Dramatic Representations of British Soldiers and Sailors on the London Stage: 1660-1800.

Myerly, Scott Hughes

Recently, Linda Colley, Charles Tilly, Marc Baer and others have discussed links between conflict, display and British identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but none has studied the connection between theater and the military, both of which conspicuously utilized spectacle and symbolism to convey messages and values. Terence M. Freeman and Gillian Russell have undertaken to fill this gap by studying war, theater and theatricality between 1660 and 1815, highlighting the symbolic role of stage soldiers and sailors, and the theatrical dimensions of warfare and military and naval institutions. They suggest that stage portrayals of the military often evinced complex attitudes towards war, identity, and nationalism which go far beyond the traditional negative stereotypes of the army and navy, raising questions about public attitudes towards state institutions, war, and power as reflected in contemporary theater.

Using more than 600 plays and related pieces, Freeman discredits the idea that Britons unreservedly disliked and feared soldiers, and to a lesser extent, sailors. He shows with ample evidence that in stage portrayals most depictions were quite positive, and even negative ones were tempered with redeeming features. Martial themes in songs, playbills, music, dance, spectacle, mainpieces, afterpieces, and interludes rendered "[servicemen] familiar, sympathetic, and admirable." (p. 137) These often emphasized the Enlightenment notion that true merit is above rank, (p. 21-22) and contrasted the effete, luxury-loving, wealthy civilian male with the rough, honest, loyal soldiers and tars, who pursued "a standard of 'Honour and Wounds.'" (p. 191) Even the recruiting party and press gang were shown in "appealing rather than appalling characterizations" (p. 196) especially in the latter eighteenth century. An important point is that these presentations were an entertainment version of actual battles and shipboard and camp life, constituting "the news video tapes of the day" (p. 5) and were important as visual representations of such events.

Freeman also emphasizes the importance of harmony, both in social interaction and between the genders. He suggests that on some level, Britons desperately wanted to believe the best about their servicemen (perhaps reflecting a desire to end or resolve civilians' conflicts with them?). Yet Freeman does not discuss this point in light of growing nationalism and the degree to which Britons identified with the state's fighting forces, nor does he examine the deeper meaning(s) of these sharp contrasts in public attitudes and what this reveals about the era's changing concepts of identity.

Harmony is also a significant theme in the most interesting of the chapters on "breeches parts," when women appeared on stage as soldiers and sailors, which increased in the latter eighteenth century. While noting that such roles suggest a union of the masculine and feminine, Freeman could have delved deeper: what do these characters denote about late eighteenth-century ideas concerning gender and identity? This puzzle acquires another aspect when he notes the disdain shown for opera-singing Italian castrati as symbolizing a jaded, luxurious culture, contrasted with poor but "manly" serviceman. (pp. 23-26) While Freeman has thus contributed to the literature on the history of sexuality, his analysis would have benefitted from consulting the extensive scholarship on that subject.

Freeman's book is also valuable for its wealth of theatrical examples, but it is somewhat repetitive and would have been strengthened by a more effective analytical structure; for example, honesty, bravery, patriotism, and the good humor and constancy of servicemen to wives or sweethearts, are cited again and again in different contexts rather than establishing their overall validity and exploring their implications. There is a tendency to ramble and present a great many examples when a few would suffice, and too great an inclination to speculate, using phrases such as "can be and perhaps are." (p. 178) Some conclusions seem forced; in one instance, Freeman suggests that it would have been unwise to ridicule servicemen on stage, as soldiers on guard duty at the theater or amongst the audiences might be offended. Yet the army hardly dominated London or its theaters, and there is no evidence that contemporaries thought stage presentations were simply hostage to the expectations of servicemen.

While the study's primary importance is its reinterpretation of the traditional negative image of soldiers and sailors, the reader does not get much analysis on the larger meanings of these themes. Freeman wisely refuses to dismiss the enormous body of evidence that Britons harbored strongly negative attitudes towards servicemen, but has not analyzed this paradox. Since civilians of various origins felt such ambivalence, it thus seems highly likely that the expressions and reflections of public opinion(s) depended upon the context of its encounters with the military - whether as performance or otherwise - which raises further questions. For example, to explore this ambiguity, Freeman might have devoted more discussion to the stage characterizations of the various ranks in the forces, or provided greater analysis of plays with military or nautical plots. A broader discussion of these stories could have yielded a good deal of useful information about public perceptions, expectations and attitudes. However, the weight of Freeman's research is impressive, and points the way towards further work in a variety of areas, including social, theater, music, entertainment, cultural and military history.

Russell primarily addresses war's significance as a cultural phenomenon during the era 1793-1815, pointing out the theater's role in shaping Britishness, which "could be a theatrical performance, open to a variety of interpretations by its actors" (p. 6) in the "intensely political" Georgian theater. The stage soldier and sailor were crucial for defining wartime patriotism, since "both radical and loyalist patriotisms struggled to appropriate the political and cultural meanings of the armed forces at this period." (p. 15) Russell also notes theatricality's significance for the "social mechanism" of late Georgian society, "where performance, display, and spectatorship were essential," and that war was not only itself theatrical, with colorful displays of martial prowess, but was experienced by many as both theater (p. 17) and "communal event" (p. 18) intended to promote loyalty. Theatricality also played a considerable role in military life which reinforced the growing demand for spectacle in the theater, and Russell examines the popularity of amateur theatricals in the navy when at sea for extended periods, and in the army when stationed abroad.

