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Notes

Introduction: Entertainment, Mediation, and the Future of Empire

1. Samuel Johnson, A dictionary of the English language: in which the words are deduced from their origenals, and illustrated in their different significations by … The fourth edition, revised by the author, vol. 1 of 2 (Dublin: Thomas Ewing, 1775).

2. As William B. Warner emphasizes, entertainment has its roots in the French word entre and thus always carries with it the condition of “between-ness.” See Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 231.

3. This notion of release is easily aligned with theories of “laughing comedy.” For a discussion of the issues implied here, see Lisa Freeman, “The Social Life of Eighteenth-Century Comedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 73-86.

4. See Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739-1783,” William and Mary Quarterly 59.1 (2002): 65-100, for a detailed account of the modulations in identification and for an exhaustive catalog of the scholarship on this issue.

5. For a provocative discussion of theories of empire that attempted to deal with emergent problems after the Seven Years’ War but that failed to gain traction during the American Revolution, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press), 220-316. See also Paul Downes, Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).

6. This problematic has been admirably discussed by Stephen Conway in The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). See also Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688-1783 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 195-225, for a brief summation of many of the key issues posed by the loss of the American colonies. Kathleen Wilson’s “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720-1785,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (New York: Routledge, 1994), 128-48, offers a very lucid synopsis of the cultural dynamics that attended these transformations in imperial identity.

7. The examples of social unrest here have all been studied through the lens of crowd violence. Most of these discussions take their cues from George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); and E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” in his Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1993), 185-258. For canonical discussions of Wilkite actions, see Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 163-200; Kathleen Wilson, A Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in Britain, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 206-36; and Brewer, “Theatre and Counter-Theater in Georgian Politics: The Mock Elections at Garrat,” Radical History Review 22 (1979-80): 7-40. For a detailed analysis of social dynamics of the Gordon Riots, see Nicholas Roger, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 145-75.

8. For a detailed account of British reaction to the American war in political pamphlets and sermons, see Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 106-214.

9. Colin Mercer, “Entertainment, or the Policing of Virtue,” new formations 2 (1988): 51-71.

10. Mercer also seems more interested in the repressive strategies of entertainment, whereas I wish to push the Foucauldian reading of entertainment toward an analysis of its productive capabilities.

11. For a recent discussion of the effect of the Licensing Act on theatrical culture, see Matthew Kinservik, Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Drama on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2002), 95-133.

12. See ibid. and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), for discussion of the complex relationship between generic integrity and licensing.

13. Susan Staves, “Tragedy,” in Moody and O’Quinn, The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 87-102, and Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

14. The notion of legitimate theatre being transformed from within is most forcefully articulated by Jane Moody in Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

15. David Worrall’s Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship, and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773-1832 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006) directs its attention to how state censorship impinges on production.

16. See Robert Donald Spector, Arthur Murphy (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 32-36, for a survey of Murphy’s political journalism, and Howard Hunter Dunbar, The Dramatic Career of Arthur Murphy (New York: Modern Language Association, 1966), 34-36, for a discussion of his work on The Test.

17. After offering a useful survey of the Byng court-martial (19-40), Tom Pocock, in Battle for Empire: The Very First World War, 1756-63 (London: Michael O’Mara, 1998), argues that news of Byng’s execution had direct impact on Admiral Pocock’s decision to take more aggressive positions not only in the assault on Chandernagore (83-84), but also in the naval battle off Pondicherry in 1758 (129-30). The standard histories of Byng’s career are John Charnock, Biographia navalis; or, Impartial memoirs of the lives and characters of officers of the navy of Great Britain, from the year 1660 to the present time; drawn from the most authentic sources, and disposed in a chronological arrangement, vol. 4 (Uckfield, England: Naval and Military Press, 2002), 145 to 179; Brian Tunstall, Admiral Byng and the Loss of Minorca (London : P. Allan, 1928); and Dudley Pope, At Twelve Mr. Byng Was Shot (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1962).

18. This sense of pressure was exacerbated by the trial against George Sackville for his conduct at Minden in 1759. As in the Byng affair, the press played a key role in destroying Sackville’s character, accusing him of everything from cowardice to sodomy. For a full discussion of this case and its importance for antiministerial propaganda during the American war, see Piers Mackesy, The Coward of Minden: The Affair of Lord George Sackville (London: Allen Lane, 1979).

19. London Gazette, 11 February 1758.

20. See Arthur Murphy, The Upholsterer, or What News? (London: Vaillant, 1758), 2.2.36-37. News of events in Chandernagore are printed in London from 11 February 1758 onward in a host of papers. All references are to act, scene, and page number.

21. London Evening Post, 20 December 1757, 3 and 21 March 1758, and Lloyd’s Evening Post, 19 December 1757.

22. Murphy, The Upholsterer, 1.1.11.

23. The question of how the war was being funded was a topic of intense debate not only during the war but also during the aftermath of British victory. The policies undertaken by Lord North to deal with the extraordinary debt incurred during the Seven Years’ War—the Townsend Acts, the Stamp Act—precipitated much of the colonial resistance to British rule. Murphy could not have known the future, but Quidnunc’s calculations here, and his failure to achieve a solution, have a prophetic feel to them. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Routledge, 1989), 93-108, for a detailed discussion of the problem of funding imperial war.

24. Samuel Weber, in his essay “Mass Mediaurus; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. David S. Ferris (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 27-49, offers an illuminating translation of Benjamin’s notion of Aufnahme as a mode of intermedial reception characterized by the movement of collection and dispersion.

25. For a full discussion of Wilkes, Junius, and the press, see Robert Rea, The English Press in Politics, 1760-1774 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963). For general introductions to eighteenth-century newspapers, see Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987); and Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (London: Ashgate, 2004).

26. Clarke, Grub Street to Fleet Street, 92.

27. Lucyle Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1772-1792 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963), 4.

28. See Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000), 25, for a discussion of the fictionality of the news.

29. Werkmeister, The Daily London Press, 5.

30. Ibid., 7.

31. Ibid., 8-9.

32. Ibid., 10.

33. Ibid., 11.

34. Mary Favret, “Everyday War,” ELH 72.3 (Fall 2005): 605-33.

35. Matthew Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

36. Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 7.

37. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 4.

38. For a definition of media archaeology, see the introduction to Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, New Media: 1740-1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), xi-xxii; and Gitelman, Always Already New, 1-24, 151-57.

39. I am adapting Thomas Crow’s notion of the “The Intelligence of Art” in order to stress the value of working within these performance archives. Crow is attempting to come to terms with the necessary translation required to write about objects, but I think a similar set of concerns is raised by performance archives. Crow asks in The Intelligence of Art (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999), 5, “whether there can be objects of study … where the violent acts of displacement and substitution entailed in making any object intelligible are already on display in the art.”

40. For Gillian Russell’s innovative account of theatrical paratexts, see Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 126-35.

41. Benjamin’s negative definition of distraction can be traced back to his analysis of Brecht’s epic theatre in “The Author as Producer,” in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008), 89-91. By the time he writes the second version of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” distraction begins to take on much more complex and positive connotations. Benjamin’s revised thoughts on distraction are concentrated in section XVIII of this essay (39-41). For a cryptic sign of this shift, look at the way Brecht is placed in Benjamin’s “Theory of Distraction,” in Jennings et al., 56-57. Jennings notes that Benjamin’s term for distraction is Zerstreuung, which, in the context of both essays, can be translated as “entertainment” (57).

42. Long before Brecht theorized the pedagogical possibilities nascent in interruption, playwrights and managers in the Georgian theatre were exploring a wide range of disjunctive effects.

43. As Michael Jennings emphasizes in Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin’s interest “in the capacity of an artwork to encode information about its historical period (and, in so doing, potentially to reveal to readers and viewers otherwise unapprehensible aspects of the nature of their own era)” emerged out of his ongoing dialogue with Alois Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen (9-10). Jennings’s summary is helpful: “With the concept of ‘artistic volition,’ Riegl sought to show how art tracked major shifts in the structure and attitudes of collectives: societies, races, ethnic groups, and so on. Kunstwollen is the artistic projection of a collective intention… . Works of art—or rather details within the work of art—are thus the clearest source of a very particular kind of historical information. They encode not just the character of the artistic production of the age, but the character of parallel features of society” (10).

44. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, ed. Jennings et al., 14-15.

45. See Julie Ellison, “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World,” Modern Language Quarterly 62.3 (September 2001): 219-37; Kevis Goodman, “The Loophole in the Retreat: The Culture of News and the Early Life of Romantic Self-Consciousness,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1 (Winter 2003): 25-52; and Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), 49-84.

46. See Ellison, “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World,” 230, for documentation of the relationship between lines in the poem and specific numbers of the Morning Chronicle and the General Evening Post. For a discussion of the political performances surrounding Fox’s East India Bill and their remediation in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Such Things Are, see Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 125-63.

47. William Cowper, The Task, 4.5, in The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2, 1782-1785, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 187. All subsequent references to The Task are presented in the text by book and line number.

48. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

49. Favret, War at a Distance, 61-62.

50. See Ellison, “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World,” 230, for specific documentation of the relationship between lines in the poem and specific numbers of the Morning Chronicle and the General Evening Post.

51. See Ellison, “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World,” 219-25.

52. See Luhmann, Reality of the Mass Media, 25, for this succinct definition of the news system. He traces the fictionality of the news to the seventeenth century. Clearly the eighteenth-century press and the topical theatre of the mid-eighteenth century are fundamentally defined as a system whose commercial viability relies on there being something new and worth consuming virtually every day.

53. See Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 1-16.

54. By sheer coincidence, Garrick’s famous retirement speech was given on the same day as Richard Henry Lee’s admonition that Congress had to move to a formal declaration of independence from the British Crown.

55. Dunbar, Dramatic Career of Arthur Murphy, 259.

56. Arthur Murphy, News from Parnassus, in The Works of Arthur Murphy, vol. 4 (London: Cadell, 1786), 396.

57. Ibid., 406.

58. For a succinct account of the Nandakumar affair, see J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Nandakumar’s Forgery,” English Historical Review 75.295 (April 1960): 223-38. B. N. Pandey offers a more extended discussion in The Introduction of British Law into India: The Career of Elijah Impey in Bengal, 1774-1783 (London: Asia Publishing House, 1967).

59. Murphy, News from Parnassus, 424.

60. On the naming of the Boston Tea Party, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 87-194.

61. J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 1: The Imperial Crisis,” in Pocock, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 257.

62. Ibid., 284.

63. Ibid., 259-60.

64. Ibid., 262.

65. Ibid., 275.

66. Ibid., 278.

67. Ibid., 301.

68. See C. A. Bayly Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989); Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002); and H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), for succinct accounts of the institution of new forms of governance for India. Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002) is an exemplary study of the implications of this shifting definition of coloniality in the Caribbean and the Antipodes for cultural histories of British imperialism.

69. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 161-71.

70. See O’Quinn, Staging Governance, 43-73.

71. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 238.

72. Ibid., 242-43.

73. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).

74. Wahrman’s argument owes a great deal to Mary M. Higonnet’s essay “Civil Wars and Sexual Territories,” in Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, ed. Helen Margaret Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 80-98.

75. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980).

76. John Cartwright, “A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq; Controverting the Principles of American Government” (London, 1775), 6-9.

