"Antitheatrical Theatricalism" on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

Character's Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage by Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. 298. $47.50 cloth.

Character's Theatre situates the eighteenth-century stage as the locus and model for the fashioning of individual identity, arguing that it was theatre more so than the novel where the construction of the modern subject took place. According to Lisa Freeman, eighteenth-century playwrights overcame prevailing theatrical artificiality and insincerity by deploying a strategy she terms "antitheatrical theatricalism" to establish authority and legitimacy against a tide of cultural criticism about the respectability of theatre. Playwrights eschewed representations of subjectivities and instead scripted representations of identities or characters. What we find in the period's staged drama, Freeman contends, is a "dynamic paradigm for representing identity that derives its force from the concept of 'character' as it was elaborated and understood in an eighteenth-century context" (7). As Character's Theatre demonstrates, identity is an effect of character, an insight that the period's playwrights exploited onstage, and drama was the genre best suited for the manipulation of audiences' epistemological frames for various pedagogical purposes, including identity construction. In support of this argument, Freeman's study delineates eighteenth-century character theory, acting styles, and audience interaction in its analysis of plays originally written and staged for eighteenth-century audiences.

Character's Theatre asserts the pervasive nature of theatricality in eighteenth-century British society, its ubiquitous role onstage and offstage, and its pedagogical potential. Theatricality, therefore, became a popular subject of drama, and plays about plays literally stage the strategy of "antitheatrical theatricalism," distancing character through metadramatics and the performance of theatricality as everyday occurrences. For example, Henry Fielding's The Author's Farce (1729-37) demonstrates the strategy of antitheatrical theatricalism in its portrayal of the theatre as a place no more artificial than other eighteenth-century cultural sites. Consequently, character representations are authorized within this framework, though provisional and temporary, mimetic and self-reflectively performative. John Gay's 1715 What D'Ye Call It? A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce dramatizes tensions between representational characters and performers so to acknowledge competing bodies and to illustrate how "character" is an unstable position of staged contests and surfaces that require interpretation. Dramatic characters thus facilitate critical assessments about how knowledge of identity is produced. For women playwrights, this assessment was particularly significant as it created conceptual space for the possibility of women authorized to resist their normative socioeconomic roles. Perceptively, women playwrights assumed the voice of nationalism and patriotism, thereby aligning themselves with the regulatory masculine voices that repudiated the infusion of foreign drama on the British stage. Freeman's analyses of Fielding's The Author's Farce and George Colman the Younger's The Female Dramatist (1781-82) thoroughly demonstrate comic and serious applications of "antitheatrical theatricalism," the ways in which eighteenth-century plays about plays stage bodies as characters and representations as identities that challenge gender boundaries while authorizing playwrights as critical spectators of culture who could teach audiences how to read the illusions of character.

Tragedy that staged the nation in crisis and patriotic characters who would come to its rescue constitute the next set of plays that Freeman's study considers. Tragedy fulfilled an important patriotic and moral pedagogy for the emerging middle class in need of character building and the inculcation of masculine, English cultural values. The period's tragic hero emerged as the common man, domestic and individualized, the exemplar of new masculine and English ideologies. Tragedy thus had the potential to expunge the nation of foreign entertainments with their irrational, feminine passions, their morally degenerate spectacles, and their threatening influences. Joseph Addison's Cato (1746) illustrates how eighteenth-century tragedy represented this new masculine hero in the context of a domestic setting in which women could not distract him or deform tragedy. In George Lillo's The London Merchant; or, The History of George Barnwell (1730-31...