The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815

Staging Grounds: Loutherbourg and Warley

“…A series of compelling and incisive studies have appeared in recent years examining the literary and wider cultural response to the pronounced theatricality of the country's military at the time of the American War. 8 Scholars have shown how the work of playwrights, poets and printmakers intersected with the anxieties and tensions of this dark period of unpopular war and political division, domestic unrest and threatened invasion. Understandably, a good deal of the attention has focused on the work of such firmly canonical cultural figures as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose Drury Lane theatre staged several productions addressing the invasion fears of the late 1770s in more-or-less direct ways.…”