PERFORMERS, PLAYWRIGHTS, AUDIENCES, theater reviewers, and the public at large used the Georgian theater as a site of ethnic conflict and ethnic reconciliation, making the theater the central cultural arena in which a battle over national identity was waged. Exploring the complicated negotiations that occurred between the theater and the culture at large, I ask why and how ethnic identity was consistently theatricalized during this period, both on stage and off. Concentrating on the crucial role the theater played in developing, maintaining, circulating, questioning, and subverting the ethnic stereo- types through which the identity of the nation was defined and...

THE MULTIETHNIC SPECTACLE was a new cultural form that engineered the intersection of several different ethnic figures on the stage in the course of a single entertainment, whether a brief farce or a full-fledged comedy, typically putting these ethnicities on display at the same time that it brought them into conflict and competition. While most often fused onto the traditional comedic marriage plot—we see here the way in which a conventional literary form accommodates a new cultural anxiety—the multiethnic spectacle was centrally concerned with two other issues: how to mark ethnic difference, and the logical corollary of such...

As a foreign observer living in England in the late 1720s, Voltaire recognized commerce as one of the chief distinguishing features of his host nation, and he located the figure of the Jew at the symbolic center of commercial England. During Voltaire’s two-and-a-half-year stay in England, he immersed himself in the English language, eventually claiming, “I think and write like a free Englishman,”¹ and in the passage I have quoted he writes remarkably in the vein of Joseph Addison, one of his favorite writers: “There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the...

It is not surprising that the general public became fascinated with—even to the point of mimicry—a people who had been officially banished from England from 1290 until 1656, and who were suddenly seen in the opening decades of the eighteenth century as a defining feature of the new commercial identity of England. In this chapter I examine the ways in which the figure of the Jew in Georgian England became a highly visible and self-conscious theatrical construct, the product of professional actors on the stage and the public at large off the stage, from the time when the...

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century a group of important novelists based in Ireland and Scotland shared the common goal of attempting to counteract the London stage’s caricaturing of minority ethnic identity. In previous chapters I have shown how the Georgian stage defined and perpetuated ethnic caricatures, and eventually began, not always successfully or comprehensively, to question and even to deconstruct such stereotypes. I now turn, in this chapter and the next, to the ways in which novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Walter Scott attempted to recuperate minority ethnic identity by unhinging it from the...

A major paradigm shift in the representation of ethnic identity occurred early in the nineteenth century: the depiction of ethnic identity moved from the caricaturing of the male other in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theater, to the romantic representation of the female other in the nineteenth-century novel. As we have seen in the course of this book, the eighteenth-century’s stage portraits were virtually always male. During a period of extraordinary social mobility, when the metropole (in the eyes of many of the English) was overrun with Scots, Jews, and the Irish, the male ethnic stage figure was a way...

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century and even through the Victorian period, the plays I have discussed in the course of this book, while largely unknown today, continued to live an important life. In these concluding pages I wish to suggest the multiple ways in which Georgian comedies and farces survived after their initial productions, and the effects of this survival. This will mean briefly following the afterlife of these plays, first, as they continued to be performed well beyond their initial productions; second, as they were collected and recollected by critics, biographers, and historians who began the...