Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

The theatricality of eighteenth-century culture has become, in recent years, a scholarly commonplace. Illuminating the formalized codes and public spectacles by which patrician and plebeian interacted in the eighteenth century, the useful body of scholarship on this topic has had the unexpected effect of deflecting attention away from the theater itself. Employing the theater essentially as metaphor, such studies rarely (if ever) take us inside the theater, and their restricted focus on class has obscured the powerful ethnic conflicts that typified the theater in particular and the culture in general. In this essay, I propose a return to the theater itself, arguably the most important and most neglected cultural arena of the period. Such a return will make clear the theater's function as a highly charged cultural site for the marking of ethnic minorities, both onstage and off.

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The view of Georgian culture that I will present in this essay is based on a series of significant theatrical phenomena that bring to light the central importance of ethnicity in the formation of nationhood during this period. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the Georgian stage, particularly during the last half of the eighteenth century, was the development and multiplication of ethnic, colonial, and provincial character types: Jews, Scots, Irish, Welsh, blacks, West Indians, nabobs, and Yorkshiremen paraded on the London stage. These domestic and colonial others showcased London and, more generally, England as the center of an increasingly complex and culturally mixed nation and empire, and in this way functioned to explore the emerging and shifting identity of the recently invented Great Britain. Insofar as such stage figures were caricatures, they functioned to establish the cultural hegemony of England precisely at that moment when the English were alarmed by the prospect of being diluted into Britons or, perhaps worse, diffused throughout the world in the colonies, with no geographic center, or with a center, the London metropolis, overrun by a hybrid mix of strangers who could claim to be British and even English--albeit "outlandish Englishmen," as we will see. Moreover, while we might expect that such ethnic figures functioned on the stage solely as caricatures, the theater in fact began aggressively to work toward rehabilitating a variety of minority populations during this period, and minorities themselves made the theater a site of resistance by protesting plays that negatively represented them. Exploring the complicated negotiations that occurred between the theater and the culture at large will allow me to explain the special cultural anxieties about ethnicity that developed during this period, to show why and how ethnic identity began to be seen as performative, and, finally, to engage a larger debate (initiated by J. G. A. Pocock) about the Anglocentric biases that underpin our formulations of so-called British history and culture.

Michael Ragussis is professor of English at Georgetown University. He is author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (1978), Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction (1986), and, most recently, Figures of Conversion: The "Jewish Question" and English National Identity (1995). He is currently working on a project that explores multi-ethnic spectacle, both onstage and off, in Georgian and Victorian Great Britian.