In this ground-breaking work, Bridget Orr shows that popular eighteenth-century theatre was about much more than fashion, manners and party politics. Using the theatre as a means of circulating and publicizing radical Enlightenment ideas, many plays made passionate arguments for religious and cultural toleration, and voiced protests against imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples by colonial Europeans. Irish and labouring-class dramatists wrote plays, often set in the countryside, attacking social and political hierarchy in Britain itself. Another crucial but as yet unexplored aspect of early eighteenth-century theatre is its connection to freemasonry. Freemasons were pervasive as actors, managers, prompters, scene-painters, dancers and musicians, with their own lodges, benefit performances and particular audiences. In addition to promoting the Enlightened agenda of toleration and cosmopolitanism, freemason dramatists invented the new genre of domestic tragedy, a genre that criticized the effects of commercial and colonial capitalism.

‘Bridget Orr’s British Enlightenment Theatre opens up an exciting research field full of radically important questions about British religious and social attitudes, their relationship to regional diversity, and the multiple ways these issues were debated on the eighteenth-century stage.’

David Worrall Source: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research

‘… will make you rethink your preconceived notions of every word in its title. … Orr’s perspective yields authoritative local readings upon which she builds rich and new accounts of generic change.’

Marcie Frank Source: The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cat