Introduction: the politics of performance and the performance of politics

Abstract

This book aims to create a space for historians and theatre scholars to continue a dialogue about the relationship between representations of politics in the theatre and the theatricality of politics itself in the long nineteenth century. Our aim is to provoke as much as to synthesise.The period of our investigation, from the time of the Napoleonic wars to the early twentieth century, resists synthesis. This is not a unified period, spanning the agitations and suppressions of democratic culture in Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the jingoism of late Victorian and Edwardian nationalism. By spreading across the boundaries of the Romantic and the Victorian, these essays examine a series of debates and conflicts in the development of industrial modernity, united by the manipulations and uses of performative strategies to engage with structures of political and cultural power. The terms in which we have staged the discussion --'performance,' 'politics,' 'history' and 'theatre' --are contingent. Our contributors engage with these key concepts in part to problematize them. If we can take it for granted that the problematization of key concepts is an important component in driving forwards debate, then we will succeed insomuch as the essays in this book represent the debate, and offer views with which to argue.In drawing together scholars from political and social history, literary studies, and theatre history, we were immediately aware of the problem of the arbitrary identification of disciplinary divides. Political historians are joined by those who draw their methodologies from social history and cultural studies; theatre studies scholars by those working in English departments and those with research interests in textual analysis. The purpose of this book, then, is more than to demarcate relationships between politics and performance in the Boyd Hilton's catchy formulation is worth repeating: 'if the theatre was political, it is equally the case that politics was theatrical … if public life was a stage, so too was the society it mirrored'. 3 Hilton's argument -that the spectacular and unregulated nature of early nineteenth-century society was a reflection of the topsy-turvy world-turned-upside-down of