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  • Introduction
  • Daniel O’Quinn and Gillian Russell

This theme issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction attempts both to encapsulate a number of important developments in the study of performance and print media and to orient future research on the complex intermedial relations endemic to theatrical culture. The explicit emphasis on media and sociability is designed to counteract the nascent tendency to separate sociability from its mediation and to isolate media archaeology from social relations. The work of the scholars represented not only recognizes the centrality of the theatre to eighteenth-century culture, but also acknowledges the ways in which theatrical experience is embedded in the mediascape of London, the provinces, and the colonies. Theatre is a crucial medial hinge that provides a vantage point for considering a wide array of under-analyzed cultural and social phenomena. The need for such a vantage point is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the general lack of scholarship on the specifically intermedial relationship between the theatre and newspapers and between the theatre and the novel. How social and cultural narratives are remediated from one mode of representation to another throws up an important set of methodological problems pertaining to reception, identity, and performance that have the potential to reactivate important debates in these various scholarly disciplines.

We have adopted the word Georgian in the title to stand for the period from George i’s accession in 1714 to the death of George iii in 1820. As with all chronological frames, this is necessarily imprecise. The more important starting date is the first issue of the Tatler in 1709, and the more salient closing date is the reopening of the modified Drury Lane theatre in 1812. As will become apparent, this period is addressed in three overlapping temporal arcs in order to track crucial cultural and social transformations that tend to be occluded by the strict separation of print and performance. The collected essays represent a commitment to interpreting theatre in its complex, multimedial contexts, reflecting what Kristina Straub describes as the period’s [End Page 337] “attraction to variety.” Underpinning all the contributions is the recognition not only that theatre was a multi-layered performance event, occurring on stage and in the auditorium, but also that these performances were mediated throughout the print public sphere. Understanding the transit back and forth between performance and print is thus vital, requiring a continual engagement with questions of remediation and reception. The theatre cannot be considered in isolation, but must be explored in relation to other forms of cultural expression and contingent social and political stages: hence, this issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction includes essays by scholars who have not hitherto been identified as working within the field of theatre studies, and the collection engages with other forms of cultural production, such as the periodical and the novel.

The essays are grouped into three sections that mark particularly vibrant fields of enquiry. The first, entitled “Daily and Nightly Life: Theatre’s Media,” brings together four essays that explore the complex integration of theatrical performance and “theatrical intelligence.” The latter phrase eventually became the primary subheading under which plays were discussed in daily newspapers, but one of the most important things to recognize about these two media is that they fully permeate one another. Topical information from the newspapers makes its way into nightly performance; many important plays actually dramatize the act of reading the papers; physical newspapers are often on stage as props. Aside from reviews and advertisements of past and upcoming performances, the daily papers are littered with gossip, innuendo, and other forms of social reporting that link their way back to events in the playhouse: popular songs, prologues, epilogues, and occasional verse about recent performances are regular features of the daily news. Both media are bound up with one another throughout this period, and the theatre managers and the newspaper editors were very much mixed up in each other’s business. Garrick’s role in manipulating the press is widely known but hardly exceptional: theatrical managers and newspaper editors relied on each other to keep both of their respective cultural products before the consumer’s eye.

These intermedial traits are crucial because it is through these...

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