With Universal Applause: The Exotic and Eighteenth Century Afterpieces

Focusing on afterpieces staged at the patent theaters, this dissertation examines the rise and influence of popular ('illegitimate') drama in Georgian London. Drawing on plays, travel literature, natural history, legal writings, music, and caricature, this work explores how questions and debates usually associated with the more exotic modes of Pacific exploration and colonization fundamentally shaped the way Britons began imagining their role amid a changing empire. Representing these debates on stage afterpieces radically challenged previous assumptions about national affiliation and identification. As this work discusses, British theater became an emblem of the universality of British civility and British commerce even as its more popular form, the afterpiece, created a series of uncomfortable anxieties about the character and integrity of the Empire. Anglo-Irish dramatists such as John O'Keeffe drew heavily upon models of exoticism as a means of highlighting their parallels to the Britain's treatment of Irish Catholics. Future United Irish leader, barrister, and playwright Leonard MacNally combined the Robin Hood trope with earlier eighteenth century constructions and the subsequent eradication of piracy by the Royal Navy as a means of advocating for a more peaceful resolution that could include Britain's 'exotic' citizens rather than its usual approach of preemptive exclusion and extermination. James Cobb, future Secretary of the East India Company show how afterpieces could be used as a means of harnessing popular support for the military actions of the East India Company even as he fundamentally questions its motivations and its claims of the right to rule in India. By examining an often neglected genre of the afterpiece this dissertation complicates how patent theaters in London assumed a highly critical approach to Britain's formation of its 'second Empire'.