William Godwin and the Theatre

David O'Shaughnessy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317323730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

William Godwin is one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. He wrote four plays at the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries. This book has two main objectives: to provide the first comprehensive discussion of these four plays, and to consider the notion of theatricality in relation to Godwin's political project.

1 GODWIN AND LONDON’S THEATRICAL WORLD

A study of Godwin’s drama must consider the specific historical conditions of the London playhouses at this particular moment. Did the theatres have political agency? Was it possible to harness their political agency for the dissemination for political justice? What precisely was the extent of a theatre’s political agency and with whom did it lie – author, audience or regulatory powers? This chapter will try to answer these questions, perhaps not definitively, but from Godwin’s perspective. There are three sections to this chapter which taken together should illuminate that the Georgian theatre represented a very potent ideological force for Godwin’s political project. By considering the influence of Rousseau and the material conditions of the theatres, Godwin’s involvement in various aspects of London life and the relationship between his thinking on education and the theatre, the case will be made for a closer inspection of the literary texts that emerged from this milieu.

Rousseau, the Moral and the Tendency

On 24 March 1793 Godwin was to ponder the question of theatre’s potential with his friend, the little known artist George Dyson. Perhaps the most interesting observation we can make about Dyson is that Godwin considered him one of his ‘four principal oral instructors’ along with Thomas Holcroft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joseph Fawcett.¹ For a man who had conversation at the heart of his political programme and had such an enormous circle of friends, this was praise indeed. Godwin and he talked as they made their way to the house of John Horne Tooke in Wimbledon. Horne Tooke was an elder statesman of the reform movement whom Godwin had first met in 1792, possibly introduced by Thomas Paine. They became friends and Godwin made the trip to Wimbledon on numerous occasions over the following years. In this instance he went with Dyson in order to attend a supper. Some of the diners were members of the Society for Constitutional Information, people such as Lord Hugh Sempill, Archibald Hamilton Rowan and John Thelwall but all were reform-minded.²

Godwin had published Political Justice six weeks previously and had just completed his Essay against Reopening the War with France as he walked out to Wimbledon with Dyson to meet this august company. Godwin, who was looking for a new project to engage his attention, thought the conversation with Dyson to be so significant that he recorded the topic in his ‘Supplement to the Journal’ on his return to London. The two discussed Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert (1758), a response to D’Alembert’s Éncylopedie entry on the Swiss city of Geneva in which he had called for the introduction of a theatre to the city.³ Rousseau, despite being a playwright himself, was disgusted by his fellow contributor’s endorsement of such a decadent and corrosive institution. He argued that the theatre isolated communities (by distracting people from their neighbours), that it could not improve public morality, only replicate or corrupt it, and that it created sympathy for unnatural actions, such as murder, and their perpetrators. Worse, the theatre was a place where men spent too much time with women and where both sexes spent too much time with immoral actors. Theatre was a distraction from productivity, an added, unnecessary expense to daily life, and it promoted general moral dissipation. The best that could be said for theatre, as far as Rousseau was concerned, was that it was permissible in a city already decadent (such as Paris) as the inhabitants were already deeply immoral and time spent at the theatre was a lesser evil than what people would get up to outside its walls, a useful disclaimer for a man who wrote plays for the Parisian audience.

Theatre could also corrupt the author as he was obliged to write for a pleasure-seeking audience. No matter how good or virtuous the intention of the writer, he could only produce what the audience already wanted if he sought any commercial success or public recognition. Moreover, while he argues that a virtuous play might be instructive, it would be boring: one might as well go to a sermon. He writes: ‘Let no one then attribute to the theatre the power to change sentiments or morals, which it can only follow and embellish. An author who would brave the general taste would soon write for himself alone’. In the context of the discussion above of Dissenting theories of preaching and performance, Rousseau’s position is worth noting:

The Orator and the Preacher, it could be said, make use of their persons as does the actor. The difference is, however, very great. When the Orator appears in public, it is to speak and not to Show himself off; he represents only himself; he fills only his own role, speaks only in his own name, says, or ought to say, only what he thinks; the man and the role being the same, he is in his place; he is in the situation of any citizen who fulfils the functions of his estate. But an Actor on the Stage, displaying other sentiments than his own, saying only what he is made to say, often representing a chimerical being, annihilates himself, as it were, and is lost in his Hero. And, in the forgetting of the man, if something remains of him, it is used as the plaything of the spectators.⁴

Like Robinson and Priestley, he relates the actor to the preacher. Rousseau’s point is about the vulnerability of the actor to the audience, but he also alludes to the dangers of performativity overcoming the message of the orator, a point that resonated with Dissenting thought.

