From Royalty to Riots: Nation and Class in the Reception of French Musical Theater in London

Of the many foreigners to thrive on the early eighteenth-century London stage, George Frideric Handel has most consistently garnered the attention of scholars.¹ Yet alongside Handel's now canonic opere serie, more ephemeral, light-hearted entertainments flourished in the margins of high culture. When French acting troupes from Paris arrived in London in 1718, they quickly became showstoppers. Their repertoire had been shaped predominantly in Paris's fairground theaters, but also in the city's official theatrical institutions—the Comédie-Italienne and the Comédie-Française. Their performances blended music with dance and acrobatics with spoken comedy and often revolved around the stock characters from commedia dell'arte. Over the next two decades, French acting troupes, consisting of up to seventy members, performed nearly two hundred distinct musical comedies in London.² While French dancers and commedia dell'arte actors had been employed on London stages for afterpieces in decades prior, the troupes that performed between 1718 and 1738 became more than addons to the main theatrical attraction and could command the stage for an entire evening.³ Offering an average of four different programs of theatrical entertainments per week, theirs was a fast-changing, ephemeral repertoire that was performed entirely in French. The troupes did not regularly perform at the London equivalent of the Paris fair theaters, but rather at the official theaters used for serious dramas and operas, including Lincoln's Inn Fields and the King's Theatre. As a result, the royal family and London's aristocratic elite were often in attendance at their performances.

Given Britain's ongoing tense political relationship with France throughout the eighteenth century, one might assume that Londoners' predominant attitude towards the French performers was one of antagonism, especially since Britain and France had recently emerged from a twenty-five-year period of war.⁴ However, the troupes' reception in London was not so clear-cut. It is true that they were condemned, belittled, and often parodied by many members of the "middling sort," a wide-ranging group that included "yeomen, financially independent trades, and knowledge-based professions."⁵ However, the French performers found great appeal among London's elite and even gained patronage from the British royalty. Their twenty years of successful trips to London were in large part due to this royal support.

This article examines the reactions to the French troupes within the context of the rapid social changes of early eighteenth-century England. Chief among these transformations was a growing concern with social hierarchy, which developed during the 1720s and 30s in response to an increasingly unified ruling elite and the growth of the middling orders.⁶ These changes eventually led to a heightened awareness of "social class" as a principle for describing the hierarchical nature of British society.⁷ Although England had long been divided along lines of rank and aristocratic privilege, many eighteenth-century commentators began to see "class" as something that could be gained or lost; it thus could be performed, emulated, or even bought, resulting in new anxieties surrounding status.⁸

In response to these changing social norms, French musical comedies were interpreted as both high- and low-style entertainment once they were imported to England, depending largely on who was watching. For elites, attendance at the French plays could signal prestige and demonstrate their nuanced grasp of foreign culture. But among the middling orders the craze for French theater was indicative of widespread trends for consuming foreign luxuries that they believed would destabilize native English culture. Thanks to this divergent reception across social strata, the French performances became divorced from their earlier position at the lower end of the hierarchy of Parisian theatrical institutions.⁹ Through this process of reinterpretation, the French performances helped to enact a mutable sense of class identity in ways that both negated and reinforced ideas of what France could represent in the transnational imagination.

The Royal Treatment

The widespread success of the French performers in the years 1718–38 depended, at least in part, on the support of the...