravel yet again. To revisit Berlant’s evocative sentence, “Affect’s saturation of form can communicate the conditions u ­ nder which a historical moment appears as a visceral moment, assessing the way a ­t hing that is happening finds its genre,” we can now elaborate further on what I described in the Introduction as the generative caesura that divides and yet

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joins ­t hese two key terms. The notion of how a historical moment viscerally finds it genre is inherently paradoxical b ­ ecause genre itself is so unstable. As a set of aesthetic norms, genre promises stability and suggests that semiosis can be regulated, but, as Derrida has famously argued, the law of genre inscribes the Other and thus t­ hese norms are always already susceptible to their undoing.1 This internal instability is amplified by the multimodal pressures exerted by adjacent genres, so at the very least we must concede that genres are dynamic entities constantly responding to the internal pressures of their constitution and to the external pull of other utterances, per­for­mances, discourses, compositions, and remediations.2 As we move from the Regency Crisis to the end of the c­ entury, new productions of Henry the Eighth, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Venice Preserv’d, ­Every One Has His Fault, The Wheel of Fortune, The Stranger, and Pizarro all generated debate about genre within an intermedial environment in which (1) generic hybridity was highly politicized and (2) generic designations ­were proliferating. Burke’s demonization of tragi-­comedy in the Reflections casts a long shadow h ­ ere, but the use of genre as a way of thinking about social norms predates that publication and is pervasive.3 The aforementioned debate sometimes animates the press in the immediate reception of t­hese productions: as we have seen, ­Every One Has His Fault, the 1795 Venice Preserv’d, The Stranger, and Pizarro all generated controversy in the press, which at times threatened the viability of ­these plays. In other instances, as with Henry the Eighth and Coriolanus, generic designation itself shifted through time: the former eventually played more as a tragedy than a history play, and Kemble himself no longer referred to the latter as a tragedy ­after 1806, preferring instead to call it a history. Likewise, Kemble’s 1794 Macbeth and Sheridan’s Pizarro elicited extensive commentary on the relationship between tragedy and spectacle. When we cast forward in time we find that retrospective accounts of the theater, especially ­t hose of James Boaden and Thomas Campbell, frequently invoke genre to derogate certain developments that run ­counter to their sense of British theatrical tradition or their sense of the “character” of the actress or actor they are celebrating: Boaden’s treatments of The Wheel of Fortune, The Stranger, and Pizarro all deploy notions of generic integrity to consolidate fantasies of the moral rectitude of Siddons and Kemble.4 One could argue that when debates regarding genre erupt or when they are retroactively invoked, we are given glimpses of the affective forces saturating form, only now they are being brought into the horizon of

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judgment, and that judgment almost invariably starts with aesthetic ­matters but ends with moral or po­liti­cal concerns. It is intriguing that t­ hese judgments are never complete, crisis is never fully pro­cessed but, rather, remains in memory awaiting reactivation in the repertoire. Affectively saturated forms are incorporated into the repertoire like a virus into the genome of the culture. That incorporation is a source and sign of resilience, but it also affords the possibility of retrogression, of the return of affective intensities when new or unforeseen circumstances align with old. This means that certain scenarios lend themselves to reactivating the repertoire. For example, with the naval mutinies of 1797 only just past and uprising in Ireland imminent, memories of rebellion in the American colonies meant that Siddons’s redeployment of per­for­mance protocols from Isabella could address indirectly this emotional assemblage. It also meant that only a few months l­ater, Sheridan, in Pizarro, could return audiences to scenarios from the early 1780s to assess the cost of corrosive solace. This type of subterranean proactive work in the repertoire is often manifested through the involution of seemingly incommensurate genres: she-­t ragedy is folded into comedy in The Stranger; Coriolanus’s tragic character, now repurposed as Penruddock, becomes instrumental to the comic resolution of The Wheel of Fortune; Pizarro redefines the generic limits of a “serious drama” by making tragic denouement beholden to spectacle; and, by 1811, Coriolanus itself gets transformed from a republican tragedy into an imperial history play. ­These summary remarks lead to four contentions. First, the realigned repertoire—in this case, the work of corrosive solace in the 1780s—­could itself be rechanneled to meet social scenarios that in what­ever way activated memories of past crises. Second, the self-­conscious debate about genre is often where the efficacy of this rechanneling is, to use Berlant’s felicitous term, assessed. Third, none of ­t hese pro­cesses is ever finished ­because they are not only chained forward through the repertoire but also rhizomatically proliferate in cognate genres across the mediascape. And, fi­nally, ­because the repertoire is not simply a future-­oriented experience, all of this activity constantly alters the sense of the past. This latter point is impor­tant ­because it is through this retroactive work that emergent norms are naturalized and at times rendered invisible as norms. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the subtle biopo­liti­cal consolidation of whiteness, of reproductive femininity, of the middle-­class ­family, and of imperial confidence in ­t hese plays ­a fter a

310 Conclusion

period of ­great social insecurity. The repertoire builds a past for the ­f uture in which t­ hese norms w ­ ill become fully operative.

Cato solus In order to test the validity of t­ hese contentions, I want to conclude this book by turning to a moment that directly activated memory of one of the most disturbing developments of the post-­American era: George III’s final descent into madness in 1810. The return of the king’s illness necessarily invoked the im­mense turmoil of the first Regency Crisis, which we discussed in Chapter 4, and, as with his production of Coriolanus in 1789, John Philip Kemble chose to stage another Roman play, Joseph Addison’s Cato, to address this renewed threat to sovereignty. Kemble’s revival of Cato at Covent Garden in 1811 brings together many of the key themes of this book—­t he relation between republican virtue and empire, the con­spic­u­ous place of interracial marriage to the f­ uture beyond Cato, and the radical contingency of per­for­mance to name only a few—in part ­because it demonstrates how re-­memorative and subjunctive forces work in confluence to meet the affective needs of the pre­ sent. Cato is a valuable site for thinking through the repertoire’s recombinative force b ­ecause forgetting lies at the heart of its most impor­ tant re-­memorative moment. In act 4, when Cato famously subordinates his emotional reaction to the death of his son Marcus in order to offer a panegyric to liberty, virtue, and country, a crucial act of forgetting is enacted to memorialize republican Rome. But ­there is an even more crucial act of forgetting that haunts this play: this one pertaining to genre. In the early phases of its reception, Cato was the only directly po­liti­cal “Roman” play that could be claimed by Whig and Tory alike. Cato’s stoic virtue and his “inexhaustibile commitment to liberty” held wide appeal, but the very malleability of the play’s po­liti­cal allegory also rendered its po­liti­cal affinities enigmatic. John Loftis famously declared that the “po­liti­cal meaning of Cato was and is still an enigma.”5 The very tension between republic and empire that animates the play’s plot lies at the heart of this enigma. Lisa Freeman summarizes the problematic as follows: For Cato . . . ​the effects of tragedy’s propensity to illustrate the dissolution of heroic values w ­ ere particularly acute. Addison deliberately drew a parallel in Cato between ­England and the Rome he endeavored

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to represent. Yet, while E ­ ngland could be projected into the glories of an idealized ancient Rome, the complicated and less than ideal politics of Rome’s rise to and, more significantly, its fall from power could not be entirely effaced from that repre­sen­ta­tion. As James W. Johnson has noted, Cato’s death “marked the end of Republican Rome and the birth of the new imperialistic stage of Roman history.” . . . ​If Rome ­were taken as the analog through which to proj­ect the ­f uture glory of E ­ ngland not only as a nation but also as a burgeoning empire, the burden of history inexorably required an awareness of that emerging empire’s eventual decline. . . . ​The very insistence that Cato embodied the last remnants of what could only be termed exceptional virtue . . . ​meant that his death marked not only the irrecoverable loss of Cato in par­tic­u­lar, but also, in a more general sense, of the immanence of the qualities he so embodied.6 First performed in the spring of 1713 at almost precisely the same time that negotiators w ­ ere hammering out the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, Cato was poised at a moment in the expansion of E ­ ngland from nation to empire. But the prob­lem of tragic closure that Freeman isolates ­here speaks directly to the very prob­lem confronting imperial modernity. How does a nation on the verge of empire avert decline? With the historical example of Rome in hand, how does one forget the loss of Cato and imagine a dif­fer­ent kind of f­ uture?7 For Laura Rosenthal, Addison’s script is replete with cosmopolitan possibilities; possibilities that are repeatedly forgotten or repressed by narrowly nationalist readings of the play. A ­ fter carefully delineating Addison’s own ambivalence t­ oward the Catonic ideal, Rosenthal turns away from the eponymous hero to consider the love plots. She argues persuasively that, although often considered a vestigial component of the play,8 “Juba and Marcia’s transracial and transnational marriage is the play’s solution rather than its prob­ lem b ­ ecause, as strangers to themselves, they might not be strangers to one another.”9 She contends that Cato’s “pedantry of virtue” and Marcus’s barely restrained passion” constitute symptoms of hyper-­nationalist patriotism that lack the necessary flexibility for modern notions of empire. In Rosenthal’s reading, Juba’s combination of courage, sensibility, and cosmopolitan subjectivity operates as a counterexample to roughly contemporaneous plays that construct interracial romance as inherently problematic.10 In Cato, the strict adherence to national identity leads to death and suicide; the enlightenment cosmopolitanism of Juba and Marcia’s betrothal, notably endorsed by Cato

312 Conclusion

in a key act of historical revisionism, promises the founding of a new po­liti­ cal order that preserves, yet transcends the concept of liberty that is laid to waste in the deserts of Numidia. That endorsement is qualified ­because Juba’s normativity is mea­sured by his Roman-­ness: he has to become other to himself to be a fit partner for Marcia. But this condition of becoming other-­to-­oneself is an impor­tant historical construct ­because, as Rosenthal shows, it allows for a consistent critique of Cato’s tragic iconicity. Although designated a tragedy by Addison, the marriage plots take the audience beyond Cato’s iconic end and thus beyond the inert fetishization of British liberty. The ele­ments of the play that push it past tragedy thoroughly open the play onto a critique of Cato’s declamations on virtue, liberty, and country. In order for audiences to invest in Cato’s patriotism, they have to constantly forget Cato’s genre, Cato’s plot, and Cato’s relation to his f­ amily and to his foreign surroundings. In d ­ oing so, they isolate speeches from Addison’s script and thus attach themselves to fantasies of the self-­same. To fully engage with Cato is to confront the prob­lem of history itself. I want to show how a certain audience forgot about the tragedy of Cato to make “history”—­that strange attempt to figure forth a past that makes a ­f uture for life. The per­for­mance of Cato by the Continental Army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1778 and the long history of Cato’s circulation in the American colonies meant that, of all the plays in the repertoire, Cato more than any other had become ineluctably aligned with the American cause.11 In the winter of 1811, Kemble sought to retrieve the play from its anti-­imperial and revolutionary per­for­mance history. The play had only played four one-­night stands in the patent theaters between the end of the Revolutionary War and the turn of the ­century. Despite concerted efforts to revive the play at Covent Garden in December 1802 with Cooke in the title role, the play met with lukewarm notices in the press and failed to draw audiences beyond the first few per­for­mances.12 Its reemergence from the post-­American shadows allows us to reflect on t­hose affectively troubling ele­ments of the 1780s that ­were interrupted by war with France and which ­were reactivated by the second Regency Crisis. Like the Valley Forge Cato, the 1811 Cato was a war­time production and it was not difficult to mobilize the allegories first set into motion by Addison. In fact, Kemble’s Cato was a return of sorts to the anti-­ French dynamics of the original production b ­ ecause the threat to the ­Catonic ideal at this moment is clearly Napoleon. Firmly entrenched in

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­ ortugal, Wellington awaited engagement with the forces of Caesar ­under P Massena’s command. But if this situation seemed auspicious for a rehearsal of the same old allegories and yet another encounter with the prob­lems regarding the death of republican Rome, I want to suggest that Kemble’s Cato was much more concerned with internal domestic affairs. The evidence for this contention lies in the reviews. A ­ fter a historical encomium to the play, the Morning Post nonetheless opined that “­Later Writers, however, have, in some mea­sure, torn the laurelled wreath from the Poet’s brow, ridiculed that which once it would have been treason not to admire, and fi­nally determined it to be a good poem, but a tedious play” (MP, 28 January 1811). In a season in which nearly e­ very mainpiece came loaded with patriotic intent—­t he run of Cato was intermittently interrupted by per­for­ mances of The Knight of Snowdoun, Gustavus Vasa, and Henry V—­Kemble’s primary achievement, according to this reviewer, was to retrieve patriotism from a condition of boredom.13 The Morning Chronicle welcomed the new production in explic­itly po­liti­cal terms: “Never unquestionably was ­there a production that teemed with more exalted princi­ples, or that breathed more warmly the genuine spirit of Whiggism—of that po­liti­cal feeling which springs from benevolence, and is reared and tutored by philosophy. Mr. KEMBLE was the able representative of the Hero of the piece, and it is not too much to say that it was the portrait of a master hand” (MC, 28 January 1811). This sense that Kemble was crafting a portrait is significant ­because it seems to separate Cato from the other characters in the play; on closer examination, however, this portrait works by the careful deployment of o ­ thers. The Morning Chronicle goes on to cite the specific moment in which Kemble’s mastery was most powerfully felt: Above all, when informed of the death of his son, Marcus, he hastily inquires how he had fallen, and is answered, gloriously, the conflict of paternal tenderness and Roman pride was depicted with such unerring adherence to the truth of nature, and with such a lively consciousness of the force of what was uttered, as to leave nothing to the mind of spectator, but to echo the sentiment and admire. The verses in which Cato says to Juba,   “Thy virtues, Prince, if I foresee aright,   “­Will one day make thee g­ reat.”

314 Conclusion

­Were seized on by the h ­ ouse with the most lively emotion. Mr. KEMBLE gave his peculiar energy to the inference from the passage; and four distinct enthusiastic bursts of applause, demonstrated the feeling of the public ­towards the PRINCE of WALES. (MC, 28 January 1811) Kemble’s per­for­mance in act 4, scene 4, steered audience attention to the condition of the sons and effectively restructured the scene as a domestic tragedy. Two ­things are remarkable ­here. First, the strong indication that Kemble played the scene as a f­ather stricken over his son Marcus’s death runs ­counter to Addison’s script. When Cato hears that his impetuous son is dead, his first assumption is that his son has died shamefully. When he is informed that Marcus did his duty to Rome by killing Sy­phax, ­t here is no anguish ­because Cato has already transformed him from son into an example of patriotic citizenship. The moment when the body of Marcus is placed on stage is the moment of Catonic exceptionalism ­because, unlike the other weeping onlookers, Cato’s cold aestheticization of Marcus’s death subordinates paternal attachment to loyalty to the Roman republic: Welcome, my son! ­Here lay him down, my friends, Full in my sight, that I may view at leisure The bloody corse, and count ­t hose glorious wounds. —­How beautiful is death, when earned by virtue? Who would not be that youth? What pity is it That we can die but once to serve our country! (4.4.77–82) This extreme act of emotional repression, bordering on perversion, is what makes Cato Cato and no other. As Juba states to the audience, “Was ever man like this!” (4.4.83). But Kemble allowed paternal feeling to enter the scene and thus made the character less of an ideal and more of a “natu­ral” man. The Morning Post gives us some sense of how this was achieved and, in so ­doing, reveals how alive the audience was to Kemble’s intervention: “The pause which ensued before the dead body was brought on the stage was not very well filled up, and something like disapprobation was expressed by a part of the audience; his acting in the subsequent scene made the amende honourable, and closed the act with boundless éclat” (MP, 28 January 1811). Using a strategy he had honed in his Shakespearean productions, Kemble introduced an elaborate pro­cession and tableau into the scene, complete with

