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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
It is a commonplace among historians that British theatre during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is best characterized on the one hand by its taste for scenic spectacle, and on the other by what Allardyce Nicoll termed ‘a general dramatic debility’. For the first time in British theatrical history, spectacle for its own sake became the principal attraction for most of the audience. Not spoken language, whether poetry or prose, but the sentient lure of elaborate scenery, pantomime, music, and mechanical effects swelled the receipts of the major and minor houses alike. The ascendancy of visual spectacle over dialogue drama of autonomous literary merit is customarily regarded as a debasement of theatre as an art form, attributed with varying degrees of emphasis to the legal shackles of the patent system and the Lord Chamberlain's censorship; to the cavernous expansion of the major houses; and to commercially expedient appeals by the managers to less cultivated tastes in the burgeoning, heterogeneous audience. This durable theory of theatrical prostration is a reductive judgement, the result of critical bias and a limited methodology that have been mind-forged manacles for historical research in theatre since its inception in the 1930s.
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