Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (review)

248ComparativeDrama Daniel O'Quinn. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 412. $60.00. In Staging Governance, Daniel O'Quinn looks deeply into the legitimate, illegitimate , and political drama oflate-eighteenth-century London. His readings explore and extend Foucault's suggestion that in the second halfofthe eighteenth century the technologies of "discipline," focused on individual bodies, were overtaken by technologies of "regulation," focused on mass populations. O'Quinn uses Foucault's work to explore thepeculiar intersections ofclass,race, and sexuality in the late-eighteenth-century metropolis, focusing on the ways both race and sexuality"exist ... at the point where body and population meet" (30). Arguing that "theatrical productions enact governance and, in so doing, both discipline and regulate their audiences," O'Quinn demonstrates beautifully the way the London theaters, newspapers, caricatures, and political dramas come together to shape powerful new fantasies of classed and racialized sexuality around traumatic questions of Britain's imperial identity (30). Staging Governanceis remarkable for its synthesis ofwidelydivergent texts and sources: theater, newspaper, and caricature archives (including reviews, newspaper "puffs," playbills, plays in manuscript and in print); parliamentary posturings; legal and political history in the vein of J. G. A. Pocock and John Brewer;Anglo-Indian affairs in line with the work ofSudipta Sen,Ranajit Guha, Sara Suleri,and P.J.Marshall; and discussions ofeighteenth-centurytheatricality byscholars such as Gillian Russell,Jane Moody,Julie Carlson, and Joseph Roach. As behooves a study interested in "technologies" of discipline and regulation, StagingGovernancealso explores the shiftingtechnologies ofthelate-eighteenthcentury theater: the overlap between the staging techniques ofpantomime and ethnographic images and writings; caricaturists' use of "pre-cinematic" technologies such as the raree show, the magic lantern, and the camera obscura to comment on the theatricality ofthe Hastings impeachment; and the spectacle ofmilitary"drill" and onstage explosions in various hybrid theatrical responses to a state of"perpetual war" in India. The book's three sections translate the mutual "infiltration" of discipline and regulation into more specifically theatrical terms (313). The first section shows farce and pantomime of the 1770s relying on the audience's individualized identification with specific characters onstage; the second section examines the "unraveling" ofthat model ofidentification during the show trial ofthe Warren Hastings impeachment; and the third section explores a new theatrical mode in which"the object ofthe performance is the consolidation ofthe audience ," an audience which is now asked to identify as a totality with a spectacle of a racially unified nation (30). Reviews249 The book's introduction establishes not only the argument, but also the complex historical context ofthe study: a crisis in British imperial identity due to the loss ofthe American colonies and the ongoing conflict and corruption in England's Indian empire; the theater's role as "a nightly laboratory in social manners" highlighting "the question of virtue" central to "Anglophone political thought" (6); and the mobilizing of the social middle through a gradual redefinition of aristocratic manners as "deviant mores" and working-class sociality as"pathological excess" (9). The real delight ofthe introduction, however , comes from O'Quinn's exemplary reading of Elizabeth Inchbald's The Mogul Tale. O'Quinn begins by summarizing the farce's critique ofEnglish colonialism in India,but then supplements this reading with a marvelous account ofhow Inchbald's farce restages Isaac Bickerstaff's The Sultan; or, A Peep into the Seraglio. O'Quinn makes a compelling case for reading the sexual excesses and inadequacies presented by the farce both in political, orientalist terms and as a reflection on the world ofthe theater and the métropole, especially given Bickerstaff's death in exile after being publicly denounced as a sodomite. This multidirectional mode ofreading—simultaneouslyout toward the colonies and in toward the metropolis—aptly epitomizes O'Quinn's argument about theatrical governance. "Ethnographic Acts," the first section of the book, presents the relationship between audiences and the material culture of the theater as a form of autoethnography, mingling self-presentation and self-evaluation. The chapter on Samuel Foote's The Nabob and the credit crisis of 1772 invites us to see the villain of the farce, Sir Matthew Mite, not only as a figure for Robert Clive, defending himself...