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“Lictors, Senators,—­Soldiers bearing the body of MARCUS on a Bier,—­ Freedmen, with his Helmet, Shield, Sword and Spear,—­Eagle and other Ensigns, and Guards with their Arms reversed” (Kemble, “The Tragedy of Cato,” Vol. 10, 6.1.45).14 Every­thing about this interruption, from the dead march all the way down to the careful deployment of martial props, reinforces Marcus’s heroism, but it also transforms his body into an icon, thus reiterating Cato’s act of exemplification. But, as with so many of Kemble’s interruptions, some portion of the audience reacted negatively to the pause required to build this formation of bodies and objects on stage. This pause introduces a discomfiting moment between Lucius’s declaration that “The citizens and senators, alarm’d, / Have gather’d round it, and attend it weeping” and Cato’s famous rejection of private emotional response. In that pause before Cato speaks, affect attaches to competing objects and Cato’s status as f­ ather and “noble Roman” are contraindicated. The significance of this unruly emotional dynamic can be excavated not only from the papers’ account of how it was put into abeyance but also from Kemble’s promptbook. The Morning Chronicle review takes us from the moment in which Kemble enacts “the conflict of paternal tenderness and Roman pride” just prior to the introduction of the tableau directly to Cato’s address to Juba that elicited fervent applause for the Prince of Wales. The Morning Post argued that it was Kemble’s per­for­mance of t­ hese latter speeches that overcame the disapprobation generated by the tableau; but by suddenly drawing an allegorical connection between Juba and the Prince of Wales, Kemble not only restructured the familial dynamic of the scene, he also pulled the entire per­for­mance to the horizon of a domestic crisis whose topicality was undeniable.15 In the fall of 1810, George III’s madness returned and it quickly became clear that he would be unable to govern. Unlike the Regency Crisis of 1788– 89 discussed in Chapter 4, George III’s incapacity threatened the governance of a state at war. All through January the papers w ­ ere replete with reports of the king’s health and of the debates in Parliament that would result in the passage of the Regency Act of 1811. The Prince of Wales became Prince Regent on 5 February 1811, only seven days ­after the opening of Kemble’s revival of Cato. If we go to Kemble’s promptbook, we find that Kemble makes a significant alteration to Cato’s speech: Cato. Thy virtues, prince [Juba], if I foresee aright, ­Will one day make thee ­great: At Rome hereafter,

316 Conclusion

‘Twill be no crime to have been Cato’s friend.— Porcius, draw near, My son, thou oft has seen Thy sire engag’d in a corrupted state, Wrestling with vice and faction; now thous seest me Spent, overpower’d, despairing of success. Let me advise thee to retreat [withdraw] betimes To our paternal seat, the Sabine field, Where the ­great Censor toil’d with his own hands, And all our frugal ancestors w ­ ere bless’d In h ­ umble virtues, and a rural life: ­There live a life retir’d.16 The crossed-­out passage was removed by Kemble in per­for­mance and replaced with “Porcius, come hither to me.—­Ah, my son—” and thus all reference to the corruption of the state and the exhaustion of Cato ­were erased. This si­mul­ta­neously preserves the legacy of George III’s avatar and directs attention to t­ hose who w ­ ill succeed him. That this was George III speaking to the morally suspect Prince of Wales would not have been lost on the audience, thus the entire recalibration of this speech is aimed at reforming the soon-­to-be regent. The explicit reference in the ensuing lines to vice now play as a condemnation of the Prince of Wales’s past public persona: Content thyself to be obscurely good: When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, The post of honour is a private station.17 Through a curious act of splitting, Kemble’s per­for­mance of Cato’s speeches in act 4 both honor the Prince of Wales and cut him off from his past life of dissipation. Marcus, the dissipated son, is dead; Cato’s living son, Portius, now figures for the historically disappointing Prince of Wales; and Juba emerges as the f­ uture ideal regent. In a sense, the allegorical inference prompted by Kemble’s per­for­mance reinvents the character of the Prince of Wales for the ­f uture regency. That the elevation of Juba comes through the suppression of Portius in this speech is notable ­because Kemble’s strongest interventions in the play—­the insertion of the tableau and the cancellation of t­hese lines—­ strategically separate Cato’s biological sons from the ­future of Rome. As noted, the exemplification of Marcus uses spectacle to firmly place him in

Conclusion 317

the monumental past. Marcus is the morally suspect son, the son most akin to the ­actual Prince of Wales, and thus he must be eliminated in a way that ­will allow a new virtuous regent to emerge in the figure of Juba. Portius is suppressed for dif­fer­ent reasons. At one level, the lines are canceled ­because they suggest that the state is both corrupt and riven by faction. But ­there is more at stake than po­liti­cal caution. Throughout the script, Portius is obliged to observe Cato’s decline and interrupt his f­ ather’s drive t­ oward death. As the canceled lines indicate, he is the witness to Cato’s despair: In act 5, he is the one who interrupts Cato’s self-­murder. But ­because Kemble’s allegory deploys Cato’s suicide to figure the crisis propagated by the king himself—it is impor­ tant to remember that suicide at this historical moment is beginning to be understood as a species of madness—­Portius is the po­liti­cally in­effec­tive son mired in the narrative of his f­ather’s past.18 Death and circumstance produce a po­liti­cal vacuum that Kemble fills with Juba. Juba’s non-­Roman Roman-­ness is an apt figure for the regency in that his alterity comes to stand for the fine line distinguishing regent from monarch that ­w ill dissolve with George III’s a­ ctual death. This alterity captures a significant shift in governance ­because the regent and the ­f uture George IV in many ways followed Cato/Kemble/George’s advice and ceded much of his public power to his ministers. Henceforth, Britain would have a dif­fer­ent kind of monarch. The temporality of this gesture is auspicious ­because it casts Juba and all the signs of his difference forward to leave Cato in place. A ­ fter giving his advice to Juba, Cato says farewell to his friends only for the curtain to rise for the ­grand soliloquy of act 5 and Cato’s suicide. Kemble was performing what his ailing king could not do: he bids adieu to the nation with dignity and parental concern. With George III fully incapacitated, the Regency Bill enabled governance to proceed as if he ­were dead. Act 5 achieves internally what the Regency Bill had to enact from outside the monarchy—it allowed the audience and, by extension, the nation to imagine the king’s death in life.19 ­Because he was performing the paradoxical isolation of George III, Kemble paid a g­ reat deal of attention to the scenography of the opening soliloquy to act 5. Addison specifies that Cato is holding the Phaedo with a drawn sword on the ­table beside him. Kemble’s promptbook domesticates this scene by adding lights, a looking-­glass, whiting, and rose-­pink curtains to simulate a chamber in the palace, and thus subtly reinforces Kemble’s construction of the character as both f­ather and monarch (Promptbooks 48). But t­ here is something disturbing about the presence of this Cato ­after the topicality of

318 Conclusion

Figure C.1. Thomas Lawrence, John Philip Kemble as Cato, oil on canvas (1812). National Portrait Gallery. London.

act 4: ­here Cato is alone with us, the national madman in the attic. This is perhaps why the term “solus” is also dropped from Kemble’s text; a subtle indication that the surrounding chamber both connects Cato to and conceals him from the domestic world around him. As with Thomas Lawrence’s painting of precisely this scene, ­there is something awry, a heightened sense that, despite the aspiration t­oward historicity, something was missing: “The famous soliloquy at the commencement of the fifth act was less effective than we expected it would be in such able hands. The first part of it had too much precision; and though it bore evident marks of deep study, it was not admired by the audience any like so much as some of his other speeches. An expression of disapprobation seemed about to be expressed, which his excellent delivery of the concluding lines not only averted, but converted to loud plaudits” (MP, 28 January 1811). As with the ­earlier moment of partial discomfort, the audience appears to be reacting to

Conclusion 319

Kemble’s tendency to drain Cato of affect and movement, to isolate his character from the audience. Macready made a similar point in his Reminiscences. ­After praising Kemble’s per­for­mance of the “I am satisfied” speech, he states that it was not enough to offset “a w ­ hole eve­ning of merely sensible cold declamation. . . . ​His attitudes ­were stately and picturesque, but evidently prepared; even the care he took in the disposition of his mantle was distinctly observable. . . . ​Though it might satisfy the classic antiquary, the want of variety and relief rendered it uninteresting and often indeed tedious.”20 The impression one gets h ­ ere is of statuesque monumentality and thus of a stepping away from the topicality that elicited such strong response only moments before at the close of act 4. Like the proliferation of domestic objects on stage at the beginning of act 5, every­t hing is tending t­ oward objecthood. The audience is snapped out of a heightened awareness of living historical change to commemorate George III, seated in a chair, at the end. The shift from subject to idealized model, to an object of veneration, for all its precision, threatened to overshadow the vigorous anticipatory inauguration of the regent at the end of act 4, and suddenly it became Kemble’s task not to save Cato from Cato but to reactivate the loud plaudits for Juba’s ­f uture. As the Morning Post reported, it was in Kemble’s per­for­mance of the final section of Cato’s soliloquy in which he famously invests in Plato’s vision of the soul’s immortal youth that converted audience aversion to “loud plaudits.” Kemble’s cold declamation of much of the speech had elicited desire for a transference of Cato’s soul forward through time, and thus he subtly inculcated a yearning for succession prior to George III’s a­ ctual death that could only secure the f­ uture of the regency. All of this attention to temporal succession is achieved through a radical curtailment of space and association. The fantasy being propagated in Kemble’s Cato of a new virtuous regency strips Juba of his African-­ness in much the same way that it separates the Prince of Wales from his own historical self: it is only discernible through its negation. This is the function of the curtain both in Covent Garden and in Lawrence’s picture. Numidia w ­ ill simply be subsumed into the domestic space of Rome and the prince ­will preserve and transcend the legacy of his ­father. ­These enabling but precarious fantasies for Britain in the winter of 1811 rely as much on the forgetting of the distinction between colony and empire as they do on the forgetting of a host of nonnormative sexual arrangements. The palpable absence of Marcia, like the active suppression of the prince’s sexual past, is ultimately the act of forgetting most crucial to the propagation of normativity in Kemble’s production.

320 Conclusion

The function of Cato at this moment ultimately confirms, however uncomfortably, that “the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal mea­sure for the health of an individual, of a ­people and of a culture.”21 We may not be sanguine about that “health” ­because it is so stridently attached in my examples to fantasies of national election and emergent biopo­liti­cal norms. But the acts of forgetting documented ­here constitute a dynamic engagement with the repertoire whose ultimate objective is the consolidation of subjective, social, and po­liti­cal desires. Kemble’s revival of the play during the second Regency Crisis confronts the fearsome fact of Cato’s death with supplementary per­for­mances aimed squarely at constituting a v­ iable f­ uture for their immediate audiences. In that regard, history as presented ­here is best understood as emotionally subjunctive, as much a function of desire as evidence of doubt. This final analy­sis, like the case studies in the preceding chapters, demonstrates that the repertoire’s dynamic force, its capacity to sustain culture, relies on, indeed demands, the recognition of affect’s subjunctive qualities. But that recognition operates differently depending on when it happens: in the moment of per­for­mance, it is felt as it saturates form; in the moment of historically engaging with the traces of that feeling—­t hat is, in the moment of retroactive analy­sis—it becomes the object of critical judgment. Between that past moment of feeling and our pre­sent act of criticism, time encrypts the unresolvable, discloses what we need, and stores scenarios we ­haven’t yet fathomed or have forgotten. Even though we tend to feel its entropic dimensions, performative time does productive work.22 That we can track t­hese recognitions in per­for­mance and in the press testifies to the ineluctable contingency of emotion, its insistent orientation t­oward the f­ uture, and its manifest importance as evidence of historical change. It also suggests that the very practice of cultural analy­sis exemplified h ­ ere falls u ­ nder the sign of the subjunctive in that it too is inherently tied to emotions, judgments, and actions that have not yet occurred but which inscribe a stance or an attitude ­toward what has happened and what might be pos­si­ble. Reconciling what has been felt and what one is able to know, mediating between affect’s saturation of form and the assessment of genre, the repertoire indexes both what remains ungraspable and what is available for reflection. That internal relation between feeling and knowing is a generative loop that ultimately inflects this critical proj­ect and the urgency of per­for­mance itself.

NOTES

Introduction 1. See “Facing Past and ­Future Empires,” “In the Face of Difference,” “Proxy Israelites,” and “Charlotte Smith’s Littoral Zones.” 2. Throughout this book I refer to the War of American In­de­pen­dence as the American War, in part to take up the usage most frequently used at the time, in part to recognize that this conflict’s global ramifications extended well beyond the founding of a new nation, and in part to disambiguate it from the Revolutionary Wars between Britain and France in the 1790s. 3. Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778) was also featured in the same exhibition. The exhibition was widely advertised and the same review of the painting was published in MH, 26 May 1784; MC, 27 May 1784; and WEP, 25–27 May 1784. 4. Saunders 30. 5. On this phenomenon, see Ritchie David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity. 6. For discussions of Alderman Boydell’s innovative linkage between exhibition event and print dissemination, see Dias, Exhibiting En­glishness, and Brylowe 86–116. 7. Fordham, British Art 250–56. 8. By enshrining slavery in the Constitution, the United States placed itself in a performative contradiction from which it has yet to recover and also provided Britain with a spurious way of declaring its moral superiority over the new nation. See Christopher Brown, Moral Capital. 9. Marshall, “Britain Without Amer­i­ca” 576. 10. Pocock, 295–96. 11. See Hoock on the death of Chatham 57–63. 12. See Saunders 9–11. 13. For a list of the fifty-­five depicted peers, see the National Portrait Gallery’s cata­log description at www​.­npg​.­org​.­u k​/­collections​/­search​/­portrait​/­mw09377​/­The​-­Death​-­of​-­t he​-­Earl​ -­of​-­Chatham. 14. On this point, see Conway 229–32. 15. See Downs 56–74. 16. See Saunders 4–39. 17. Fordham, British Art 253. 18. See Fordham’s authoritative analy­sis of the painting in British Art 218–38 and Solkin’s impor­tant treatment in Painting for Money 210–13. West’s painting was not widely exhibited but its remediation in engravings made it almost ubiquitous. On the 1776 engraving by William Woollett’s print of The Death of General Wolfe, see Brylowe 91–93.

322

Notes to Pages 11–22

19. Prown 2.304 indicates that Copley’s wife, child, and their nurse w ­ ere the models for the preliminary sketches of the fleeing ­women and ­children, but that does not limit their connotation ­here. 20. Saunders 14, 34. 21. Reynolds’s famous paintings of Rodney and Eliott ­were not painted ­until 1787–88, five years ­a fter victory at Les Saintes and the relief of Gibraltar. On the vexed rendering of veterans in the period, see Myrone 200–226 and 237–42. 22. For the use of this term, see Brown, Moral Capital. Brown traces fundamental transformations in the articulation of abolitionist sentiment in Britain to the advent of the American crisis. See especially 100–258. 23. See Brown, Moral Capital. 24. On the productive force of the enigma, see Barthes’s discussion of the hermeneutic code in S/Z 17–21. 25. On surrogation, see Roach Cities 2–3 and 279–81. 26. See Bowen, Mancke, and Reid 15–65. 27. Colley 143. See also Gould 181–214. 28. I am using “productive” h ­ ere in the Foucauldian sense that “power produces domains and rituals of truth,” Foucault, Discipline and Punish 194. 29. Davis, “Nineteenth-­Century Repertoire” 6. 30. Ibid. 31. Bratton. 32. The “liveness” that Phelan accords to per­for­mance has a supplementary afterlife in dif­fer­ent media 118, 146. 33. See O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis 6–29; O’Quinn, “Insurgent Allegories”; and Mulrooney 21–106. 34. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire 20–21. 35. Bal 183. 36. On this issue, see especially Roach, Cities. 37. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire 28. 38. See De Lauretis 97, 144–45, and Laplanche and Pontalis. 39. For differing methodological approaches to the question of sociability and the public, see Russell, ­Women; Worrall; and Freeman, Antitheatricality. 40. Retiford, Plenary Address, ISECS, Edinburgh 2019. 41. Cohen, Global Indies 5–10. 42. Bourdieu 52–79. 43. Berlant, Cruel Optimism 3. 44. See Mary Favret’s reading of Persuasion in “Everyday War.” 45. The quoted phrase is adapted from the subtitle to Berlant’s The Female Complaint. 46. See O’Quinn, “Navigating Crisis,” for a specific application of Berlant’s notion of the good life to Sheridan’s The Rivals. 47. Berlant, Cruel Optimism 10. 48. Ibid. 16. 49. See Macpherson 386–90 for a discussion of the blurring between form and genre in recent criticism. 50. On multimodality, see Prior xx. Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” is the canonical statement regarding the constitutive contamination of generic norms.



