Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution and Richard Brinsley Sheridan by David Francis Taylor (review)

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in his triple and intersecting capacities as parliamentarian, playwright and theatre manager, is the charismatic subject of Theatres of Opposition – a study of the “complex overlap of theatrical and parliamentary-political cultures towards the end of the eighteenth century” (2). Driven by the revisionist aim to recover “the simultaneity and interconnectedness of theatrical practice and political action” (6), Taylor’s methodology is impressively interdisciplinary, drawing upon literary, political, theatrical and art histories.

The book opens with Sheridan’s response to the American War of Independence, offering readings of The Rivals, The School for Scandal, The Critic and the less familiar afterpieces St Patrick’s Day and The Camp as dramas that emblematise Sheridan’s “campaign for an actively critical political public” (32), at once alert and resistant to the government’s print propaganda war. A careful analysis of the politically pointed style of The Englishman (jointly edited by Sheridan and Charles James Fox between March-June 1779) makes for especially compelling reading. Responding to The Critic as a play that satirises both the eighteenth-century press and contemporary performance practices, Taylor’s understanding of silence as “a potent political signifier” (54) lays the ground for his subsequent investigation of Pizarro (Sheridan’s only tragedy). Supported by a detailed examination of Sheridan’s widely publicised involvement in the Warren Hastings Trial (1788-95), Pizarro is read as a “sequence of failed speech acts” (127) that ultimately expose the “powerlessness of the orator in his attempt to inscribe accountability within the apparatus of colonialism, and of the inability of eloquence … to counter regimes of despotism and torture” (126-27).

The final part of the book focuses on the demands imposed by, and Sheridan’s studied, often deliberately provocative responses to, the role of theatre manager. Taylor reflects upon the ideological significance of Sheridan’s decision to add Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved to Drury Lane’s 1795 repertoire, and invest in Henry Ireland’s radically-inflected Shakespearean forgery, Vortigern. This is supplemented by a Foucauldian chapter on “the scenography of incarceration”, which posits intriguing points of contact between the rebuilt theatre (of 1794) and the new jail at Clerkenwell. The Epilogue then looks to contemporary caricatures (a source cited throughout the book) as evidence of the oxymoronic power of Sheridan’s “theatrical politics” (248). It is a shame that Taylor’s understandable need to limit the study to the 1770s-1790s does not allow for a discussion of Sheridan’s political career during and immediately after his election to the Ministry of all the Talents (only mentioned in passing), which would have made for interesting reading at this point. Notwithstanding, this tremendously well-researched and elegantly written book contributes as importantly to our knowledge of eighteenth-century theatre and politics, as it does to Sheridan’s legacy.