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 (1661- 1674, 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.

Theater took root despite irksome moral opposition to frivolity and an ever-present connection with prostitution.

A noteworthy event transpired on January 29, 1728, when John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera opened to a packed house at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theater. A comic balladopera, Gay’s work marks the beginning of London’s robust popular musical theater. Gay’s play quickly spread through the Empire, spawning distinctive musical theater cultures in Philadelphia and New York. A short time later in 1731, George Lillo’s The London Merchant similarly reinvented popular tragedy as entertainment for the emerging merchant classes spread across England, the Colonies and the Continent.

David Garrick personifies this growth as well as anyone. His remarkable London acting career began in 1741 when he stepped onto the stage to perform the lead of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Before his death in 1779, the diminutive Garrick had rewritten the rules for English-language acting. He elevated a naturalistic and relaxed style as preferred over the bombastic and grandiloquent acting that had come before. Garrick was a faultless agent for bringing to life the drama of the period written by such authors as his contemporary and mentor Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The theater’s success combining licentiousness and satire (often with political intent) alarmed many in power. In 1737, Prime Minister Robert Walpole rushed a hastily drafted Licensing Act through Parliament granting the Lord Chamberlain the power to ban and censor plays. London, however, was already different from the city it had been a century before. A theater-loving merchantry and professional classes now rivaled the gentry and aristocracy in political and economic clout.

With popular demand and profits running high, few plays were censored (though self-censorship undoubtedly increased). Meanwhile, illegitimate (unlicensed) performance moved in to fill voids created by state meddling in the highly competitive theater world. The actor Samuel Foote,

Performing arts poster from 1879: “Miss Jane Coombs, School for Scandal.’” Photo: Metropolitan Litho Studio. 1879. US Library of Congress, Theatrical Poster Division.

for example, invited his audience to tea, thereby avoiding some of The Licensing Act’s strictest sanctions.

Garrick joined James Lacey in managing Drury Lane, sponsoring works in all genres. He and Lacey supported fresh approaches to staging and costumes. The result was a flourishing dramatist scene.

George I brought his Kapellmeister with him from Hanover to London. Georg Friederich Händel’s presence in London made the city a major center of Baroque music. He integrated English choral and instrumental music into the European mainstream of the times, setting a foundation for the city to become a major European music center. Together with John Rich, he launched opera at the Covent Garden Theatre in 1733, further securing that neighborhood’s prominence as a theatrical center.

Richard Sheridan’s The School for Scandal perhaps best reveals Hanoverian London’s vibrant and innovative theater scene. Sheridan was well schooled in gossip himself. Born in Dublin, he moved to England with his family when he was seven. His playwright-novelist mother had come to town to produce her plays; his father, who had been an actor-stage manager in Dublin, tagged along to help. Sheridan led a dramatic life of his own, which included famous duels, a stint as owner of Drury Lane’s Royal Theater, and three decades serving as a Whig politician and Member of Parliament. His support for the demands of the American colonists made him stand out even more. Impoverished by ill-health and financial gaffes, Sheridan remained a respected and beloved figure nevertheless. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Sheridan’s play tells the tale of Lady Sneerwell, a wealthy widow, and her helper Snake. The two become master rumor-mongers as she moves through polite society, making it ever less polite in her wake. Five acts of convoluted scandal ends with Sneerwell and Snake being exposed as the liars they are. The play has continued to be one of the most beloved comedy of errors in the English theatrical canon, and continues to be played on stage and screen today.

Sheridan, the impresario and politician, humorously captured the mores and behaviors of London society as it became wealthier, more egalitarian and more urbane across the decades of Hanoverian rule. Even greater hijinks lie in store as the dynasty passed authority to Prince Regent George during his father George III’s mental incapacities. The Prince Regent assumed the throne following his father’s death in 1820 and remained as George IV until his own demise in 1830. London by that time had become Europe’s most prosperous (though strikingly inequitable) city and has remained a foremost global theatrical force ever since.