Performing the West Indies: Comedy, Feeling, and British Identity

Writing in 1772, Richard Cumberland described his approach to comedy as "design'd as an attempt upon [the reader's] heart, and as such proceeds with little deviation from mine."¹ More than thirty-five years later, he reiterated this sentiment in his Memoirs, stating "there never have been any statute-laws for comedy; there never can be any; it is only referable to the unwritten law of the heart, and that is nature."² In essence, then, the affect of comedy is an idealized communion between feeling hearts, made possible through the medium of performance. Later eighteenth-century comedies, frequently described today as "sentimental," were expressly designed to promote this "undeviating" connection between playwright and audience—a connection that can only work, it would seem, when the feeling hearts share certain natural affinities. But what connections can exist when the playwright's subject is seemingly remote from the audience? By examining Richard Cumberland's The West Indian (1771) and George Colman the Younger's Inkle and Yarico (1787), this essay explores the implications of these affinities, what Raymond Williams calls "structures of feeling," embedded in comedies that take advantage of England's fascination with its own, seemingly exotic colonies. Under these circumstances, how easy is it for the playwright to create a connection between his creation and the hearts of a decidedly nonexotic English audience?

To shift the terms of Cumberland's discussion only slightly, the kind of communion he describes that is made possible through the medium of comedy represents the shared consciousness that constitutes a "structure of feeling." Williams uses the term to explain a set of social experiences, "meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt," and thus "variable" rather than fixed.³ Like Cumberland, he stresses that structures of feeling are of necessity communal, a set of social relationships that are both thought and felt and that represent the "affective elements of consciousness and relationships … in a living and interrelating continuity."⁴ As Williams explains, these structures are a "set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension … a social experience which is still in process."⁵ Williams's concept is especially relevant for the later eighteenth century. Perhaps no other age was quite so fascinated by the moral and aesthetic implications of shared feelings or sympathy⁶ even as it experienced a wide range of social and economic transformations.

The arts play a special role in these discussions of "meanings and values." For Williams, they fulfill a general function, exemplifying a "present and affective" experience, vividly realized and widely felt that also can represent the first indicator of a new structure of feeling.⁷ In the context of eighteenth-century moral and aesthetic theory, the arts are proactive as well as reflective; the affective power of art actively promotes virtue, both personal and civic. As Cumberland and his contemporaries recognized, theater is unique in that the audience experiences the drama in real time; it is living and present in a way unlike any other art and derives its affective power through these very qualities. In the words of Henry Home, Lord Kames, who like Williams respected art's affective "presence": "of all the means for making an impression of ideal presence, theatrical representation is the most powerful. That words independent of action have the same power in a lesser degree, every one of sensibility must have felt."⁸

National identity constitutes one structure very much "in process" in the last decades of the eighteenth century and one unusually strongly linked, in the eyes of Britons, to the practice of comedy. For writers such as Kames and fellow Scot Hugh Blair, for example, comedy becomes an expression of British national character. Kames sees comedy as a matter of national morality, warning that "odious" writers such as the Restoration comic playwrights "spread infection through their native country."⁹ Many writers follow Kames in attaching national importance to the practice of a specific, recognizably English, mode of comedy. Thus, when comparing English and French comedy, Blair writes:

From the English Theatre, we are naturally led to...