This essay explores some of the plethora of modes of censorship of British ‘imperial’ theatre through the long eighteenth century. Suppression ranged from the informal censorship of ‘Oriental’ performance practiced by Sir Richard Steele in managerial practice and periodical censure through cancellations of productions of Patriot drama attacking colonial slavery deemed offensive by Walpole’s Licenser. While productions set in distant lands increasingly offered an allegorical means of critiquing British imperial practices, in the decades of reaction following the French and Haiitian Revolutions, plays that explicitly denounced English participation in the slave trade, such as Oroonoko, were eventually expunged from the stage by nervous managers. Helping explain this managerial censorship. William Hazlitt’s amazed and anxious response to a rare performance of Oroonoko in 1815 reveals the terror inspired in White audiences by the belief that Black spectators might re-enact the slave revolts modelled on stage by heroic African protagonists. Censorship of imperial subjects thus ranged from the attempted control of dramatic subject matter through to the governmental or managerial erasure of texts and performances deemed subversive or revolutionary.

The afterword revisits the major themes of the book but also points to the particularly important role of Irish writers in articulating critiques of empire, unsurprising in view of their nation’s subject relation within the United Kingdom. This final section also addresses the question of slavery, now seen as the greatest contradiction in Enlightenment political thought and practice, noting that this issue becomes prominent politically and theatrically in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Early Whig hostility to extractive colonial policy, recently uncovered by Steven Pincus, suggests however that mainstream anti-slavery positions may have emerged earlier than previously believed, suggesting potential rethinking of such tragedies as Oroonoko and Young’s The Revenge.

English Enlightenment dramas set in the new world frequently depicted European oppression; from John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted (1704) through Aaron Hill’s Alzira (1736) to Arthur Murphy’s Alzuma (1767), playwrights present actions highly critical of European colonialism. These plays put indigenous critiques of European invasion into circulation, drawing on and rearticulating the writing of Incan Garcilaso de la Vega and Adario, Lahontan’s interlocutor in his famous Dialogue. Rather than regarding such discourse as European projection, I argue that the voices of protesting Incas and Mohawks be recognized as “energumen” or discourse of the other, whose critiques of empire, slavery and forced conversion shaped the development of progressive thought in Europe.

This chapter focuses on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as primary proponents of Enlightened culture in late Stuart England. Often seen now as ineffectual witnesses to the human costs of expanding commerce and imperialism, Addison and Steele were important as advocates of religious toleration, universal education, cultural relativism and hostility to extractive colonialism. Drawing a parallel between their modelling of empathetic persuasion in their periodical papers with Steele’s practice as a sentimental dramatist, I show how his playwriting sought to create national sympathy across sectarian, ethnic and ideological boundaries in order to create empathy for outsiders. This was a particularly urgent issue for Steele, who suffered all his career because he was Anglo-Irish.

The introduction provides a survey of recent scholarship on the English Enlightenment and situates this study in that context. Recognizing that there a plethora of “Enlightenments,” even within a particular state such as Britain, itself a composite monarchy of nations, I argue that late Stuart and Georgian drama included articulations of radical as well as conservative Enlightened positions, notably in regard to religious toleration, imperial oppression and social hierarchy. I link my analysis of Islamic and indigenous American voices within eighteenth-century plays to recent scholarship that identifies European dependence on non-European literary, theological and technological sources in the creation of Enlightenment.

This chapter focuses on dramatizations of what John Marshall identifies as the central issue of the early Enlightenment, religious toleration, also a crucial pillar of Whig ideology. Addison and Steele were both advocates of toleration, and their fellow dramatists were no less enthusiastic. I analyse John Hughes’s The Siege of Damascus (1718), a play that remained widely popular through the century, famous for its tense scene of religious testing. The play was based on the work of pioneering Arabist Simon Ockley and offers an object lesson in the way a respectful account of Arab history was put into wide circulation. Other plays that used Near Eastern settings, such as Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735) and James Thomson’s Edward and Eleonora (1739) shared Hughes’s tolerationist agenda. By contrast, I also present plays with a much more conservative perspective on religious difference, including John Brown’s Barbarossa (1754).

Often associated with urban institutions as coffeehouses and learned societies, the Enlightenment included fascination with outsiders – wild men, feral children, shipwrecked solitaries and local savages, or rustics. The long eighteenth-century theatre showcases this interest in “local savagery” in particular through a huge expansion in the number of plays set in spas, villages and country estates. These plays expand the collective vision of the nation, often celebrating the countryside as the green heart of England, the site of immemorial rights and model of social harmony. Just as frequently however, this pastoral image is threatened or subverted by Irish or labouring-class writers such as Robert Dodsley and Oliver Goldsmith, who highlight the local injustice and imperial violence that holds the rural (and national) hierarchy in place. This chapter maps rural dramaturgy from the Restoration forward to reveal these conflicting representational strategies, as Whigs and Tories fought to claim the nation’s heartland as the symbolic ground of political legitimacy and were followed by increasingly radical outliers whose view of rural society was considerably more critical.