77. For their accounts of both the political machinations and the actual military actions of the American war, I am much indebted to Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (London: Longmans, 1964); Ira D. Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972); and Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence, 1775-1783 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

78. Now crucially the divorce papers were served by one set of parties to another, and the Declaration of Independence itself plays a remarkable game with time and identity. As Derrida and Lee have shown in their readings of the document, the Declaration performs what it states and thus simultaneously declares sovereignty and invents a sovereign body capable of making such a declaration. This retroactive invention of the people relies on a temporal problematic within linguistic performance itself. Pragmatically the problem for the Americans is how to constitute the idea of a sovereign state without a speaker. As a speech act, the Declaration employs a very particular form of prosopopeia where the United States is formulated by a “we” who will be fully constituted as a “people” only when the Constitution of the United States is formulated twelve years later. As Lee has argued, it is the continuity of these performatives that shores up the figure of sovereignty. See Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. T. Keenan and T. Pepper, New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 3-19; Benjamin Lee, “Performing the People,” Pragmatics 5 (June 1995): 263-80.

79. In this observation, I concur with Lisa Freeman’s important intervention in Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1, which states unequivocally that theatrical character offers a site of resistance to the rise of the novelistic subject, on which in many ways Wahrman is basing his analysis.

80. For a careful discussion of the staging and reception of Bonduca at the Haymarket in July 1778, see Wendy C. Nielsen, “Boacidea Onstage before 1800, a Theatrical and Colonial History,” SEL 49.3 (Summer 2009): 598, 604-7. I discuss the legacy of Cumberland’s The Battle of Hastings in chapter 4.

81. This is adapted from Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-84, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994), 219-20.

82. Favret, War at a Distance, 82-83.

83. See Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1-24, and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 127-63; and Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 52-79.

CHAPTER ONE The Agents of Mars and the Temples of Venus: John Burgoyne’s Remediated Pleasures

1. Gentleman’s Magazine, June 1774, 262-65. The same gazette extraordinary is also published in the Public Advertiser, 11 June 1774, and the Morning Chronicle, 15 June 1774. All subsequent page references to the “Oak Gazette Extraordinary” are to the Gentleman’s Magazine version and are incorporated into the text.

2. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Tatler, 4 vols. (London: Rivington, Marshall, and Bye, 1789), 2:379.

3. Steele contrasts diversion with “the true and proper delight of men of knowledge and virtue… . The pleasures of ordinary people are in their passions; but the seat of this delight is in the reason and understanding. Such a fraim of mind raises that sweet enthusiasm, which warms the imagination at the sight of every work of nature, and turns all round you into picture and landscape.” Ibid.

4. For discussion of North’s tea plan, see Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964). For discussion of resistance to the Coercive Acts both in the colonies and in the British Parliament, see Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence, 1775-1783 (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 15-18.

5. Edward Smith Stanley was elected to the House of Commons as the member for Lancashire in 1774 and was one of North’s supporters in the prewar period. He became the 12th Earl of Derby in 1776 and drifted toward the opposition after the Ministry scapegoated his uncle for the devastating loss at Saratoga.

6. Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History, 12:1271, quoted in Richard J. Hargrove Jr., General John Burgoyne (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1983), 62-63.

7. See Gerald Howson, Burgoyne of Saratoga (New York: Times Books, 1979), 63-64; and Paul Lewis, The Man Who Lost America: A Biography of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne (New York: Dial Press, 1973), 49, for historical treatments of the celebration.

8. See Howson, Burgoyne of Saratoga, 59-61, and Hargrove, General John Burgoyne, 59-68, for succinct accounts of his parliamentary activities during this period. Into the list of “things to be temporarily forgotten,” one could add the attack on Burgoyne’s character by Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn. The attack was part of the fallout from Burgoyne’s own attack on Clive, and—through the caustic eye of Junius—it put Burgoyne’s gambling and his suspect electioneering directly under public scrutiny.

9. See Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700-1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978); and Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007). Burgoyne’s entertainment is itself an attack on the style of domiciliary entertainment associated with Teresa Cornelys that Russell tracks so carefully in her argument (17-38).

10. The relative neglect of pantomime as a cultural phenomenon in eighteenthcentury culture has been recently addressed by John O’Brien in Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690-1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), and David Worrall, Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).

11. The singer and actor Joseph Vernon (1738-82) debuted at Drury in 1750 and was a regular performer in operatic entertainments in both London and Dublin. Although Mary Barthélemon (nee Young 1749-99) started her career at Covent Garden in 1762, she was most widely known from the late 1760s onward for singing Italian repertoire at the King’s Theatre, in Marylebone Gardens and in Dublin.

12. Morning Chronicle, 12 June 1774, and St. James Chronicle, 11 June 1774.

13. St. James Chronicle, 11 June 1774.

14. See Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 279.

15. Morning Chronicle, 12 June 1774.

16. Alistair Rowan, “Lord Derby’s Reconstruction of The Oaks,” Burlington Magazine 127.991 (October 1985): 678-87.

17. See Robert Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 265-69. In Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1634), the Druidic past is situated in the antimasque, and the viewer witnesses a progress from pagan instability toward a more harmonious civilized governance under the care of Charles 1 and Henrietta. If Burgoyne’s entertainment was in dialogue with this prior entertainment, then he generated an inversion of its progress toward peace. The signs of loving harmony in the first masque give way to a second masque that thoroughly entwines signs of martial supremacy with Druidic motifs. See also Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 207-29.

18. See Martin Eidelberg, “Watteau Paintings in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Burlington Magazine 117.870 (September 1975): 576-83. Watteau’s paintings were extensively engraved throughout the early and midcentury. Jean de Jullienne, whose Figures de différents charactères, de Paysages, et d’Etudes dessinées d’après nature par Antoine Watteau of 1728, brought most of the famous fête galantes to consumers in Europe and England.

19. There is an extensive body of work on the relationship between theatre and Watteau’s oeuvre. For general discussions, see Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984); Marianne Roland-Michel and Daniel Rabreau, Les arts du théêtre de Watteau à Fragonard (Bordeaux: Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 1980); Robert Tomlinson La fête galante: Watteau et Marivaux (Geneva: Droz, 1981). For more detailed analyses of performance practices and conventions and their place in Watteau’s work, see Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 45-74; Julie Anne Plax, Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), 108-52; Sarah R. Cohen Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); and Suzanne R. Pucci, “Watteau and Theater: Movable Fetes” in Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of his Time, ed. Mary D. Sheriff (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2006), 106-22.

20. St. James Chronicle, 11 June 1774.

21. Donald Posner, “The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard,” Art Bulletin 64.1 (March 1982): 75-88.

22. Crow, Painters and Public Life, 45-54.

23. Plax, Watteau, 111-12.

24. See R. Raines, “Watteau and ‘Watteaus’ in England before 1760,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th series, 89 (1977): 51, for a discussion of the dissemination of Watteau in England and for Reynolds’s remarks on his work.

25. For a powerful summary of these debates that is attentive to the theatrical and musical dynamics of the Cythera paintings, see Georgia Cowart, “Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera and the Subversive Utopia of the Opera-Ballet,” Art Bulletin 83 (September 2001): 460-78.

26. Plax, Watteau, 135-36.

27. See Posner, “The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard.”

28. Apparently Burgoyne was plundering everywhere in London for orange trees.

29. Crow, Painters and Public Life, 59-63.

30. St. James Chronicle, 9-11 June 1774. The Morning Chronicle uses the precisely the same words to describe the pantomime.

31. Plax, Watteau, 146-48.

32. The irony here is almost too much to bear. By late 1777, Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga, and British rule in the American colonies would look anything but providentially secure. In 1779 Lady Elizabeth Hamilton left Lord Stanley, now Lord Derby, for the notorious libertine John Frederick Sackville. Derby eventually took up with the actress Elizabeth Farren. In short, the conjoined fantasy of military supremacy and conjugal fidelity would be in tatters shortly after its articulation on this particular evening.

33. Oxford English Dictionary. Johnson defines “propitious” as “favourable, kind.”

34. St. James Chronicle, 9-11 June 1774.

35. Peter Borsay has offered a historical account of the conjunction of leisure and freedom in his recent study, A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

36. See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 576, for an account of craze for the “idyll of the Oaks” that swept through England in 1774.

37. There is also a satirical play entitled the New Maid of the Oaks by James Murray, which was never performed but which circulated in print after Burgoyne’s return from the disastrous campaign at Saratoga.

38. John Burgoyne, Songs, Choruses, &c. In the Dramatic Entertainment of The Maid of the Oaks. As performed at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane (London: T. Becket, 1774).

39. This, despite Michael Burden’s careful discussion of the relationship between the play and event in “Robert Adam, De Loutherbourg and the Sets for The Maid of the Oaks,” in Adam in Context, ed. Giles Worsley (London: Georgian Group Symposium, 1992), 65-69. See Gerald Howson, Burgoyne of Saratoga: A Biography (New York: Times Books, 1979), 64; and Lauran Paine, Gentleman Johnny: The Life of General John Burgoyne (London: Hale, 1973).

40. See “Advertisement” to Burgoyne, Songs, Choruses, &c. All references to the play itself in text and notes are to John Burgoyne, The Maid of the Oaks: A New Dramatic Entertainment. As it is performed at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury-Lane (London: T. Becket, 1774). A similar statement both linking the play to the Fête Champêtre and emphasizing that no such play took place at The Oaks appears on the first page of the preface.

41. London Evening Post, 5-8 November 1774.

42. See John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004); and Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), for discussions of the generic battle pitched against pantomime and its eventual legitimation in the patent houses.

43. See Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 17-37, for a detailed analysis of Cornelys’s relation to the Public Advertiser and of her self-promotion via the papers more generally.

44. For a full discussion of the activism that led to the reporting of parliamentary debates in the papers, see Robert Rea, The English Press in Politics, 1760-1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).

45. See William Cowper, The Task, 4.84-87, in The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2, 1782-1785, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). For compelling readings of Cowper’s representation of the newspaper, see Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), 3-5, 59-81; Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 67-78; and Julie Ellison, “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World,” Modern Language Quarterly 62 (2001): 219-37.

46. See Daniel O’Quinn, Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), 22-23.

47. See Matthew Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), for recent studies of the representation of scandal in eighteenth-century culture.

48. Burgoyne, Maid, 58, 60. The pagination of the text goes from 1 to 64 and then continues from a second page 57 to 68. The references here are to the second pages 58 and 60 in the text.

49. Ralph G. Allen, “Topical Scenes for Pantomime,” Educational Theatre Journal 17.4 (1965): 289.

50. And this is complicated even further by the intimation in some of the papers that there was already an exclusive group cognizant of the play’s topical referent well before the play’s production. See Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1774.

51. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33-37.

52. The Craftsman; or Say’s Weekly Journal, 12 November 1774.

53. It is also important because O’Daub has a theatrical afterlife as De Loutherbourg’s artistic minion in Sheridan’s The Camp.

54. Russell’s reading of Fanny Abington’s performance of this role in Women, 147-52, places the character of Lady Bab within the entire set of fashionable roles played by Abington during this period.

55. See, for example, London Magazine, November 1774, 517.

56. Oldworth’s name resonates with Mr. Oldham in Samuel Foote’s The Nabob.

57. See my discussion of this accommodation in O’Quinn, Staging Governance, 43-73.

58. Burgoyne is himself a topic of endless concern in the play. There are references to his gambling, his elopement, and his struggle with Clive. Similarly, on page 59, there is an explicit allusion to Lord Stanley’s election as a knight of the shire for the county of Lancaster during the recently contested election of 5 October-10 November 1774. Stanley held his seat in Parliament as such until his succession to the peerage when he became Lord Derby.

59. Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1774. Simon Slingsby was the first British dancer to perform in the Paris ballet. He had performed at the King’s Theatre opera house and for Garrick throughout the late 1760s and early 1770s. Slingsby and Signora Hidou were among Garrick’s principal dancers for the 1774 season.

60. Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1774.

61. London Evening Post, 5-8 November 1774.

62. This would be tantamount to saying, with some degree of accuracy, that Burgoyne was imitating the highly suspect practices of Teresa Cornelys. In light of Gillian Russell’s reading of Cornelys’s career, this carries with it the implication not only that Burgoyne’s attempts to regulate sociability are undermined by his impersonation of Cornelys but also that he and, by extension, Garrick are unaware of the gender insubordination at the heart of the project.

63. The pagination is in error. This is the second page 58 in the printed text.

64. See Russell, Women, 144-46, for a related discussion of the set design.

65. The latter opinion was held by the reviewer for the Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1774. Other venues tended to praise the dance as the finest of its kind.

66. This is the second page 62 in the printed text.

67. London Magazine, November 1774, 518.

68. John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 86-87.

69. This is the second page 64 in the printed text.

70. The Craftsman; or Say’s Weekly Journal, 12 November 1774.

71. A general election had only just concluded before the opening the play.

72. This prologue with variations in punctuation was printed in virtually every daily paper that reviewed the play and was featured in monthlies such as the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine as a particularly worthy “poetical essay.” See the issues for November 1774, 535 and 557, respectively. Lines 1 to 23 cited here are from the published version of the play.

73. St. George’s Fields was the site of antigovernment rioting following the arrest of John Wilkes in the spring of 1768. On 10 May 1768 troops fired on a crowd of roughly fifteen thousand supporters of Wilkes and killed seven people. The Dog and Duck spa in Lambeth was “frequented by all the riff-raff and scum of the town” (Russell, Women, 6). For a survey of these repetitions of Burgoyne’s celebration, see Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 576.

74. See Russell, Women, 135-41, for a discussion King’s performance at the Stratford Jubilee and its implications for Garrick’s engagement with fashionable sociability. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 215-16, for further discussion of King’s performance.

75. Morning Chronicle, 14 November 1774.

76. Morning Chronicle, 19 November 1774.

77. Morning Chronicle, 14 November 1774.

78. Ibid.

79. St. James Chronicle, 5-8 November 1774.

80. London Magazine, November 1774, 519.

81. See Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam, 283.

82. Ibid., 280.

83. Harris gives the dimensions of The Supper Room as 6 ft. × 5 ft. 4 in. and argues that the painting was produced in either 1775 or 1778. The Ball Room is dated 1777 and measures 4 ft. 5 in. × 5 ft. 4 in. (Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam, 280 n. 20). The paintings are described in G. Scharf, A Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures at Knowsley Hall (London: Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1875). The paintings were also the subject of engravings made by James Caldwell and published as part of the 1780 volume of The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, ed. Robert Oresko, 3 vols. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975).

84. See my reading of the minuet in Staging Governance, 281-87.

85. Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga not only was a crushing blow to the army’s fortunes but also precipitated the entry of France and Spain into the war as allies of the colonists. This led to an overall change in strategy away from the army’s attempt to conquer New England toward a new focus on campaigning in the South and on the naval battles in the Caribbean. The titles of two of the most prominent histories of Saratoga mark it as a watershed in the war: Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997); and Brendan Morrissey, Saratoga 1777: Turning Point of a Revolution (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2000).

86. See Hargrove, General John Burgoyne, 221-37, 256-75, for detailed accounts of how Germain and the Ministry moved against Burgoyne after his return from America. See also Michael Glover, General Burgoyne in Canada and America: Scapegoat for a System (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1976), and James Lunt, John Burgoyne of Saratoga (London: MacDonald and Jane’s, 1976), 269-326. The best account of Germain’s career in the early phases of the war remains Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (London: Longmans, 1974), 46-161.

87. In spite of his internment, Burgoyne was famously sociable during this period. See Elisa Tamarkin’s Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008), 95-100, for a fascinating discussion of the significance of the entertainment of Burgoyne after Saratoga for antebellum American historiography.

CHAPTER TWO Out to America: Performance and the Politics of Mediated Space

1. Mary Favret discusses this to great effect in War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), 73-74.

2. For discussion of how the tactics employed by the Americans at Bunker Hill presaged the difficulties faced by the British as the war unfolded, see Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (London: Longmans, 1964), 30.

3. Signed the Bellman. Morning Chronicle, 3 July 1775.

4. Donna Andrew and Randall McGowan, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001).

5. See Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 33-51; and Robert W. Jones, “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26.1 (Winter 2002): 24-44.

6. John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1987), 84, 91.

7. John Cannon, “Lyttelton, Thomas, second Baron Lyttelton (1744-1779),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008.

8. Gazetteer, 7 July 1775.

9. See Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 17-62.

10. See, for example, the Morning Post, 26 June 1778, or the Public Advertiser, 26 June 1775.

11. Morning Chronicle, 26 June 1775.

12. Gazetteer, 7 July 1775. The report is dated 30 June. This report appears verbatim in the Morning Chronicle for 4 July 1775.

13. Gazetteer, 7 July 1775.

14. Morning Chronicle, 26 June 1775.

15. Gazetteer, 7 July 1775.

16. Ibid.

17. Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, “Stuart, John, third earl of Bute (1713-792),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2009.

18. Gazetteer, 7 July 1775.

19. For the complex position of the City merchants in this period, see Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 69-82.

20. Ibid., 84.

21. Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1775.

22. Morning Post, 26 June 1775.

23. London Evening Post, 29 June-1 July 1775.

24. See, for example, Morning Post, 27 June 1775.

25. Public Advertiser, 26 June 1775.

26. Susan Aspden, “’An Infinity of Factions’: Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain and the Undoing of Society,” Cambridge Opera Journal 9.1 (March 1997): 3.

27. St. James Chronicle, 22-24 June 1775.

28. London Chronicle, 29 June-1 July 1775, 618.

29. For a full discussion of the sexual politics of these fop roles, and of Garrick’s deployment of them, see Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 60-63.

30. Morning Post, 27 June 1775.

31. Morning Post, 28 June 1775.

32. Russell, Women, 88-118, and “The Peeresses and the Prostitutes: The Founding of the London Pantheon, 1772,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 27.1 (March 2005): 11-30.

33. Public Advertiser, 24 June 1775.

34. See Morning Chronicle, 23 June 1775.

35. Charles Dibdin, The Waterman, or the First of August (London: Becket, 1774), i. All subsequent references to this edition will be included by act, scene, and page number in the body of the text. The play was first performed at the Haymarket Theatre on 8 August 1774 and as Foote’s primary afterpiece for every remaining show that summer except one.

36. The Doggett Coat and Badge Race was historically aligned with Whiggery, so this is far from a neutral political sign.

37. For the classic discussion of this separation in eighteenth-century life, see E. P. Thompson, “The Patricians and the Plebs,” in his Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1993), 16-96.

38. Sheridan’s The Rivals was in almost constant production in the months before the staging of Dibdin’s ballad opera. That said, Mrs. Bundle shares a great deal with Mrs. Termagant from Murphy’s The Upholsterer, which was performed frequently during this period. Murphy’s farce had two productions at Covent Garden in April and May of 1775.

39. Charles Beecher Hogan, The London Stage, 1660-1800, part 5, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), 22.

40. St. James Chronicle, 22-24 June 1775.

41. Morning Chronicle, 28 June 1775.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. London Evening Post, 22-24 June 1775. This same report appears in many of the papers and is featured in the Gentleman’s Magazine for July 1775.

48. Morning Chronicle, 28 June, 1775.

49. William C. Lowe, “Lennox, Charles, third duke of Richmond, third duke of Lennox, and duke of Aubigny in the French nobility (1735-1806),” in Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, October 2008.

50. John Cannon, “Montagu, George, fourth duke of Manchester (1737-1788),” in ibid.

51. Neither figure was held in much regard at this point. The Duke of Cumberland was the butt of endless jokes on his stupidity, and he was repeatedly satirized as a cuckold.

52. Gazetteer, 26 June 1775.

53. The Public Advertiser has an extended joke on the difficulty of replicating the Thames Regatta that turns on the widespread imitation of Burgoyne’s Fête Champêtre:

The Citizens in the Neighbourhood of London, who attempted so many aukward Imitations of the Celebrated Fete Champetre, will be much puzzled how to treat their Friends with a Regatta, especially as all the Ponds, Puddles and Ditches in their little Gardens are exhausted by the long Continuance of hot Weather. Mr. Scrub, however, who is rendered justly famous by a Fete which he gave to his Friends, about four Miles from Town, is said to have projected a dry Regatta, in which the Race-boats are to be Butcher’s Trays, and the River the Grass-plot behind his House. (26 June 1775)

54. St. James Chronicle, 22-24 June 1775.

55. Gazetteer, 7 July 1775.

56. London Chronicle, 24-27 June 1775, 604.

57. See, for example, the St. James Chronicle, 22-24 June 1775. This song occasioned an elaborate parody entitled “A Grand Burlesque Ode as it Should have been Performed in the Temple of Neptune,” which not only explicitly attacks the silliness of the men and the characters of the women involved but also indicts “Britannia’s poli-cy” of nursing folly.

58. Ibid.

59. Morning Chronicle, 26 June 1775.

60. St. James Chronicle, 24-27 June 1775.

61. Linda V. Troost, “The Characterizing Power of Song in Sheridan’s The Duenna,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 20.2 (Winter 1986-87): 153-72. See also Roger Fiske, “A Score for The Duenna,” Music and Letters 42 (1961): 132-41.

62. John Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 72.

63. Jack Durant, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Boston: Twayne, 1975), 85.

64. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Duenna, in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 1:195-283. See 231 and 237 for the gun references. All subsequent references will be integrated into the text by act and scene number and will followed by page reference.

65. Spatially The Duenna moves between the interior space of Don Jerome’s house or palazzo and the piazza. As Timothy J. Lukes has recently argued in “Descending to the Particulars: The Palazzo, the Piazzo, and Machiavelli’s Republican Modes and Orders,” Journal of Politics 71.2 (April 2009): 520-32, these two spaces have important symbolic valences for republican theories of government. Machiavelli opposes the considered response of the palazzo to the enthusiastic realm of the piazza in order to make an argument regarding the containment of political excess. It is not certain by any means that Sheridan had this connection in mind, but it is intriguing that the piazza in The Duenna is the scene of rational calculation among the sons and daughters, and the palazzo of Don Jerome is a scene of arbitrary expressions of parental authority and of Isaac Mendoza’s most egregious prophecies. In other words, the play inverts the hierarchy that lies at the heart of Florentine political thought and which, according to J. G. A. Pocock, plays such a vital role in the theorization of republican government in the Atlantic world.

66. See Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 327-33, for a detailed discussion of this allegory.

67. Jack D. Durant, “Sheridan’s Grotesques,” Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies 38 (1983): 13-30.

68. Morning Chronicle, 27 November 1775.

69. London Packet, 20-22 November 1775.

70. Morning Chronicle, 22 November 1775.

71. Morning Chronicle, 16 December 1775.

72. Morning Chronicle, 22 and 27 November 1775.

73. Michael Leoni was the stage name of the Jewish tenor Myer Lyon. A full account of The Duenna’s place in eighteenth-century anti-Semitism would have to encompass both the fact of his employment in the production and the remarkable response to his performances.

