Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816 by Claire Grogan, and: Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan by David Francis Taylor (review)

David Francis Taylor’s Theatres of Opposition originates in his doctoral thesis, and the questions behind Claire Grogan’s Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton also first took shape during her graduate research into the politics of British women’s writing in the late eighteenth century. The books share relatively little besides. They seem to pull their subjects in different, if not entirely opposed, directions. Both do, of course, endeavour to make us see their respective authors as we should, both encourage us to shed our sense of stylistic or disciplinary boundaries to do so, and, as is to be expected, both position their own nuanced interpretations precisely within the wealth of scholarly publications on their chosen subject or relevant topics. Yet, whereas shining a true light on Richard Brinsley Sheridan requires Taylor to teach us to think of him as his contemporaries did on both the theatrical and political stages at once, Grogan would like us to extricate Hamilton from the revolutionary debates in which critics normally situate her, or at least she would like us to do so long enough to appreciate that it is through her unique use of a variety of literary genres rather than more conventional political interventions that she participated in revolutionary deliberations.

Densely written, rich in detail, and the product of not only careful reading, but also extensive research in the theatrical and political contexts in which Sheridan was seen to act, Theatres of Opposition is a demanding but rewarding study. The Sheridan that emerges from its pages is more than the successful author of The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777): he is a major cultural figure of the time. Having bought David Garrick’s share in the Theatre Royal in 1776, Sheridan remained a key personage in Drury Lane until the theatre’s destruction by fire in 1809. A journalist as well as theatre manager and dramaturge, he was elected to the Commons in 1780. A gifted speaker, he rose within the Whig party and became the subject of numerous cartoons, which attest to his fame as a politician. A number of these are reproduced in Theatres of Opposition and contribute to Taylor’s case that Sheridan was, and was seen to be, an actor and politician in one, a single body on two stages illustrated by James Gillray’s portrayal of Sheridan as Harlequin. The stages themselves were more than contiguous: they too formed but one platform.

Considering Sheridan as a writer, orator, and manager, Taylor focuses on the playwright’s engagement with the imperial questions that America, India, and Ireland posed to the defenders of liberty in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Of the many interesting facets of his thesis is the argument deployed in chapter 3, “Tyranny in India or, Britain’s Character Lost. A Tragedy.” Here we are shown that Sheridan’s parliamentary speeches on the impeachment of Warren Hastings broke down the distinction between political oratory and dramatic performance, although the five-and-a-half-hour speech he delivered on 7 February 1787 was phenomenally successful, praised in the highest terms by fellow Members, including Edmund Burke, and did transform Hastings’s trial, as Taylor comments, into “a spectacular event.” What we learn is to appreciate the tensions inherent in theatricalized politics. Agreeing with Sara Suleri’s contention in The Rhetoric of English India (1992), Taylor argues that the difficulty Hastings’s indictors faced was the invisibility of the victim, the absence of the colonial body suffering, the lack of a tangible pain to sympathize with. He shows how Sheridan used tragic modes to compensate for the...