Irrespective of Rousseau’s bearing on Dissenting thought, there can be no doubt of his immense influence on Godwin. A parishioner by the name of Frederick Norman introduced Godwin to Rousseau as well as other French Enlightenment thinkers such as Holbach and Helvetius in 1781 and they had a significant impact: ‘My faith in Christianity had been much shaken by the books which Mr Norman put in my hands’.⁵ He returned to Rousseau’s work throughout his life and most intensely in 1792 when he read the Lettre à d’Alembert.⁶ Godwin was also very concerned with theatre’s potential for beneficial or harmful effects to a society. His explicit position in Book VIII of Political Justice (1793) is that theatre would someday be defunct, a view that appears to chime with Rousseau:

Shall we have theatrical exhibitions? This seems to include an absurd and vicious cooperation. It may be doubted whether men will hereafter come forward in any mode gravely to repeat words and ideas not their own? It may be doubted whether any musical performer will habitually exercise the compositions of others. We yield supinely to the superior merit of our predecessors, because we are accustomed to indulge the inactivity of our own faculties. All formal repetition of other men’s ideas seems to be a scheme for imprisoning for so long a time the operations of our own mind.⁷

Godwin’s vision of a society without theatre is equivocal. So, for that matter, is Rousseau’s who saw a role for drama in cities that were already dissolute. Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert ends with a utopian pastoral vision of innocent community entertainment, a sharp contrast with contemporary theatre as he sees it. However, while Godwin’s utopian view also sees theatre as redundant, the emphasis is on its redundancy, rather than its corruption. Theatre is imagined as a vehicle for ideas that in the world of individuated rational-critical exchange will no longer be necessary as society will be engaged in perpetual improvement rather than the static discussion of old ideas. This in no way precludes the utility of theatre as a means of provoking this societal change.

The discussion of theatre in the final pages of Political Justice led to the conversation between Godwin and Dyson in March 1793. Godwin recorded the thrust of the conversation in a supplement to his journal, an indication of its importance:

Rousseau sur les Spectacles – Do theatrical productions, such as we find them do most good or harm? – Which is most powerful, the moral inference fairly deducible from an interesting story, or its tendency to rouse? instance in Othello – A question similar to that of Rousseau may be put relative to Petronius, Horace, Voltaire, Hume, Sterne – How far is mind generated, not only in the vulgar persons suitably prepared, but even in the vulgar, by energy of intellectual exhibitions?⁸

How did the theatre function in the modern world? This was the question that Rousseau and D’Alembert debated in their correspondence of 1758. Again, we note in his conversation with Dyson the Godwinian dichotomy of the ‘suitably prepared’ and the ‘vulgar’ but here Godwin’s anxiety is specifically related to the theatre. Such concerns about the theatre’s capacity to reduce a collection of vulgar individuals to an uncritical mob and the possibility of this mob being inflamed to inappropriate and irrational action by the ‘energy’ of the performance will be recognizable to most historians of the 1790s. For instance, Godwin’s disagreement with John Thelwall, leading member of the London Corresponding Society, whose mass meetings he found ‘sufficiently alarming’, is well known.⁹ Godwin wrote in the aftermath of the passing of the Two Acts in 1795 that the London Corresponding Society was too unruly:

The speeches delivered at these meetings, and the resolutions adopted, have not always been of the most temperate kind. The collecting of immense multitudes of men into one assembly, particularly when there have been no persons of eminence, distinction, and importance in the country, that have mixed with them, and been ready to temper their efforts, is always sufficiently alarming.¹⁰