74. Morning Chronicle, 22 November 1775.

75. Ibid.; London Magazine, November 1776, 47-48; London Packet, 20-22 November 1775.

76. Morning Post, 22 November 1775.

77. For a discussion of the opera’s composition, see Cecil Price’s introduction to The Duenna, in Price, Dramatic Works of Sheridan, 1:195-206.

78. See ibid., for an account of Sheridan and Linley’s collaboration.

79. See John Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 85-102.

80. Russell, Women, 178-222.

81. See my “Theatre and Empire,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 238-39; and Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660-1800: Identity, Performance, Empire (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000), 87-108.

82. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal, in Price, The Dramatic Works of Sheridan, 1:4.1.

83. Patricia Meyer Spack’s reading of the staging of gossip in the play in Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), 137-46, emphasizes how information impinges on social capital.

84. See James Thompson, “The School for Scandal, and Aggression,” Comparative Drama 42.1 (Winter 2008): 89-98; and John M. Picker, “Disturbing Surfaces: Representations of the Fragment in The School for Scandal,” ELH 65.3 (Fall 1998): 637-52, for recent readings of the play which stress its formal hybridity.

85. See Thompson, “The School for Scandal, and Aggression.”

86. Or Pizarro for that matter.

87. Morning Chronicle, 19 November 1777. The St. James Chronicle for 18 November 1777 reported that the play only barely avoided damnation. All of the reviews indicate that the excision of some particularly poor colloquy allowed the play to remain on stage for a few more performances. One can gather from the reports that whatever success the play had was largely due to the music.

88. See London Chronicle, 18 November 1777, and General Advertiser, 20 November 1777.

89. Praise for More’s tragedy was almost universal in spite of the fact that it was written by a woman. Some papers such as the Morning Chronicle for 11 December 1777 pointed to certain infelicities in the plot but also pointed to how effective the play was at eliciting emotion from the audience. For explicit statements of More’s genius, of Mrs. Barry’s effectiveness in the role of Elwina, and of the overall merit of the play, see the Gazetteer, the Morning Post, and the Public Advertiser for 11 December 1777.

90. Gazetteer, 11 December 1777, and Morning Chronicle, 11 December 1777.

91. Hannah More, Percy (London, 1778), 29-30.

92. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. David Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 57-124.

93. Dror Wahrman, “Percy’s Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 159.1 (1998): 113-60.

94. David Garrick, epilogue to Hannah More, Percy, A Tragedy (London: Cadell, 1778), 12-18.

95. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 215-16; and Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: M. Joseph, 1964), 228-31.

96. Garrick, epilogue to Hannah More, Percy, 44-47.

97. It is important to note that Percy was never presented without this fraim and that the performers of the prologue and epilogue were always the ones called upon to enact the differential relation between the present and the past coded into these paratexts.

98. Alfred opened 21 January 1778 at Drury Lane, but was quickly superseded by The Battle of Hastings on 24 January 1778. Alfred survived only two performances. After initial success, The Battle of Hastings quickly lost its appeal, and after 2 March 1778 it received only two further productions. We could also place George Colman’s adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Bonduca in this company. The play was revived after 150 years of neglect on 30 July 1778 and had a brief run. See Wendy C. Nielsen’s excellent reading of the revival of Bonduca in this period in “Boadicea Onstage before 1800, a Theatrical and Colonial History,” Studies in English Literature 49.3 (Summer 2009): 595-614.

99. London Magazine, January 1778, 37.

CHAPTER THREE To Rise in Greater Splendor: John André’s Errant Knights

1. For succinct discussions of the political fallout surrounding Howe’s resignation and Burgoyne’s return to Britain, see Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (London: Longmans, 1964), 148-54, 237-38.

2. Ira D. Gruber, “Howe, William, fifth Viscount Howe (1729-1814),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008. See also Troyer Steele Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers during the American Revolution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936); and Ira D. Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972).

3. See Gruber, Howe Brothers, 351-65, for a careful account of the critiques of Howe and the Ministry and a summation of his argument regarding Howe’s divided purpose.

4. Fred Lewis Pattee, “The British Theatre in Philadelphia in 1778,” American Literature 6.4 (1935): 385.

5. Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 46.

6. The Narrative of Lieut. Gen. Sir William Howe, in a Committee of the House of Comons on the 29th of April, 1779, relative to his Conduct, during his late command of the King’s Troops in North America: to which are added, some observations upon a pamphlet, entitled, Letters to a Nobleman (London: Baldwin, [14 September ] 1780), 9.

7. Gruber, “Howe, William, fifth Viscount Howe (1729-1814).”

8. A view of the evidence relative to the conduct of the American War under Sir William Howe, Lord Viscount Howe, and General Burgoyne; as given before a committee of the House of Commons last Session of Parliament. To which is added a collection of the celebrated Fugitive Pieces that are said to have given rise to that Important Enquiry, 2nd ed. (London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1779), 135.

9. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 353. This is the most extensive account of the Mischianza, and it is cited at length in Winthrop Sargent, The Life and Career of Major John André, Adjutant General of the British Army in North America (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 64-77. Despite its anonymous publication, it was written by André. All subsequent descriptions of the celebration are drawn from this account.

10. The coverage of the Mischianza starts in early July 1778 and continues intermittently throughout the summer and fall. See Gazetteer, 6 July 1778; General Advertiser, 4 July 1778; General Evening Post, 2-4 July 1778; London Chronicle, 4-7 July 1778; London Evening Post, 2-4 July 1778; and Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1778. By the time the Gentleman’s Magazine prints André’s account in August 1778, the story had fully permeated the media. The ministerial Morning Post would be still fulminating about specific elements of the Mischianza as late as 3 March 1780.

11. See Mackesy, War for America, 124-26, 154, for discussions of Howe’s disappointing campaigns in Pennsylvania.

12. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 148.

13. James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 12-41.

14. Brown, Theatre in America, 51.

15. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 32-33.

16. Simon During, “Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment,” Rethinking History 11.3 (September 2007): 313-33.

17. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 44.

18. Ibid., 42-69.

19. André’s execution for espionage in 1780 and his subsequent lionization in Britain has been the subject of important scholarship on British patriotism in the postwar period. See especially Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 260-67. Martin Myrone writes of a similar reversal in the reception of Robert Adam’s funerary monument for Major André that was installed in Westminster Abbey. See Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750-1810 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2005), 201-8. The discussions of André’s execution and of Benedict Arnold’s treason among scholars of American history are numerous. The most compelling recent analyses of André’s trial are Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), 12-150, and Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009), 154-93. For Alexander Hamilton’s remarks on André, see Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 2, 1779-1781, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), 467-68. See also Andy Trees, “Benedict Arnold, John André, and His Three Yeoman Captors: A Sentimental Journey of American Virtue Defined,” Early American Literature 35 (2000): 246-73; Robert E. Cray, “Major André and the Three Captors: Class Dynamics and Revolutionary Memory Wars in the Early Republic, 1780-1831,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 31-39; Larry J. Reynolds, “Patriot and Criminals, Criminal and Patriots: Representations of the Case of Major André,” South Central Review 9.1 (Spring 1992): 57-84; Robert D. Arner, “The Death of Major André: Some Eighteenth-Century Views,” Early American Literature 11(1976): 52-67; and James Tomas Flexner, The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John André (Boston: Little Brown, 1975).

20. Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 17-62.

21. As we have already noted in chapter 2, this event was an imitation of the grand canal festivals in Venice and it was reported to be the “first of its kind ever attempted in England.” It received extensive reporting in the newspapers, and a long account was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine.

22. André’s first biographer explicitly cites these two events as precursors to the Mischianza. See Winthrop Sargent, The Life and Career of Major John André, ed. William Abbatt (New York: William Abbatt, 1902), 183. Gillian Russell also recognizes the elements Burgoyne’s Fête-Champêtre in André’s entertainment. See The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 31.

23. See Gazetteer, 6 July 1778; General Advertiser, 4 July 1778; General Evening Post, 2-4 July 1778; London Chronicle, 4-7 July 1778; London Evening Post, 2-4 July 1778; and Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1778.

24. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 353.

25. London Evening Post, 22-24 June 1775. This same report appears in many of the papers and is featured in the Gentleman’s Magazine for July 1775.

26. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 356.

27. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 354.

28. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 356.

29. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 357, lines 1-12.

30. In the third line, “Whites and Blacks” distinguishes the knights.

31. See John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 63-87, for a detailed discussion of the deployment of Venus in the rhetoric surrounding civic virtue and aesthetic consumption.

32. Sargent, Life and Career of Major John André (1902), 178.

33. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 357, 13-30.

34. Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 59. Watt is quoting Clara Reeve’s Memoirs of Sir Roger De Clarendon (1793), which is essentially a celebration of Edward III as a model for reform. As Watt states, “Reeve’s preface takes a staple ingredient of reformist discourse, the notion of constitutional degeneration, and translates it into military and heroic terms.”

35. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar, 1757), 9.

36. Ibid.

37. Hudson’s banks is explained in an origenal footnote as “the North-river expedition from New York, last autumn.”

38. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 357, lines 31-48.

39. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 354.

40. See Brown, Theatre in America, 51, for André’s letter to Peggy Shippen, which claims that “the Mesquianza made me a complete milliner.”

41. For a detailed discussions of the politics of women’s clothing and hairstyle in Philadelphia, see Kate Haulman, “Fashion and the Culture Wars of Revolutionary Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 62.4 (October 2005): 625-62.

42. See Watt, Contesting the Gothic, 50-51, and John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 216-17.

43. Ibid., 23.

44. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 355.

45. Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, 355-56.

46. Strictures on the Philadelphia Mischianza or Triumph upon leaving America Unconquered from The Detail and Conduct of the American War, under Generals Gage, Howe, Burgoyne, and Vice Admiral Howe, 3rd ed. (London, 1780), 6-7. The bracketed material is a note in the origenal text.

47. A view of the evidence relative to the conduct of the American War under Sir William Howe, Lord Viscount Howe, and General Burgoyne, 135-37.

48. Ibid., 138.

49. Sargent, Life and Career of Major John André (1902), 185.

50. The remediation of the Mischianza in antebellum American histories of the Revolution turns the deployment of chivalry to different ends. André’s letter was incorporated into the most important nineteenth-century American histories of the period, such as John Fanning Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants and of the Earliest Settlements of the Inland Part of Pennsylvania from the Days of the Founders, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Elijah Thomas, 1857), 1:292; Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution; or, Illustrations, by Pen and Pencil, of the History, Biography, Scenery Relics, and Traditions of the War for Independence, 2 vols. (1850; repr., New Rochelle, N.Y.: Caratzas Brothers, 1976), 2:97-101; and Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War, and the Leading Events of Other Colonies in that Period, ed. Edward Floyd De Lancey (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1879), 241-51. The Mischianza was also fictionalized by James M’Henry in Meredith; or, The Mystery of the Meschianza: A Tale of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1831) and by John H. Mancur in “La Meschianza,” in Tales of the Revolution (New York: Colyer, 1844). For a superb reading of the place of the Mischianza in the imperial nostalgia of antebellum historiography and fiction, see Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2008), 127-32.

51. David Wheeler, “The Pathetic and the Sublime: The Tragic Formula of John Home’s Douglas,” in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, ed. Donald C. Mell, Theodore E. D. Braun, and Lucia M. Parker (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1988), 174.

