Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 by Kathleen Wilson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 by Kathleen Wilson Julia Fawcett Kathleen Wilson, Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 ( Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 481; 42 b/w and 13 color illus., 5 maps. $39.99 cloth. Theater, as one of my mentors is fond of saying, is good to think with. Kathleen Wilson's Strolling Players of Empire proves the wisdom of these words as it follows British plays across a ballooning British Empire—from Kingston to Calcutta and from Sumatra to St. Helena—to understand how they interacted with local histories and performance traditions in shaping assumptions about race, gender, power, and empire throughout the long eighteenth century (which Wilson defines as beginning in 1656, when Oliver Cromwell readmitted Jews to England, and ending in 1833, with the abolition of slavery across the empire). Containing her argument within the frame of the proscenium allows Wilson to cover an admirable swath of time and space, and the book offers a powerful example of how scholars might take up the recent challenges proffered by Lisa Lowe and Jodi Byrd (among others) to envision more global histories. The book also intervenes in recent debates about the origins of modern racial categories. Through a series of nuanced and complex readings of English plays and characters as they were adopted, adapted, revised, and resisted by provincial players, Wilson argues that race was never "only 'skin deep'" but was (and is) produced through complex performances of power, identity, and empire—and is no less real or ineradicable for being so (468). Wilson relies on performance studies to define performance as a "way of knowing" through a combination of mimesis, mimicry, and alterity—as a "repetition of a repetition, or a repetition with a difference" that "can never recapitulate original essence" (18, 19). This definition allows her to zero in on the ways in which British imperialists attempted to impose their cultural beliefs and behaviors on imperial subjects by forcing them to imitate a narrow definition of Britishness, but also how these same subjects both resisted and expanded that narrow definition by repeating these performances with significant differences. In exploring how the performance traditions and histories of the colonized reshaped what it meant to be British, Wilson "explore[s] the possibility that, in the eighteenth century at least, Britons, not the colonized, were the premier mimic men and that this propensity both aided and confounded the purposes of colonization" (16). Without downplaying the violence or cruelty of Britain's imperialist strategies, then, Wilson is careful to recognize the agency and contributions of colonial subjects in resisting and shaping the performances of Britishness that circulated throughout the globe. Strolling Players of Empire consists of eight chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, "Playing," focuses on performances staging debates about what (and who) constituted "foreignness" as the empire expanded far beyond English shores. Chapter 1 serves as a helpful introduction to Wilson's methodology by pointing out that, in an empire in which even plays that debuted in London circulated far beyond the metropole, any discussion of the public sphere must necessarily include those in Britain's colonial territories, including men and women of African, Indigenous, and subcontinental Indian descent. The next two chapters demonstrate the applications of such methods across a wide range of places and stages. Chapter 2 follows performances of Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent from Havana to London to Jamaica to Calcutta to New South Wales as a "contested carrier of the values of [End Page 123] Englishness"—and of values regarding sexuality, gender, and kinship relations in particular. Chapter 3 focuses on the Jewish characters in two of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's plays—The Duenna and The School for Scandal—as limit cases through which Britons in Jamaica and Calcutta explored who counted as white and who as non-white, who as "British" and who as "foreign." If part 1 teases out the nuances of "foreignness" as a contested category across the empire, part 2, "Theatres of Empire," explores how different places and peoples performed their varying notions...