Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Jean I. Marsden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage by Jean I. Marsden Marcie Frank Jean I. Marsden, Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage ( New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 234. $99.00 cloth. In Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage, Jean I. Marsden firmly establishes the overriding significance of affect to theater in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, she treats their relations as reciprocal, going so far as to propose that theater should be understood as affect. This is because, although it is not the only vehicle for affective transfer, theater is the period's most significant one and the model for its theorization. As Marsden argues, moreover, the transfer of emotion is crucial both as the basis of response to theatrical performance and as the measure of its success. By these means, she rehabilitates plays that have long gone unappreciated because of their sentimentality. Moreover, she forges a powerful argument for the way this drama functioned in the performance of a national imaginary. Not only did the eighteenth-century stage present transfers of feeling among actors and deliver them from actors to audiences; the theater also functioned as the reference point for those moral and aesthetic theories that posited the virtue of such transfers in the concept of sympathy. Theater provided theorists Adam Smith and David Hume with a repository of examples for describing moral and aesthetic response as well as with the location in which such responses occurred. Theater thereby served as both a model for and a medium of affective exchange. Furthermore, "because of the intense emotions it excited, and because of the public venue in which those emotions were experienced, [theatre] was hailed as a source of national moral authority," making it possible for the philosophical precepts to be extended to a broad public (2). A gracious organization of materials amplifies these connections. The first two chapters treat the role of theater in Scottish Enlightenment thought and audiences' responses to Sarah Siddons in Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage after her return to the London stage in 1782. In the subsequent three chapters, Marsden turns to specific plays in order to illuminate their contributions to the national imaginary: Arthur Murphy's The Grecian Daughter (1772), Richard Cumberland's The West Indian (1771) and George Colman's Inkle and Yarico (1787), and Cumberland's The Jew (1794). In closing her book with The Jew, which remained inordinately popular well into the nineteenth century but is more of a historical curiosity to-day, [End Page 484] Marsden follows the affective logic of sentimental nationalism that has been thoroughly explored in contexts other than the British stage, most prominently in Lauren Berlant's genealogy of American liberalism.1 Though the study of affect has sparked divergent, indeed theoretically incompatible, approaches to literary and cultural study, spurred on in part by Berlant, Marsden uses "feeling," "emotion," and "affect" interchangeably at no particular cost to her analysis, a practice I follow here for the sake of brevity.2 Marsden underplays the congruences of her work in theater studies with other branches of eighteenth-century studies and other areas of the profession. If she thereby accrues some advantages, including avoiding the weeds of terminological debate, she also sometimes misses the opportunity to make connections that would reinforce the significance of her conclusions. In compelling readings, Marsden attends to the positions occupied by women, enslaved people, and ethnic minorities as they performed the contradictions inherent in British ideals of duty, liberty, and toleration. Siddons's Euphrasia, the dutiful Grecian daughter who keeps her father alive by feeding him from her own breast, puts gender in the service of patriarchy by projecting a national ideal founded in filial, specifically daughterly, piety. As Marsden points out, this performance led to Siddons being painted as the Tragic Muse, first by Thomas Cook in 1783 and then by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1784 (97). The West Indian and Inkle and Yarico navigate differently the difficulties of celebrating a British liberty achieved through imperial expansion and supported by slavery. The Jew dramatizes the evils of antisemitism and encourages the tolerance of ethnic and...