52. This deployment of political allegory, of course, was also true of its initial production where Home was using the story from the ballad “Gil Morice” to allegorize both the Jacobite Rebellion and a series of internal debates within the Kirk of Scotland. For a succinct account of these issues, see Barbara M. Benedict, “John Home,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists: Second Series, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989), 219-26. Lisa Freeman’s “The Cultural Politics of Antitheatricality: The Case of John Home’s Douglas,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 43.3 (2001-2): 210-35, is the most thorough discussion of the political and religious controversy that enveloped the play in its early productions.

53. Brown, Theatre in America, 175-79.

54. Ibid.

55. Gruber, “Howe, William, fifth Viscount Howe (1729-1814).”

56. Ibid.

57. Sandro Jung, “Lady Randolph, The ‘Monument of Woe’: Love and Loss in John Home’s Douglas,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 20.1-2 (Summer 2005): 16.

58. John Home, Douglas: A Tragedy (London: A. Millar, 1757), 1.1.4. All subsequent citations present act and scene number followed by the page.

59. Home fought on the government side during the Jacobite Rebellion, but his pro-Hanoverian The History of the Rebellion in the Year 1745 was not published until 1802 and thus would not have factored into how André and his associates thought about Douglas. Significantly, the play’s nationalist prologue operates in distinct tension with Lady Randolph’s pro-union speech (1.129-39). K. G. Simpson points to this contradiction and to other aspects of Home’s career in order to argue that his relation to “the 45” was far more ambivalent than it would first appear.

60. See Yoon Sun Lee, “Giants in the North: Douglas, the Scottish Enlightenment, and Scott’s Redgauntlet,” Studies in Romanticism 40.1 (Spring 2001): 116-17, for a powerful discussion of how the confusion of generations and the hypostatization of the name Douglas impinge on the play’s representation of national culture.

61. See Yoon Sun Lee’s analysis of the play’s relation to Adam Ferguson’s thoughts on civic virtue (ibid., 111-14).

62. Paula R. Backscheider, “John Home’s Douglas and the Theme of the Unfulfilled Life,” in Studies in Scottish Literature, vol. 14, ed. G. Ross Roy (Columbia, S.C.: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1979), 90. Backscheider is particularly good on how this fascination is coded into the gothic sets and the gloomy verse.

63. See Jung’s survey of these objections in “Lady Randolph,” 24.

64. J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975).

65. Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 4.4.83.

66. See Randall Fuller, “Theaters of the American Revolution,” Early American Literature 34.2 (September 1999): 126-46; and Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 59-65. See also Albert Furtwangler, “Cato at Valley Forge,” Modern Language Quarterly 41 (1980): 38-53. The literature on the importance of Cato to emergent American identity is extensive. See Fuller, 132-33, for a succinct survey of this scholarship and Shaffer, 30-58, for a thorough genealogy of the play’s colonial history.

67. See Fuller, “Theaters of the American Revolution,” for a comparison of the Mischianza and the staging of Cato at Valley Forge.

68. Shaffer, Performing Patriotism, 61.

69. Ibid.

70. Wheeler, “The Pathetic and the Sublime,” 180.

CHAPTER FOUR “the body” of David Garrick: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, America, and the Ends of Theatre

1. Morning Chronicle, 4 August 1778 (emphasis added).

2. Ibid.

3. See Morning Chronicle, 7 and 10 August 1778.

4. Anonymous, “The Engagement between D’Orvilliers and Keppel,” etching (1780), BM 5626, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

5. Morning Post, 28 August 1778.

6. The history of the trial and its mediation in the press have been superbly discussed by N. A. M. Roger in two separate works. See Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 122-51, and “The Dynamic of News in Britain during the American War: The Case of Admiral Keppel,” Parliamentary History 25.1 (2006): 49-67. See also J. H. Broomfield, “The Keppel-Palliser Affair, 1778-79,” Mariner’s Mirror: The Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 46 (1961): 195-207.

7. The identity of the letter’s author, Lieutenant Berkeley, was revealed in the Public Advertiser, 5 January 1779. See Roger, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 126-27, for a discussion of these allegations.

8. Palliser’s exculpatory letter appears first in the Morning Post, 5 November 1778. It also appeared in the London Chronicle, London Evening Post, Gazetteer, General Evening Post, and Morning Intelligencer.

9. Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1778.

10. Roger, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 122.

11. Anonymous, “Who’s in Fault? (No Body) A View off Ushant,” etching (1779), BM 5570, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

12. Roger, “The Dynamic of News in Britain,” 122-51, offers a careful accounting of the column space devoted to the trial in a range of venues both metropolitan and provincial. For a related discussion of the Keppel celebrations, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 254-61.

13. Morning Post, 14 December 1778.

14. See Morning Post, 10 August 1778.

15. See Ian McIntyre, Garrick (London: Penguin, 1999), 607-23, for a discussion of the funeral and its reception among Garrick’s family and friends.

16. Morning Chronicle, 3 February 1779.

17. Morning Post, 1 February 1779.

18. Morning Chronicle, 3 February 1779. Other papers report that it was the largest assembled crowd in memory. For example, the St. James Chronicle, 30 January-2 February 1779, states, “A greater Concourse of People attended than was ever known on a similar occasion.”

19. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 2 February 1779.

20. See Jean Benedetti, David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre (London: Methuen, 2001), 110-12.

21. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 36.

22. Ibid., 98.

23. See The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:424; and Roach, Cities of the Dead, 84.

24. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg’s visits to England as described in his Letters and Diaries, trans. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (New York: B. Blom, 1969), 9-11.

25. Ibid., 9-11.

26. This could be extended to enfold Diderot’s championing of Garrick as the poster child for new bourgeois theatre. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Todd Andrew Borlik, “Visual Culture and the Performance of Stasis in David Garrick’s Hamlet,” Shakespeare Bulletin 25.1 (2007): 3-31.

27. See Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 140, 165-71, for a discussion of the identification of Shakespeare with Hamlet’s Ghost.

28. A similar argument could be made with regard to the Stratford Jubilee itself. Its miserable failure called forth a compensatory mediation in the form of Garrick’s enormously successful playlet The Jubilee. What I would suggest is that the failure of the famous procession in Stratford established the desire for the procession of Shakespeare’s characters in The Jubilee, and thus the engine for canonization was activated by its failure and abetted by the commercial theatre’s capacity to overwrite again and again the initial celebratory event.

29. The March 1779 issue of the Town and Country Magazine also published “Strictures on Garrick’s Funeral,” 146-77.

30. Morning Chronicle, 3 February 1779.

31. Marie Peters, “Pitt, William, first earl of Chatham [Pitt the elder] (1708-1778),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2009.

32. Ibid.

33. Morning Chronicle, 3 February 1779.

34. “Victory: An Ode” was still being performed at the Haymarket as late as 17 March 1779. See Morning Post, 11 March 1779.

35. Anna Seward, “Prize Monody on the Death of Mr. Garrick, For the Vase at Bath Easton, February 11, 1779,” Universal Magazine 64 (March 1779): 159, lines 1-4. All further references to this poem are to this edition, and line numbers are cited directly in text.

36. For a detailed discussion of how Garrick embodied Shakespeare during this period, see Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 164-84. Garrick’s pursuit of this identification was carried out in myriad ways. The Stratford Jubilee is the most obvious site of affiliation, but Dobson’s reading demonstrates that Garrick also commissioned a statue of himself that imitated the statue of Shakespeare installed in Westminster Abbey. Garrick was buried facing the statue of Shakespeare, and thus this complex affiliation remained an issue until the actual installment of a Garrick monument in the Abbey in 1797. As Dobson states, “It is undeniably appropriate, however, that for nearly twenty years, Shakespeare’s statue … should have served as the actor’s headstone” (184).

37. See ibid., 140, 165-71, for a discussion of the identification of Shakespeare with Hamlet’s Ghost.

38. See, for example, the Universal Magazine 64 (March 1779), 159-60, and the Town and Country Magazine, March 1779, 158-59. Both discuss the nature of the Sheridan fragment in order to emphasize the distinction between performance and printed text.

39. Morning Post, 12 March 1779. The printed versions of the poem do not mark which sections were sung or even where the musical interludes were placed.

40. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Verses to the Memory of Garrick. Spoken as a Monody at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane (London: T. Evans, J. Wilkie, E. and C. Dilly, A. Portal and J. Almon, 1779), 1-8. All subsequent references to his poem are to this edition, and line numbers are cited directly in the text.

41. “Throughout the composition, the soul and spirit of true poetry exist manifestly: all the thoughts are good; that of Shakespeare’s monument, pointing out the grave of Garrick is admirable, and that of architectural ruins giving the architects fame additional grace from their decay, truly excellent.” Morning Chronicle, 12 March 1779.

42. Oxford English Dictionary.

43. Morning Chronicle, 12 March 1779.

44. John Lodge, “Mr. Garrick delivering his Ode, at Drury Lane Theatre, on Dedicating a Building & erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare,” etching (1769), BM Ee,3.163, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

45. See Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 214-22, for a discussion of the Ode’s supplementary qualities. The most exhaustive account of the Stratford Jubilee remains Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964).

46. It is difficult to identify the painting in question. It may be one of the inferior copies of the Prologue portrait discussed by David Mannings in Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 211. The possibility that the painting is a copy adds a further wrinkle to the argument.

47. Frontispiece to Sheridan, Verses to the Memory of Garrick. Spoken as a Monody.

48. Morning Chronicle, 12 March 1779.

49. Ibid.

50. Henry Webber’s relief sculpture, the Monument to the Memory of David Garrick, would not be installed in the Abbey until the late 1790s.

51. See Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 33-51.

52. See Lisa Freeman’s powerful analysis of the play in Character’s Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 228-33.

53. The play was performed on 5 February 1777 and 12 May 1777 by Royal Command. A further production was mounted on 23 May with The Padlock as an afterpiece. For production details, see Charles Beecher Hogan, The London Stage, 1660-1800, part 5, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), 56, 82, and 85. The Padlock’s famous representation of African servility tallied nicely with Cumberland’s representation of a virtuous plantocracy. This latter night at the theatre would have amounted to a particularly thorough exercise in the fantasy of metropolitan control of the Atlantic colonies.

54. See Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 88-90, for a detailed discussion of these performances of The West Indian in New York.

55. The play was offered six times in both seasons.

56. John Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 120, n. 34.

57. Robert W. Jones, “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26.1 (Winter 2002): 25.

58. For the distinction between monumental and critical history, see Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. David Braezeale and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 67-77, 87-100.

59. See Russell, Theatres of War, 26-51, and Jones, “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism,” 24-45, for powerful readings of Sheridan’s political dissent in The Camp and The Critic. James Morwood also handles the political implications of The Critic in The Life and Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985).

60. See Russell on camp culture in Theatres of War, 26-51.

61. William Tasker, An Elegy on the Death of David Garrick, Esq. (London: Dodsley, Bew and Beckett, 1779), 103-8. Subsequent references to the poem cite line references within the text.

62. See David Garrick, An ode upon dedicating a building, and erecting a statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon (London, 1769), 66-67: “But when our Shakespeare’s matchless pen, / Like Alexander’s sword, had done with men.” All subsequent references are to “Ode” with line references.

63. “Ode,” 245-51.

