Jean I. Marsden

Ghostwriting: Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood as Adaptation

How can we discuss Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood as an adaptation when we have no extant source? Rather than focusing on the question of authorship, this chapter considers Double Falsehood within the context of the eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire, especially adaptations of Shakespeare and Theobald’s own output. The treatment of the female characters, Leonora and Violante, is compared to the representation of women in popular tragedies of the period. Henriquez’s rape of Violante presents the most concrete example of Theobald combining contemporary dramatic formulas with the plot of an earlier source in which the ravished woman does not die but is rewarded with marriage, a resolution contrary to the standard conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama.

Richard Cumberland's The Jew and the Benevolence of the Audience: Performance and Religious Tolerance

This article investigates the genesis, staging, and reception of Richard Cumberland’s The Jew (1794), a sentimental comedy designed with the express purpose of ridding England of its anti-Jewish prejudices through the medium of performance. Cumberland’s play centered on the benevolence of Sheva, a figure created expressly to counter Shakespeare’s Shylock, so that the staging of this benevolent Jew would generate a sense of “fellow-feeling” in spectators that subsequently enabled them to put aside bias. While audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were profoundly moved by watching The Jew, their deepest emotion was consciousness of their own virtue and that of their nation, demonstrating the power and ultimately ephemeral nature of sentiment in performance.

Shakespeare and the Culture Wars

Visualizing studies the reception of discrete topoi from the old Regime through the 1790s. Consider the wrenching imagery of Mallet’s “Departure of a Volunteer” (1793), which reworks archetypes inherited from Greuze’s “Father’s Curse” (1777) to stress the conflict of interest between patriotism and the family. where Greuze represented the young man joining the soldiers in a spirit of adventure that warranted paternal anger, Mallet gives spiritual legitimation to the people’s army and dismisses the entreaties of the family with concern for a higher good (140).