In ‘Theatre in the 1850s’, Kate Newey writes about the ‘mapping of London as an international entertainment centre’ and looks at the ways in which theatre began to create a new collective national identity, based in the act of spectatorship, and in what was seen on stage, even when that included the Irish Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of a French melodrama. Newey reminds us of the persistent popularity of melodrama, and of the use of the theatre as a site for discussion of contemporary events, and gives an extended reading of Charles Kean’s work with Boucicault on his drama, The Corsican Brothers (1852), which went on to become one of the most popular plays of the century. The chapter also considers the links between the stage and realist and sensation fiction, the internalisation of British theatre culture, and how nineteenth-century theatre became part of an international, commercial, cultural matrix.

In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford’s historical tragedy, Charles the First, was banned by the new Examiner of Plays, George Colman. In 1737, William Havard’s play, King Charles I was performed at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just before the 1737 Licensing Act established legislative State censorship of the British theatre. There is an intriguing timeline here: in 1737 a play about Charles I ran for several months at a Theatre Royal, and was subsequently played throughout Britain for the next fifty years; in 1824 another play about Charles I was banned before it reached the stage. These events bookend the period covered by this book, and this chapter works between them to explore aspects of the cultural memory of Charles I in the English theatre, and the impact of censorship not only on Mitford’s career but also the broader question of women’s participation in the theatre in the early nineteenth century. Mitford’s playwriting career spanned the end of John Larpent’s time and the start of George Colman’s tenure as Examiner of Plays, and her experience points to the increasing constraints on women playwrights’ agency and confidence in the period.

The demands of living to please and pleasing to live - that uneasy compact between art and commerce - was one of the central anxieties of Victorian cultural life. The words spoken by David Garrick, standing on the Drury Lane stage in 1747, were much quoted by novelists, critics, visual artists, playwrights and essayists throughout the nineteenth century. Dr Johnson’s 'Prologue' speaks of a capricious eighteenth-century audience, but in 1747 Garrick could stand on the stage of Drury Lane and rely on the certainty of his theatre’s monopoly on the 'legitimate' theatre. In the theatre, painting and literature, artists, critics, and audiences had a shared sense of British national culture, its aesthetic qualities and class allegiances. By Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837, under the complex pressures of industrialization and urbanization, and a vigorous democratic impulse, British national culture appeared fractured and contentious. Artists, critics and audiences were often at odds over what was pleasing, and how that which pleased could - or should - provide a living. While eighteenth-century cultural certainties and coherence may have been a façade reliant on the acceptance of an exclusive Whig ascendancy, this sense of a coherent national culture had, by the start of the Victorian period, disappeared. The contending discourses of national culture, perhaps artfully glossed over before the French Revolution, became overt, and the ideological conflicts of class and gender became part of the very content of much of British culture, particularly that which we have come to see as ‘popular culture’.

What we think of as the Victorian theatre emerged from the late Romantic period, and the aesthetic and political anxieties of the early decades of the nineteenth century were woven into the legislative, industrial and aesthetic characteristics of that theatre throughout the rest of the century. Many of the enduring debates about the theatre - about its audiences, texts and performance practices - were first broached in the late Romantic period, when the break between popular and high culture was institutionalized and embedded in ideologically loaded hierarchies of aesthetic value. These hierarchies are still with us today: whenever impassioned public debate erupts over the place of Shakespeare's plays in English-speaking national schools curricula, or the advisability of the (British) National Theatre staging Oklahoma in a state-subsidised theatre, or the paucity of new plays which are not musicals on Broadway, we are re-enacting Victorian debates about the competing roles and values of theatre as entertainment, or art or education. Abiding anti-theatrical concerns that theatre professionals value art over entertainment, evident in the assumptions and actions of state funding bodies (where these exist), and the suspicion that performance for the sake of pleasure (entertainment) is somehow both ethically and aesthetically 'wrong', are views inherited from the nineteenth century. And canonical literary histories of the Victorian period - the privileging of some narratives over others - have reinforced these ideological and aesthetic anxieties.

In 1832, two movements for reform coincided. In June, the first Reform Act received royal assent, while in August, a select committee of the House of Commons reported the results of its inquiry into the current state of the British theatre. However, this coincidence was not accidental. Early nineteenth-century discussions of the theatre regarded it as an important cultural institution that represented particular views of the nation, while, conversely, political life in the first decades of the nineteenth century was conducted in an increasingly public and performative way. In this essay I will explore a variety of views of reform to be found in the London theatre industry in and around 1832, focusing on two contrasting concepts of a reformed theatre, one emerging from the select committee, and the other from performances at two of London's popular theatres, the Surrey and the Coburg. This contrast demonstrates the limits and boundaries of parliamentary attempts at reform of the theatres, and the existence of differing views about the desirable nature of a reformed theatre. In the hectic daily clamour of attractions, novelty, and spectacle in London's commercial theatre industry in the first third of the nineteenth century, discussions about reform of the theatre were not limited to its legislative regulation. They included tub-thumping about the ‘decline of the drama’ and the ‘national drama’, discussions of the constitution and respectability of audiences, and keenly promoted demonstrations of the quality of productions at the new theatres compared with the performances at the established Theatres Royal in Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

The theatre of the nineteenth century offered women irresistible opportunities for independence, action, agency, fame and money. Yet participation in the theatre also threatened loss of position and reputation, exhaustion, frustration, exploitation and poverty. The theatre as a profession (for middle-class women particularly) challenged the ideals of self-effacement and control of women's ‘natural’ voracious desires which Mary Poovey argues are at the heart of the idea of the ‘proper lady’. However, as Kerry Powell argues in the case of actresses, the theatre also offered women the opportunity to ‘speak compellingly’. In spite of the difficulties of negotiating this tricky territory, women moved into the theatre in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century, and their participation in the theatre industry constitutes one of the more visible instances of women's increasing autonomy and self-definition through work in the period. Women's participation in the theatre was all the more important as the theatre was, in effect, a mass medium of the nineteenth century. But the theatre in the nineteenth century was not simply an entertainment industry: it was an important part of the discursive construction of English (and I use this term deliberately) national culture. If we adopt Benedict Anderson's concept of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, then the theatre was a vital part of that imagining, and women in the theatre were defining and participating in one of the more significant constructions of ‘cultural nationhood’ in the period.