Discoveries and Recoveries in the Laboratory of Georgian Theatre

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For a four-month period in 2010 David Francis Taylor worked as a research consultant with the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds, the only working Regency playhouse in Britain. In this article Taylor reflects upon the experiences and insights he acquired over the course of this collaboration. In particular, he indicates how the theatre's restaging of the neglected repertory of the long eighteenth century within the Georgian space of performance can aid theatre historians in understanding the intricate dynamics of the period's theatre architecture and, crucially, the position and agency of its spectatorships. David Francis Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His book Theatres of Opposition, which concerns the theatricality of politics in the career of the playwright-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan, will be published next year by Oxford University Press. He has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, and the Keats-Shelley Review, and is currently co-editing, with Julia Swindells, the Oxford Handbook to the Georgian Playhouse.