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Article Excerpt
In February 1755, John Home set out for London on his trusty steed Piercy, a band of merry supporters by his side and a copy of the completed manuscript for his tragedy Douglas in his greatcoat pocket in anticipation of a production review by David Garrick. (1) Despite Home's strong letters of introduction and ample connections, Garrick still rejected the play, finding it "totally unfit for the stage" (320). Not to be discouraged, Home and his supporters arranged for a production of the tragedy to be mounted on the Edinburgh stage, reasoning that "if it succeeded in the Edinburgh theatre, then Garrick could resist no longer" (324). Performed for the first time on 14 December 1756 at the Canongate Theater in Edinburgh and "attended by all the great literati and most of the judges" of the day, the tragedy was indeed an "unbounded success" (327). It sent the town of Edinburgh into an "uproar of exultation that a Scotchman had written a tragedy of the first rate, and that its merit was first submitted to their judgment" (327). Indeed, so moved by the play and by Scots pride at the origin of this effort was one audience member that he is reported to have cried out mid-performance, "Whaur's yer Wully Shakespere noo!" thereby inaugurating a nationalist critical tradition that would find its way into all subsequent discussions of the merits of the play. (2)
Based on the old Scottish ballad Gil Morrice and written in declamatory blank verse, the play itself offers the tale of Lady Randolph and the rediscovery of her long-lost son Norval, the secret offspring of her clandestine marriage to a scion of the great Douglas clan. The tragedy unravels as the young Norval is murdered by a jealous villain, and the devastated Lady Randolph commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff. Set in medieval times and played against the background of a gloomy and dark landscape, the tragedy, with its scenes of extreme pathos and sudden eruptions of violence, anticipates the kind of gothic melodrama that became so popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (3) In the more immediate event, Home's triumph in Edinburgh did attract the attention of London; and John Rich took the opportunity forfeited by his rival Garrick to bring the tragedy to Covent Garden in March 1757, where it enjoyed a respectable run of nine performances in its first season.
For all its eventual success on the stage, however, it is arguably the case that the "most remarkable circumstance attending its representation," and perhaps the motive for Rich's interest in the transfer of the play to London, was, as Henry Mackenzie comments in his Account of the Life and Writings of John Home, "the clerical contest which it excited, and the proceedings of the Church of Scotland with regard to it." (4) John Home, as it turns out, was actually the Reverend John Home, a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland with a parish at Athelstaneford. While the "literati" of Edinburgh may have celebrated and cried up Home's tragedy--indeed they were probably responsible for much of its success on the stage--an equal uproar of outrage was raised both against the play and against theatricality more generally by a well-organized and more orthodox faction in the church. These "High-Flyers," led by Alexander Webster and Patrick Cuming, took exception to the participation in the theater by a member of the clergy, and they instituted proceedings in the various presbyteries not only against John Home but also against all of the other ministers who attended the tragedy's performance. In short order, they succeeded in having notices of "admonition and exhortation" against the "illegal and dangerous Entertainments of the Stage" read from all pulpits of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Presbyteries and found at least one minister, a Mr. White, who was willing to be made into an example and submit to a six-week suspension from his pastoral duties for his attendance at the theater. (5) But in the libel against Alexander Carlyle, a.k.a. "Jupiter" Carlyle, a great friend of Home's and a leader of the Moderate faction in the kirk, they encountered considerable resistance and were forced to appeal their case from the Dalkeith presbytery through the Synod to the supreme judicature of the General Assembly. In the end, Carlyle triumphed as the General Assembly upheld the Synod's judgment that the "grounds of proceeding in this affair in the way of a libel, [were] not sufficiently clear and uncontrovertible," that is, there was no "express law or statute of [the] church which prohibit[ed] her members and ministers to witness theatrical representations." (6) John Home himself avoided prosecution by resigning his ministerial commission and moving to London where, under the patronage and protection of both Lord Bute and the Prince of Wales, he went on to produce a number of other plays. In his wake he left behind an Edinburgh and a Scottish kirk that had been torn apart not just by the prosecutions but also by the heated pamphlet exchanges over the aesthetic and moral merits of Douglas in particular and the playhouse in general.
In this essay, I mean to take the Douglas controversy as an historical case in point to support the larger argument that theater has ever been located at the center of and as a site of magnification for broad cultural movements and conflicts and that antitheatrical incidents, in particular, provide us with occasions to trace struggles over major shifts in the nature and balance of discursive power and authority. In taking such an approach, I am purposefully turning my focus away from the usual ground of investigation that has characterized so many studies of antitheatrical discourse from Plato to the present, away, that is, from a focus on the nature of representation per se. (7) I am doing so because the idea of representation invoked in antitheatrical discourse, whether in the seventeenth, the eighteenth, or the twentieth century, is almost always a fairly rudimentary and reductive, because instrumentally rhetorical, one; and, as such, I believe our interest in this field might be better served both by paying more explicit attention to when, why, and how anxieties about representation manifest themselves and by tracing the actual politics that govern and regulate these ostensibly aesthetic and moral debates. In short, I want to shift the focus of antitheatrical investigation away from abstract ontological concerns and toward more concrete epistemological considerations by situating and treating antitheatrical incidents not merely as reactions to specific theatrical performances or texts but also as cultural performances in themselves that need to be read and interpreted.