Notes to Pages 22–48

323

51. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.” 52. Like Levine and Latour, I understand social and po­liti­cal praxis to have a formal dimension. See Levine 3. 53. See Wahrman 238–42 and Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims. 54. On the shift in trade relations, see Marshall, Remaking 97–116 and 260–81. On the movement of p ­ eople, see Marshall, Remaking 219–38. See also Sussman ch. 3. 55. For a direct discussion of this issue, see my reading of George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico in Entertaining Crisis 275–301. See also Wheeler x. 56. See my “Charlotte Smith’s Littoral Zones” and my consideration of the imperial critique mobilized by Inchbald and Burney in Staging Governance 125–63, 222–58, and Hannah Cowley in Entertaining Crisis 252–68. On this ­matter, see Ashley Cohen’s reading of Evelina in The Global Indies 63–71; Roberts on Smith’s formal innovations; Bolton, “Imperial Sensibilities,” on Burney and colonialism; and Nachumi 79–146 and Frank, The Novel Stage 97–156 on Burney and Inchbald. 57. See especially The Female Complaint. 58. See Ashley Cohen, “Aristocratic Imperialists.” 59. On the importance of sexual regulation and biopolitics more generally to the practice of colonialism, see Stoler, Race 19–136 and Carnal Knowledge 41–78. 60. See Bickham, Making Headlines. 61. See William Cowper, The Task (4.1–87) in The Poems of William Cowper, Volume II 1782–1785. For a discussion of Cowper’s complex engagement with the newspaper, see Ellison 219–37; Goodman, “Loophole” 25–52; Favret, War at a Distance 49–84; and my own discussion of this passage in Entertaining Crisis 20–24. Ellison documents the relationship between lines in the poem and specific numbers of the Morning Chronicle and the General Eve­ning Post. 62. Gould 148–80. 63. For a detailed account of the strategic importance of the b ­ attle, see Spinney 296–316 and Trew 45–56. 64. Wahrman 238–43 and Fliegelman. 65. For a full discussion of ­t hese prints and other repre­sen­ta­t ions of Native Americans in the period, see Troy Bickham, Savages Within the Empire. 66. See Brown’s discussions of Granville Sharp and ­others’ re­sis­tance to slavery in the 1760s and 1770s in Moral Capital 92–206, and Flavell, When London Was the Capital of Amer­ i­ca. 67. See Greene 224–27. 68. ­A fter all, t­ here was internal division among the colonies and ongoing conflict with First Nations. 69. Fordham has identified an entire subgenre of “peace prints” that almost invariably represent peace in disastrous terms. See “Satirical Peace Prints” 64–89. 70. Davis 7. 71. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance 200–221 for a discussion of how the Begams ­were represented during the trial of Warren Hastings. 72. See O’Quinn, “Scissors and N ­ eedles.” 73. See Derrida, “The Law of Genre.” 74. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance 260–68, and Stoler, Race 19–136.

324

Notes to Pages 51–74

Chapter 1 1. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 1.277. 2. See Booth’s sequential discussion of t­hese plays in his essay on Siddons in Booth, Stokes, and Bassnett 17–30. 3. Favret, War at a Distance 9–21. 4. See Russell, Theatres of War; Straub, “The Soldier in the Theatre”; Jenks, Naval Engagements; and Taylor, “Staging the War at Sea”. 5. See Marsden, Fatal Desire 84. 6. Playing the allegorical implications to their fullest, this also means that Sir Gilbert’s eventual ac­cep­t ance of Charles allows him to forestall charges of tyranny. As George III’s allegorical type, he avoids both the responsibility for misrule and the explicit charges of tyranny that dogged him not only during the war but also during the early years of Pitt’s ministry. 7. The scholarship on Siddons’s celebrity is extensive. See Heather McPherson, Art and Celebrity and “Searching for Sarah Siddons”; West, “Public and Private Roles”; Brooks 117–41; Gibson; Engel, Fashioning Celebrity 26–58; Worrall 105–18; Rosenthal, “The Sublime”; and Nussbaum 278–84. On celebrity more generally, see Roach It; Worrall; Lockhurst and Moody; Rojek; and Czennia. 8. Marsden, Fatal Desire 112. 9. See Munns 161. 10. Cowper, Letters 1.555. 11. Marsden, Fatal Desire 87. 12. West, “Public and Private Roles” 6. See also Asleson 52–55. 13. On ­t hese satires, see Rosenthal, “The Sublime” 64–69. See Brooks 123–24 for an account of direct personal attacks on Siddons’s use of her experience of maternal loss. 14. Brooks, 119–21, 118. 15. Asleson 53. 16. See Foucault, “Society” 241. On biopolitics more generally, see Lemke. 17. For a useful summary of the emergence of thanatopolitics from Foucault’s conception of the biopo­liti­cal, see Deutscher 64–104, Rabinow and Rose, and Han 149–61. For the classic discussion of the term, see Agamben. 18. In this regard, Siddons’s per­for­mances “spoke to what Linda Colley has called ‘the cult of prolific maternity’ . . . ​permeating the cultural sphere” 118. On this point, see Colley 238–40. 19. Carlson, Theatre of Romanticism 163. 20. See Marsden’s recent discussion of Siddons’s per­for­mance in the play in Theatres of Feeling 70–101. The notices of Siddons’s per­for­mances are laudatory, but most papers impugned the play: see MC 1 November 1782, MP 31 October 1782, and PA 14 November 1782. The PA review encourages her to take up Lady Randolph in John Home’s Douglas instead. 21. See PA, 9 November 1782, and MP, 12 and 23 November 1782. See also MC, 27 January 1783, for an extensive comparison between Siddons and Mary Ann Yates in the role of Jane Shore. 22. See Anderson, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss, and my Entertaining Crisis. 23. News of the relief of Gibraltar came on 7 November 1782, the day before Jane Shore opened on 8 November.



Notes to Pages 74–98

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24. See Brown, Ends of Empire 80–86 on the function of vio­lence in Jane Shore. 25. Freeman, Character’s Theater 134. 26. On the normativity inherent in the rhetorical alignment of futurity with the protection of the child, what he refers to as “reproductive futurism,” see Edelman, No ­Future 9–31. 27. Freeman, Character’s Theater 140. 28. Ibid. 143. 29. Mitchell 48. 30. Burke, Writings and Speeches 4.155–56. 31. Ibid. 4.156. 32. The alignment of act 3 and con­temporary politics was remarkably resilient. This is MH for 14 January 1787: “Mr. Fox is so much improved in the pathetic since he has attended Mrs. Siddons’s per­for­mance that he means to adopt the buskin in his f­uture declamations. The sublime and beautiful criterion of taste, has attended several of his rehearsals, previous to the next Westminster meeting, and is so much charmed by his manner that intends collecting a reservoir of tears to enable himself to weep by way of illustration, and puff hypo critic upon the day of experiment!” 33. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 1.286–87. 34. Ibid. 1.302. 35. Burke, Writings and Speeches 4.156. 36. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 1.302–4. 37. Ibid. 1.305. 38. Ibid. 1.307. 39. Pitt’s asexuality perfectly contrasted with Fox’s earthy, libertine qualities. 40. Edmund Burke deploys this same trope in Reflections with regard to Sarah Siddons. Boaden may well be rehearsing this rhetorical move to further ridicule Burke. 41. The appellation is a joke on Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, his most famous publication prior to the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France. 42. Pitt and Eliott emerge as cognate figures ­here for a more restrained fiscal-­military state. Just as the prime minister’s moderation was figured by his asexual demeanor, the intense phallicism of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous 1787 portrait of Eliott was contained by the general’s aged wisdom.

Chapter 2 1. For a compelling discussion of the remediation of the Peace of Paris and of West’s unfinished painting, see Bugg 141–59. For more general discussions of the peace pro­cess, see Kaplan 431–42 and Coleman 309–40. 2. www​.­metmuseum​.­org​/­a rt​/­collection​/­search​/­656864. 3. Fordham has identified an entire subgenre of “peace prints” that almost invariably represent peace in disastrous terms. Significantly, ­t hese prints frequently have recourse to the Weird ­Sisters from Macbeth for their satire. See “Satirical Peace Prints” 64–89. 4. See David Taylor’s specific discussion of this print (110) and the place of the Weird ­Sisters in the remediation of Macbeth in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries in Politics 101–39. 5. Taylor, Politics 105.

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Notes to Pages 100–113

6. See Dobson, The Making of a National Poet, and Ritchie, ­Women and Shakespeare. 7. The low point was in 1781–82, with only six dif­fer­ent scripts in production at Drury Lane. Covent Garden in the same season was r­ unning twelve dif­fer­ent Shakespearean plays and four (Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Romeo and Juliet) ­were played in excess of four times each. 8. For a full discussion of Sheridan’s complex response to Garrick’s death and of The Critic as a post-­A merican play, see my Entertaining Crisis 223–39. 9. Smith had effectively “owned” the role at Drury Lane a­ fter Garrick s­ topped playing the part. See Holland 86. 10. See Cunningham. 11. Thomas Campbell 2.10–39. 12. See Donohue, “Kemble and Mrs. Siddons” 65–85, and McDonald 124–30. Pascoe also remarks upon this in Romantic Theatricality 19–20. 13. See McPherson, “Masculinity, Femininity” 299–333. 14. This has further implications when we take into account Michael Dobson’s highly persuasive discussion of Garrick’s self-­alignment with Shakespeare. See Dobson, “John Philip Kemble” 164–84 and The Making of a National Poet, 164–222. 15. Rosenthal, “The Sublime” 75. 16. See Pascoe, Sarah Siddons Audio Files 96–103. See also McGillivray, as well as Oya 77–88. 17. In a dif­fer­ent context, Kathryn Pratt has singled out the importance of Siddons’s gestural economy to her per­for­mance of melancholia. See her “Thomas Sheridan, Sarah Siddons” 46–69. 18. See Thomas Campbell 2.10–39. 19. Rosenthal, “The Sublime” 74. 20. See Foucault, “Governmentality.” 21. Thomas Campbell 2.33. 22. Ibid. 2.18. 23. Rosenthal, “The Sublime” 76. 24. As Chelsea Phillips observes, Siddons played Lady Macbeth on numerous occasions while pregnant in 1785. Phillips’s reading of how her pregnant body could inflect key speeches is fascinating; see especially “I have given suck” 26–29. 25. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 1.132–33. 26. For further sense of the fierceness of Pritchard’s Lady Macbeth, see Rosenberg 73–86. 27. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies 2.149–50. 28. Davies, Life of Garrick 2.183–84. 29. Most reports indicate that Smith’s interpretation of the role mimicked Garrick’s per­ for­mance. 30. See Pop 80. Pop states, “The work should be titled with the caption Fuseli inscribed on it: “MY HUSBAND!—­I’ve done the deed.” Fuseli unquestionably indexes the image to this speech, but the title used by the Zu­rich Kunsthaus makes it clear that the drawing is connected to a specific performance—­t hat is, it is pegged to the repertoire, not to the archive. 31. This is especially notable in the painting of the scene, now in the Tate collection, first exhibited in 1812. ­Every time Fuseli returns to this scene, Lady Macbeth’s profile comes to look more and more like Siddons.



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32. My insistence on per­for­mance h ­ ere is to mark a methodological difference from Carr and Knapp’s analy­sis of ­t hese images as ways of understanding the text. Their reading of the deployment of the emblematic tradition in Zoffany’s picture is extremely productive, but the discussion of Fuseli’s drawing anachronistically reverts to generalized notions of melodrama. Despite registering that t­hese pictures are related to specific productions of Macbeth, Carr and Knapp do not consider them as remediations of per­for­mance. By moving so quickly to the Shakespearean text, the repertoire’s dynamic relation to history is negated. 33. McPherson, “Masculinity, Femininity” 309. 34. Burden has drawn attention to a similar divergence in per­for­mance protocols from the world of dance that resonate with Siddons’s interventions (55–69). 35. Thomas Campbell 2.37–39. 36. For a discussion of the importance of masculinity to this debate, see Holland 86. 37. Whately 11–12, 14, 50. 38. Ibid. 50. 39. Kemble, Macbeth Reconsidered 7–8. Kemble refers to the Sergeant as Captain. 40. See Straub’s discussion of the Whately-­Kemble debate and the question of martial masculinity in Macbeth in “The Soldier in the Theater” 429–47. See also Donohue, Dramatic Character 201–14. 41. The press singled out significant changes to the blocking of ­battle scenes in act 1 and act 5, although it is unclear that Kemble was mobilizing large numbers of minor players as he would in l­ater productions. See, for example, the Morning Chronicle for 1 January 1789: “The method in which the army of Macbeth is now introduced upon the stage in the beginning of the play, seems to have taken its rise from judicious mea­sures of Mr. Kemble, and it is but a piece of justice to that performer, to acknowledge it is attended with pleasing effect.” 42. Even with a strong sense of historical distance, some scripts simply could not be performed. Kemble’s desire to stage Julius Caesar would have to wait almost twenty years to be realized. On this issue, see Dobson, “John Philip Kemble” 96–99. As Jacobus has discussed at length, ­later critics, including William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ­were deeply uncomfortable with the per­for­mance of regicide and she argues that this discomfort contributed to claims that Macbeth was better for the closet than the stage. See Jacobus. 43. Balderston 725–26. 44. Donohue, Dramatic Character 201–14. 45. See O’Quinn, “Facing” and “Sir Joshua Reynolds.” 46. See Dias, and Brylowe 86–116. Barchas’s “Introduction” to the Shakespeare Gallery circa 1796 on the website What Jane Saw is extremely evocative. The site also provides reproductions of the images and the cata­log entries with the excerpted scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. 47. See Calè. 48. According to a letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 11 September 1788: “To prevent such expectations from taking root in the minds of tasteless individuals, it would not have been amiss had Messrs. Boydell advertised us that their first instructions to their artists was to forget, if pos­si­ble, they had ever seen the plays of Shakespeare as they are absurdly decorated in modern theatres, and by no means to adopt the ideas of ornament or attitude from any living man­ag­er or performers of ­either sex.” As Barchas indicates, Boydell may well have written this anonymous puff himself.

328

Notes to Pages 128–144

49. Reynolds’s painting of Macbeth’s second engagement with the Witches remained unfinished ­because of his encroaching blindness, but the unfinished canvas was displayed in the South Room of the Shakespeare Gallery by the early 1790s. 50. As David Taylor has argued, the Weird S­ isters invest the play with comic ele­ments throughout the ­century (Politics 105). 51. Junod 144. 52. Henry Fuseli, The Analytical Review, May 1789, quoted in Junod 143. 53. Junod 144. 54. See Jacobus. 55. See especially Donohue, “Kemble’s Production of Macbeth (1794)” 63–74. 56. Paradoxically, the other innovation that generated the most discussion was Kemble’s decision to concretize the “spirits grey” in act 4 by having c­ hildren onstage dressed as miniature spirits. H ­ ere the literalization of the script was uniformly ridiculed and seen as contradicting the elimination of Banquo’s ghost. 57. See Oya 89–93. 58. Marvin Carlson made this point more generally in Places of Per­for­mance and more recently in The Haunted Stage. 59. See Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death. 60. On Siddons’s late style, see Freeman, “Mourning” 597–629.

Chapter 3 1. Reynolds’s famous painting David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy is perhaps the most explicit indication of this versatility. 2. See Straub, Sexual Suspects 127–50, Klein 136–77, and Brooks 63–96. 3. Tomalin makes this observation in Mrs. Jordan’s Profession 70. 4. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 1.234–35. For a detailed discussion of the painting’s execution, see Bennett and Leonard, “A Sublime and Masterly Per­for­mance.” 5. As Hughes has shown, ­t here was also a remarkably high number of marine paintings showing engagements at sea, many of which depict actions related to Rodney’s campaigns in the West Indies in the 1784 Royal Acad­emy (RA) show. See Hughes 139–52. As I argued in the Introduction, the constant invocation of Rodney reframes loss as gain and often allows for more searching questions to be asked in the same venue. 6. Reynolds had painted Abington as the Comic Muse in the late 1760s on a much grander scale. This e­ arlier painting is almost precisely the same scale as Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse but did not achieve renown. It was painted over the period 1764–68. She is in a white flowered dress holding a comic mask, and a statue of Thalia is partially vis­i­ble in the background. See Mannings 1.55. 7. The scholarship on Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse is extensive. See especially McPherson’s two essays on the painting, “Picturing Tragedy” and “Tragic Pallor.” Weinsheimer’s “Mrs.  Siddons” and Roach’s “Patina” offer further perspectives on the complexity of this painting. 8. According to Mannings, Walpole had significant influence on l­ater reception. He disparaged the Abington picture and perhaps over-­praised the Siddons (1.56) 9. Hoppner’s picture split the reviewers: The St. James Chronicle for 12–14 May 1786 declared it “by far the best work this artist has produced,” whereas the Morning Post opined that



Notes to Pages 145–153

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“the figure of this actress is lamely drawn, badly coloured, and wants even the h ­ umble merit of resemblance” (10 May 1786). 10. The Country Girl had last been performed at Drury Lane on 16 December 1774. See Tomalin 50–51 and Brooks 93–94 on Jordan’s lobbying for the play. 11. Not all reviewers w ­ ere as sanguine. The Morning Chronicle for 17 November 1785, ­a fter expressing its yearning for the glories of Garrick’s theater, essentially accuses Jordan of overacting. By her third appearance in the role, she had silenced the critics. 12. Jordan also played a breeches part in Shield’s Rosina and in Cobb’s new comic opera The Strangers at Home. See GEP, 8–10 December 1785. The Morning Post for 9 December 1785 reported that “Mrs. Jordan made a very graceful female husband.” 13. See my Entertaining Crisis 219. 14. See Russell, ­Women 119–52, and Nussbaum 226–64. 15. See my Entertaining Crisis 62–89 for an extended discussion of the play and of the controversy it invoked in the press. 16. See David Taylor, Theatres of Opposition 108–10; Choudhury, Battacharya 91–137; and O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis 133–37. 17. For recent discussions of the po­liti­cal import of fashion, see Keen, Lit­er­a­ture, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, and Campbell, Historical Style. 18. See my reading of this act of shaming/correction in Entertaining Crisis 70. 19. See Russell, ­Women 119–52. 20. See O’Quinn, “Theatre, Islam” 645–51. 21. The play’s humiliation of the sultan also tallies with the kind of anti-­Nabob sentiment that accompanied critiques of the East India Com­pany. 22. Garrick, “Preface,” The Country Girl vi. All subsequent references to this play ­w ill be given by act, scene, and page number. 23. On the cosmopolitan overtones of The Country Wife, see Rosenthal, Ways of the World 72–87. 24. In keeping with our reading of Jane Shore in Chapter 2, we could call Belville the comic version of William Shore. 25. Garrick’s adaptation is post‒Seven Years’ War and thus we can postulate a realignment of masculinity for a newly triumphal empire. In this light, the play’s alteration of Wycherley’s script is even more acutely felt in the wake of imperial humiliation. 26. The shift in locale is identifiable by the repeated reference to Rosamond’s Pond, a ­water feature in the park referred to in both Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift and Congreve’s Way of the World. The Exchange implies prostitution; Rosamond’s Pond was more frequently associated with disastrous love. See Wheatley 3.168–69. 27. Brooks 86–87. 28. Garrick vi. 29. See Brooks’s discussion of Leigh Hunt’s retrospective accounts of Jordan’s girlish per­for­mances 102–3. 30. Perry notes that this equation of Jordan’s acting style and “nature” was central to Hazlitt’s 1815 account of her celebrity 146. See Brooks 93–100. 31. See Klein 157–64. 32. Nussbaum, Rival Queens 204–13. 33. Pointon 48.