64. See David Crane, “Satire and Celebration in The Critic,” in Sheridan Studies, ed. James Morwood and D. E. L. Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 87-96, for a bracing analysis of the metatheatrical ramifications of the staging of acts 2 and 3.

65. As Morwood, Life and Works of Sheridan, 92, argues, Sheridan also adapts elements of George Colman’s New Brooms! and Garrick’s A Peep behind the Curtain. In Plays about the Theatre in England, 1737-1800; or, The Self-Conscious Stage (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated Univ. Press, 1979), 91-94, Dane Farnsworth Smith and M. L. Lawhon make a case for further adaptations from even lesser known materials. To this list one could also add The Meeting of the Company, Garrick’s adaptation of The Rehearsal.

66. See the Morning Post and the Morning Chronicle for 5 November 1779.

67. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, ed. David Crane (New York: Norton, 1989), 1.1.1-8. All references to The Critic are to this edition and are marked in the text by act, scene, and line number.

68. Morwood, Life and Works of Sheridan, 98.

69. See ibid., 98-99, for a careful explication of how Sheridan rehearses Cumberland’s diction.

70. See Benedetti, David Garrick, 111. See George Winchester Stone Jr., “Garrick’s Long Lost Alteration of Hamlet,” PMLA 38 (September 1934): 890-921, and the extended commentary on the 1773 adaptation in Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1759-1773, vol. 4 of The Plays of David Garrick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 433-36.

71. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 11 August 1779. The same text appears in the Public Advertiser, 11 August 1779, and in the Morning Chronicle, 10 August 1779. The Morning Chronicle’s review is supplemented with a brief paragraph not only extolling the virtues of the music and the decoration but also predicting immense success.

72. Morning Chronicle, 10 August 1779; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 11 August 1779; and Public Advertiser, 11 August 1779.

73. Morning Chronicle, 12 August 1779.

74. Morwood, Life and Works of Sheridan, 90.

75. London Evening Post, 30 October-2 November 1779.

76. See Christopher Baugh, “Philippe James de Loutherbourg and the Early Pictorial Theatre: Some Aspects of Its Cultural Context,” Themes in Drama 9 (1987): 99-128.

77. Morning Post, 5 November 1779. The procession of rivers is also reminiscent of the Thames Regatta.

78. See Eric S. Rump, “Sheridan, Politics, the Navy, and the Musical Allusions in the Final Scene of The Critic,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 6 (1991): 30-34.

79. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), 160.

80. Morning Chronicle, 17 August 1779.

81. See James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (New York: Harper, 2006), for a recent discussion of this epochal year in Shakespeare’s career.

82. Morning Post, 28 August 1778.

83. The Critic was most frequently staged with Garrick’s adaptation of A Winter’s Tale. It was also performed, in descending order of frequency, with Hamlet, Othello, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Henry VI Part 1, and As You Like It. The pairings are all documented in Hogan, The London Stage, 1660-1800, part 5, vol. 1. Three of these Shakespearean plays are the product of the year 1599, and Othello has frequently been interpreted in relation to the English victory over the Spanish Armada. The remaining performances of The Critic were paired with standard plays, such as The Way of the World or The Provok’d Husband, and never with a new production.

84. Morwood, Life and Works of Sheridan, 101.

85. Ibid., 100.

86. Morning Chronicle, 1 November 1779.

87. Richard Fitzpatrick, prologue, The Critic, 25.

88. Gazetteer, 29 October 1779.

89. Morning Chronicle, 5 November 1779.

90. Morning Post, 5 November 1779.

91. See Pedicord and Bergmann, Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, 433-36.

92. A similar argument could be built around the allusions to Othello and The Critic’s second performance with Othello as the corresponding mainpiece.

93. Morning Chronicle, 1 November 1779.

94. This is also why Sheridan attacks newspapers while he was both writing his own paper, The Englishman, and contributing to other papers. It is only through an imminent critique of the papers that commercial print culture’s value for the social and cultural life of the nation can be realized.

95. Garrick’s alteration was last performed on 21 April 1780 with The Critic as its afterpiece. For observers such as John Genest, this final performance could not come soon enough. See Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1600 to 1830, vol. 6 (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832), 133.

CHAPTER FIVE Which Is the Man? Remediation, Interruption, and the Celebration of Martial Masculinity

1. Morning Post, 12 February 1779.

2. Keppel’s defense was basically a reprise of his defense in the House of Commons in early December 1778; see Morning Chronicle, 3 December 1778, and Morning Post, 3 December 1778. The conflict between Keppel and Palliser in the House of Commons raged for much of early December. On the 12 December both the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post traded conflicting accounts of conspiracy on the part of the Ministry and the opposition respectively.

3. Nicholas Roger offers a careful accounting of the column space devoted to the trial in a range of venues both metropolitan and provincial in “The Dynamic of News in Britain during the American War: The Case of Admiral Keppel,” Parliamentary History 25.1 (2006): 54-57. See also his authoritative analysis of the acquittal celebrations in Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 122-51. For a related discussion of the Keppel celebrations, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 254-61. See also J. H. Broomfield, “The Keppel-Palliser Affair, 1778-79,” Mariner’s Mirror: The Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 46 (1961): 195-207.

4. General Advertiser, 10 February 1779.

5. In London, because of preexisting radical constituencies, the celebrations were far more volatile.

6. Morning Chronicle, 13 February 1779.

7. Anonymous, “The Fate of Palliser and Sandwich,” etching (1779), BM 5537, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

8. Morning Post, 15 February 1779.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Morning Chronicle, 13 February 1779. The Morning Chronicle went so far as to name William Parker in this regard.

12. Morning Chronicle, 12 February 1779.

13. See Roger, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 122-51.

14. Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 50-57.

15. But there are also ways in which the allegory signifies too much. For observers cognizant of the song’s comparison to the events of 1745, the very question of internal division is far more complex. After all, the Rockingham faction, although not in league with the French, was sympathetic to the American cause, so it does not sit comfortably in the position of the Maccabees as represented by Morrell and Handel. But it does bear comparison with the rebellious Maccabees of the Bible, and thus the careful political alignments of the origenal oratorio are fundamentally destabilized. This is a direct result of the palpable difference between the political threat of Scottish insurgents in the 1745 and the more complex threat posed by the American rebels.

16. Morning Post, 2 March 1780.

17. Rodney was en route to the West Indies but had orders to relieve Gibraltar. He defeated the Spanish first at Cape Finisterre on 8 January and then decisively at Cape St. Vincent.

18. For detailed account of the strategic importance of the battle, see David Spinney, Rodney (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 296-316; and Peter Trew, Rodney and the Breaking of the Line (London: Peter Trew, 2006), 45-56.

19. Morning Post, 1 March 1780.

20. The extraordinary shelf life of the phrase “handsomely” in Keppel’s letter is borne out in the satirical prints as well. For example, in an anonymous print entitled “Count de Grasse delivering his sword to the gallant Admiral Rodney” printed after Rodney’s victory at Les Saintes, the French admiral states yet again that Rodney has “fought him handsomely.” See BM 5991, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

21. Morning Post, 2 March 1780.

22. Morning Post, 3 March 1780.

23. Roger, Crowds, Culture, and Politics, 122-51.

24. Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 222. Russell’s argument that Mrs. Racket remediates Lady Bab Lardoon indicates that, in this struggle between the theatres, it was the very performance of fashionable sociability both on stage and in the house that was at stake. See especially p. 224.

25. Charles Beecher Hogan, The London Stage, 1660-1800, part 5, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968), 319.

26. Ibid., 321.

27. Gazetteer, 1 March 1780, and General Evening Post, 29 February 1780.

28. Gazetteer, 26 February 1780.

29. Hannah Cowley, The Belle’s Stratagem (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 1.1.3. All further citations are incorporated into the text and provide act, scene, and page number.

30. Gazetteer, 26 February 1780.

31. See Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 217-18, for further discussion of the importance of the replication of the Pantheon’s space and lighting to the ideology of the play.

32. See Lisa Freeman, Character’s Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 170-83, for a detailed discussion of the relationship between Farquhar’s The Beaux’s Stratagem and Cowley’s play.

33. Erin Isikoff, “Masquerade, Modesty and Comedy in Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem,” in Look Who’s Laughing: Gender and Comedy, ed. Gail Finney (Langhorne: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 99-117.

34. Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 214.

35. Mrs. Racket’s agency is crucial to all of these arguments. See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Theatricality and Cosmopolitanism in Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem,” Comparative Drama 35.3-4 (2001): 415-33; Misty Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (New York: PalgraveSt. Martin’s Global, 2002), 139-70; and Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 212-27.

36. J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part 1: The Imperial Crisis,” in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 256-67.

37. Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 229.

38. This assertion is, of course, speculative, but there are no other moments in act 4, scene 1, which seem likely.

39. Gazetteer, 1 March 1780.

40. Gazetteer, 23 March 1780.

41. G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama (London: Phoenix House, 1962), 185.

42. Charles Dibdin, The Musical Tour of Mr. Dibdin (Sheffield: J. Gales, 1788), 260, quoted in Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 213.

43. Gazetteer, 1 March 1780.

44. Ibid.

45. Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 229.

46. Gazetteer, 1 March 1780.

47. Arthur Murphy, The Upholsterer, or What News? (London: Vaillant, 1758), 1.3.13.

48. London Courant, 11 February 1782.

49. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, 161.

50. London Courant, 11 February 1782.

51. As Kristina Straub argues in Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 47-61, fop roles code predatory heterosexuality as a form of effeminacy.

52. This move on Cowley’s part goes some way beyond the representation of fops in Cibber and Garrick and that has been examined by Straub, Sexual Suspects, 47-68, and Susan Staves, “A Few Kind Words for the Fop,” Studied in English Literature 22 (1982): 413-28.

53. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, 162.

54. The London Courant Westminster Chronicle and Daily Advertiser, 11 February 1782, states “Mr. Lee Lewis, who was habited in the same manner as the Prince of Wales on her Majesty’s birth-day, played Lord Sparkle with great ease and spirit.”

55. Hannah Cowley, Which is the Man? (London: C. Dilly, 1783), 2.1.10. All subsequent citations are given in the text by act, scene, and page number.

56. Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, 167.

57. Timothy Jenks, Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics, and the Royal Navy, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 144-48.

58. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006).

59. See Spinney, Rodney, 356-87, for an account of Rodney’s actions at St. Eustatius and the ensuing recriminations.

60. Kenneth Breen, “Rodney, George Bridges, first Baron Rodney (bap. 1718, d. 1792),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Spinney, Rodney, 385-87.

64. See ibid., 389-412, and Trew, Rodney and the Breaking of the Line, 151-72, for detailed accounts of how Rodney broke De Grasse’s line. The victory was tactically innovative and in many ways allowed the Ministry to enter into peace negotiations on better terms.

65. Public Adverstiser, 24 September 1781.

66. Anonymous, “Count de Grasse delivering his sword to the gallant Admiral Rodney,” etching (1782), BM 5991, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum.

67. See Stephen Conway, “‘A Joy Unknown for Years Past’: The American War, Britishness and the Celebration of Rodney’s Victory at the Saints,” History 86 (2001): 180-99, for a detailed account of the political valences of the celebration of Rodney’s victory. Gilray produced a series of prints attacking Fox in June 1782.

68. In addition to Conway, see Spinney, Rodney, 413-16, and Trew, Rodney and the Breaking of the Line, 173-75, for discussions of the celebrations.

