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This essay explores the impact of mirrors on Georgian-era theatrical and social performance. It suggests that looking glasses—as they burgeoned in eighteenth-century playhouses, offstage, onstage, and backstage—provided key sites for actors and audiences to engage with both the metaphysical and empirical implications of specular display. It further reveals how mirrors functioned as cultural touchstones in critical debates over the correlation between morals and manners, authenticity and facsimile, ideal imitation and original expression, and how they thus provide fresh contextual insight into an era of aesthetic transition.

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Scholars have long perceived the early nineteenth century as an era of decline in the drama, a time when the literary and dramatic arts severed connections, and playwrighting for the Theatres Royal became subject wholly to popular sway. James Kenney's comedies reveal how such a view is symptomatic, in part, of the early nineteenth‐century clash between advocates for the arts and promoters of commerce. Through an exploration of character and identity formation within commercial society, Kenney interrogates the seeming opposition between the arts and commerce and exposes, instead, their interdependency. By juxtaposing romance narrative convention and the modern marketplace, he shows that the early nineteenth‐century stage was one of dynamism and growth, rather than failure and loss.