The theatrical revolution, 1776–1843

Abstract

The late eighteenth century witnessed a revolution both in dramatic genres and in theatrical institutions. In 1776, the year in which David Garrick retired from the stage, the patent theatres – Drury Lane and Covent Garden – still stood unchallenged as England’s national theatres, the cultural Parliament of the nation. The stock dramatic repertoire performed each season at these houses represented a collection of plays which would have been utterly familiar to many of their leisured and aristocratic patrons: Shakespearean tragedies such as Richard III and Macbeth , John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera , Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife , Goldsmith’s comedy of class and mistaken identity, She Stoops to Conquer , and Jane Shore , Nicholas Rowe’s pathetic tragedy of female suffering. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the monopoly over ‘legitimate’ plays enjoyed by Drury Lane and Covent Garden had been abolished; according to the provisions of the Theatre Regulation Act (1843), all theatres licensed for the public performance of plays were now permitted to stage any dramatic genre. The intervening period was an age of extraordinary institutional change that saw the commercial disintegration and ideological collapse of legitimate drama, the emergence of an influential cultural sphere – the so-called minor playhouses – and, most important of all for the history of British theatre, the irresistible rise of illegitimate dramatic forms such as extravaganza, burlesque and melodrama. This was an age, too, of sparkling dramatic celebrity. Newspapers, journals and grand dinner tables alike delighted in performers, playwrights and dramatic gossip. In John Philip Kemble’s lofty, grandiloquent Coriolanus, Sarah Siddons’s unforgettable representation of Lady Macbeth (‘Power was seated on her brow’, remembered William Hazlitt; ‘she was tragedy personified’), and Edmund Kean’s dignified Shylock or his playful, disconcertingly jocular Iago, critics and spectators acknowledged that they were witnessing a transformation in Shakespearean performance. But celebrity was by no means confined to the representation of Shakespeare.