Such a method requires that we excavate the fallout of these eruptions in all of their historical particularity and develop a thick description of the contentious cultural milieux in which they take place. In the case of Home's Douglas, I will argue that the reaction to the tragedy's appearance on the Edinburgh stage can be read as a major point of culmination in a struggle for authority and power that had been in process for decades between orthodox factions of the Scottish kirk and the secular and secularizing forces of the Scottish Enlightenment. To bear this claim out, I will explore the clashes over patronage and infidelity that occurred in the years leading up to the Douglas affair and demonstrate how the exchanges involved in these controversies reflected major shifts in the political and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Scotland. Taking a broader view, moreover, I will explain how these changes had a significant impact not only on the conception of the public sphere per se but also on the distribution of discursive authority and power in the public sphere of representation. Finally, I will trace how a new and increasingly compelling rhetoric of political economy finds its way into both sides of the debate in the documents related to the Douglas controversy. That is, while the storms over Home's tragedy certainly rained down their fair share of the kind of fire-and-brimstone vitriol that is generally characteristic of antitheatrical diatribes, in the specific arguments made both for and against the stage, we can identify an increasing investment in a modern discourse of political economy, an acute awareness of the need to address the question of how best to allocate and utilize the resources of the polis. While this rhetorical shift might be predicted on the pro-theatrical side from the Scottish Enlightenment's widespread engagement with, and advocacy for, economic concerns, the fact that this idiom had also been adopted in antitheatrical materials suggests the extent to which a new cultural politics had already and unwittingly gained hegemonic status in mid-eighteenth-century Scotland.
I. GENERAL BACKGROUND
While Douglas may have provided the spark that ignited a full-fledged flame war, the core fuel had long been prepared and stoked. Indeed, though neither an innocent nor a defenseless one, Home was a kind of scapegoat, that is, he provided the occasion for long-seething tensions and conflicts both within the Presbyterian church itself and between the church and secular forces to erupt. As Alice Gipson has noted, by the time
Douglas was written, there were in Scotland two church parties. One was the high Calvinistic, headed by men ultra conservative, with very extreme ideas as to their clerical obligations, and with very little toleration of any degree of social intercourse between the clergy and the laity ... [while t]o the other and more liberal church-party belonged such men as Adam Ferguson, Alexander Carlyle, and John Home, who ordered their lives on the assumption that they were none the worse as clergymen for indulging themselves in what they sincerely believed to be innocent social diversions, and for admitting to their society lay members from whose company they might gain both pleasure and profit. (8)
Forming a powerful faction in the Church of Scotland that began its rise as early as the 1720s under William Hamilton and William Wishart and that could trace an intellectual lineage from, Shaftesbury to Francis Hutcheson, this latter group, known as the Moderates, celebrated a right of free association, advocated for a more open, liberal and humane religious attitude, and concerned themselves more with the forms of polite conversation than with the contents of church doctrine and theology. (9) To this end, they participated as founding members in many of the most eminent clubs and societies of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, including the Select Society, founded in 1754, that numbered amongst its most prominent members not just Home, Carlyle, and Ferguson, but also Adam Smith and David Hume. (10)
Not insignificantly, Carlyle remarked on the impact of these forums of sociability and conversation in the conduct of church business, observing that while
the clergy of Scotland, from the Revolution downwards, had in general been little thought of, and seldom admitted into liberal society ... [so that] a clergyman was thought profane who affected the manners of gentlemen, or was much seen in their company,.... [By the 1750s] the young clergy began to feel their own importance in debate, and have ever since continued to distinguish themselves, and have swayed the decision of the Assembly so that the supreme ecclesiastical court has long been a school of eloquence for the clergy, as well as a theater for the lawyers to display their talents. (259, 266-67)
Historians such as Callum Brown have confirmed Carlyle's self-serving recollections, writing of the emergence of the Moderates as a dominant force in the kirk:
They discarded much of what they perceived as harsh Calvinism in preaching and church discipline in favour of refinement and elegance, moderation in religious enthusiasm, and philosophizing rather than remonstration in pulpit discourse. (11)
In this manner, the nature of discursive practice in the church was transformed, even as the church itself became a site of performance for those who had cultivated eloquence through secular conversation rather than through theological debate.
Such an alteration in the discursive climate and expectations of eighteenth-century Scotland can be traced not only in the...
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