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The Representation of the 'Exotic' Body in 19th-Century English Drama

Final Report Summary - REBED (The Representation of the 'Exotic' Body in 19th-Century English Drama)

REBED is a survey of the representation of the cultural and physical body of the non-European Other in 19th-century English drama, with specific attention to melodramas, farces, burlesques, pantomimes, and extravaganzas. In all these genres, which Allardyce Nicoll in his A History of English Drama (1952-59) has called ‘illegitimate’ drama, as well as in the more established and ‘legitimate’ corpus of tragedies and comedies, the presence of the ‘exotic’ body is extensive and widely documentable, articulated as it is into recurrent themes such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, not to mention the several variations on Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which largely contributed to shape the image of the Black (this term referring here to people and cultures of sub-Saharan African descent).
Focusing on drama allows a particularly rich investigation into the subject, as drama provided its public with a more direct and potentially less mediated encounter with the non-European Other, the presence of which can be examined both at textual and visual levels. However, while previous criticism, such as the ground-breaking volume Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930 (Bratton et al. 1991), or the more recent The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Ziter 2003) and Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black (Waters 2007), have focused on selected case studies, REBED has conducted an overall examination of the subject, investigating the actual staging of non-European peoples and cultures, its cultural and political background, as well as the possible political impact of the dramatic representation of the ‘exotic’ body.
In so doing, the project has focused in particular on the visual features (settings, costumes, make-up, lighting, etc.) of the ‘exotic’ body on stage, examining drama in relation to popular performances (freak shows, ‘human zoos’, and the circus), as well as to non-dramatic genres such as travel narratives, scientific accounts, and the novel. The material conditions of theatrical activities – the composition of audiences, the careers of selected actors, producers and managers, the fortune of performances and their relation to theatrical venues, and the general political frame for the theatre (Parliament Acts concerning theatre, leisure and censorship) – have also been taken into account.
The main scope of REBED has been to verify whether – and how – 19th-century English drama contributed to the forging of a politically-oriented perception of the non-European Other; as such, the project has aimed at providing a model for further investigation in other areas, centuries and/or genres that may be of use for the framing of contemporary perceptions of non-European minorities in Europe.

The research has been conducted primarily on the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays collection (British Library), but a number of other sources have been of great use: the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Pettingell Collection at Kent, the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield, the John Johnson Collection at Oxford, the theatre collection at the V&A, as well as several online sources (the AHRC-funded Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Project; the University of Worcester Victorian Plays Project; the East London Theatre Archive; the University of Massachusetts Adelphi Project). Bibliographical sources include, alongside Nicoll’s seminal work, Firkins’s Index to Plays, 1800-1926 (1927), MacMillan’s Catalogue of the Larpent Plays in the Huntington Library (1939), Conolly and Wearing’s English Drama and Theatre, 1800-1900 (1978), and Ellis’s English Drama of the Nineteenth Century (1985).
All these sources have been fundamental for the completion of the first list of plays dealing exclusively with the ‘exotic’ body between 1800 and 1900. This list, included amongst the project’s reference materials, also indicates the venue and date for premieres, the publication date where appropriate, details on repositories where only manuscripts are available, as well as the genre for each play. Other reference materials include: an index of writings and adaptations from non-dramatic sources; an index of settings, peoples and themes; as well as an index of pre-1800 plays that were either of particular relevance for the definition and articulation of the ‘exotic’ body in the 19th century, and/or popular on the Georgian and Victorian stage. These materials provide both scholars and the public at large with immediate statistical evidence on the presence of the ‘exotic’ body on stage, as well as on the exchange between genres in the course of the 19th century, and the continuity of ‘exotic’ representations from earlier periods.
All of the project’s phases have been discussed with the scientist in charge, but also with a number of other people at Oxford who work on the same or similar areas of interest: at the Faculty of English, Dr Sos Eltis, Professor Sally Shuttleworth, Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Dr Michèle Mendelssohn, Dr Nicholas Shrimpton, Professor Elleke Boehmer, and, at the Faculty of History, Professor Pietro Corsi. Numerous contacts, both in the UK and in Italy, where the fellow originally comes from, have also been central to the investigation, with particular reference to collaboration with the Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo (Bologna). Exchanges with scholars and students from seminars at Oxford, such as the Victorian Graduate Seminar, the Literature and Science seminar, the Postcolonial Seminar, and the TORCH Race and Resistance Network, have also provided good occasions for the discussion and definition of the term ‘exotic’ in the 19th-century theatrical context.

REBED ultimately argues that the ‘exotic’ body, far from merely representing one of the several subgenres of 19th-century English drama, can be examined as a category on its own, with titles showing marked similarities, as well as cross-contamination as for the representation of the non-European on stage, and with the non-European body differing significantly, in its turn, from other types of ‘exotic’ (such as the Jew, the Gypsy, or the ‘European’ – the Irish, the French, the Italian, etc.) that were also extremely popular on the Georgian and Victorian stage.
The representation of the non-European on stage also provides innovative perspectives on the history of 19th-century English drama, as well as its construction in criticism, with renowned features of this drama, such as realism, acquiring new meaning if investigated under the lens of the ‘exotic’. Last but not least, the study of the non-European on stage as a separate category, while offering more immediate observation of the ways in which the culture of the Empire affected the literary and artistic representation of specific peoples and places, also complicates any picture of this representation as exclusively hostile, and/or derogative towards the represented subject. With its own peculiar mechanisms and features, 19th-century English drama provided a portrait of the non-European that, if centred on recurrent and simplistic stereotypes, was not unproblematic in its political and racial issues, nor offered a homogenous representation of the ‘exotic’ body.