Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter by Marty Gould (review)

Through his examination of three popular themes or figures in plays of the nineteenth century, Marty Gould argues for the importance of theatre as a site for the examination of popular imperialism, its connotations and its functions. His focii are the representatives of “the imperial adventurer, the repatriated colonial, and the soldier fighting Britain’s wars abroad” who are made manifest respectively in updated Robinson Crusoe figures, the colonial nabob returned to Britain, and the soldiers, specifically Scots, who fought in the Indian Rebellion (3). Gould further suggests, however, that the theatre acted as a site in the service of empire, concerned as it is with the forming of communities through its interactive, audience-based mode, as well as its consolidation of a fundamentally performative mode of national identity. As such, the book functions as a study of “popular imperialism”—an assessment of some of the ways in which empire was understood, experienced, and perpetuated by the English at home (11). This is not a political analysis, but a very useful study of one means by which contemporary culture brought a British audience into imaginative contact with its imperial legacy.

The material brought to light here is fascinating: Gould draws on the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s collection at the British Library to excellent effect; he brings a new dimension to our sense of the responsiveness of the theatre to its moment. Gould demonstrates the ways in which plays regularly brought the resources of the panorama and various exhibitionary media to bear on the task of representing far-flung nations, and offers interesting, though perhaps underdeveloped, ideas about the generic make-up of Victorian theatre. I suspect that the Victorians were more open to the variety of spectacular phenomena available to them than Gould implies, and less ready than he or other modern critics to categorise and pigeon-hole their visual pleasures. Nonetheless, the sheer vitality of Victorian theatre, its centrality to political and cultural debate as well as to entertainment, is brilliantly documented in Gould’s careful engagement with his material.

His intentionalist mode of interpretation is less successful. In his reading of The Cataract of the Ganges (1823), an example of a “theatrical Robinsonade” by William Thomas Moncrieff, Gould suggests that the play, alongside other Crusoe-inspired texts, “seek[s] to usurp the position occupied by Defoe in Britain’s mythology of imperial adventure” (38). There is an anachronistic feel to this claim as there is to the suggestion that the play also “advances English eloquence, a hybrid of text and performance, as the most powerful tool in the nation’s imperial arsenal” (35). An occasionally heavy-handed set of modern preoccupations threatens to unbalance Gould’s careful demonstration of the ways by which drama can both manifest and mediate political contexts and actions. Elsewhere, Gould argues for the Robinsonade’s “steadily decreasing interest in Crusoe as colonial settler,” and its presentation of Crusoe instead as effectively an administrator of Empire who exports ideas of English governance before returning to enjoy prosperity back at home (53). In uncovering such narrative arcs, Gould’s readings open up new mechanisms of imperial control.

Gould’s fascinating treatment of “theatrical nabobery” examines a figure best known to us as a minor walk-on character in Victorian fiction, where he usually operates, as in Vanity Fair (1847–48), as a grossly comedic figure, whose origins lie in eighteenth-century drama (91). Benjamin Disraeli writes in 1845 of the transition of the nabob from historical to theatrical figure, and it’s useful to have this phenomenon brought back to our attention. However, in this section, the text’s argument becomes less clear. In an attempt to define the nabob’s impact, Gould argues that he “simultaneously supported and challenged the national construction project” (110). The dual aspects of this figure are constantly asserted in what seems almost a verbal tic: of course they assert a fundamental truth about the contradictions of...