I N 1803, EN GLISH AUDIENCES RAVED OVER THE DEBUT OF AN ACTOR named Carlo. His performances drew nightly crowds to London's heatre Royal, Drury Lane, and rescued its manager from inancial ruin. But while playgoers cheered Carlo's performance in he Caravan (1803; Reynolds), the conservative press jeered. Carlo, they insisted, was obviously unit for the stage: he was not an actor at all but a Newfoundland dog. When critics argued that animals had no place in a respectable theater, they were using the novelty of he Caravan to rehearse a common objection to contemporary drama. he introduction of a dog onstage was only the latest example of a trend toward hybrid theatrical forms-works of melodrama, burlesque, and extravaganza that louted convention by mixing prose, poetry, music, dance, and tableaux. he very visible diference between Carlo and other actors made him a convenient symbol of this intermixing, and purists rushed to denounce interspecies entertainments as the epitome of dramatic decadence. Melodrama and other hybrid forms have enjoyed a radical revaluation in the intervening years, but in one sense the purists' verdict proved conclusive: time has ushered Carlo from the footlights of Drury Lane to the footnotes of theater history. Although he Caravan and its star are now forgotten, the controversy they spawned continues to shape and constrain emerging theories of animal performance. In keeping with the broader nonhuman turn in the humanities, theorists and performance artists have begun to embrace what Una Chaudhuri calls "the productive diiculty" that animals pose to drama, "this most anthropocentric of the arts" ("Of All" 520, 522).1 By their own accounts, scholars of animal performance are motivated by drama's long history of animal exclusion; their work addresses the fact that "animals are not JOHN MACNEILL MILLER is assistant professor of En glish at Allegheny College. His research and teaching focus on the relation of Victorian literature, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. He is working on a book about the ecological implications of Victorian narrative form.