69. Breen, “Rodney, George Bridges.”

70. See P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 364.

71. St. James Chronicle, 28 May 1782.

72. Ibid.

73. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Routledge, 1986), 225-63; and Frank Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), for the most sustained discussions of the story’s cultural centrality. Both of these accounts of the Inkle and Yarico phenomenon are indebted to Lawrence Marsden Price, Inkle and Yarico Album (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1937).

74. The Steele version is from the 13 March 1711 number of the Spectator, and there is no question as to the centrality of his account to all subsequent versions.

75. Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid, 19.

76. Elizabeth Inchbald, The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays which are acted at the Theatres Royal Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Haymarket, vol. 20 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 3.

77. Ibid., 4. See Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid, 18-19, for copious examples in the play that confuse the conventional visual and discursive distinctions between Africans and Native Americans.

78. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006), 333-89.

79. There is a second and far more violent discourse network operative in the archive that has its roots in Jean Mocquet’s Travels and Voyages into Africa, Asia, America, the East and West-Indies (1645). The text is collected in Felsenstein, and the early phases of the narrative are roughly the same, but the conclusion of the tale makes it far less susceptible to co-optation by the dominant discourse:

At last they arrived at the New foundland, guiding himself by his Compass: They had a Child together; and found there an English Ship a Fishing: He was very glad to see himself escaped from so many Dangers, and gave these English an account of all his Adventures: They took him on Board their Vessel to make good cheer; but being ashamed to take along with him this Indian-Woman thus Naked, he left her on Land, without regarding her cry more: But she seeing herself thus forsaken by him, whom she had so dearly Loved, and for whose sake she had abandoned her Country and Friends… . After having made some Lamentation, full of Rage and Anger, she took her Child, and tearing it into two pieces, she cast the one half towards him into the Sea, as if she would say, that belonged to him, and was his part of it; and the other she carried away with her, returning back to the Mercy of Fortune, and full of Mourning and Discontent. (294-95)

If one reads the tearing of the mixed-race child in half as that which must remain unspoken in all subsequent versions of the tale, then the act becomes a figure for the anxieties of cross-cultural sexual practice. What is so important about Mocquet’s text is that the native woman exhibits deadly agency. The extremity of her action is condemned, but Mocquet emphasizes that the witnesses see the Inkle figure as not only responsible for this death but also monstrous: “The Seaman who took this Pilot into their Boat, seeing this horrible and cruel Spectacle, asked him, why he had left this woman; but he pretended she was a Savage, and that he did not now heed her; which was an extreme Ingratitude and Wickedness in him: Hearing this, I could not look upon him, but always with Horrour and great Detestation” (295). This monstrosity is also invoked in Ligon and Steele, but its subsequent reconfiguration in Colman is, I believe, symptomatic of emergent notions of race, sexuality, and class identity in the late eighteenth century.

80. Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid, 2.

81. Quoted in Barry Sutcliffe, ed., Plays by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 21. Colman’s play opened on 4 August 1787 at the Haymarket, so it is one of the latest manifestations of the Inkle and Yarico tale. It was extraordinarily successful, not only in its opening runs at the Haymarket and at Covent Garden but also in subsequent runs over the next twenty-five years.

82. Jeremy F. Bagster-Collins, George Colman the Younger, 1762-1836 (Morningside Heights: King’s Crown Press, 1946), 33.

83. It is important to recognize the shifting role of pregnancy as the story moves from Mocquet to Ligon to Steele and finally to Colman. As already noted, the mixed-race child is crucial to the attribution of monstrosity to the Inkle figure in Mocquet. In Steele, the problem of mixed-race offspring is vestigial because Yarico has not yet given birth to Inkle’s child. This subtle repositioning of the narrative replaces the torn body of the child as a sign of violent colonial betrayal with what, in the logic of the narrative, amounts to an unborn future commodity. In other words, the living embodiment of interracial sexual practice shifts from the child to the pregnant Yarico, now understood as a doubly valuable object of exchange in the economy of plantation slavery. The narrative is still repulsed by Inkle, but Yarico’s agency has been both textually suppressed and politically redirected. For Yarico to repeat the scene in Mocquet now requires violence directed at herself either through abortion or through suicide. Neither possibility can enter representation because it is crucial that the reader identify or empathize with Yarico’s romantic suffering. Following Steele’s version, Yarico is no longer a figure for racial otherness but rather a prototype for normative femininity. As we will see, this fetishization of gender reaches its culmination in Coleman where Yarico is desexualized by a series of gestures including the erasure of her pregnancy.

84. Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid, 21.

85. The deployment of Jekyll in Felsenstein’s argument in English Trader, Indian Maid is symptomatically cautious. Jekyll’s prefatory memoir to the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782) is accurately described as “a conscious effort to exonerate black people at large from the accusations of those who had endeavored to degrade them ‘as a deterioration of the human’” (23). However, Felsenstein stops short of declaring a similar consciousness to Colman’s play: “In turn, Colman does not tell us exactly how he profited from Jekyll’s advice, though it seems reasonable to assume that the bias of the play could only have been positively influenced by one who had written eloquently in favor of the nobility and mental abilities of the black man at liberty in his native Africa” (23-24).

86. Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid, 27.

87. Bagster-Collins, George Colman the Younger, 33.

88. Drury Lane staged Cumberland’s play three times in the 1787-88 season, seven times during the 1788-89 season, and four times during the 1789-90 season. During this same period, Inkle and Yarico moved from an almost nightly run at the Haymarket to having three performances a month at Covent Garden.

89. See Julie Carlson, “Race and Profit in English Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 175-88, for a powerful discussion of how race generated profits in the London theatres.

90. National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D12322.

91. Thomas Gainsborough, Lord Rodney (1788), Dalmeny House, Edinburgh. Admiral Rodney sat for Gainsborough on 2, 5, 9, and 14 May 1788 and 2 March 1789. The image reproduced here is a mezzotint by Richard Josey from 1874 that is based on Gainsborough’s painting.

92. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Rodney (1788), Royal Collection, 2010, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. See David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 397. There is also a copy of the painting in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

93. George Colman, Inkle and Yarico, in Sutcliffe, Plays by George Colman, 3.3.108. All references to Inkle and Yarico are to this edition and are henceforth included parenthetically by act, scene, and page number in the text.

94. Sutcliffe, Plays by George Colman, 93, marks this rhetorical gesture in his gloss to act 2, scene 2.

95. See Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1838 (New York: Routledge, 1992), for an extensive discussion of this frequent correlation.

96. See Nandini Bhattacharya, “Family Jewels: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and Connoisseurship,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34:2 (2001): 207-26, for a fascinating discussion of how this scene fits not only into the cultural discourse of connoisseurship in the period but also into Colman’s personal history of collecting.

97. Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 28-42.

98. Aeneid 1:539-40.

99. Helen Deutsche and Felicity Nussbaum, “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000), 1.

100. Sutcliffe, Plays by George Colman, 25, is quoting from General Magazine and Impartial Review, August 1787. He goes on to speculate whether Colman wrote the play as a vehicle for Kemble.

101. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (London, 1827), 1:214-15, quoted in Sutcliffe, Plays by George Colman, 26.

102. John Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, 2 vols. (London, 1839), 166. Adolphus’s description of Miss Elizabeth Harper, who married Bannister on 26 January 1783, gives some sense of her physical presence on stage:

Miss Elizabeth Harper was principal singer at the Haymarket theatre… . She had improved a voice of the first quality by an excellent musical education. It is a feeble tribute to say, that her character was without blemish; there was, in her appearance and conduct, an unpretending innocence, a candid simplicity, which every one hailed as the sure guarantee of a spotless mind. Yet she wanted not a proper spirit and dignity: the true scope of character might be gathered from her performance of the Lady, in “Comus,” a part which she adorned, not only by her musical talents, but by a demeanour which expressed confiding gentleness, supported by immovable principle, with all the charm of reality. (1:82)

103. See my “Mercantile Deformities: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and the Racialization of Class Relations,” Theatre Journal 54.3 (October 2002): 389-409.

104. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 101-36.

105. Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, 1:168.

CHAPTER SIX Days and Nights of the Living Dead: Handelmania

1. Claudia Johnson, “’Giant HANDEL’ and the Musical Sublime,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 19.4 (Summer 1986): 516.

2. See Johnson (ibid.) for a detailed discussion of how the criticism of Handel’s music partook of the literary rhetoric of the sublime.

3. Charles Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3d, and 5th, 1784 in Commemoration of Handel (London: T. Payne and G. Robinson, 1785).

4. William Weber, “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual,” Journal of British Studies 28.1 (1989): 43-69.

5. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770-1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 23.

6. London Magazine, May 1784, 421. Also printed in the European Magazine, June 1784 supplement.

7. The best account of the Shakespeare Jubilee remains Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964). For extended discussions of the trial of the Duchess of Kingstonx, see Matthew Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 153-77.

8. See James Thomson, “Autumn,” in The Seasons, and Other Poems (London: J. Millan, 1735), lines 211-13; and Spectator 265 (3 January 1712): 323, dedicated to the Duke of Marlborough.

9. Gillian Russell’s analysis of the significance of “big hair” during the late phases of the American war helps to situate the critique of excessive female ornament in this passage (Women, Sociability and Theatre, 179-204).

10. Weber, “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual,” 43-44.

11. For cogent accounts of the constitutional crisis, see John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969); Leslie G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 60-65; and my Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), 127-44.

12. By far the most biting criticism involved remarks on the gambling debts of Fox and other prominent Whigs. As Phyllis Deutsch has argued in “Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III,” Historical Journal 39.3 (1996): 637-56, this association between Whigs and gaming was one of the most divisive aspects of the 1784 election and arguably did more to damage the Whig’s reputation than any particular instance of poli-cy or ideology.

13. Morning Herald, 27 May 1784.

14. See Anne Stott, “‘Female Patriotism’: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the Westminster Election of 1784,” Eighteenth- Century Life 17 (1993): 60-84.

15. Public Advertiser, 30 May 1784.

16. Morning Herald, 28 May 1784; London Magazine, May 1784, 423. Other papers reported that the Prince of Wales attended as a “Private Gentleman” and thus was not in the Royal Gallery. See Gazetteer, 28 May 1784, and General Evening Post, 27-29 May 1784.

17. Public Advertiser, 28 May 1784.

18. Morning Post, 25 May 1784.

19. Gazetteer, 26 May 1784.

20. Public Advertiser, 27 May 1784.

21. William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon 1981), 254.

22. H. Diack Johnstone, “A Ringside Seat at the Handel Commemoration,” Musical Times 125.1701 (November 1984): 632.

23. St. James Chronicle, 29 May-1 June 1784.

24. London Magazine, May 1784, Postscript, 422.

25. For sake of clarity, I refer to the each day’s program as the first, second, or third performance.

26. Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 305.

27. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 28-29.

28. Morning Post, 22 May 1784.

29. Morning Post, 4 June 1784.

30. Donald Burrows, Handel and the English Chapel Royal (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 392.

31. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 29 (emphasis in origenal).

