Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (review)

In the late eighteenth century, from the early 1770s through the 1790s, Britain experienced a prolonged crisis of national identity. The humiliating loss of the Atlantic colonies was bad enough, but more importantly, this debacle revealed that the financial practices of the East India Company were organized (badly) along the lines of unbridled capitalism, at the expense of everything else: king, country, and most acutely, the people being colonized. As Daniel O'Quinn writes:

The pressure of imperial expansion was redefining British polity in a fashion that was progressively undercutting the political conjunction of liberty and landed property, while reconfiguring the state relation as one between a potentially tyrannical court of directors and its shareholders.

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Reports began filtering back, from India and elsewhere, that the British abroad, in the context of colonial life and outside the scrutiny of home, were behaving savagely and undermining everything that Britain stood for, or thought it did. Meanwhile at home, recently returned Britons like Warren Hastings, who had been made massively wealthy by unregulated colonial enterprise (London nicknamed them "nabobs"—provincial governors of the Mogul empire in India—as a backhanded salute to the source of their incomes), were under increasing legal and political scrutiny for having themselves turned into the corrupt monsters they had been deployed to civilize in the first place.

The challenge at home, above and beyond how to regulate rampant colonial enterprise, was how to bring this ugly undertow of reports about greed and gross misconduct into alignment with Britain's elevated self-image as a country transforming the dark corners of the globe with its culture, trade, and religion. These reports surfaced at a time when a rising merchant middle-class sensibility in England was increasingly asserting itself, in critical opposition to the perceived excesses of a decadent and financially embarrassed aristocracy.

This is the extraordinarily complex backdrop of O'Quinn's examination of how theatrical productions, political cartoons, and public trials created a Möbius strip of shifting public opinion in which the nation's identity crisis got aired, digested, and debated. Imperialism created fundamental contradictions in the fabric of British life, and theatre seems to have been one important way that Britons at home determined, night by night, what stories they were going to tell themselves in order to resolve those contradictions. But the theatre was not simply a panacea: there were popular plays and performances in the mix that were equally bent on disrupting those stories. The fluidity and speed with which the debates moved—from newspaper to the playhouse to private conversations and back again—should not surprise us, but it does. Public opinion, as it formed and transformed, rippled through London as if the city were a single, huge neural network.

For theatre historians, especially those who have struggled with the densely coded topicality of late eighteenth-century drama, O'Quinn's book is a revelation. It becomes rapidly clear why so many of these plays have been dismissed by critics as third-rate drama: they were, in many cases, first-rate political commentary. It's a matter of shifting the frame, which O'Quinn does with dispatch and authority. We may as well watch the Daily Show without being up-to-date on the current news: we hear the laughter, but the jokes don't land. O'Quinn provides the backdrop and the political referents, but not simply so that the plays come into sharper focus (although that would be a substantial contribution by itself). He also gives us a glimpse of how these plays confirm or challenge national and racial superiority, and how those sentiments then ripple out from the theatre and back into circulation. It's a body politic in the most connected and enviable sense: the theatre functions like a rump parliament. This is by no means a new idea, but O'Quinn's book gives theatre historians new ways to make the case. These plays do not gesture vaguely...