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

Theatrical Nation provides a model of what cultural studies and the reinvigorated study of the “actual theater” of the eighteenth century can accomplish. London of the eighteenth century was undoubtedly multicultural, uncertain of its dynamic Englishness, and involved in a global economy that transformed it socially as well as economically and politically. This book shows that while Jewish and Scottish characters were more popular than ever during the Georgian period, ethnic minority audience members were increasingly ostracized as “an attempt to maintain them as purely theatrical.” It continues the momentum that Mr. Ragussis established with his groundbreaking Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (1995). His move to plays, long overdue, is worth the wait.

Though Theatrical Nation primarily studies London performances from the 1760s through the early nineteenth century, it also briefly considers the influences of earlier dramatic traditions and economic events since the 1690s that created the intense racial atmosphere of the later eighteenth-century theater experience. Mr. Ragussis wisely sets out to narrow his focus to the most commonly controversial stage figures—the Jew, Scot, and Irishman—who he argues “establish the hegemony of England at that moment when the English were threatened by being diluted into Britons or perhaps worse, diffused throughout the world in the colonies.” Actually, Theatrical Nation is not a study of Scottish or Irish character types, nor does it need to profess that it is. His readings of performances of Jewish identity, which are central in each of the six chapters and epilogue, prove his conclusion that the Georgian theater was a “site of ethnic conflict and ethnic reconciliation” and “the central cultural arena in which a battle over national identity was waged.”

“Family Quarrels,” the first chapter, establishes the study’s focus on the nature of Englishness and otherness and begins to explore how actors moved between roles as “ethnic chameleons” and audiences and the press responded to and motivated representations of ethnic identity. Its outline of the demographic changes in London as the city’s population doubled between 1650 and 1750 is clearly stated, but should be more substantial. It also weakly notes that multiethnicity was a “new” issue for Londoners.

More convincing is Mr. Ragussis’s criticism of Richard Sennett’s argument in The Fall of Public Man (1974) that Londoners were unaware of racial or ethnic outsiders as categories or types. Sennett, and the scholars he most influenced, such as David Marshall and Jean-Christophe Agnew, Mr. Ragussis believes, foregrounded class in the eighteenth-century theater to such an extent that they “had for many years the unexpected effect of deflecting attention away from the theater itself.” Marshall and Agnew did not, in their defense, stay entirely conceptually outside the theater, but it is true that the multiethnic audience and their quarrels had been largely invisible until feminist and postcolonial scholars more openly engaged in historical discourses of race. Mr. Ragussis notes his indebtedness to these scholars yet laments that, still, ethnic stage characters in hundreds of eighteenth-century plays have not been analyzed.

The third chapter, “‘Cheeld o’ Commerce’: Merchants, Jews, and Fathers in a Commercial Nation” may be most relevant to scholars working before 1750. It begins with Voltaire’s 1733 vision of the Royal Exchange as the setting for ethnic and cultural equity and then grounds its argument in J. G. A. Pocock’s convincing Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (1985). Pocock had asserted that after the 1690s, political and social history was redefined in terms of commercial motives; Mr. Ragussis looks to how the stage explored “England’s national reputation for both commerce and tolerance.” So while Theatrical Nation is predominantly a profile of the Georgian theater, its findings can also be used retrospectively to notice how, for example, the traditional figure of the Wandering Jew was replaced by a “sanitized” version in early eighteenth-century commercial propaganda and then, after the Jewish Naturalization Act of...