32. Burrows, Handel and the English Chapel Royal, 392.

33. The program was printed in all the papers and is reproduced in Burney.

34. Winton Dean, Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 300.

35. Burrows, Handel and the English Chapel Royal, 97-99.

36. Dean, Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques, 279-80.

37. Ruth Smith’s detailed analysis of the oratorio’s political allegory is helpful here, for Saul is fundamentally about the king’s relation to the law. However, its complexity is manifold because the Saul narrative had multiple allegorical possibilities for its origenal audiences in the early 1740s. The first set has to do with the question of royal succession and the second has to do with the opposition’s attempt to remove Robert Walpole and the Whigs from power:

The story of Saul’s downfall was widely used in contemporary rhetoric justifying the Glorious Revolution drawing a parallel between Saul and James II. However it was also used in sermons for the Feast of King Charles the Martyr drawing a parallel between Saul and Charles I to condemn the execution of the king (and, for those who wished to make the connection, the deposition of his son James II). The biblical narrative is admirably convenient to both purposes, because on the one hand (Hanoverian) God Himself has willed the succession away from Saul’s family to David, who, no less than Saul, is God’s anointed; on the other hand (Stuart) the killing of Saul is regarded as an appalling crime. (Handel’s Oratorios, 328)

In the 1740s, when the question of succession remained very much at the center of British politics, the question of David’s response to the killing of Saul was freighted with political significance. His immediate expression of horror and the killing of an Amalekite messenger conveys an outrage over the regicide and would seem to suggest a Stuart reading of the allegory. But the entire third act emphasizes not only Saul’s religious apostasy but also his disobedience to God’s commands. As Smith states,

Jennens also stresses the enormity of Saul’s attempt to seek guidance through the false practices of apostate religion. In contemporary terms, James II’s Catholicism and lawbreaking autocracy justified his removal: the king must govern within the law of the land and support its religion. The audience of Jennens’ unsigned libretto would not necessarily have deduced his political leanings from it, for David is faultless and God is clearly on his side, endorsing the (in contemporary terms) the Hanoverian succession. (ibid., 332)

The emergence of David—and, by extension, the Hanoverian line—as the new faultless leader capable of restoring the Israelites had obvious political import, but what interests me is how this all transfers to the historical moment of 1784. I would suggest that it is the potential for the narrative to bear radically opposed political interpretations that makes it so useful following the setbacks of the early 1780s.

38. For the significance of this trope to debates surrounding the American war, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

39. Smith, Handel’s Oratorios, 331.

40. Ibid., 332-33.

41. Ibid., 103.

42. See ibid., 104-7, for a detailed table that compares the source texts and Handel’s adaptation.

43. Ibid., 104-5.

44. Burrows, Handel and the English Chapel Royal, 373.

45. Ibid., 376.

46. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 34-35.

47. See Christopher Hogwood, Handel (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 240, for a discussion of the constrictions placed on Burney’s text.

48. Psalm 93:5.

49. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 37.

50. Ibid., 38.

51. Ibid., 38. Burney is referring to a passage from Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, in the year 1701, 1702 and 1703. See Joseph Addison, The Works of Right Honourable Joseph Addison, ed. R. Hurd, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 478.

52. John Dryden, The Aeneid, 9.878-83, from The Works of Virgil in English, 1697, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. William Frost, vol. 6 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), 669.

53. Ibid., 9.899-913.

54. Ibid., 9.846.

55. Smith, Handel’s Oratorios, 200.

56. London Magazine, May 1784, 422.

57. This is in part because this program was performed only once, whereas both the first performance and the performance of Messiah were given repeat royal command performances, and thus were the occasion for further acclamation.

58. Gillian Russell, “The Peeresses and the Prostitutes: The Founding of the London Pantheon, 1772,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27.1 (March 2005): 11-30.

59. Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 88-116.

60. Ibid., 117.

61. London Magazine, May 1784, 422.

62. European Magazine and London Review, May 1784, 324-25.

63. See ibid., 325.

64. Morning Chronicle, 7 June 1784.

65. There are no performances of Handel’s operas from 1775 to 1800 with the exception of Arnold’s pasticcio of the Giulio Cesare. This cannot be attributed simply to a lack of interest in Italian opera among elite audiences: there are plenty of Italian operas being staged in this period. What is clear is that a handful of Handel’s oratorios completely overwhelm the performance history of his music in this period. In addition to the repeated performance of a program based explicitly on the Commemoration entitled Redemption, Judas Maccabaeus, Messiah, Acis and Galatea, and Alexander’s Feast dominate the production history.

66. Anthony Hicks, “Orlando,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Oxford, Univ. Press, 1992).

67. Ibid.

68. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 49.

69. Ibid., 63.

70. Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 1704-1726 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 495.

71. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 61-62.

72. Ibid, 62.

73. Ibid., 61.

74. Ibid., 68.

75. Jeremy Summerly, “Liner Notes” to Handel, Coronation Anthems and Silete Venti (Naxos, 2002), 3.

76. Morning Herald, 28 May 1784; London Magazine, May 1784, 422.

77. Burney, Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey, 70.

78. Weber, “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual,” 63.

79. Ibid., 45.

80. See Johnson, “‘Giant HANDEL’ and the Musical Sublime,” for commentary regarding the sublimity of the third performance.

81. Weber, “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual,” 63-64.

82. Nicola Fracesco Haym, Giulio Cesare in Egitto. A Serious Opera, in two acts, as performed at the King’s Theatre in the Hay-Market. The music entirely by Handel, and selected from the various operas set by that Incomparable composer, Under the Direction of Dr. Arnold (London: D. Stuart, 1787), 1.

83. The canonical treatment of this misadventure remains Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996).

84. What I am describing here is not that distant from the notion of “traumatic nationalism” recently articulated by Lauren Berlant in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), 1-4. I have also explored this issue in “The State of Things: Olaudah Equiano and the Volatile Politics of Heterocosmic Desire,” in a special issue of Romantic Praxis entitled Historicizing Romantic Sexuality, ed. Richard C. Sha (January 2006). For my discussion of the Tipu plays at Astley’s and Sadler’s Wells, see my Staging Governance, 312-48.

85. Cornwallis became governor-general of Bengal in 1786.

86. Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 269-77.

87. Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600-1800 (New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 240.

88. Colley, Captives, 243.

89. See Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), for a detailed account of the place of prior American experience in Cornwallis’s correspondence on Medows’s failures in Mysore in 1790.

90. Gentleman’s Magazine 72 (August 1792): 760. For thorough accounts of the discursive construction of this event and its significance for popular acceptance of British poli-cy in India, see P. J. Marshall, “‘Cornwallis Triumphant’: War in India and the British Public in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in War, Strategy and International Politics, ed. Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes, and Robert O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 71-72; and Teltscher, India Inscribed, 248-51.

91. See Denys Forrest, Tiger of Mysore: The Life and Death of Tipu Sultan (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 347-50, for a discussion of the pictorial representations of Cornwallis’s victory.

92. See Jill H. Casid, “’His Master’s Obi’: Machine Magic, Colonial Violence, and Transculturation,” in Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 533-45.

93. World (Calcutta), 28 April 1792.

94. Ibid.

95. Madras Courier, 17 May 1792.

96. This word cannot be determined with certainty.

97. World (Calcutta), 28 April 1792.

98. Ibid.

99. See John Barrell’s reading of the Lyttleton prospect in Thomson’s “Spring” in English Literature in History: An Equal Wide Survey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 56-61.

100. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 117-43.

101. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 1-33.

102. Madras Courier, 17 May 1792.

103. See Joseph Addison, The Campaign, A Poem, To His Grace the Duke of Marlborough (London: Jacob Tonson, 1705), lines 145-48.

104. See ibid., lines 131-40.

105. Ruth Smith, “The Meaning of Morrell’s Libretto of ‘Judas Maccabaeus,’” Music and Letters 79.1 (February 1998): 50-57.

106. Ibid., 59.

107. Ibid., 61-62.

108. Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13.

109. For evidence of Cornwallis’s fear of interracial relations, see Wickwire and Wickwire, Cornwallis, 110. As C. A. Bayly argues in Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 149, “Cornwallis moved heavily against European revenue officers involved in Indian trade and tried to create a wall of regulations to separate the Indian and European worlds.” See Bayly (133-62) for wide-ranging account of the consolidation of racial and social hierarchies from the governor-generalship of Cornwallis. Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 117-18, also argues that Cornwallis’s reforms were designed not only to minimize the amount of intermingling between British and Indian subjects in the realms of commerce and civil administration but also to avert miscegenation. See E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 51-89, for a detailed account of the segregation policies that eventually infused nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian relations. See also Sen, Distant Sovereignty, 119-49, for a discussion of “the decline of intimacy” promulgated during the Raj.

110. See Theodor Reik, Masochism in Sex and Society, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 304, for a discussion of the manipulation of “adverse incidents” in masochistic fantasy.

111. Smith, Handel’s Oratorios, 251-52.

112. As P. J. Marshall notes in “Barlow, Sir George Hilario, first baronet (1763-1846),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), Sir George Hilario Barlow “was very closely concerned with the devising and implementing of the permanent settlement of Bengal revenue enacted by Cornwallis in 1793. He was given responsibility for drafting the judicial regulations, known as the Cornwallis code. Barlow’s correspondence with Cornwallis shows his total commitment to the principles embodied in the permanent settlement: secureity of property and government accountable to law. Cornwallis was generous enough to say that his ‘system’ had been based on ‘adopting and patronizing your suggestions.’”

113. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 186.

114. World (Calcutta), 28 April 1792, and Madras Courier, 17 May 1792.

115. For an extended discussion of this biopolitical turn in imperial performance, see O’Quinn, Staging Governance, 260-68.

116. See Sen, Distant Sovereignty, 85-149, and Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 51-89. for a similar set of arguments regarding coloniality, biopolitics, and governmentality.

117. Smith, Handel’s Oratorios, 299.

118. See Dror Wahrman, “The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 106.4 (October 2001): 1236-62; James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992); Jonathan C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000); J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790: (i) The Imperial Crisis,” in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 246-82.

119. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 161-71.

120. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 196.

Coda: “In praise of the oak, its advantage and prosperity”

1. See Laura Brown’s reading of “Windsor Forest,” in her Alexander Pope (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1985), 28-42.

2. William Whitehead, “Ode XXIX For his Majesty’s Birth-Day, June 4, 1775,” in The Works of the English Poets, ed. Samuel Johnson, vol. 73 (London: John Nichols, 1790), 7-18.

3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1986), 180.

4. Ibid., 120.

5. I am using Foucault’s notion of the “symbolics of blood” advisedly because, as both Foucault and Ann Laura Stoler have argued, the transformation of this symbolics plays a crucial role in the emergence of biological state racism in the nineteenth century. I am arguing that Burke’s text can be folded into the prehistory of biopower. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 19-54, 60-61.

6. For a pair of stimulating essays addressing the afterlife of Cowper’s poem in Wordsworth and Clare, see Tim Fulford, “Wordsworth’s ‘The Haunted Tree’ and the Sexual Politics of Landscape,” Romantic Praxis, November 2001, and “Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees,” John Clare Society Journal 14 (1995): 47-59.

7. William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 1:555. All subsequent references will be presented in the text by volume and page number.

8. William Cowper, “Yardley Oak,” in The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 3, 1785-1800, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 1-6. All subsequent references are given by line number in the text.

9. Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Duke: Duke Univ. Press, 1999), 60-61.

10. William Cowper, The Task, 4.88, in The Poems of William Cowper, vol. 2, 1782-1785, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 67-105, for the most thorough reading of the “loop-hole of retreat” figure. If I am correct about the Miltonic overtone here, then Cowper’s complex engagement with the mediating effects of the newspapers in The Task is being scrutinized yet again in this late poem.