Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain

Michael Ragussis. Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010 288pp. $55.00In its focus on Englishness and notions of national identity in late Georgian Britain, Theatrical Nation brings together a range of "domestic others" not generally considered simultaneously. Previous studies have reflected critically on depictions of Scots, or the Irish, or Jews in eighteenth-century literature and culture;Michael Ragussis' innovative approach treats these three ethnic groups as mutually interactive identities in a variety of popular representations. In doing so, he offers valuable new insights into the multiple, shifting processes of Britain's national self-definition. Theatrical Nation inserts itself into the ongoing discussions about national identity in the eighteenth century as it complements the recent boom in studies contextualizing "Englishness" within notions of Empire. Focusing on the ethnic aliens within Britain's shores, Ragussis' study suggests that, in spite of the many uniting factors that scholars have identified, such as Protestantism, a well-developed internal economy, or a thriving print culture, the "Briton" was a shaky and unstable identity category, splintered into a multiplicity of partially assimilated ethnicities.Ragussis argues that a fundamental theatricality at the crux of ethnicity and nationhood in the late eighteenth centuryshaped Irish, Scottish, and Jewish identities. By "theatrical ization" of ethnic identity, Ragussisrefers to a set of complex, often contradictory, ways in which ethnicity was represented and perceived. A cluster of visual, sartorial, physiognomic, aural, linguistic, and behavioural codes, ethnicity could, on occasion, be either set aside or deliberately assumed. Nevertheless, as he notes, this potential fluidity also sparked the desire to fix and mark indelibly the ethnic other as an "outlandish" figure,as late eighteenth-century Britain struggled to stabilize the cultural and linguistic lineaments of national identity.Ragussis establishes this complex cultural theatre of ethnic identity in his introduction, titled "Family Quarrels" after Thomas Dibdin's 1802 comic opera, which sparked a riot by Jewish members of the audience because of its anti-Semitism. The playhouse incident was much debated in the print media,where the theatre's right to satirize all kinds of people was countered by Enlightenment discourses of toleration that decried unfair ethnic generalizations in progressive England, even as the articles sometimes rehearsed the very prejudices they sought to uproot. For Ragussis, this drama of ethnic caricature and minority resistance inside the playhouse,which spread beyond its walls to initiate broad discussions about what kind of nation Britain was and should be, is symptomatic of the ways in which the theatre mirrored the nation as a contested space. But Ragussis' opening gambit also introduces us to some of the strengths of his critical approach in this book. The treatment of Dibdin's play is embedded within a broad and densely textured discussion of the drama of ethnic identity happening off the stage and over a span of time. This is Ragussis' typical strategy in his chapters, especially those focused on the theatre, as he touches upon specific moments in a variety of stage offerings (plays proper, farcical afterpieces, operas ) to read them in the context of larger cultural trends. His attention to fluctuating conditions of dra- matic performance, the alterations a work undergoes over time, the impact of new casts, differences in audience reception, particularly strengthens his analysis of cul- tural patterns.In the next three chapters, Ragussis focuses on a range of theatrical forms or strategies invented to negotiate ethnic dif- ference on the London stage. In a chapter thathas appeared in article form in Critical Inquiry, he first analyzes the emergence of what he calls the "multiethnic spectacle. …