Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880

Abstract

Fashionable Acts is a welcome addition to the new theatre history. For 15 years now the previously rather sequestered, somewhat antiquarian and too-easily-disregarded study of the theatre of the past has slowly been finding its place in the main flow of social history and cultural scholarship, and beginning to consolidate an historiography that responds to, and belongs within, modern scholarly discourse on the past. The process began some time around the publication of Marc Baer's Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and has built a body of work since then, in a series of important essay collections as well as in monographs. These include radical departures into histories of performance such as Tracy C. Davis's Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), but this late-twentieth-century example is unusual: the larger body of the new work is in earlier periods, and forms an interesting concentration in the long eighteenth century. The list includes not only Baer's book on theatre riots, and Jane Moody's study of the same decades in her Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) but also valuable studies such as Paula R. Backscheider's Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and Gillian Russell's The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). This eighteenth-century concentration may be related to the use by mainstream cultural and political historians of the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘the theatrical’ as tools in characterizing social conduct in a way peculiarly significant in that period. In works like Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) the reading of social performance begins to be more important than setting out simple taxonomies of class and power, and comes to be understood as a key hegemonic tool. Theatre historians are beginning to demur at the idea that all social behaviour is to be read as performance, and to assert that the difference between what happens on stages, on the one hand, and in the auditorium or indeed the streets and coffee houses, on the other, is still fundamental to the understanding of drama and music and their reception. Nevertheless, we have benefitted from the wide acceptance of the idea that at certain social moments, especially perhaps in the eighteenth century and immediately beyond, some groups used performative behaviour as an important aspect of their self-definition; and that such public appearances included attendance at the theatres. In reciprocation, as it were, for the transfer of this element of theatre discourse to analysis of the wider public sphere, performance historians are increasingly willing to acquire the techniques and undertake the labour, particularly in the form of the statistical analysis, that are the basic tools of mainstream social history.