Spectacle and Revolution in 1790s Tragedy

Abstract

The French Revolution provided British writers, painters, and caricaturists a wealth of images and subject matter for their work, from the ic.on of the ancien re6gime, the stormed Bastille; to the execution of Louis XVI; to scenes of frenzied crowds. These images and the plots of upheaval and insurrection connected them were depicted overtly or mapped onto the characters and stories of history.1 The perception of the effect of the French Revolution on the English stage has been skewed, however, by three trends in discussions of the tragic drama of the last quarter of the eighteenth century: a general dismissal of tragedy;2 a contemporary bias favoring ironic, pro-revolutionary plays; and an interest in canonized writers. Although Allardyce Nicoll urges critics to strike a balance between a chronicle of pseudo-classic traditions and a chronicle of romantic revolt, the latter chronicle has dominated dramatic history to the detriment of those plays that may not immediately pique an interest because they are conservative and cautionary rather than seductively covert.3 That the conservatism of post-1789 tragedies is seldom discussed raises the issue of how politics and theater intersected then, as they do now, where the spectacle of the Revolution was and is concerned. It is certain that any depiction of revolutionary events that favored upheaval required that its messages be covert or coded. As Nicoll notes, with the stirring events across the Channel audiences became unduly sensitive, and many authors, no hidden meaning, had their works condemned because of supposed satirical or allegorical intent.4Jeffrey N. Cox similarly concentrates on what was suppressed, censored, and hidden in plays when he observes that sympathetic representations of rebellion had to be indirect because of the fear that revolutionary sentiments on the stage