Daniel O’Quinn's Staging Governance offers a vibrantly written, elegantly theorized, and historically incisive analysis of England's late eighteenth-century theatrical engagement with empire. O’Quinn does an exceptional job of highlighting the striking complicity between the figures of colonial otherness and metropolitan selfhood that were deployed on the London stage during this period. This book also stands out for the compelling dialogue it presents between the Foucaldian concepts of discipline and regulation and early romantic strategies of spectacle and performance. This dialogue is supported, on the one hand, by O’Quinn's fine critical dexterity and, on the other, by his masterful knowledge of eighteenth-century drama, print culture, and what Jane Moody has called the illegitimate theater (Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 [Cambridge, 2000]).
The loss of Britain's thirteen colonies is the historical trauma that marks the starting point of O’Quinn's narrative. Against this loss he analyzes both Britain's anxieties and its compensatory imperial fantasies as manifest in the theater and the popular press. The first section, entitled “Ethnographic Acts,” reads the East India Company as a locus of conflict for issues surrounding England's transition from a politics of landed proprietors to one of directors and shareholders. O’Quinn probes the ways in which the fear of contamination by contact with colonial India depended on an understanding of “the prior social deterioration of the metropole” (40). O’Quinn shrewdly teases out how this deterioration was figured through representations of gender insubordination, sexual aberration, aristocratic excess, and financial instability, both in India and England.
Chapter 1, “Empire's Vicious Expenses,” focuses on the commutability of colonial corruption and metropolitan credit practices, using Samuel Foote's play The Nabob to examine “the preexisting social pathology that is made visible by the Nabob figure” at a time when landed property interests were trying to understand their new relationship to commercial interests (56). Chapter 2 analyzes Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's and John O’Keefe's extremely successful pantomime, Omai; or, A Trip round the World in order to show how Omai's depiction of soldierly virtue in the person of Captain Cook worked to neutralize the metropolitan vice depicted in The Nabob. O’Quinn's political assessment of paratextual materials, especially production-related images, is particularly powerful in this chapter.
The book's second section, “Women and the Trials of Imperial Masculinity,” focuses on the performance of gender in and around the impeachment of Warren Hastings. According to O’Quinn, if the 1770s saw the imbrication of “the American threat, Indian mismanagement, and the dissipated character of the gentry” into a seamless narrative of vulnerability, then the 1780s inherited a cultural imaginary that figured imperial relations “in terms of gender insubordination and sexual deviance” (121). These gender tensions are intimately linked to what O’Quinn identifies as a crisis regarding modes of sovereignty at home and abroad. Accordingly, in chapter 3, O’Quinn reads Elizabeth Inchbald's play Such Things Are (1787) as employing key aspects of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws to expose the governmental and economic tensions involved in the debate over Charles Fox's East India Bill. He ends by employing Louis Althusser's reading of The Spirit of the Laws to argue that the playwright, not the politician, becomes the “arbiter of manners and morals” in times of governmental corruption (146).
In chapters 4 and 5, O’Quinn offers a systematic exposition of how theatrical conventions shaped the Hastings trial. These chapters stand out because of O’Quinn's stunningly thorough knowledge of late eighteenth-century theater. His readings of the Hamlet intertext apparent in the satirical prints of William Dent and John Gillray and of the connections between Edmund Burke's oratorical performance and eighteenth-century versions of Macbeth are particularly impressive. At the same time, O’Quinn builds on the work of Sara Suleri (The Rhetoric of English India [Chicago, 1992]) by exposing the unspeakable commutability of guilt that is ineffectually banished by the oratory of Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Charles Fox during the impeachment. O’Quinn is particularly good at signaling moments where factionalism breaks down in the face of such shared guilt, comparing Hastings's political morality to Fox's elocutionary strategies, or Hastings's power in India to Burke's knowledge of eastern cultures and languages.
The third section, “A Theatre of Perpetual War,” looks at how Britain recalibrated its imperial interests in the 1790s, focusing on the transformation of India from a mercantile to a territorial empire and on the increasing militarization of the subcontinent that accompanied it. O’Quinn convincingly traces how these changes in governmentality were accompanied by and filtered through a shift from autoethnographic spectatorship to “more productive forms of subject maintenance” (268) that worked to consolidate the audience into a collective national subject.
This section raises a number of difficult and provocative questions. To begin with, there was a very apparent contradiction between the new militarism of Lord Cornwallis's Indian rule and the concomitant claims of middle-class benevolence. Indeed, as O’Quinn rightly points out, military battalions under the East India Company's control increased during the shift of rule from Hastings to the ostensibly moderate Cornwallis. In order to address this tension, O’Quinn draws a careful distinction between military spectacle and military action while recognizing middle-class benevolence as a “historical mystification” of ongoing violence (274). He then leads the reader to question the relationship between the middle-class values being dramatized in such texts as Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace (1788) and the increasing militarization of India. Why, for example, is it historically possible for Starke to attack the “Indianization” of the aristocracy by way of emergent middle-class norms while Foote's The Nabob, produced over a decade earlier, cannot? How was the class position Starke endorsed related to the renewed ideological investment in landed property that preceded the Permanent Settlement of 1793?
O’Quinn follows these questions in chapter 7 by correlating the expansion of the theater to include precinematic forms of display with the shift from a theatrical emphasis on individual traits to a mobilization of shared national characteristics. This shift has important implications for thinking about questions of empire in the Celtic periphery, and O’Quinn provides an insightful discussion of the geographical transferability of colonial anxiety that allowed theater evoking India to deal specifically with Ireland during the 1790s.
Part of what is so exciting about Staging Governance is that O’Quinn actively challenges his own critical paradigms by applying them to various cultural contexts. Whereas he begins his study by considering the effects of the American war on British policy in India, he ends by contemplating the transformation from the collective identity of the 1790s to the glorification of individual subjectivity that would reappear in British culture after Waterloo. Throughout Staging Governance, O’Quinn works to defamiliarize English identity by showing that the viziers, janissaries, sultans, and natives that peopled popular portrayals of the East were, as often as not, projections of metropolitan anxiety. Here, O’Quinn follows Saree Makdisi (Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity [Cambridge, 1998]) in asserting that, during the late eighteenth century, the figure of the East functioned more as a testing ground for fears about the metropolis than as a self-consolidating other. Staging Governance is a work of immense value, both to the study of romantic-era theater and to the broader studies of empire, gender, and class in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
