Tenuous power, anxious peace: postrevolutionary war stagings of identity in the transatlantic theatre, 1783-1832

The resolution of the American Revolution in 1783 would terminate a tether between two peoples that had previously seemed interminable.Though both would reflexively project a selfassuredness to the other, the Revolution would initiate a renegotiation of the identity politics that had long governed both nations.In both the British and American theatre at the turn of the eighteenth century, this crisis of identity was still palpable.Through a dual analysis of the embattled performance history of William Dunlap's Andr on one side of the Atlantic and the sensational popularity of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro on the other, this thesis endeavours to show that the notions of liberty at the heart of the American Revolution would come to stimulate internal contestation in both polities, to elicit more questions than it did answers.Following this theatre historiography, this thesis will analyze the theatre's capacity to operate as political theatrum mundi in this period as a result of its inclusivity.At a historical moment where identity was as unreliable as loyalty and forces both internal and external stood in the way of national self-definition, the theatre provided a basis for community that was otherwise manifestly absent.ii King 3 (Everett 334).That the issue of "national friendships and national enmities; of parental and filial regards" (Everett 334) was still, some thirty years after independence had been won, an issue of concern articulates the lengthy difficulty America experienced transitioning from controlled colony to autonomous state.Plainly, there remained vestiges of Britishness everywhere in Americanness, of Americanness everywhere in Britishness.This is perhaps the crux of British-American relations following the Revolution: each would, as it stood, always be that which the other would define themselves against.The struggle to transcend this, to move beyond it, would consume both well into the nineteenth century.It would ultimately be the theatre that became the social locus in which both Britons and Americans would explore the problematic nuance of their relation to one another, the drama the medium through which both sought to mediate this profound sense of change.In an attempt to trace such explorations and mediations in all their ebbs and flows, this thesis will explore a relatively lengthy period of time.Using the year 1832 specifically as the latter bookend of this chronology serves the purpose of elucidating not only what changed in 1832, but what had changed by 1832.Methodologically speaking, the inclination of New Historicism to shed light on "the ways in which language created and subverted national literary, political, and economic roles and in doing so participated in a transatlantic conversation in which the words necessarily underwent a sea change as the crossed the pond" (Pace 230) make it ideally-suited to an analysis of British-American relations in this period.Max Weber has argued for the importance of understanding "social phenomena on two levels, at the level of meaning of the actors themselves and at the level of collective action among groupings of actors" (Turner 34).Amidst the crisis and doubt, anxiety and uncertainty of the postrevolutionary period, the "social phenomena" of this moment refracts what mattered to peoples' everyday lives, reveals what acts, rituals and King 4

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