The book's title does not reflect its true breadth, for Russell begins by discussing army theatricals in the 1770s: the elaborate "Mischianza" festivity held by the British outside Philadelphia in 1778, and a round of entertainments at Coxheath camp in southern England in 1779-1780. Russell, like Freeman, notes a destabilization of gender categories in these shows, and her analysis of class interprets military theatricals as assertions and celebrations of noble officers, laden with cultural and social significance as a representation of war and aristocratic sociability, which "encoded the political visibility and power of the elite." (p. 47) But while Russell raises many questions, her analysis of these shows is often faulty. What evidence exists that the military elite "needed" to define itself in this way? Could it be that the "Mischianza" mainly signifies a combination of boredom and bravado, or a desire to appear supremely indifferent to the threat from American bumpkins? She interprets Coxheath as dramatizing "the ideology of a war of elites in which what was at stake was the hegemony of the upper class." (p. 37) To what threat does she refer? Questions raised by the American Revolution? Calls for political reform? Neither of these can truly be said to have been threatening to aristocratic hegemony in Britain at that time.

Similar assertions and conclusions - sometimes quite sweeping - of startling boldness appear in nearly every chapter, based upon casual connections rarely supported by evidence. These are sometimes banal; Russell posits that military theatricals held on a Gulf of Mexico island in 1815 "marked the distinctiveness of the experience of war . . . [placing] the normal categories of identity - time, place, rank, gender - in a condition of flux and uncertainty." Such mystification misses the simple fact that within the routine and rigidity of colonial martial life, such diversions helped to distract idle officers from omnipresent boredom and unpleasantness. Yet Russell discerns deeper meanings in these theatricals: the officers "could test their sense of national identity," which "meant excluding" common soldiers, women, escaped slaves and Native Americans. (pp. 177-178) The notion that the military machine used (and needed) entertainment to forge or reinforce its "national identity," when virtually every dimension of martial life aimed at eliminating any other sort of identity than that of British soldier, can be most charitably described as far-fetched. Russell's rather limited use of the large number of servicemen's memoirs and published letters may partially account for this lack of perspective.

Some assertions approach the absurd; when discussing the military's violence as theatergoers, oftentimes against politicized civilians, Russell cites theater historians noting "the 'internally disciplined' theater audience of the mid-nineteenth century," concluding that this was "the product of an overt disciplining of audiences by the military during the period of the French wars." (p. 119) In discussing shipboard theatricals, Russell makes interesting observations about homoeroticism, class and power, but then invokes potent, weighty meaning by elevating the customary gratuity a London theater manager gave to sailors who rowed him ashore into "an attempt to replace an economy of service and deference with the lateral relationships of a commercial transaction; it was a recognition of mutual powerlessness, of their bond as 'actors' in a theater of war." (p. 157)

Yet despite these excesses, this book does have value; it points out important literary works on war which have been ignored by military historians, and also illuminates some overlooked areas, such as Cape Town's "African Theater" of 1800-1802, an example of the much-neglected history of entertainment in the colonies. Russell highlights the important dimension of theatricality and the many striking similarities between military and naval institutions and the theater, but she does not go beyond this analysis to study a more intriguing consideration: these morally suspect, nomadic, spectacular and entertaining - yet largely isolated - institutions are dependent upon and feared by civilians, who view them as aberrant. Yet servicemen symbolize conditions which have since become commonplace - the loss of an established, stable community as a nexus for each person's existence, the frequent, semi-nomadic movement of one's domicile, the growing isolation of - and alienation from - the great majority of people that one casually encounters, the institutionalization of work (and sometimes living conditions), and the much greater role of entertainment and escapism. These theater and military sub-culture themes thus stimulate comparison with similar conditions that have become increasingly normal patterns of life in late twentieth-century, post-industrial countries, and are relevant subjects for future research.

Nevertheless, Freeman and Russell raise intriguing questions about the military image, showing that stage representations contrast vividly with the traditional negative stereotype; the nasty portrayal is reversed, and as Freeman notes, the soldier becomes a "powerless, innocent victim rather than swaggering brute." (p. 114) Thus, Freeman and Russell suggest that a complex relationship existed between the British public and the military, and that this ambiguity appears in popular culture. Apparently, the army and to a lesser extent the navy were either hated or adored as a consequence of the context of their public presentation. When abroad in the civilian world, servicemen were often perceived as raucous predators - both in terms of violence and their seductions of the innocent - and they frequently viewed civilians with contempt. Yet civilians knew that they were often trepanned into the service, subjected to atrocious conditions that were quite similar to - or were simply a military form of slavery, and generally abused, while the bones of most would remain forgotten in some remote land, or under the ocean's depths.

These authors have established that martial stage themes were a major cultural phenomenon long before modern media, and were important images of state institutions, war and power which deserve much closer study than they have hitherto received. As Freeman rightly notes, this is "a largely untapped reservoir of information concerning the relationship between the British military and the popular culture of London." (p. 1)

Scott Hughes Myerly Los Angeles, CA