Afterword: What Now?

The past yields up new discoveries with every change in present trends. That is so because the situation in which we find ourselves excites our imagination for how we got here and where we are going. Nowhere is this fact of experiencing history more evident than in the language we use to characterize the revolutions of which we believe ourselves to be the heirs. To the new ideas and practices they introduced, we retrofit contemporary lexicons, reinterpreting what we believe to have happened in light of what seems to be happening to us. Like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, we are thrilled to discover that we have been speaking prose all along, but we refresh our diction to animate our connection to the past by bestowing upon it the keywords of the present.

Take “media,” for example. Modifying the titular “information age” in the subtitle of this double issue, the word “media,” once properly used as the plural of medium, has now morphed into the singular media, which is monolithic yet hydra-headed, coming at us from all sides, as in “the media spins the news.” Referring in its earliest usage to the middle term of a syllogism, a ground of proof or inference (CE 1584), the word medium separated gradually into the meanings of an intermediate agency (CE 1605) or instrument of circulation or exchange such as currency (CE 1740) or liquid vehicle, as in painting (CE 1854), and only later into a mode of mass communication (OED). Today, media, like data, is everywhere. Neither a lonely medium nor a single datum dares intrude on media, which conveys the complex sense of a transmitting structure or vehicle of communication, including the enabling technology and protocols pertaining to that vehicle. More and more, it also suggests a mode of interactive connection, as in social media, producing networked communications broadly conducive to sociability. Retrospectively applied in that sense by Daniel O’Quinn and Gillian Russell in their introduction to this issue, the word “media” bespeaks their governing idea for the collection. They invoke “multi-media contexts” and “intermedial relations” that they characterize as forming a “mediascape.” For them, neither digitization nor cyber networking originated such a precocious wonder, however, as the essays by fourteen expert authors they have brought together show. For their innovative purposes, print and playhouse in the eighteenth century constitute “New Media” avant la lettre.

The ambition of Georgian Theatre in an Information Age: Media, Performance, Sociability prompts reflection on the scope of the intervention it makes in received theatrical history. Three sections divide the brave new world of Georgian publicity into interconnected but distinct categories: media, repertoire, and narrative. The first section implicitly (and importantly) distinguishes media from genre. Fine-grained case studies by Stuart Sherman, Leslie Ritchie, Kristina Straub, and Helen Burke demonstrate not only how the theatre and newspapers became the dominant media of their day, but also how they collaborated productively on a daily basis to answer the never before so urgent question, “What Now?” New Media in the eighteenth century served as mutually reinforcing vehicles to raise and momentarily satisfy public curiosity for news of the very latest events and the dominant personalities of the age. The ultimate products that they created together were not the commodities of consumer culture, but rather the consumers themselves. News and performances that made news, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, had the power to make hungry where they most satisfy, drawing a crowd to the self-evacuating banquet. Section 1 sets the table. “Theatre’s Media” shows how oral and literate transmissions intertwined in the popular service of gossip: the tattler reports what the spectator wants to see. The remaining two sections feature genres, with new research sampled from the extraordinary variety of forms that an expanding public in the eighteenth century demanded from its new media. The section titled “New Situations” sets forth the generic complexity and geographical expansion of the “repertoire.” The forms of tragedy, comedy, mixed drama, private theatricals, operettas, colonial spectacles, and an early version of performance (or installation) art vie for preeminence among the ensemble of proliferating entertainments. Essays on particular...