Freemasonry emerged in London in the late 1710s as a form of sociability committed to tolerant, cosmopolitan constitutionalism of a characteristically Enlightenment cast. Welcoming to Jews and Catholics, and men of varying social class, the lodges were also frequented by many, quite probably a majority of, male theatre professionals. Among the famous actors, managers and dramatists, the masons counted George Lillo. My contention is that it is no accident that all the most important contributors to domestic tragedy were masons (Hill, Lillo, Moore) but that their generic innovations crafted a genre peculiarly able to represent the shocks of commercial capital and colonial trade on individuals sutured from traditional forms of familial and kinship network and support. The fraternal assistance of the lodge stood as an alternative source of succour in a hostile world, even if it often failed to rescue its fallen brothers. Lillo wrote The Tragedy of George Barnwell in the same year he joined a lodge, and his drama symbolically enacts the challenges and comforts of masonic fraternity.

This chapter argues that Arthur Murphy’s tragic dramaturgy is more radical than has been recognised, notably in its treatment of the classic Enlightenment concerns with religious toleration and the ‘savage’ or indigenous critique of colonial invasion. Murphy’s serious plays are Drydenic in spatial reach, stretching from East Asia (The Orphan of China [1759]) to Peru (Alzuma [1757/1773]) via Syria (Zenobia [1768]) and Greece (The Grecian Daughter [1772]). Murphy’s imperial dramaturgy swerves from his predecessor’s, however, in focusing on female protagonists and reiterating indigenous or non-European literary historical accounts of colonial conquest and resistance. Contextualising Murphy’s tragic writing via his Irish and Catholic origins (partially subsumed by his later metropolitan British and Anglican affiliations), this chapter explores Alzuma’s reiteration of Voltaire’s and Hill’s Alzire/Alzuma, themselves redactions of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of Peru. Noting how Murphy’s profound attachment to his devoutly Catholic mother informs his critique of forced conversion, Orr shows how his dramatisation of the black legend topos is linked to other Irish Patriot uses of this trope, by radical politician Charles Lucas and by well-known Patriot author Henry Brooke, in the latter’s Montezuma [undated].

In an extraordinary tribute by one preeminent New Zealand writer to another, Witi Ihimaera's dedicatory address or mihi to Dear Miss Mansfield (1989) offers Mansfield his ‘highest regard and gratitude for having been among us and above us all’. Recognising that Mansfield's writing captures ‘the common experiences of mankind’, Ihimaera nonetheless stitches her into a whakapapa or genealogy of New Zealand literature that has issued in the bicultural ‘years of fulfillment’ bringing such (Māori) women writers as Patricia Grace and Keri Hulme to prominence. In the bipartite collection that follows, Ihimaera binds Mansfield's writing further into a bicultural, indeed Māori tradition, through textual ‘variations’ of stories ranging from ‘The Woman at the Store’ to ‘At the Bay’. While the ‘variations’ provide oblique or sometimes scathing commentary on the gender, race, and class violence that subtends Mansfield's evocation of the world of high colonialism, the novella that forms the first part of the volume performs another kind of tributary provocation and appropriation. On the basis of a suggestion canvassed in Pat Lawlor's book about Maata Mahupuku that the latter was in possession of a manuscript authored by Mansfield, the story teases the reader into following a literary detective hunt to track down the missing novel. The conclusion assures the reader that the manuscript did in fact exist but, in accordance with Māori custom, was destroyed by Maata. As the narrator explains to the reader, when Mansfield died, the manuscript ‘which was also Katherine Mansfield, became a tupapaku – the dead Katherine – and all the more tapu (sacred) for that. It was something which, in Māori tradition, would have been returned at the tangi – like a piece of greenstone or feather cloak – to be joined again with the person and taken with her to earth, as an act of honour and aroha’. But because the manuscript was also Maata, she had to carry the tūpāpaku with her until her own death, resisting the European presumption that it should be made public, so ‘that when she died the manuscript which was both Katherine and herself should be closed away with her like a jeweled locket’.

Ihimaera's version of Maata stands in contrast to the heroic work of scholarship performed by Margaret Scott, patient transcriber of Mansfield's notoriously difficult handwriting, which produced a lengthy extract of the embryonic novella that is published in The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (2002).