Laughing Bravely in Illegitimate Theatre: The Comic Spirit in Romantic-Era Slavery Plays

The essay is a critical examination of the modes and forms through which Romantic illegitimate theatre appropriated the comic black character, who proved to be particularly pliable to the inherent subversive drive of the “low” popular forms performed on the London stages in the Georgian era. Specifically, the comic opera and the harlequinade, and marginally the pantomime, provide paradigmatic case studies to discuss how genre conventions were part of the construction of stereotyped comic, yet at times also subtly seditious, representations of black characters – almost invariably servants. In this respect, the enormous success of Isaac BicKerstaff’s and Charles Dibdin’s 1768 comic opera “The Padlock” significantly testifies to the taste and expectations of the late 18th-century theatrical audience in relation to the staging of an increasingly sensitive issue such as black slavery. This play provides a model for a comic mode subversively relishing in the desecration of power through the representation of subaltern characters resisting authority. Ultimately, the essay aims to examine this and other case studies as evidence that Romantic illegitimate comic theatre provided a privileged site for confronting the dilemmas of an increasingly multiracial society. Contrary to the general critical consensus dismissing them as sheer popular entertainment (“afterpieces” intended to break the seriousness of the mainpiece repertory), illegitimate forms such as comic operas and Harlequinades were important vehicles of ideological debates with the purpose of furthering socio-political causes.