330

Notes to Pages 153–175

34. See Gernerd. 35. See Brooks 73–76. 36. Brooks 70. 37. It is intriguing that in its earliest productions Barnacle’s critique is aimed at the debt incurred during the Seven Years’ War. In the post-­A merican moment, Barnacle’s dressing down of Sprightly speaks to the loss of colonial possessions. Having spent a ­great deal to beat back the French claims in North Amer­i­ca both at Quebec and in the West Indies, now ­t hose very same territories are all that remain. 38. The Romp is not the only play in Jordan’s rise to fame in 1785 that turns on the articulation of whiteness. James Cobb’s comic opera The Strangers at Home was another Jordan vehicle whose relation to post-­American race politics warrants attention, but this time the issue has to do with white survivors of Barbary slavery. 39. Thomas Campbell 2.10–11. 40. Ibid. 2.11. 41. Reviewers w ­ ere fascinated by Siddons’s costume in this scene. 42. It appears to be a miscitation or an adaptation of a line from Charlotte Smith’s “Elegiac Sonnet #7: On Sleep”: “Float in light visions round Morpheus’ head.” 43. Siddons, Reminiscences 17–18. Quoted in McPherson, “Tragic Pallor” 480. 44. Mbembe. 45. One could argue that the racist speeches in The Romp are far more explic­itly offensive than blackface scenes in The Padlock or Inkle and Yarico, and yet we tend not to think of Jordan in this way. 46. See Kates, Clark. 47. Roach, It 1–21. 48. Her scarcity continued well into the next season. She appeared only four times in 1786–87 with her first appearance in The Provok’d Husband not u ­ ntil 26 January 1787. 49. In the light of the argument to follow, we could speculate that Euphrosyne is a type for Elizabeth Farren, and thus this picture sits squarely in the realm of Drury Lane. 50. See also Roach, It, 117–45 for a wide-­ranging discussion of hair’s significance in the eigh­teenth c­ entury and beyond. 51. Woffington’s sapphic allure in travesty was widely recognized especially with regard to her turn as Sir Harry Wildair. See Klein 157–64 and Brooks 71–76. 52. See Brooks 64–65, 82. 53. We could argue that a similar ­t hing was already afoot in The Country Girl for Harcourt and Belville are sal­vaged by their conspicuously middle-­class attributes. 54. Woffington’s per­for­mances in The Constant C ­ ouple also generated re­sis­tance. See Brooks 77–78. 55. Woffington played Wildair seventy-­t hree times over fourteen seasons in London and numerous times in Dublin. Jordan performed Sir Harry Wildair twelve times in the 1788–89 season (with Henry the Eighth Drury Lane’s strongest showing in a season that saw Inkle and Yarico surging to twenty-­four per­for­mances at Covent Garden) with diminishing numbers of per­for­mances in the subsequent seasons. During the season t­ here is much discussion of her per­for­mance, but in retrospective accounts, such as Boaden’s Life of Mrs. Jordan, the play is barely mentioned. 56. Brooks 67.



Notes to Pages 176–198

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57. Richard Wroughton, who played Standard, was born in 1748, therefore he would have been forty when cast in this role. 58. Brooks likewise argues that this per­for­mance of Jordan’s “au­t hen­tic” self is the key to her celebrity 93–109. 59. Brooks 70. 60. Sexualized travesty would increasingly migrate to pantomime. 61. Andrew 43–82. 62. Nussbaum 219. 63. See Phillips, “Bodies in Play,” and Engel and McGirr, Stage ­Mothers. 64. See Tomalin, and Phillips, “Thalia’s Sweetest Child.” 65. The vast array of principal boys in nineteenth-­century pantomime can be seen as part of Jordan’s legacy. ­These roles ran the gamut from boyish mischief to more knowing expressions of sexual desire that we can trace back to Woffington.

Chapter 4 1. In this regard, Siddons and Jordan ­were very much a part of the changing understanding of motherhood in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury that has been explored by Bowers, Mellor, Spencer, Batchelor, Kipp, Ledoux, and, with specific relation to the stage, by Engel and McGirr. 2. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 1.277. 3. Throughout this chapter, I refer to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII or All Is True by the title Henry the Eighth to keep in line with late eighteenth-­century usage. 4. Boaden offers a lengthy discussion of the impeachment impugning the motives of man­ag­ers and defending Pitt. As already noted with regard to Boaden’s comparison of Siddons and Pitt in Chapter 1, ­t hese po­liti­cal digressions in Boaden’s prose are unusual and indirectly point to impor­tant historical implications that can be excavated from the more immediate press reviews. See Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble 1.409–12. 5. McDonald 117. 6. Siddons’s celebrity and Kemble’s management ensured that the play would run for twelve per­for­mances in the 1788–89 season (although all but one of t­ hose per­for­mances came before early February). Over the next five seasons the play would only be mounted twice a year. 1795–96 was the exception with three per­for­mances, but the play was shelved ­a fter 15 January 1796 ­until 1806. 7. In Memoirs of John Philip Kemble, Boaden emphasizes that Kemble was deeply involved with managing the pro­cessions (1.423). 8. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance 164–221. See also Rolli. 9. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance 186–89; Suleri 49–74; and Teltscher 157–91. 10. Derry 4. 11. Andrea 99–123. 12. See ibid. 100. 13. The East India Com­pany’s chief remaining rivals in India at this moment ­were the Sultans of Mysore who w ­ ere backed by the French. 14. Andrea 109. 15. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance 201–3. 16. Andrea 112–23.

332

Notes to Pages 199–205

17. Boaden’s narrative of Siddons and Johnson conferring over the dignity of Queen Katherine’s role ties the greatest actress to the greatest man of letters. But buried in his account is an explicit alignment of Buckingham’s trial and the Hastings trial. See Boaden, Memoirs . . . Siddons, 2.261, 263. 18. Thomas Campbell 2.139–52. Campbell’s account of the per­for­mance history of the play is highly inaccurate. He builds much of his reading on the “certainty” that it was performed for Elizabeth (2.134–39). Significantly, he implicitly recognizes that Siddons’s earliest per­for­mances w ­ ere not acclaimed when he states, “I cannot say, from my own observation, ­whether she improved or not in per­for­mance of Queen Katherine, but she used to pride herself in having done so in all her ­g reat characters; and I cannot suppose her to have been self-­ deceived” (2.139–40). This bridging paragraph opens onto Campbell’s citation of the fulsome account attributed to Terry and printed by James Ballantyne. Close attention to how Campbell builds this panegyric gives a sense of how Siddons’s celebrity was retroactively amplified. 19. According to the New London Stage Proj­ect, Henry the Eighth had six per­for­mances in the 1806 season, two in 1810, and three in 1811. All of the famous images of Siddons in the role date from this point or a­ fter. The earliest is a stipple point engraving from 1806; Henry Harlow’s painting of the trial scene is from 1817. 20. Boaden’s treatment of Kemble’s accession to the role is also slippery. He notes that he had to work up the role when Bensley became ill during its opening season at Drury Lane; however, he follows with, “But when he came afterwards to study the part more profoundly, and to take in all the collateral aids derived from Cavendish and Fiddes, he spoke to me of the rawness of his first per­for­mance; as indeed he was entitled to do, from the elaboration which, at Covent Garden Theatre, rendered his Wolsey one of the most affecting moral lessons on the stage” (Memoirs of John Philip Kemble 1.422) Kemble became man­ag­er of Covent Garden in 1803. 21. Th ­ ose supporters of Fox who survived the 1784 election ­were often referred to as Foxite rather than Whig, b ­ ecause they w ­ ere committed, like their leader, to reining in the power of George III and by extension William Pitt. 22. Coriolanus, in Thomas Sheridan’s version, played at Covent Garden in intermittent runs from the 1754–55 season to the 1767–68 season. Garrick ran a successful version in 1754, but the play stayed out of Drury Lane’s roster u ­ ntil Kemble’s version of the play. 23. Hazlitt, 53. 24. Pocock 246–317. 25. See Sachs 189–220; Dobson, “John Philip Kemble” 55–104; and Bate. 26. See Mahoney and Atkinson. 27. Sachs 200. 28. Odell 2:104. 29. The play requires two Forum sets and I think it is likely that Hodgkin’s view was supplemented by o ­ thers. This helps to explain why a reviewer of Macready’s 1838 production of Coriolanus remembers, “The pictures which Kemble gave when he revived the play might be splendid, but they w ­ ere utterly unreal—­t hey clustered fine buildings together with equal disregard to the proprieties of place or time—­t he arch of Severus or Constantine, the Coliseum, the pillar of Trajan, all the grandeurs of imperial Rome, flaunted away within three hundred years of the first birth of the city” (Sachs 197). 30. Sachs 190.



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31. All references to the play are to John Philip Kemble, Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron (London: J. Christie, 1789). The 1789 edition refers to the play as a tragedy and is available in facsimile from Cornmarket Press (London: 1970) with an introduction by Inga-­Stina Ewbank. 32. Thomson, Coriolanus 62. 33. Ripley provides a careful comparison between Thomson, Sheridan, and Shakespeare in Coriolanus on Stage 95–108. 34. Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage 103. 35. Ibid. 104. 36. See Liddle. 37. See Armitage. 38. See Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, for one attempt to capture this despotic condition’s permeation of everyday life. 39. Sheridan, Coriolanus ii. 40. See Smith, Handel’s Oratorios 271–73 and 299–303. On the importance of this air in ­later settings, see O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis 247–448, 332–33, and 348–52. 41. Sen 13. 42. ­There are more than 300 drawings in the folios, split evenly between Coriolanus and Kemble’s 1794 production of Lodoiska. The drawings are not labeled, but t­ here is a list of acts and scenes in Greenwood’s hand that seems to roughly correspond to the order of the folio. 43. One of Greenwood’s drawings of the arch has a sketch of the arch from the top that suggests that it was divided into two interlocking sections that likely would have slid into and out of place along grooves from the wings. Since the scene needs three “Streets of Rome” it is likely that the same backdrop would have done t­ riple ser­v ice for act 2, scenes 1, 3, and 5. 44. Considering the choreography of the ovation, it seems more likely that the Triumphal Arch and the Senate building ­were built structures, but it is also pos­si­ble that they descended into place as flies. 45. Again, the reverberations of “filial piety” from Sheridan’s “Speech on the Begams Charge” seem to be still vibrating through the mediascape. 46. Pocock 257–61. 47. Baker 111. 48. On the dialectical image, see Benjamin, Arcades 471; N7a, 5; and Pensky 180–81. 49. We could suggest that Hamilton’s picture gives us a glimpse of how ele­ments of the repertoire can remain latent, available for reactivation at a ­later point, especially in the way that the child mimics Volumnia’s gestures. 50. Baker 112. 51. It is not the only print that suggests that Pitt has effectively performed a coup. 52. See Barrell, Spirit of Despotism and Imagining the King’s Death. 53. Quoted in Dobson, “John Philip Kemble” 76. On Inchbald’s “Remarks” in general, see Freeman, “On the Art of Dramatic Probability.” 54. See O’Quinn, “Stealing Culture.”

Chapter 5 1. Ahmed 21–49. 2. Burke, “Thoughts” 316. 3. See O’Quinn, “Insurgent Allegories” and “Stealing Culture.”

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Notes to Pages 229–243

4. See Derry; O’Quinn, “Fox’s Tears”; and Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death. 5. See Moody; Cox, Romanticism 39–55, 70–91 and “Illegitimate Pantomime”; Gamer; Hadley; Kwint; Newey; Mulrooney; Van Kooy and Cox; Frank, “At the Intersections”; Bratton; Rahill; and Tait. 6. Blue-­Beard played for sixty-­four nights in the 1797–98 season, thirty-­eight nights in 1798–99, and twenty-­four per­for­mances in 1799–1800; and it remained popu­lar throughout the early nineteenth c­ entury. 7. See Misty G. Anderson 139–200 for overviews of both Cowley and Inchbald’s work in this period. 8. Marsden, “Richard Cumberland.” See also Bannett, “Cumberland’s Benevolent Hebrew.” 9. The play opens on 29 January 1793 and runs for an extraordinary thirty-­t wo per­for­ mances in its first run. I am using Cox and Gamer’s edition of the play; therefore, citations give act, scene, and line number. 10. Katherine S. Green 47. 11. See Russell, Theatres of War 11, and Moody 49–50. 12. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​of John Philip Kemble 2.78–79. 13. Ibid. 2.80. 14. For a useful discussion of how the same reviewer transfers his ideological critique into a critique of generic hybridity, see Moody 49–50. 15. That “Philo Briton” can cite the play verbatim suggests that the contributor was associated e­ ither with Inchbald or with Covent Garden. 16. See Thompson, Making 70–72. 17. See Thompson, “Moral Economy” in Customs in Common 185–258. 18. In a strictly theatrical sense, the question of food rioting resonates powerfully with the rebellious street scene that opens Kemble’s 1789 Coriolanus. 19. For a succinct account of the relationship between physiocracy and classical po­liti­cal economy in Britain, see Meek 345–63. 20. Bolton, ­Women 39. 21. Misty G. Anderson 188. 22. See ibid. 190–91, Katherine S. Green 58–61, and Garnai 715–16 on Harmony as a vehicle for institutional critique. 23. This nightmare would become more palpable during the naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore in 1797. 24. See Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs” in Customs in Common 16–97. 25. Many of the papers recognized that Placid was based on Foote’s Jerry Sneak from The Mayor of Garrett. See the London Magazine, February 1793, 92. This intertextual gesture is impor­tant b ­ ecause Foote’s satire ridicules the braggadocio of Major Sturgeon during a period of peace between the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary War. If Foote’s play is resonating in the minds of audience members, then the parallel would have been quite complex. Inchbald’s reworking of the Jerry Sneak plot is radically dif­fer­ent from Foote’s—it follows the same subjection-­rebellion-­subjection structure, but the emphasis in Inchbald is on the playing of roles. On a more abstract level, the connection to Foote’s play offers a subtextual critique of camp culture that Gillian Russell has discussed in Theatres of War. In a sense, Inchbald’s play rehearses much of The Mayor of Garrett but reorganizes the class identities of the characters.