Godwin was quick to distinguish between the public meetings of the London Corresponding Society and more private gatherings such as the Sunday dinners at Horne Tooke’s attended by polite members of the Society for Constitutional Information. No wonder then that Godwin had reservations about contemporary theatre. The London theatres were filled with boisterous audiences and Godwin was always anxious with regard to crowds. ‘The conviviality of a feast’, he had earlier warned in 1793, ‘may lead to the depredations of a riot’. He continued: ‘While sympathy of opinion catches from man to man, especially in numerous meetings, and among persons whose passions have not been used to the curb of judgment, actions may be determined on, which solitary reflection would have rejected’.¹¹ Those people ‘whose passions have not been used to the curb of judgement’ are the same ‘vulgar’ who are not ‘suitably prepared’ for the melee of modern theatre attendance as he put it to Dyson. Numerous critics point to the raucous atmosphere that pervaded both legitimate (the patent theatres of Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Haymarket) and the illegitimate (minor theatres, the most prominent of which included Sadler’s Wells and Astley’s Circus) playhouses.¹² Even in a year as politically contentious as 1794 Thomas Holcroft wrote an afterpiece which suggested that Covent Garden (perceived to be a Government theatre) and Drury Lane (considered to be an Opposition stronghold) should put aside their purported political differences, rise above party politics, and tackle the common noisy insurgency that pervaded their theatres in order to reclaim their status as moral and cultural beacons. An extract shows the extent of the problem as Thomas Holcroft saw it:

Tim Halfprice: Ah You dear devils! Here you are! To it! Go it! – Oh dam’me, / Go it! I’m a Box Lobby Buck! You shall make me / Quarrel-master General to you both.

I understand the business! / I am at one or t’other of your houses every night; & dam’me, / I would be at both together if I could. Oh, its high fun!

Queen Covent Garden: Yes, sir: I have seen you!

Tim: To be sure you have!

Queen Drury Lane: And heard you too!

Tim Halfprice: To be sure you have! I make the tour of the Lobbies – curse the Box-keeper, bang the doors, talk loud to the Doxies – bawl / to Ned, Tom & Dick – pinch the Orange women till they / squeak again and take care that the whole house shall hear / as little of the play as I do.¹³

Despite the volatile environment of the 1790s playhouse and his disdain for it, Godwin’s fiction, diary and letters provide ample and incontrovertible evidence that attending the theatre and writing drama were central preoccupations for him from before his arrival in London through to the performance of Faulkener in 1807. Some of this can be explained by the reasons outlined above – fame, political culture, literary status – but it is also of central importance that the theatre facilitated a fluid and dynamic space between author and spectator that could satisfy both Godwin’s interest in using performative oratory for the dissemination of knowledge and his later shift to a collaborative model of knowledge production.

In the 1793 edition of Political Justice Godwin argued that literature was one of three methods of perfecting the mind, education and political justice being the others. However, a careful reading of the relevant passages indicates that he was actually suggesting that literature and education were vehicles for spreading political justice, each with different advantages and disadvantages. Literature had the merit of being powerful in the diffusion of truth, it ‘has reconciled the whole thinking world respecting the great principles of the system of the universe’. In the interaction of reader and text, Godwin saw the ‘collision of mind with mind’ that will cause truth to be ‘struck out’, adversarial language that evokes sermons and Ciceronian oratory. However, literature had a limited influence as it ‘exist[ed] only as the portion of the few’ – again we have the distinction between the intellectual haves and have-nots. In short, while literature had an intrinsic power, it had too limited a range to bring about wholesale social reform as it was ‘unaided by the regularity of institution and discipline’. As for education, the other means of spreading political justice, this was also flawed. Perfecting the mind through education was a non-starter due to a shortage of great teachers – teachers like himself – which again pointed to a problem of disciplinary scale. Preceptors, to use Godwin’s term, were all subject to inherited prejudice and other ‘errors of mankind’.¹⁴

The second and third editions of Political Justice scrap this chapter but the replacement text has similar issues at heart. Godwin’s incorporation of Shaftesbury in this new chapter (‘The Voluntary Actions of Man Originate in Their Opinions’) and the subsequent elevation of the passions alongside reason strengthen the possibilities for theatre. The summation Godwin offers of his central principles indicates that the communication of ideas for the amelioration of society remained central:

Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error: Sound reasoning and truth are capable of being so communicated: Truth is omnipotent: The vices and moral weakness of man are not invincible: Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement’.¹⁵

During the 1790s Godwin sought a ‘means of communication’ which had adequate scale, was capable of communicating truth through a process of exchange and could marry passion with reason. Theatre could satisfy his requirements.

The Georgian playhouse was a literary environment which evaded any issue of disciplinary scale. Hogan estimates there were approximately 10–15,000 visits to the patent theatres every week in Georgian London.¹⁶ It also encompassed the broad cross-section of society that Godwin wanted to address. While the very poor could not be said to be a regular presence at Drury Lane or Covent Garden, most classes of society were represented there:

In the class-conscious eighteenth century a fairly sharp distinction was almost always observed as to those theatregoers who prescriptively should sit where. In the...