EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY THEATRES AND POLITENESS

Thomas Sheridan need not have looked beyond the theatre in order to pursue his mission as an elocutionary reformer and saviour of the nation. For by the mid eighteenth century the theatres in Britain had secured sufficient public respectability for dramatic entertainment to be widely apprehended as a powerful vehicle of useful instruction and social reform. The spectacle of acting itself might ‘fire a feeling Age’, averred Aaron Hill.

Such a view of the theatre's social function was relatively new when Hill made this claim in 1746. The court-centred theatres of the Restoration and late seventeenth century – with typically boisterous audiences, and repertoires rich in bawdy dramas – were hardly venues for teaching modern manners and ethics. For many commentators of that period who were concerned with the moral health of the nation, the theatres were dangerously decadent institutions promulgating lewdness and debauchery.