Notes to Pages 243–267

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26. See my “Scissors and N ­ eedles” 105–25 for an extended discussion of Inchbald and sexual economy. 27. See Ashley Cohen, “Aristocratic Imperialists.” 28. Foucault, “Governmentality” 216. 29. MC, 29 October 1795. 30. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​of John Philip Kemble 2.140. 31. Dobson, “John Phillip Kemble” 97. 32. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​of John Philip Kemble also rec­ords Kemble’s success as Publius in The Roman F ­ ather in the 1794–95 season 2.134 and, in the pro­cess, he sends up the French as false Romans. 33. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling 149–65. 34. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​of John Philip Kemble 2.140–41. 35. Cumberland, The Wheel of Fortune 2.3.33. All subsequent references ­w ill be given by act, scene, and page number. 36. Andrew 43–82. 37. Cumberland’s script does not directly allude to Macbeth 4.1.39–40 or to Burke’s weaponization of this speech, but he comes very close. 38. See Brown, Moral Capital. 39. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance 43–73. 40. See McCall on bourgeois tragedy and Hernandez 29–67 on Lillo in par­t ic­u ­lar. 41. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 2.324, 326. 42. Russell, “Killing Mrs. Siddons.” 43. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 2.325. 44. Russell, “Killing Mrs. Siddons.” 45. Schink iii. 46. See Gill for the standard discussion of the naval mutinies of 1797. 47. Eu­ro­pean Magazine, 33 April 1798, 260. 48. Monthly Mirror, April 1798, 232–33. 49. Ibid. 233. 50. Steinfort upbraids the Stranger for banishing his ­children 4.55–56. 51. Russell, “Killing Mrs. Siddons” 444. 52. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 2.324. 53. Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​of John Philip Kemble 2.210. Boaden’s elaboration quickly leaves Kemble b ­ ehind to expatiate on the failings of Mrs. Haller’s characterization 2.211–14. 54. This may be why audiences ­were so uncomfortable with the aging Siddons whose body could no longer be understood in reproductive terms. See West, “Siddons, Celebrity, and Regality” 195–96, and Freeman, “Mourning.”

Chapter 6 1. The attribution of this design to de Loutherbourg now seems reasonably secure. For a discussion of its genesis and its afterlife in other plays, see Jackson. Julie Carlson in “Race and Profit” argues that the scene lives on as a form of anti-­colonial visual counter-­memory in ­later plays concerned with slavery. 2. See McPherson, “Caricature” 607–31, for a discussion of the visual satires associated with the play. 3. On the play’s patriotism, see Reid, “Patriotism,” and Valladares, Staging 27–70.

336

Notes to Pages 267–280

4. See Van Kooy. 5. For example, Isaac Cruikshank’s The Delegates in Counsel, or Beggars on Horse­back (1797) depicts Sheridan, Fox, and ­others inciting the sailors to Jacobinism. 6. See Sheridan, Speeches 4.424–28. 7. See ibid. 4.397–410. Sheridan spoke on the ­matter four times prior to the speech of 2 June, on 8, 9, 23, and 26 May. 8. This position was shared by Fox throughout the 1790s. See Mitchell 161–63. 9. See Gill’s analy­sis of the Whig position (348–54) and especially his long citation from the Morning Chronicle for 12 June 1797. 10. See Taylor, Theatres 126–30, for a careful tracking of the play’s relation to Sheridan’s oratory on the suppression of rebellion in Ireland. Significantly, the naval mutinies and the Irish Rebellion ­were often aligned. 11. The opening and closing sections of this review are almost identical to the review in the Morning Post and the Gazetteer, 6 June 1799. 12. See O’Quinn, “Stealing Culture” 63–67, and “Insurgent Allegories” 15–20. 13. See Ayling 196. 14. The phrase “Maidstone Liberty” refers to the po­liti­cal debacle following the treason trial of the United Irishman Arthur O’Connor at Maidstone when prominent Whigs, including Fox and Sheridan, acted as character witnesses for the defendant. This detail reminds us of the play’s complex relationship to Irish politics, but I w ­ ill not be pursuing this issue in this chapter. O’Toole 351–54, Taylor, Theatres of Opposition 119–54, and Kiberd 159 direct attention to this issue, but Clare provides the fullest explication to date. 15. See Peters. 16. Dorothy George identifies Dundas, Grenville, Portland, and Windham in the foreground (7.564). 17. ­Because Pitt aligned himself so strongly with Hastings, the Whig attack on the former governor general of Bengal also impugned the ministry. 18. Sheridan, Pizarro 2.2.669. All subsequent references to the play ­w ill be presented parenthetically by act, scene, and page number. 19. Loftis, Sheridan 462. 20. Carlson, “Trying” 362. 21. See Ayling 199–200. Green, The Majesty of the P ­ eople 17–24. 22. See Loftis, Sheridan 466. 23. See Green’s The Majesty of the ­People for the manifold ways this phrase inflects the politics of the 1790s. 24. George makes this observation (7.566). 25. Both Loftis, Sheridan, and Cobbett (76–94) indict Sheridan on ­these grounds. I have attempted to build a genealogy of Sheridan’s theatrical practice that would lead to the complexity of this chapter’s reading of Pizarro in Entertaining Crisis. 26. EM, 24–27 May 1799. This passage appears verbatim in the Star for 25 May 1799 and a similar critique appears in the London Packet for 24–27 May 1799. 27. Rosenthal, “Entertaining W ­ omen” 164. 28. In 1799, the Duke of Clarence was no longer in active ser­v ice and, despite attempts to connect him not only with a successful naval c­ areer but also with Nelson’s victory at Aboukir, his public persona at this time was far from martial and anything but virtuous. 29. Bardsley 28–29.



Notes to Pages 280–288

337

30. Ibid. 30. 31. See Couture for a detailed discussion of how Siddons’s Lady Macbeth haunts the per­for­mance of Elvira. 32. Johnson, “The Critical Difference.” 33. This vulnerability is impor­tant b ­ ecause if we are to understand Pizarro as the type of Bonaparte, then it constitutes the all-­important point of re­sis­tance to his romantic claims on the imagination of his admirers (both sexual and po­liti­cal). 34. For a consideration of the interracial child as a key trope of enlightenment cosmopolitanism, see Rosenthal, “Juba’s Roman Soul.” 35. See Suleri 49–74 and O’Quinn, Staging Governance 165–221, for discussions of the deployment of sexuality in the Hastings oratory. See Marshall for the most cogent account of the proceedings. 36. Donohue, Dramatic Character 142–44. 37. This was actually an issue of g­ reat concern to the conservative reception of the play. The Anti-­Jacobin and o ­ thers w ­ ere quick to point out the religious distinction that prevents the Peru/Britain allegory from fully cohering. See Donohue, Dramatic Character 149. 38. In the Harvard manuscript version of Pizarro, Las Casas’s speech is introduced as a reflection: “What a dreadful reflexion! a ­Battle—­against whom? against a King, that a few days ago offered peace—­against a nation, that in innocence, and with purity worship their Creator in their accustomed way and manner.” This precursor text is intriguing not only ­because it makes less of a connection between Peruvian worship and Christian deism, but also b ­ ecause it describes a f­ uture event as susceptible to “reflexion.” The temporal disjunction makes the use of the word almost catachrestic, but it is impor­tant to recognize that this same construction is used with less linguistic vio­lence by Elvira shortly before Las Casas’s speech. 39. Gray and Hindson 13–27. 40. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 175. 41. Ibid. 175–76. 42. Christopher Reid notes, “In a famous exchange of letters with Philip Francis, who had read an early draft of portions of the Reflections, Burke sought to demonstrate the authenticity of the feelings expressed in his lament for the fallen queen by declaring that he had himself shed tears as he composed it (Corr. 6:85–92)” (“Patriotism” 12). 43. For a discussion of how this played out in parliamentary debate, see my “Fox’s Tears.” 44. That this is demonstrated in a scene where the representatives of inconsistency are actually on the side of good—­a nd on the British side of the allegory—­turns the satirical knife even further, for the audience is asked to identify with that which is understood to be treasonous in any conventional understanding of the term. 45. Donohue, Dramatic Character 147–48. 46. Anti-­Jacobin Review 3 (1799), 210. 47. Donohue, Dramatic Character 147. 48. More, Strictures 43, quoted in Russell, “Killing Mrs. Siddons” 438. 49. This takes on further significance when we recognize that Sheridan was widely satirized for Elvira’s supposed flaw. All of the graphic satires on the play, and much of the con­ temporary criticism, charge Sheridan with po­liti­cal inconsistency. 50. Boaden was particularly displeased with this aspect of the play. See Memoirs . . . ​John Philip Kemble 2.239–40.

338

Notes to Pages 290–302

51. Jameson 232. 52. Dr. Bisset in the Historical Magazine for June 1799, quoted in Britten 133. 53. Interestingly, this was what Pitt categorically refused to do during the mutiny crisis. Apparently, Sheridan offered his ser­v ices to Pitt at roughly the same time as his famous address to the House on 2 June. Pitt refused the offer. 54. See Taylor, Theatres 146, on the play’s instability. 55. “Mr. Sheridan’s Pizarro, as a fable, has unity of action; though, in the language of rhetoricians, an implex, instead of a ­simple story. The action is not only entire, but impor­tant and in­ter­est­ing; it tends to improve our virtuous sensibility. . . . ​Mr.  Sheridan’s Rolla we think a most masterly delineation of the best and highest moral qualities, tried in circumstances that required their full exertion; a combination of greatness and goodness of heroism, the kindest of affections, and the most exquisite sensibility, ministering to happiness. Excellent as the character of Rolla is, it does not transcend credibility. Feeling as he did, his attempt to snatch the child was perfectly natu­ral; but, we must say, we think the escape through all the Spanish guards rather beyond the bounds of probability; although, if admitted to be credible, one of the most in­ter­est­ing scenes in the piece” (Britten 131–32). Bisset is working in a thoroughly Aristotelian and Addisonian register when he describes the fable as “implex.” In the Spectator no. 297, Addison states that “The Fable . . . ​is, according to Aristotle’s Division, ­either S­ imple or Implex. It is called ­Simple when ­t here is no change of Fortune in it: Implex, when the Fortune of the chief Actor changes from Bad to Good, or from Good to Bad.” The word is apt in describing much of the play. 56. Britten 136. 57. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France 92–93. 58. See Taylor, Theatres 149–51, for a discussion of how Kemble’s staging of spectacle may have directed the play ­toward loyalist extravaganza thereby blunting some of the radical possibilities in the script. 59. Dutton’s remarks are quoted in Britten 134–35. 60. See Wiley 611. 61. On the child’s hybridity, see Peters 36–37 and Taylor, Theatres 148. 62. See Taylor, Theatres 148–49. 63. See Loftis, Sheridan, for a thorough discussion of Rolla’s connection to Whig critiques of the government. 64. See O’Quinn, “Fox’s Tears.” 65. See Wilson 1–28. 66. From James R. Anderson, An Actor’s Life. 67. Aged eigh­teen months, James Anderson played the role Cora’s baby in the 1813 production of Pizarro at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh. Mrs. Macnamara, the actress playing Elvira, was reported to have described the bridge scene as follows: “When John Kemble drew his sword and snatched the baby out of the soldier’s arms, holding him high in air, he struck a glorious attitude, looking more than mortal! Having waited for the applause, my dears, which ­every sensible and well-­t rained actor should do, he ran up the rocks t­ owards the rustic bridge, and, having reached the opposite side, began cutting with his sword the frail planks which divided him from his pursuing enemies, the Spaniards! Well, my dears, would you believe it, the stupid carpenters, having mistaken their cue, proceeded to remove the props and supports from under­neath the bridge before proper time? The plank which bore the hero and baby gave way with a loud crash, and nearly precipitated them into the roaring torrent below. Prov-



Notes to Pages 308–320

339

identially, however, the men who caused the mishap, with extraordinary presence of mind, instantly hastened to repair the mischief by holding up the bridge with all their united strength till Kemble and the baby ­were safely across the stream. The effect was appalling! but my dears, the applause was tremendous.” Anderson, An Actor’s Life 4.

Conclusion 1. Derrida, “The Law of Genre.” 2. On multimodality, see Prior. 3. See Duff, and Gray and Hindson. 4. See Boaden, Memoirs . . . ​Siddons 2.325–28 and Memoirs . . . ​of John Philip Kemble 2.239–41. 5. Loftis, The Politics of Drama 57. 6. Freeman, “What’s Love” 465. 7. It is hard to overstate the importance of this issue for eighteenth-­century Britons. Aside from the vast scholarship on Gibbon, McDaniel’s Adam Ferguson offers a succinct analy­sis of Rome’s function in Enlightenment historiography. 8. Indeed, Freeman shows how late eighteenth-­century versions of the play eliminated the lovers altogether. Inchbald in her Remarks on the play stated “that the love scenes are all insipid; but it should be considered that neither Cato nor his f­amily, with strict propriety, could love any t­ hing but their country.—­As this is a love which w ­ omen feel in a much less degree than men, and as bondage, not liberty, is ­woman’s wish, ‘Cato,’ with all its patriotism, must ever be a dull entertainment to the female sex; and men of course receive but ­little plea­sure from elegant amusements, of which w ­ omen do not partake.” See Addison 8. 9. Rosenthal, “Juba’s Roman Soul” 63. 10. Rosenthal’s argument resonates with my discussion of the relationship between Cora and Alonzo in Pizarro and of the significance of their child in Chapter 6. 11. See Shaffer, Litto, Furtwangler, and O’Quinn, “The Function” 493–98. 12. See Morning Chronicle, 24 and 31 December  1802, and Morning Post, 24 December 1802. Drury Lane also staged the play for a few per­for­mances in January 1809, but the revival was curtailed when the theater burned down in February. 13. On this roster of plays, see O’Quinn, “Anticipating Histories” 221–27. 14. The insertion of this kind of tableau was typical of Kemble’s practice, particularly in his Shakespearean production. Also typical was his publication of the acting version of the play. The published adaptation makes numerous alterations to act 4, scene 4. 15. This allegorical connection was enhanced by the fact that Kemble’s son Charles was cast as Juba. 16. Kemble, “The Tragedy of Cato” 46–47. 17. Ibid. 47. 18. For a detailed discussion of the changing attitudes t­oward suicide in this period, see Andrew 101–9. 19. See my Entertaining Crisis 312–26 about George III’s revivification following the War of American In­de­pen­dence. 20. Macready, Reminiscences 102. 21. Nietz­sche, “On the Uses” 63. 22. See Davis, “Performative Time.”

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Bibliography 345 Davis, Tracy C. “Nineteenth-­Century Repertoire.” Nineteenth-­Century Theatre and Film 36.2, October 2012, 6–28. https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­7227%2FNCTF​.­36​.­2​.­4. —­—­—. “Performative Time.” In Representing the Past: Essays in Per­for­mance Historiography, edited by Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait. University of Iowa Press, 2010, 142–67. De Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Indiana University Press, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7.1, Autumn 1980, 55–81. Derry, John. The Regency Crisis and the Whigs, 1788–89. Cambridge University Press, 1963. Deutscher, Penelope. Foucault’s F ­ utures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason. Columbia University Press, 2017. Dias, Rosie. Exhibiting En­glishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic. Yale University Press, 2013. Dobson, Michael. “John Philip Kemble.” In Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean: ­Great Shakespeareans, Volume 2, edited by Peter Holland. Bloomsbury, 2010, 96–99. —­—­—. The Making of a National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Clarendon Press, 1992. Donohue, Joseph W. Dramatic Character in the En­glish Romantic Age. Prince­ton University Press, 1970. —­—­—. “Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth: The Romantic Approach to Character.” Theatre Notebook 22.2, Winter 1967/68, 65–85. —­—­—. “Kemble’s Production of Macbeth (1794).” Theatre Notebook 21.2, Winter 1966/67, 63–74. Downs, Murray Scott. “George III and the Royal Coup of 1783.” Historian 27.1, November 1964, 56–74. Duff, David. Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford University Press, 2009. Ellison, Julie. “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World.” Modern Language Quarterly 62.3, September 2001, 219–37. Engel, Laura. Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-­Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making. Ohio State University Press, 2011. Engel, Laura, and Elaine M. McGirr. Stage ­Mothers: ­Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830. Bucknell University Press, 2014. Favret Mary. “Everyday War.” ELH 72.3, Fall 2005, 605–33. —­—­—. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern War­time. Prince­ton University Press, 2010. Flavell, Julie. When London Was the Capital of Amer­i­ca. Yale University Press, 2010. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Fordham, Douglas. British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. —­—­—. “Satirical Peace Prints and the Cartographic Unconscious.” In Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire, edited by John McAleer and John M. MacKenzie. Manchester University Press, 2015, 64–89. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 1998.

