Performing Imperial Masculinity in British Theatre in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on theatrical representations of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with special reference to two stage productions, Ramah Droog (1798) and The Cataract of the Ganges (1823). It argues that whilst the plays may have intended to deploy India as a space upon which to outline a militaristic British national identity and bourgeois gender norms, they in fact reflected contemporary anxieties about the fragility of British imperial masculinity. Moreover, it proposes that though theatre directors sought to impress upon audiences a sense of imperial dominance over the subcontinent through the deployment of visual technologies, such attempts were not wholly successful, with spectators having the capacity to deconstruct the façade that lay before their eyes.