"Art against art": Sentimentality, Mid-Century Drama, and the North American Crises

In this essay, I examine two English comedies that appeared in the context of North American crises. The first is a little-studied play, The Jealous Wife (1761), written by George Colman the Elder and staged during the Seven Years' War (1756–63); and the second is a minor drama of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Camp: A Musical Entertainment, first performed on October 15, 1778, in the midst of heighted tensions in Europe over the American Revolution. Each play represents how the habits and behaviors of military life seep into English society. While The Jealous Wife charts the looming influence of the military on cultural institutions and social structures, Sheridan's entertainment observes how various niche artforms compete with the extravagant pageantry of military exercises on British soil. These two plays are significant in eighteenth-century drama because they try to reckon with military conflicts that will forever change the texture of British life at home and abroad.¹

As these two plays struggle for relevance, they serve as remarkable testaments to art as the characters articulate distinct subjectivities amid the onslaught and pressures of war's homogenizing effects. The Jealous Wife centers on the domestic quarrels of the Oaklys, and the subplot features the momentarily thwarted marriage between Oakly's nephew and the heiress of a country fortune. These tensions are exacerbated by the meddling of Oakly's brother, a major in the British army. Sheridan's play focuses on the quotidian aspects of military life. The Camp, as its name suggests, responds to the absolute sensation of the camp at Coxheath, for the British would arrive in droves at the settlement to ogle at the military's exercises. Like Aphra Behn before him, Sheridan eyes warily the rival "entertainments" of the state that attract an audience that would otherwise populate the theatre.

Art simultaneously accesses the spaces and temporalities of the war efforts and provides a separate realm from the naturalization of the military as organizing British identity. In the Prologue, Sheridan foregrounds the theatre's canny, if obligatory, promotion of the British military that appropriates all of "Fashion's Forms":

The Stage is still the Mirror of the Day,Where Fashion's Forms in bright Succession play;True to its End, what Image can it yieldIn Times like these, but the embattled Field?²

Through his acknowledgement that the war is everywhere—"what image can [the stage] yield / In Times like these"?—he tries to grapple with what Timothy Morton would term a hyperobject, an entity too large to conceptualize. While Morton observes that hyperobjects occupy a space that renders them "invisible to humans for long stretches of time," he states how they "exhibit their effects interobjectively [or] can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects." In other words, it is unknown as a distinct quantity and known through its properties as "hyper relative" to other things.³ Even as the military swells and escalates its presence across the globe and different spheres of life—public and private—the stage furnishes the aesthetics—"Fashion's Forms"—that allow the audience to scale vast temporalities ("in bright Succession play") and a set of coordinates ("the embattled field") that cuts across military and domestic life.

Colman and Sheridan, in fact, present multiple artforms that enable the characters to regain ontological security and creative control. In his entertainment, Sheridan depicts an enormous spectrum of art—visual, theatrical, musical, acoustic, decorative sewing and textiles, cosmetic, landscape, pastoral—whose practitioners descend on and take as their subject the camp. On the one hand, as Cecil Price explains, Sheridan offers the British public "scenic tricks and illusions . . . when literary invention was a standstill, and wit and wisdom were busy elsewhere" (711). In other words, the playhouse conceded to the vast mobilization of material, economic, and cultural resources to fight Britain's wars in the Americas and protect the country from its Continental rivals. On the other hand, Sheridan emphasizes that literary and other artists' inventions continue ("still"), thereby not only illuminating "the embattled...