346 Bibliography —­—­—. “Governmentality.” In Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, edited by James D. Faubion. New Press, 1994, 201–22. —­—­—. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. Picador, 1997. Frank, Marcie. “At the Intersections of Mode, Genre, and Media: A Dossier of Essays on Melodrama.” Criticism 55.4, 2013, 535–45. —­—­—. The Novel Stage. Bucknell University Press, 2020. Freeman, Lisa. Antitheatricality and the Body Public. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. —­—­—. Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Stage. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. —­—­—. “Mourning the ‘Dignity of the Siddonian Form.’ ” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 27.3–4, Spring‒Summer 2015, 597–629. —­—­—. “On the Art of Dramatic Probability: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Remarks for the British Theatre.” Theatre Survey 62.2, May 2021, 163–81. —­—­—. “What’s Love Got to Do with Addison’s Cato?” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500– 1900 39.3, Summer 1999, 463–82. Furtwangler, Albert. “Cato at Valley Forge.” Modern Language Quarterly 41, 1980, 38–53. Gamer, Michael. “A ­Matter of Turf: Romanticism, Hippodrama, and Legitimate Satire.” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 28.4, 2006, 305–34. Garnai, Amy. “Radicalism, Caution, and Censorship in Elizabeth Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault.” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 47.3, Summer 2007, 703–22. Garrick, David. The Country Girl. Altered from Wycherley, by David Garrick. Bell, 1791. Genest, John. Some Account of the En­glish Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830. 10 vols. Bath, 1832. George, Mary Dorothy. Cata­logue of Po­liti­cal and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. 7 vols. British Museum, 1942. Gernerd, Elisabeth. “Pulled Tight and Gleaming: The Stocking’s Position Within Eighteenth-­ Century Masculinity.” Textile History 46.1, 2015, 3–27. Gibson, Megan E. “Sarah Siddons, Sensibility and Enthusiastic Devotion in the British Enlightenment.” Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 42.2, 2019, 193–209. Gill, Conrad. The Naval Mutinies of 1797. Manchester University Press, 1913. Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge University Press, 2004. —­—­—. “The Loophole in the Retreat: The Culture of News and the Early Life of Romantic Self-­Consciousness.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1, Winter 2003, 25–52. Gould, Elijah. The Per­sis­tence of Empire: British Po­liti­cal Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Gray, Tim, and Paul Hindson. Burke’s Dramatic Theory of Politics. Avebury, 1988. Green, Georgina. The Majesty of the ­People: Popu­lar Sovereignty and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s. Oxford, 2014. Green, Katherine S. “Mr. Harmony and the Events of January 1793: Elizabeth Inchbald’s ­Every One Has His Fault.” Theatre Journal 56.1, March 2004, 47–62. Greene, Jack P. “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution.” In The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2, edited by Peter J. Marshall. Oxford University Press, 1998, 208–30.

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352 Bibliography Roberts, Bethan. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eigh­ teenth ­Century. Liverpool University Press, 2019. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. Reaktion Books, 2001. Rolli, Chiara. The Trial of Warren Hastings: Classical Oratory and Reception in Eighteenth-­ Century ­England. Bloomsbury, 2019. Rosenberg, Marvin. “Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the Eigh­teenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In Focus on Macbeth, edited by John Russell Brown. Routledge, & Kegan Paul, 1982, 73–86. Rosenthal, Laura “Entertaining W ­ omen: The Actress in Eighteenth-­Century Theatre and Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1737–1837, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn. Cambridge University Press, 2007, 159–73. —­—­—. “Juba’s Roman Soul: Addison’s Cato and Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.2, Fall 1999, 63. —­—­—. “The Sublime, the Beautiful, ‘The Siddons.’ ” In The Clothes That Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, edited by Jessica Munns and Penny Richards. University of Delaware Press, 1999. —­—­—. Ways of the World: Theater and Cosmopolitanism in the Restoration and Beyond. Cornell University Press, 2020. Russell, Gillian. “Burke’s Dagger: Theatricality, Politics and Print Culture in the 1790s.” Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 20.1, 1997, 1–16. —­—­—. “Killing Mrs.  Siddons: The Actress and the Adulteress in Late Georgian Britain.” Studies in Romanticism 51.3, Fall 2012, 419–48. —­—­—. The Theatres of War: Per­for­mance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815. Clarendon Press, 1995. —­—­—. ­Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Sachs, Jonathan. Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832. Oxford University Press, 2010. Saunders, Richard H. “Genius and Glory: John Singleton Copley’s ‘The Death of Major Peirson.’ ” American Art Journal 22.3, Autumn 1990, 5–39. Schink, A. The Stranger: A Comedy. Freely Translated from Kotzebue’s German Comedy of Misanthropy and Repentance. London, 1798. Scrivener, Michael. Seditious Allegories: John Thelwall and Jacobin Writing. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Sen, Sudipta. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. Routledge, 2002. Shaffer, Jason. “ ‘­Great Cato’s Descendants’: A Genealogy of Colonial Per­for­mance.” Theatre Survey 44.1, May 2003, 5–28. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. Pizarro: The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 2 vols. Edited by Cecil Price. Clarendon Press, 1973, 2:625–704. —­—­—. Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 4 vols. Patrick Martin, 1816. Sheridan, Thomas. Coriolanus: or, The Roman Matron. A Tragedy. Taken from Shakespeare and Thomson. A. Millar, 1755. Siddons, Sarah. The Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773–1785. Edited by William Van Lennep. Widener Library, 1942.

Bibliography 353 Smith, Ruth. Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-­Century Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Solkin, David. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-­Century ­England. Yale University Press, 1993. Spencer, Jane. Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660–1830. Oxford University Press, 2005. Spinney, David. Rodney. George Allen and Unwin, 1969. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. University of California Press, 2002. —­—­—. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Th ­ ings. Duke University Press, 1995 Straub, Kristina. Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-­Century Players and Sexual Ideology. Prince­ton University Press, 1992. —­—­—. “The Soldier in the Theater: Military Masculinity and the Emergence of a Scottish Macbeth.” The Eigh­teenth C ­ entury: Theory and Interpretation 58.4, Winter 2017, 429–47. Suleri, Sara. The Rhe­toric of En­glish India. University of Chicago Press, 1992. Sussman, Charlotte. Peopling the World: Representing ­Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Tait, Peta. Wild and Dangerous Per­for­mances: Animals, Emotions, Circus. Palgrave, 2012. Taylor, David Francis. The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830. Yale University Press, 2018. —­—­—. “Staging the War at Sea: Re-­enactment, Repetition, and Race.” In The Cultural History of the Sea: The Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury, edited by Jonathan Lamb. Bloomsbury, 2021, 87–111. —­—­—. Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Oxford University Press, 2012. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer­i­cas. Duke University Press, 2003. Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: Eu­ro­pean and British Writing on India 1600–1800. Oxford University Press, 1995. Thompson, Benjamin. The Stranger. In The German Theatre, Translated by Benjamin Thompson. 6 vols. London, 1811, 1.1–76. Thompson, E. P. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popu­lar Culture. New Press, 1993. —­—­—. The Making of the En­glish Working Class. Vintage, 1966. Thomson, James. Coriolanus. A Tragedy. Dublin, 1767. Tomalin, Claire. Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a ­Great Actress and a ­Future King. Viking, 1994. Trew, Peter. Rodney and the Breaking of the Line. Pen and Sword Books, 2006. Valladares, Susan. Staging the Peninsular War. Routledge, 2015. Van Kooy, Dana. “Darkness Vis­i­ble: The Early Melodrama of British Imperialism and the Commodification of History in Sheridan’s Pizarro.” Theatre Journal 64.2, May  2012, 179–95. Van Kooy, Dana, and Jeffrey  N. Cox. “Melodramatic Slaves.” Modern Drama 55.4, 2012, 459–75. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-­Century ­England. Yale University Press, 2004.

354 Bibliography Weinsheimer, Joel. “Mrs. Siddons, the Tragic Muse, and the Prob­lem of As.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, 1978, 317–28. West, Shearer. “The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons.” In Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists, edited by Robyn Allison. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999, 1–40. —­—­—. “Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Ageing Actress.” In Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody. Palgrave, 2005, 192–213. —­—­—. “Thomas Lawrence’s ‘Half-­History’ Portraits and the Politics of Theatre.” Art History 14.2, June 1991, 225–49. Whately, Thomas. Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare. T. Payne, 1785. Wheatley, Henry B. London, Past and Pre­sent: Its History, Associations, and Traditions. Murray, 1891. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-­Century British Culture. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Wiley, Michael. “Linguistic Instability in R. B. Sheridan’s Pizarro,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ ture 55.3, Summer 2015, 603–20. Williams, D. E. The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Lawrence. London, 1831. Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: En­glishness, Empire and Gender in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury. Routledge, 2002. Worrall, David. Celebrity, Per­for­mance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Young, Julian Charles. A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young. Macmillan, 1871.

INDEX

Abington, Frances “Fanny,” 26, 101, 138–39, 160; and American War, 144–46; aristocratic femininity and fashionable sociability, 146–47, 152–55, 163–66; celebrity, 146–47, 161–65, 171; as comic muse, 142–44, 166, 328n6; rivalry with Dorothy Jordan, 139, 144, 152, 161, 167; travesty, 161–65 Abington, Frances “Fanny,” roles: as Charlotte Rusport (The West Indian), 145–47, 164; as Lady Bab Lardoon (The Maid of the Oaks), 145–47; as Lady Racket (Three Weeks After Marriage), 164, 165–66; as Roxolana (The Sultan), 144, 147–48; as Scrub (The Beaux’ Stratagem), 139, 146, 161–65, 171 Adams, John Quincy, 95, 97 Addison, Joseph, Cato, 310–20 affect: aesthetic mediation of, 20, 22–24, 40, 68–69, 86–87, 306; and history, 1, 20, 40, 43, 47, 146; and loss, 2, 6–9, 67, 74; and performance, 15–17, 42, 73–74, 113, 133, 137, 248, 269; and politics, 67–68, 74, 82–88, 191, 195, 200, 224, 261, 285; subjunctive qualities of, 40, 310, 320. See also attachment; form; genre; happiness Ahmed, Sara, 227, 333n1 Alexander the Great (D’Egeville), 244–45 Ali, Hyder, 54 alienation, 14, 68, 73, 105, 133, 220, 261, 264 allegory: domestic, 65, 69; indigenous, 32, 34; political, 154, 167, 212, 271–72, 276–78, 281, 283, 305; topical, 3, 18, 42, 45, 61–62, 71, 81, 88, 201, 268, 291, 310, 315–17, 337n37, 337n44. See also topicality All the World’s a Stage (Jackman), 51, 56–63, 70 Althusser, Louis, 19

amelioration, 42, 238–40 American colonies, 1, 9, 24, 27–28, 54, 73, 85, 95, 242, 309, 312. See also post-American repertoire American War. See War of American Independence Anderson, Misty G., 239 Andrea, Bernadette, 193, 195, 198 Annales-school, 19 aristocratic vice: adultery, 75–76, 148, 172–78, 258, 260, 263–64; and critiques of fashionable society, 56, 81–83, 93, 138, 147, 240, 256, 316; dueling, 49–50, 177, 249–50; gambling, 81, 203, 248–50; suicide, 339n18 attachment: and detachment, 24, 27–28, 43; erotic, 257, 263, 280–83, 288, 293, 296; historical, 23–24, 44; homosocial, 228, 247–48; maternal, 66–67, 108, 120, 159, 218–20, 222, 228; political, 23, 28, 41, 263, 314–15; to heroic fantasy, 20, 281–82, 289; utopian, 28, 289. See also corrosive solace; cruel optimism; desire; friendship audience: and awareness of repertoire, 15–18, 59, 61, 80, 102, 112, 118, 120, 123–24, 174, 187, 261, 279, 334n25; desires and needs of, 64–67, 70, 101, 161–62, 177, 264–65, 297, 302; discomfort, 42–44; gender identification, 152–53, 176, 286; and national fantasy, 5, 195, 247–48, 278–79, 289, 306, 317; political action, 223, 225–26, 229, 244; political contemplation, 211, 221, 234, 240–41, 253, 274, 290–92; predilection for allegory, 81–82, 200–202, 272, 275–77, 316, 319, 337n44; rank, 76; scale, 17–18, 244; social spectacle, 54–55, 65–69, 229, 244, 269–72, 304, 314–15; subjectification, 132–33, 293; temporality, 105, 266

356 Index Beach, Thomas, John Philip Kemble as Macbeth and Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, 114, 116–17 The Beaux’ Stratagem (Farquhar), 139, 161–65, 171 Begams of Awadh, 198, 201. See also Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: “Speech on the Begams Charge”; Pizarro Berlant, Lauren, 27; aesthetic mediation of crisis, 20–24, 40, 68–69, 87, 306; Affect, form, and genre, 22–23, 307, 309. See also crisis; cruel optimism Bickerstaffe, Isaac. See Love in the City; The Sultan biopolitics: biopower and reproduction, 27, 155, 160, 176, 178–79, 188, 198, 231, 239–40, 243; biopower versus sovereign power, 67–68, 120–21, 198–99, 220–21, 228; and comedy, 167, 231; and the deployment of sexuality, 88, 108, 138–39, 153–55, 160, 198; elite sociability and middling biopower, 27, 42, 88, 165, 241; and maternity, 27, 67, 93, 108, 120, 159, 216–22, 228, 279; middle class ascendancy, 25–29, 42, 148, 171, 183, 222, 234, 243, 256, 307, 320; and tragedy, 108, 120–21; and white supremacy, 26, 47–48, 148, 155–61. See also child as sign; maternality Blue-Beard (Colman), 229, 244, 334n6 Boaden, James: on the 1782–83 Season, 51, 83–84, 87, 185; on Hastings’ impeachment, 332n17; on John Philip Kemble in The Wheel of Fortune, 247–48; on the moral rectitude of Sarah Siddons, 84, 86–87, 109, 139, 142, 257, 308; on William Pitt the Younger, 84–87, 184 body: of the actor, 253, 256, 305, 314–15; of the actress, 88, 107–8, 112, 144, 150, 152–53, 156–60, 162, 168, 174, 178–79, 184, 189, 265, 326n24, 335n54; of the child, 232, 293–302; and class, 92, 154, 162; as a location of affect, 18, 42; public, 88, 189; representation of, 8, 12, 109, 225. See also embodiment Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon Bonaparte Boydell, William, 3, 126–27, 321n6 Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 3, 99, 126–27, 222

breeches parts, 137–38, 145, 150–55, 170–71, 329n12. See also Jordan, Dorothy “Dora,” roles: Peggy (The Country Girl) Brooks, Helen E.M., 67, 138, 150, 153–54, 175–76 Burgoyne, John, 145–46 Burke, Edmund: on the American war, 242; critique of Shelburne ministry and articles of peace, 35, 77–78, 84–87, 277–78; and impeachment of Warren Hastings, 28, 45, 189–91, 193–94, 196–99, 283, 295; on Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as Tragic Muse, 142 Burke, Edmund, works: Reflections on the Revolution in France, 203–4, 238, 241, 278, 284–88, 292–93, 308; “Speech on Change of Ministers,” 78, 84–85; Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 204, 228–29, 296 Burney, Frances, 146 Butler, Judith, 19 Campbell, Thomas, 83, 102, 119–20, 308, 332n18 celebrity, 26, 63–64, 139–44, 157, 268, 324n7. See also under Abington, Frances; Jordan, Dorothy; Kemble, John Philip; Siddons, Sarah Chamberlain, Lord, 229 Chatham, 1st Earl of (William Pitt the Elder), 6–8, 12, 35, 37–38, 40–41, 55, 73, 85 child as sign: of anxieties of empire, 9, 14; of biopolitical imperatives, 67, 179, 232, 263–65, 297; of cosmopolitan/utopian possibility, 282–83, 294–95, 297–304; of emergent middle class norms, 240–41, 293; of ethic of care, 67, 75–76, 196; of future imperial control, 222, 227 Cibber, Colley. See To Have and Have Not Cibber, Susannah, 64, 72 civil war: in the Atlantic imperium, 21, 36, 41, 88, 95, 97–98, 160, 178, 255; in Coriolanus, 218–19, 255; in Jane Shore, 74–76, 80, 82, 86, 93 Clive, Robert, Lord, 189 Cobbett, William, 277, 304 Cohen, Ashley, 19 Colman, George. See Blue-Beard comedy, 46–47, 137, 160, 165, 230–32, 255–56, 264



Index 357

confederacy, 209, 218, 220 consensus, 220; as ritual, 210–12, 278; fragility of, 42, 225 The Constant Couple (Farquhar), 138, 144, 170–78 constitutional crisis, 35, 71, 77, 83, 87, 95, 217 Copley, John Singleton: Death of Major Peirson, 2–5, 7–9, 11–14, 26; Death of the Earl of Chatham, 2–3, 5, 6–9; Watson and the Shark, 321n3 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 205, 254, 298; John Philip Kemble adaptation of (1789), 45, 186, 188–89, 203–4, 206, 208–14, 216–21, 223–26, 228–29, 231, 244, 245, 254; John Philip Kemble adaptation of (1811), 204–5, 212, 216, 226, 245, 309; Thomas Sheridan adaptation of (1755), 206–8, 211, 216, 218, 332n22; James Thomson adaptation of (1749), 206–7, 209–10, 216, 218–19 corrosive solace: definition of, and relation to cruel optimism, 1, 25–28, 47–48, 257; and dynamics of historical change, 42–43, 46–47, 94, 182–85; and middling biopower, 82–83, 189; transformation of, 229–30, 261, 269, 307–9 corruption: and the East India Company, 24, 33, 189–95, 199–202, 253; and elite masculinity, 65–67, 74–75, 82–83, 93, 208, 228, 252; factional, 86, 209; imperial, 232, 242, 252–55; state, and liberty, 37, 89, 194–95, 277–78, 290, 316–17; and republican virtue, 205–11, 216–25 cosmopolitanism, 228, 282, 286, 289, 294–95, 297–98, 311 Covent Garden Theatre, 52, 100, 101, 165, 177, 202, 224, 225, 231, 244, 271, 301; as political space, 233, 236 Cowley, Hannah, 26, 186, 230. See also The Fate of Sparta; The World as It Goes Cowper, William, 30, 65 Crawford, Anne, 72 Crillon, Louis de (Duc du Mahon), 52–53 crisis, 15, 18, 21–25, 228, 309; attempts at resolving, 40–41, 47, 57, 241–43, 268, 297–98, 304; geopolitical, 62, 68–69, 81, 87, 96–101, 131, 135, 267. See constitutional crisis; Regency Crisis (1788–89); Regency Crisis (1810)

