SHORT ESSAYS ON COMMUNITY, DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND THE PERFORMING ARTS
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London, 1730
Georgian London (1714-1830) was a wonder to behold, with religious and civil wars receding in the past, the enclosure movement having transformed rural England, the industrial revolution only beginning, the Great Fire of 1666 and great plagues of previous decades quickly having been forgotten and the Empire continuously growing. London sat at the center of a self-satisfied imperial network spanning the globe. Victories in the Seven Years’ and Napoleonic Wars offset even the unpleasant loss of thirteen Atlantic North American colonies. All was not well, of course. The dislocations of the enclosure movement raised social unrest with English society becoming ever more violent. Crime provoked constant concern for Londoners throughout the period. Inequality stoked social tensions in an era that rejected meaningful reform. Wealth and power nonetheless flowed toward London, which grew from roughly a half-million to a million-and-a-half residents under Hanoverian rule. London had long been a center of public amusement, some rather less than refined. The city’s theater had passed through a golden age under Elizabeth I, as provincial actor William Shakespeare came to town and joined with well-established thespians and playwrights such as Christopher
Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Watson, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, James Burbage, Richard Burbage, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd and John Lyly. As important, an audience drawn to public spectacle and entertainment financed their efforts. Theater, at a time of religious, political, and regal strife, proved a perilous game. While the Tudor and Stuart monarchs rather enjoyed a play or two, the puritanical roundheads in the Long Parliament did not. Parliament closed the theaters in 1642. Charles II, however, embraced spectacle. Once restored to the throne, he took a liking to theater; or rather, at least to young actresses such as Nell Gwyn (who became his long term mistress). All forms of public entertainment took flight under the Stuarts, with new places of assembly developing at coffee houses, gambling parlors, taverns and men’s clubs. Theaters at Drury Lane (1674-present in various incarnations), Dorset Garden (1671-1709) and Leslie’s Tennis Courts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (16611674, 1695-1705) supported competing theatrical companies such as The King’s Company and The Duke’s Company. Performance and rehearsal schedules became regularized and theater became increasingly centered around the Covent Garden market in the city’s new West End.
