Insurgent Allegories: StagingVenice Preserv'd,The Rivals, andSpeculationin 1795

Abstract

Theatre is first and foremost a social experience, and thus poses fundamental questions regarding the relationship between artistic production and political reception. As audiences are transient and hybrid, one is forced to think through not only the ephemerality of response, but also its unpredictability. These challenges for cultural analysis are not confined to performance, but the analysis of specific performances can be conducted in a fashion that sheds light on more general problems for thought itself. This essay aims to do just this by looking closely at roughly three weeks of theatrical production in the patent theatres in the mid-1790s. The period in question – from October 21, 1795 to November 8, 1795 – is not a random selection, for during this brief period the license for one of the most popular and successful plays in the traditional repertory, Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd, was revoked and the play was consigned to theatrical oblivion because it was deemed too incendiary for the London stage. However, the precise nature of the play's alleged threat to British society was itself a contested issue and raises key questions about intention and the destruction of tradition. After the Pitt government eliminated Venice Preserv'd from the cultural horizon, a fascinating series of events transpired in the London theatres that allow us to re-structure the questions pertaining to the relationship between governance and art. In the demonstrations of loyalty and disloyalty which suffused not only the productions of Venice Preserv'd in late October, but also productions of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and Frederick Reynolds's Speculation in early November, one can discern an instability in the notion of patriotic or national affiliation which, I want to argue, was far more threatening to William Pitt's governance than any particular expression of anti-government sentiment.