The Critic (Sheridan), 100–101, 267, 290 cruel optimism, 25, 27–28, 48, 257, 262, 264–65 cultural patrimony, 26, 61–62, 73, 99, 126, 130–31, 167, 183 Cumberland, Richard. See The Jew; The Wheel of Fortune; The West Indian Damer, Anne Seymour, 222 Davies, Thomas, 112–13 Davis, Tracy, 15–16, 43 death, 118–19, 265; and futurity, 14, 41–42, 63–68, 108, 160, 297, 311–12, 317–19; as historical interruption, 96, 101, 138, 221. See also surrogation D’Egeville, James Harvey. See Alexander the Great De Lauretis, Teresa, 17 de Loutherbourg, Philip Jacques, 134, 213, 266, 272, 302, 335n1 Demos, “the People,” 203, 207–8, 277 D’Eon, Chevalier, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 322n50 desire: desired imperial futures, 39, 193, 199, 243, 319–20; and fantasy, 27, 117, 176; for peace, 30–31, 35, 40, 53–56, 74, 95, 199, 227–28; object of, 27, 70, 75–76, 97, 112, 118, 154, 163–64, 177, 282; operation in the repertoire, 25, 43–44, 61, 68–72, 102, 120, 122, 125, 130, 244, 263; sexual, 58, 75, 148, 150, 153, 196, 281, 296, 331n65. See also need Dias, Rosie, 126, 321n6 discomfort, 42–46, 120, 126–28, 281, 287–90, 306 dislocation, 14, 24–25, 28, 69, 94 dissensus, 24, 210, 216, 225, 229 domesticity, 61–62, 65–66, 76–77, 165–67, 183–85, 241–43, 315. See also biopolitics Drury Lane, Theatre Royal, 52, 101, 133, 188, 199, 244, 266; George III’s boycott of, 269–72; management of, 44, 99, 122, 137, 185–86; as a political space, 55–56, 63, 81–83, 118, 157, 224, 269–72, 277 East India Bill (1783), 24, 54, 79, 96, 210, 277 East India Company, 24, 189–91, 194, 199, 201, 253. See also Hastings, Warren, impeachment of Edelman, Lee, 325n26

358 Index Eliott, General George Augustus (1st Baron Heathfield): icon of new masculinity, 11–12, 56, 61, 73–74, 176; reports on character, 91–93, 325n42; success at Gibraltar, 7, 51, 53–54, 56 embodiment: and celebrity, 154, 164, 174; of political ideals, 199, 209, 212, 217, 220; of social norms, 12–14, 29, 45, 74, 84, 104, 147, 152, 154, 160–62, 168, 184, 240, 265; of vice, 76, 82, 203, 250. See also body; child as sign Empire, British: first, 5, 8, 21, 26, 28, 54, 231; second, 28–29, 48. See also American colonies; civil war; fantasy: imperial; India; Seven Years’ War; War of American Independence Empire, Roman, 204–5, 252, 317 enigma, 310; as a narrative driver, 39, 91, 263; as a temporal placeholder, 39 entropy, 18, 23, 320 ephemera, 16, 19, 29 epic, 128–31 errancy, 60, 62, 70, 147, 238, 252, 265 ethic of care, 65, 67–68, 76, 94, 107–8, 118, 179, 228, 259, 293, 296–97 Every One Has His Fault (Inchbald), 46, 48, 225–26, 230, 231, 233–44, 308 fantasy: of femininity, 92, 152, 186, 232, 257; imperial, 12, 28, 30, 145–47, 194, 199, 227, 251–52, 257, 265; of masculine efficacy, 130–31, 220, 243, 281; national, 32, 47, 131, 134, 159, 160, 209–10, 244, 278, 288–89, 292, 319; structure of, 17, 20–21; temporality of, 27–28, 187 farce, 56–58, 240. See also All the World’s a Stage Farquhar, George. See The Beaux’ Stratagem; The Constant Couple The Fate of Sparta (Cowley), 186 Favret, Mary, 322n4 femininity: and abjection, 9, 64–65, 69, 74, 83, 94, 265; aristocratic, 146–47, 152, 154, 163–66; middling, 86, 92, 152–61, 167–71, 178, 188, 191; and same sex eroticism, 170, 176–77. See also gender insubordination; maternality food rioting, 208, 334n18 Foote, Samuel. See The Mayor of Garrett; The Nabob Fordham, Douglas, 3–4, 8, 321n18

form: and affect, 22–26, 35, 40, 183–85, 232, 262–63, 307–8, 320; and genre, 22–26, 257, 307–8, 322n49; and historical change, 29, 41–44, 47, 232, 304; and politics, 135, 185, 187, 210, 220, 232, 243, 275, 277, 290–92, 306, 323n52. See also embodiment; interruption Foucault, Michel, 67, 108, 322n28. See also biopolitics; governmentality Fox, Charles James, 229, 242, 296–98; criticism of George III and Pitt Ministry, 81, 89, 267–68, 272, 277–79; East India Bill (1783), 7, 24, 79, 96, 189, 210, 277; Fox-North Coalition, 54, 79, 82–83, 85–87, 96, 210; Hastings impeachment, 28, 189, 295; opposition to Regency Bill (1789), 203, 210, 221, 223–24; in political satire, 97, 275–76; “Speech in Defence of His Resignation,” 34–41, 77–79, 277; Westminster election (1784), 7, 277 Freeman, Lisa, 75, 77, 310–12 French Revolution, 24, 122–23, 184, 192, 201, 210, 220, 224–25; Edict of Fraternity, 233; execution of Louis XVI, 42, 228–29, 233, 275; French Constitution, 241 French Revolutionary Wars, 4, 208, 233, 269, 274, 312; British victory at Aboukir, 261, 268; criticism of, 234–40, 242, 287; Directory, 268, 305; French invasion of Egypt, 262; impact on the British imagination, 24, 41–42, 229, 287 friendlessness, 242, 247, 265, 271–272 friendship, 88, 206–7, 296–98; and biopolitics, 220, 228; and political affiliation, 89, 227–29 Fuseli, Henry: Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth After the Murder of Duncan, 113–16, 326nn30–31; The Witches Appear to Macbeth and Banquo, 99, 126–31 futurity: in Macbeth, 109–12, 118–21; promise of, 12–14, 201, 258–59, 295–98, 325n26; repertoire’s postulation of, 70, 76, 101, 219–20, 306, 309–10; and uncertainty, 34, 40. See also child as sign; interruption; performative time Gainsborough, Thomas, 142 Garrick, David, 15; adaptation of The Country Wife, 148–49; impact of



Index 359

death, 73, 100, 101–3, 138, 183–84; Relationship to repertoire, 5, 73–75, 90, 119–20. Garrick, David, roles: as Hastings (Jane Shore), 72–75; as Macbeth (Macbeth), 99–105, 112–16, 121–23, 125 gender. See femininity; masculinity gender insubordination, 157. See also breeches parts; travesty genre, 27, 64, 308–9; and affect, 22–23, 139–42; contamination of, 104–5, 120, 231–34, 253, 292–93; and history, 120, 130, 307–9; hybridity, 44, 229, 267, 290, 292, 304, 308; as a matter of normative evaluation, 22–24, 263; and social norms, 22–23, 125, 253–56, 263–65, 308–9; status and change, 43–44, 46–47,128, 206, 229. See also comedy; epic; farce; masque; she-tragedy; tragedy George III, 95–97, 145, 251; and Handel, 210, 212, 224–25; interference with East India Bill, (1783), 7, 24, 79, 96, 189, 210, 277; madness (1788–9), 42, 45, 192, 203, 223, 229; madness (1810), 310, 315–19; patriot kingship, 209–10, 220; and Shelburne’s ministry, 34, 36, 77–78; threat of despotism and absolutism, 81–83, 86, 184, 236, 272, 275, 295; Whig criticism of, 36, 77–78, 194, 196, 210, 269–74, 280, 289, 305–6 George Augustus, Prince of Wales, 192, 203, 224, 315–17 Gibraltar, 61–62; impact on Peace of Paris negotiations, 51, 53, 90–91; relief of, 30, 51, 53, 71, 74; siege of, 12–14, 51, 52–54, 56, 69 governmentality, 92, 185, 190, 220; and population, 243. See also biopolitics Great Mutiny of 1797 (Spithead and Nore), 24, 42, 53, 233, 261–62, 267, 309 The Grecian Daughter (Murphy), 52, 63, 71, 88, 101, 185 Greenwood, Thomas, 134, 333n42–43; Drawings for Coriolanus, 213–17 Grey, Charles, 189, 203 Hamilton, Gavin, Coriolanus, Act V, Scene III, 222–23 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 101, 103

Handel Commemoration (1784), 100, 210, 225 happiness, 149, 172, 227–28 Harlow, George, Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, 109, 111–12 Harlow, Henry, The Court for the Tryal of Queen Katherine, 202 Hastings, Warren, impeachment of, 24, 28, 45, 185, 188–201, 232, 275, 295, 332n17. See also Burke, Edmund; Henry the Eighth; Sheridan, Richard Brinsley Hazlitt, William, 102, 131, 144, 203–4 Henderson, John, 165–67 Henry II (Hull), 186 Henry the Eighth (Shakespeare), 202, 227, 308; Kemble’s 1788 production of, 45, 186, 188, 195, 198, 201; relationship to Hastings impeachment, 188, 190–92, 196, 198–201; representation of India, 192–95, 198–99, 332n17. See also Siddons, Sarah; Kemble, John Philip heroic fantasy, 130–31, 257, 281–82, 287–89. See also martyrdom history, 6, 46, 120, 138, 146, 292, 312, 320; sign of, 189, 221 history painting, 3–5, 17–18 history play, 186, 308–9 Hoppner, John, Mrs. Jordan in the character of the Comic Muse, 139–40, 144, 167–68, 328n9 Howe, Admiral Richard, 53, 71 Hull, Thomas. See Henry II Inchbald, Elizabeth, 26, 226, 255. See also Every One Has His Fault inconsistency, aesthetics and politics of, 267–68, 285–87, 290–92, 337 India, 184, 188, 242; Bengal Famine, 189; East India Bill (1783), 24, 54, 79, 96, 210, 277; East India Company, 24, 189–91, 194, 199, 201, 253; Hastings impeachment, 24, 28, 45, 185, 188–201, 232, 275, 295; and empire in Henry the Eighth, 192–201, 332n17; in Pizarro, 276; in The Wheel of Fortune, 252–53. See also Begams of Awadh; Clive, Robert, Lord; Singh, Devi; ud-Daulah, Asaf Indigeneity as a figure for “America,” 32, 34, 97, 242 intermedial analysis, 18, 229

360 Index interruption: as aesthetic strategy, 45–56, 177, 187, 221, 229, 232, 306, 314–15; as formal problematic, 41–46, 185, 262–63; as political dynamic, 41, 185–86, 192, 199, 229, 241; as temporal phenomenon, 43–45, 53, 221, 229, 307. See also discomfort; performative time Irish Rebellion, 24, 42, 233, 261–62, 268, 309 Isabella (Southerne, The Fatal Marriage), 51, 63–70, 309 Jane Shore (Rowe), 52, 63, 68, 70–77, 79–83, 86, 88, 94, 101, 184–85, 191 The Jew (Cumberland), 230 Johnson, Samuel, 199 Jordan, Dorothy “Dora,” 25–28, 42, 44; and middling femininity, 155–57, 159–61, 167–68, 171; performance of masculinity, 152–56, 176–79; pregnancies, 178–79; relationship with William Henry (Duke of Clarence), 178, 184, 279–80; and repertoire, 138–39, 144; rivalry with Frances Abington, 139, 144, 152, 161, 167 Jordan, Dorothy “Dora,” roles: as Cora (Pizarro), 279, 293–97; as Little Pickle (The Spoiled Child), 179; as Miss Hoyden (A Trip to Scarborough), 145; as Peggy (The Country Girl), 138, 145, 148–51, 155, 159–61, 170; as Priscilla Tomboy (The Romp), 137–39, 145, 148, 151–52, 154–57, 160–61, 170; as Sir Henry Wildair (The Constant Couple), 138, 170–71, 173–78, 183–85; as Viola (Twelfth Night), 138, 145, 170 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 100, 231, 245, 298 Junod, Karen, 128, 130 Kemble, John Philip, 26, 44, 137; celebrity, 184–85, 224, 261, 264–65; management of Drury Lane, 44, 122, 137, 185–87; and pageantry/spectacle, 122, 132–36, 187, 211–17, 244, 314–15; republican governance, 184, 206–9, 218, 220, 310; roman avatars, 204, 244–45, 252–55, 317–20; topicality, 188, 192; Cato, 231, 245, 310, 312–20; Coriolanus, 44–45, 186–89, 203–31, 245, 293, 309; Hamlet, 101; Henry the Eighth, 44, 185–88, 201–2, 227; Macbeth, 44, 99, 121–26, 130–36, 185, 293, 308; Venice Preserv’d, 44, 45, 229, 269, 293. See also interruption

Kemble, John Philip, roles: as Coriolanus (Coriolanus), 206, 210–14, 216–18, 226; as Macbeth (Macbeth), 122–26, 132; as Penruddock (The Wheel of Fortune), 44–46, 23–31, 253–56, 260, 265, 309; as Rolla (Pizarro), 266, 298–301; as The Stranger (The Stranger), 258–61, 264–65; as Wolsey (Henry the Eighth), 188, 201–2 King, Thomas, 185 Kotzebue, August von, 46, 47, 231–32, 257–58, 290 Lamb, Charles, 131, 186 late style, 186 Lawrence, Sir Thomas: John Philip Kemble as Cato, 244, 318–19; Rolla, 298–300 Lee, Nathaniel. See The Rival Queens Lewis, William, 144, 165–66 life, 20–21, 23, 28, 44, 173, 220, 250, 265, 312; and death, 63–64, 68, 108, 160, 265, 317. See also biopolitics Lloyd, T.A. See The Romp loss: of the American colonies, 1, 7, 9, 24, 27, 46, 48, 52, 65, 73–74, 86, 93–94, 100, 145–46, 184, 234, 242–43; feeling of, 33–34, 41–42, 62, 67, 101, 103, 122, 243, 293, 297, 305; overcoming, 64, 68–69, 73–74, 88, 93 Love in the City (Bickerstaffe), 138, 145, 151 loyalism, 89, 224, 226, 229, 267, 269, 289, 314 Lyttelton, George, 206 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 121, 125, 130, 308; 1785 production of, 70, 88, 94, 105, 108, 118, 121; 1788 production of, 99, 122–26, 184–85, 327n41; 1794 production of, 44, 99, 122, 132–36, 293; in All the World’s a Stage, 60–61; in eighteenth century culture, 97–98, 128. See also Garrick, David; Kemble, John Philip; Mossop, Henry; Pritchard, Hannah; Siddons, Sarah; Smith, William “Gentleman” Macklin, Charles, 100 Marcius, Caius, 254–55 Marius, Gaius, 254–55 Marsden, Jean, 20, 58, 64–67, 230, 286, 324n20 martyrdom, 5–9, 12 masculinity: aristocratic, 62, 148, 158, 172, 177, 184, 252; heroic, 128–30, 281, 288; and



