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The first study of popular eighteenth-century English theatre to engage with voices of radical dissent that argued for religious toleration, attacked imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples and challenged social hierarchy. This book tells the story of freemasons who served as theatrical 'shock troops of the Enlightenment'.
List of contents
Introduction: dramatizing enlightenment; 1. Addison, Steele and enlightened sentiment; 2. Fair captives and spiritual dragooning: Islam and toleration on stage; 3. The black legend, noble savagery and indigenous voice; 4. The Masonic Invention of domestic tragedy; 5. Local savagery: the Enlightenment countryside on stage; Afterword.
About the author
Bridget Orr is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. She is the author of Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714 (Cambridge, 2001) and co-author of Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840 (1999). She is editor of a special Pacific issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and has published many essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and New Zealand, Maori and Pacific writing and film. Among other awards she has won Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Summary
The first study of popular eighteenth-century English theatre to engage with voices of radical dissent that argued for religious toleration, attacked imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples and challenged social hierarchy. This book tells the story of freemasons who served as theatrical 'shock troops of the Enlightenment'.
