A study of Godwin's drama must consider the specific historical conditions of the London playhouses at this particular moment. Did the theatres have political agency? Was it possible to harness their political agency for the dissemination for political justice? What precisely was the extent of a theatre's political agency and with whom did it lie – author, audience or regulatory powers? This chapter will try to answer these questions, perhaps not definitively, but from Godwin's perspective. There are three sections to this chapter which taken together should illuminate that the Georgian theatre represented a very potent ideological force for Godwin's political project. By considering the influence of Rousseau and the material conditions of the theatres, Godwin's involvement in various aspects of London life and the relationship between his thinking on education and the theatre, the case will be made for a closer inspection of the literary texts that emerged from this milieu.

Rousseau, the Moral and the Tendency

On 24 March 1793 Godwin was to ponder the question of theatre's potential with his friend, the little known artist George Dyson. Perhaps the most interesting observation we can make about Dyson is that Godwin considered him one of his ‘four principal oral instructors’ along with Thomas Holcroft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joseph Fawcett. For a man who had conversation at the heart of his political programme and had such an enormous circle of friends, this was praise indeed.