Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (review)

{ 145 } BOOK REV IEwS \ Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain. By Michael Ragussis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. vii + 247 pp. $55.00 cloth. Michael Ragussis’s Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain offers a fascinating and meticulously researched study of the “ideological work” performed by ethnic types on the eighteenth-century British stage (4). Ragussis questions how the rapid increase in ethnic characters in the English playhouse (Jewish, Irish, Scottish, Yorkshire, Welsh, West Indian, etc.) created an “ethnic spectacle”—one designed to showcase these types as “purely theatrical” by reinforcing the boundaries between the performance of ethnic identity onstage and the performance of “Britishness” outside the playhouse (2). Yet rather than focusing narrowly on how a dominant group used theatre to exert authority over oppressed groups, he also pays careful attention to the “history of resistance” enacted by ethnic minorities who protested their political, social, and cultural marginalization (12). Ragussis incorporates a range of dramatic and popular literature into his study, as well as an impressive array of illustrations, newspaper accounts, and memoirs. He also situates his work firmly in the political history of the period, providing ample background for the reader less familiar with the labyrinthine politics of the Georgian era. The result is an erudite, well-written, and persuasive argument about the changing functions of ethnic types in eighteenth-century British culture. Theatrical Nation consists of six chapters plus a brief epilogue. Chapter 1, “Family Quarrels,” serves as an introduction to the study and explores a nation under siege not from outside forces but from the very groups it had so successfully colonized. Ragussis argues that the battle for control in the Georgian playhouse mirrored a larger struggle to reconceptualize the nation as either “diverse but unified” or “destabilized and internally divided” (14). He suggests that examining “immensely popular but critically neglected plays and performances ” and situating those works within larger cultural trends of the period can shed new light on the “consistently comparative nature” of ethnic representation in Georgian England (21). Ragussis is also intrigued by the ways in which the stage helped to promulgate a kind of semiotic shorthand for debates over ethnic identity. These coded signs simultaneously embedded ethnic stereotypes in British culture even while they underscored anxiety that Britons would not be able to spot the markers of difference. This theme leads into chapter 2, { 146 } BOOK REV IEwS which examines the phenomenon of ethnic passing and what Ragussis terms the “multiethnic spectacle” of the Georgian stage (43). Chapter 2 interrogates both well-known and less familiar play texts, including Macklin’s Love à la Mode, Sheridan’s Captain O’Blunder, Mendez’s The Double Disappointment, Reed’s The Register­Office, Carey’s The Honest York­ shireman, and O’Keeffe’s The Irish Mimic; or, Blunders at Brighton. While Ragussis notes the importance of outward physical signs (skin tone, ethnic dress, etc.), he argues for dialect as one of the most problematic components of the multiethnic spectacle. The impetus to standardize British speech and the pressure on outside ethnic groups to shed their linguistic markers produced the “ethnic incognito” (58), a dangerously liminal figure hovering at the threshold between “British” and “other.” Thus the stage sounded the alarm by exposing characters attempting to pass into a vocal and aural culture to which they did not belong. Ironically, perhaps, the stage also aided in the preservation of various ethnic dialects as the nation succumbed to a kind of dictionary mania, categorizing and archiving regional dialects in danger of disappearing. Critics paid increasing attention to the “authenticity” of a character’s dialect. The one notable exception, Ragussis notes, was the stage Jew, whose speech patterns“became an obstacle to the full recuperation of Jewish identity on the stage” (79). Chapters 3 and 4 focus more specifically on the strange career of the stage Jew. Chapter 3,“Cheeld o’ Commerce,” links Britain’s rapidly transforming capitalist economy to efforts to rehabilitate the stage Jew (which was followed by an equally dramatic backlash against the character in the wake of the“Jew Bill” controversy of 1753–54). By the end of the century it was no longer possible to...