Index 361

homosocial dynamics, 65, 75, 227–28, 296–97; Macbeth/Macbeth and, 121–25, 130–31; martial, 11–12, 28, 62–63, 74, 92, 104, 121–25, 130–31, 155–56, 173–76, 184, 219, 275–76; masculine ideals, 26, 76, 86, 314; middling, 76–77, 82–83, 149, 256; as performed by women, 152–53, 171, 176, 178–79 (see also breeches parts; travesty); ruination of, 137, 157; working class, 162–65 masque, 193–95, 271–72 maternality, 120, 159, 191; and anguish, 9–11, 186, 293–94; and touch, 67, 107–8, 212. See also attachment; biopolitics; child as sign; pregnancy The Mayor of Garrett (Foote), 334n25 McPherson, Heather, 104, 114, 159, 328n7 mediascape, 17, 23, 40, 43, 94, 188, 194, 309 mediation, 15, 30, 83 melancholia, 43, 221 melodrama, 22, 27, 229, 232, 234, 265, 302, 304 memory: cultural, 6, 83–84, 136, 183, 186, 200, 277; and historical change, 29, 124, 310; relation to repertoire, 16–18, 29, 43, 60–61, 64, 120, 124, 158, 261, 309; of David Garrick, 72–74, 102–4, 113; of Hannah Pritchard, 113, 119, 158; of Peg Woffington, 174–77 mentalité, 19, 23, 25 middling ranks, 47–48; ascendancy of, 155, 160, 165; and biopower, 25–29, 42, 93, 234; critique of, 240–41, 243; emergent social norms of, 76–77, 82–83, 86, 92, 148, 176, 256, 264 monumental history, 226, 317, 319 moral capital, 12, 34, 251–52 morality, 104, 155, 256, 267, 286–88; geographical, 190, 199; immorality, 240, 257, 267, 290, 316–17; as a mode of social regulation, 25, 58, 92–93, 138–39, 148–51, 173–74, 177, 292; significance of sympathy to, 282–85; of war, 234, 238. See also Boaden, James: on the moral rectitude of Sarah Siddons Morton, Thomas, 230 Mossop, Henry, 103, 206 Murphy, Arthur. See The Grecian Daughter; Three Weeks After Marriage

The Nabob (Foote), 253, 255 Napoleon Bonaparte, 268, 272, 274, 276–77, 279, 287, 312 nationalism, 42, 91, 267, 287, 289, 297–98; in Cato, 311–12; in The Country Girl, 159–60; in Henry the Eighth, 186, 202–3, 227–28; in The Sultan, 147. See also fantasy: national necropolitics, 160 need: instantiated by loss, 12, 41–42, 55–56, 64, 69–71, 90, 102; relation to performative time, 17, 39, 310. See also desire negation, 64–68, 162–66, 175–76, 290–92, 319 Nelson, Horatio (1st Viscount Nelson), victory at Aboukir, 261, 268 newspapers: reporting on Gibraltar, 52–56, 90–93; reporting of Peace of Paris, 29, 34–40, 62, 97–99; reporting political controversy, 80–82, 87–89. See also names of specific plays for reviews and “Theatrical Intelligence”; topicality North, Frederick (Lord North), 21, 55, 62, 77, 95, 268; Fox-North Coalition, 54, 79, 82, 83, 85–87, 96, 210 nostalgia, 14, 145, 209 Oswald, Richard, 95–96 Othello (Shakespeare), 59–62 Otway, Thomas. See Venice Preserv’d pageantry, 187–88, 195–96, 201–2 Paine, Thomas, 203–4, 238 pantomime, 331n65 parody, 87 patriotism, 56, 82, 177–78; in Cato, 311–13; in Coriolanus, 205–11, 219, 223–24; in Pizarro, 275–80, 287–89, 292, 304–5; and Sarah Siddons, 74–76, 93. See also fantasy, national peace, 6, 30–31, 34–41, 56, 97–98, 243 Peace of Paris (1763), 5, 29, 38 Peace of Paris (1783), 2, 24, 29, 53–54, 62, 88, 97 performance: in All the World’s a Stage, 57–63; of gender, 19, 26, 88, 108, 139, 150–63, 168–71, 179 (see also femininity; masculinity); and repertoire, 15–17, 29, 72, 133, 187; performative analysis, 18; protocols, 15, 29, 47, 60, 72–73, 101, 117–20, 133, 158, 175, 183, 261–63, 269, 309; studies, 19, 29

362 Index performative time, 15–16, 19, 39, 45, 69–70, 84, 117–18, 221, 307, 320. See also futurity; temporality physiocracy, 236, 238, 334n19 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 213–14 Pitt, John, 55–56, 61–62 Pitt, William (the Elder). See Chatham, 1st Earl of Pitt, William (the Younger), 79, 203, 221, 236, 242, 267, 280; authoritarianism, 23–24, 42, 184, 210, 225, 269; and masculinity, 86, 236, 243, 275; representations of, 194, 199, 224–25, 272, 275–77, 290–91; and Sarah Siddons, 83–87 Pizarro (Sheridan), 28, 47–48, 266–306, 308–9 Pocock, J.G.A., 23, 204, 209 post-American repertoire: and corrosive solace, 27–28, 48, 136, 191, 307; defined, 4–5, 42–48; realignment of social and political norms, 153, 159, 161, 179, 184, 188, 220; re-territorialization of, 262, 269, 279, 286, 290; return of affective dynamics, 310, 312; uncertainty, 14, 24–25, 29, 34, 101, 139 posthumous politics, 35, 37–39 pregnancy, 178–79, 326n24 Pritchard, Hannah, 5, 120, 137–38, 183; as Lady Macbeth (Macbeth), 99, 103–4, 112–20, 123, 132, 158 private theatricals, 57–58 Quesnay, François, 238 race: blackface, 59–60, 330n45; interracial family/child, 293–94, 297–98, 311; racial alterity, 48, 317; racialization of class relations, 60–62, 148, 156–58; relationship to gender norms of middle class ascendancy, 26, 42, 47–48, 153; in the repertoire, 59–62, 155–61, 250–51; as shorthand for empire, 11–14, 32–34, 147, 198. See also whiteness Regency Crisis (1788–89), 24, 43, 45, 184, 187, 192, 203, 210, 219–21, 223–25, 310, 317 Regency Crisis (1810), 320; Regency Act (1811), 315 remediation, 2, 16–18, 23, 39–40, 99, 126, 136, 143, 167, 204, 308. See also newspapers repertoire: affective dynamics of, 1, 20–22, 27, 64–65, 67, 132, 137, 166, 191, 234; and

citationality, 56–65, 70, 82–84, 97–98, 109, 159, 290, 294–95; defined, 15–20; disappearance from, 226, 228–29, 230, 244–45, 256, 261, 298; and history, 1, 11, 17, 28–29, 41–42, 44–47, 123, 183–84, 221, 268–69, 307; and mediation, 17, 30, 52, 57, 127, 143, 306, 320; and memory, 17, 74, 102, 119, 123, 132–33, 158, 177, 310, 320; and naming, 43–44; reactivation, 51, 63, 138–39, 143, 173–74, 177, 309; realignment, 14, 24–25, 67, 69, 99, 102, 156, 230, 258, 279, 309; and recognition, 15–19, 22, 26–29, 45, 61, 64, 67–69, 94, 98–99, 162, 187, 205, 210, 213, 239–41, 256–57, 274–75, 277, 320; and repetition, 15–19, 40, 69, 107, 118–20, 219, 294; rupture of, 64, 66, 68, 87–88, 99–101, 105, 117–18, 132, 133, 135, 159, 184, 187, 286, 306; sustaining culture, 72, 74, 269, 307, 320; temporality, 29–30, 44, 47, 74, 306, 309–10; wartime, 145–46. See also corrosive solace; post-American repertoire reproduction. See biopolitics republicanism, 23, 28, 45–46, 93, 187, 230–32, 245, 252–56, 298 Reynolds, Frederick, 230 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 168; David Garrick Between Comedy and Tragedy, 328n1; Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I, 128–29; Mrs. Abington as Roxolana, 142–43, 144; Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 139, 141–44 The Rival Queens (Lee), 57, 58, 63 The Rivals (Sheridan), 271 Roach, Joseph, 17, 138, 164 Rockingham, Lord, 29, 34, 37, 54, 77 Rodney, Admiral George Brydges, 54, 73; victory at Les Saintes, 30–31, 35, 39–40, 53, 145 Romanticism, 25, 43, 130–31, 204 Rome as cultural and political signifier, 28, 203–5, 208–9, 212–22, 231, 244–45, 252, 254–55, 298, 310–20 Romney, George: Dorothy Jordan as Peggy in The Country Girl, 167–69; Macbeth drawings, 105–7 The Romp (Lloyd), 138, 145, 148–51, 154–57, 160–61, 170, 177 Rosenthal, Laura, 104, 107–8, 279, 311–12 Rowe, Nicholas. See Jane Shore Rowlandson, Thomas, 224–25



Index 363

Royal Academy of Arts, 3, 5, 18, 139, 144, 147, 166, 167, 328n5 Russell, Gillian, 143, 146, 233, 258, 263, 265 satirical prints, 30–32, 196, 224–25, 266–67, 272–77, 290–91 scenario, 17. See also repertoire scenography, 132–35, 204–5, 213–16, 271–73; and rendering of politics, 213–16 The School for Scandal (Sheridan), 100, 146, 278 Senegambia, in The Wheel of Fortune, 249–51, 253 sentimentality: Berlant on, 21–22, 27; politicization of, 166–67, 191–92, 200, 284–85 Seven Years’ War, 156, 295, 329n25, 330n37; in All the World’s a Stage, 56, 62; and the Earl of Chatham, 6, 8, 37, 73; and familial rhetoric, 21, 32; in The Wheel of Fortune, 249, 251 sexuality: interracial, 282, 289, 293–94, 310–12; same sex desire, 152–54, 170, 174–77; sexual agency, 63–88, 152–54, 160, 174–77, 257–65, 279–89. See also biopolitics Shakespeare, William, 72, 74, 132, 183; decline and resurgence in the repertoire, 98–102, 105, 126, 186. See also Coriolanus; Hamlet; Henry the Eighth; Macbeth; Othello; Julius Caesar; Twelfth Night Shelburne, Lord, 81, 277; American peace negotiations, 36, 77, 79, 85, 89, 96, 275; controversial ministry, 34–35, 54, 71, 75, 78, 83, 275 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 122, 230, 295; as owner/proprietor/manager of Drury Lane, 119–20, 185, 199; “Speech on the Begams Charge,” 45, 189–91, 196, 198, 200–201, 275, 283; “Speech on the General Mutiny,” 267–68, 336n7. See also The Critic; Pizarro; The Rivals; The School for Scandal she-tragedy: and abjection, 9, 64, 256, 265; and corrosive solace, 42; generic precursors of, 58; and migration into other genres, 47, 101–2, 108, 247, 258, 260–63, 309; political significations of, 71, 83, 87; and realignment of the repertoire, 24–25, 51–52, 63–66, 101–2, 105, 138, 183, 269 Siddons, Henry, 67 Siddons, Sarah, 9, 25–28, 42, 44, 51, 78, 92–93, 101, 137, 142–43, 183–86, 269; celebrity,

63–64; interventions in the repertoire, 64, 72, 87–89, 105, 136, 220, 257–58, 261, 284–85; performance of female abjection, 9, 58, 64–65, 69, 74, 83, 94; performance of femininity, 84, 86, 92–93, 157–59; performance of maternity, 11, 67–68, 108; and stage properties, 105, 108–20; use of touch, 67, 107–8, 264; and whiteness, 158–59; and William Pitt, 83–87. See also Boaden, James; Campbell, Thomas Siddons, Sarah, roles: as Belvidera (Venice Preserv’d), 52, 63, 71, 88–90, 93, 165–66, 185, 229, 256; as Cordelia (King Lear), 186; as Elvira (Pizarro), 257, 279, 284–86; as Isabella (Isabella), 9, 11, 51, 55, 58, 63–70, 185, 191, 256, 261, 309; as Jane Shore (Jane Shore), 52, 63, 71–77, 79–83, 86, 184, 185, 191; as Lady Macbeth (Macbeth), 99, 102–12, 117–26, 130–36, 157–59, 185, 187; as Mrs. Haller (The Stranger), 47, 232, 257–65; as Queen Katherine (Henry the Eighth), 45, 185–92, 196–202; as Sarah Millwood (The London Merchant), 256–57; as Volumnia (Coriolanus), 45, 185, 188, 206, 212, 218, 220–24, 256 sign of history, 46, 189, 221 Singh, Chait, 191, 198 Singh, Devi, 191 slavery as a figure for “America,” 33–34. See also moral capital Smith, Adam, 238 Smith, Charlotte, 1, 26 Smith, William “Gentleman,” 103–5, 108, 121, 231 sociability, 18–19, 27–29, 165, 176–77, 234–38, 247–49, 252–53, 264–65 Southerne, Thomas, The Fatal Marriage. See Isabella sovereignty, 75–76, 194–95, 271, 278. See also biopolitics spectacle, 75, 178–79, 224; as supplement, 43–44, 132–35, 293, 302–4 stage properties, 105, 113–18, 211–16, 298–302 The Stranger (Thompson), 46, 231–32, 257–65 Straub, Kristina, 56, 138, 327n40 structures of feeling, 19 subject, 17, 19–21, 23, 27, 243, 253; sovereign, 75, 209, 289 The Sultan (Bickerstaffe), 144, 147–48 surrogation, 56, 73, 103, 138

364 Index sympathy, 65–66, 237, 240, 258, 293; and natural humanity, 45, 86, 248, 284–89; and sentimental fiction, 27 tableau, 187, 229, 264, 314–15, 339n14 Taylor, David, 56–57, 98, 294–95, 328n50 Taylor, Diana, 16–17, 19, 52 temporality: of the daily press, 29–30, 39–41, 52–53, 56, 90–91; material, 105, 117–19; of topical theater, 45, 70–74, 93, 221, 262. See also futurity; history; performative time theatricality, 2, 6–8, 16, 25, 56–58, 127, 146, 149 theatrical seasons: 1782–83 season, 9, 25, 51–52, 63–64, 71, 83–90, 101, 185; 1785–86 season, 144–47; 1788–89 season, 185–86, 203–4, 221, 330n55; 1793–94 season, 233; 1794–95, 132, 244–45; 1795–96 season, 226, 229, 245, 269, 293, 308; 1797–98 season, 261–62; 1798–99 season, 266–72 Thelwall, John, 229 Thompson, Benjamin. See The Stranger Thomson, James, 206–10, 216, 218–20 Thrale, Hester, 123 Three Weeks After Marriage (Murphy), 164–66 To Have and Have Not (Cibber), 138, 145, 170 topicality, 2–3, 18, 56, 80–81, 88–89, 135, 318–19; failed, 44–45, 198–201 tragedy, 133, 284, 300, 304, 338n55 travesty, 138, 152–54, 162–65, 175, 179; as distinguished from breeches parts, 170–71. See also Abington, Frances “Fanny,” roles: as Scrub (The Beaux’ Stratagem); Jordan, Dorothy, roles: as Sir Henry Wildair (The Constant Couple); Woffington, Peg: as Sir Henry Wildair (The Constant Couple) Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 238 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 138, 145, 168, 170, 177 Two Acts, 184, 186, 229 ud-Daulah, Asaf, 191 uncertainty, 23–25, 34, 40–41, 53–56, 90–91, 119–21, 156, 161, 216 unhappiness, 234, 240–43, 248, 250, 256, 265 urgency, 17–18, 22, 29, 34, 43, 47–48, 57, 125, 139, 320 utopian narrative, 47–48, 290, 293, 298, 301–2; and corporeal hybridity, 295, 298

Venice Preserv’d (Otway), 70, 71, 88–90, 93, 144, 165–66, 230; 1795 controversy, 44–45, 226, 229, 244, 269, 293, 308 virtue: maternal, 184; republican, 28, 184, 205–6, 255, 310. See also corruption War of American Independence, 3–5, 25–26, 33, 73, 99, 145, 147, 184, 190, 234, 236, 242; articles of peace, 85, 87; Constitutional Congress of 1787, 209; Gibraltar, 61–62; Gibraltar, siege of, 12–14, 51, 52–54, 56, 69; Gibraltar, relief of, 30, 51, 53, 71, 74; Gibraltar, impact on Peace of Paris negotiations, 51, 53, 90–91; Lexington and Concord, 30, 90; Les Saintes, 6, 30, 39–40, 53, 145, 322n21; Peace of Paris (1783), 2, 24, 29, 53–54, 62, 88, 97; Saratoga, 146, 261; Stony Point, 261; Valley Forge, 312; Yorktown, 7, 30, 34, 65, 77, 95, 146, 261. See also Rodney, Admiral George Brydges; Senegambia wartime, 53, 61, 145, 202, 312 West, Benjamin: American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain, 95–97; The Death of General Wolfe, 5–6, 8–9 Westall, Richard, Lady Macbeth in the Letter Scene, 109–10 The West Indian (Cumberland), 145−47, 251 West Indies, 30, 39, 55, 155, 328n5, 330n37 The Wheel of Fortune (Cumberland), 46, 245–56, 258 Whitefoord, Caleb, 95 whiteness, 12, 26–28, 34, 47–48, 330n38; consolidation of, 60, 307, 309; performance of, 156–61 Wilks, Robert, 174 Williams, Raymond, 19 Wilson, Kathleen, 298 Woffington, Peg, 138, 152–53, 159; as Sir Henry Wildair (The Constant Couple), 144, 154, 174–77 Wordsworth, William, 131, 136, 144 The World as It Goes (Cowley), 230 Wroughton, Richard, 175, 177 Zoffany, Johann, David Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard in Macbeth, 113, 116