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² See Barrell, John, “Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law: The State Trials of 1794,” in his The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 119–43Google Scholar; Epstein, James, “From Ritual Practice to Cultural Text,” Memoria y Civilización 3 (2000): 107–25Google Scholar, and his “‘Equality and No King’: Sociability and Sedition—the Case of John Frost,” in Romantic Sociability: Essays in British Cultural History, 1776–1832, ed. Russell, Gillian and Tuite, Claire (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar, in press; Gilmartin, Kevin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, chap. 3; Wood, Marcus, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

³ The Licensing Act of 1737 had given statutory authority to the censorship of plays in London, and during the 1790s, the office of examiner of plays was held by one of the most meticulous of officeholders, John Larpent. See Conolly, Leonard, The Censorship of English Drama, 1737–1824 (San Marino, 1976), pp. 2, 13–15Google Scholar, and more broadly, chap. 4.

⁴ Carlson, Marvin, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), p. 11Google Scholar; Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996), pp. 28, 88–90Google Scholar.

⁵ Baer, Marc, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 4.

⁶ Russell, Gillian, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1995), p. 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ See Grieder, Theodore, “Annotated Checklist of the British Drama, 1789–99,” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 4 (1965): 21–47Google Scholar; and Conolly, Censorship of English Drama, chap. 4.

⁸ Cox, Jeffrey N., “Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790s,” English Literary History 58 (1991): 588Google Scholar. For the representation of revolutionary events at the minor theaters, see Russell, , Theatres of War, pp. 66–74Google Scholar.

⁹ Backscheider, Paula S., Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, 1993), p. 233Google Scholar, and more generally, chaps. 5 and 6.

¹⁰ See Russell, , Theatres of War, pp. 106–21Google Scholar.

¹¹ “Letter to Richard Brinsley Sheridan from the Lord Chamberlain's Office,” 30 March 1792, Public Record Office (PRO), Lord Chamberlain (LC) 74.

¹² Thelwall was referring to the “liberty and revenge” dialogue between the conspirators Jaffeir and Pierre in act 2, scene 2. Thelwall vowed to interrupt the play and read the passage aloud if “these Patriotic passages” were censored or encore them if they were played. When the passages were played, some fifteen to twenty persons in the theater audience supported Thelwall's countertheater, but they were eventually shouted down by the rest of the audience. See “Spy Report on Thelwall Political Lecture of 31 January 1794,” PRO, London, Treasury Solicitor (TS) 11/955/b [missing p. 1].

¹³ At this time, Sheridan's company was performing out of the King's Theatre at Haymarket, while his regular theater at Drury Lane was being rebuilt. See “Agreement between Wm. Taylor Esq. And R.B. Sheridan, for the Drury Lane Company … rebuilt,” 12 August 1791, PRO, LC 74. For the lord chamberlain's warning, see “Letter to Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” 30 March 1792, PRO, LC 74.

¹⁴ State Trials for High Treason. Embellished with Portraits. Part Third. Containing the Trial of Mr. John Thelwall, Reported by a Student in the Temple (London, 1795), pp. 35–36Google Scholar. For more on the appropriation of Venice Preserv'd, see Barrell, John, “‘An Entire Change of Performances?’: The Politicisation of Theatre and the Theatricalisation of Politics in the mid 1790s,” Lumen 17 (1998): 11–50Google Scholar, and his superb Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 567–69Google Scholar.

¹⁵ De Marinis, Marco, “The Dramaturgy of the Spectator,” Drama Review 31 (1986): 103Google Scholar.

¹⁶ The Sun reported disturbances at Drury Lane Theatre on the night after Thelwall's acquittal for high treason. The farce Nobody had been altered so that a soldier replaced a “moralist” as hero; the ministerial-funded Sun blamed the rioting that resulted on “that spirit of Equality which certain persons so seditiously inculcate.” See The Sun (8 December 1794). “Moralist” was a term commonly used to denigrate reformers in the period.

¹⁷ While Backscheider mentions Holcroft, she denies any connection between his political activism and his drama. See Spectacular Politics, p. 174, and esp. p. 278, n. 2.

¹⁸ Thomas Holcroft, review of Man as He Is, by Bage, Robert, Monthly Review 10 (March 1793): 297Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Chartier, Roger, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Baltimore, 1997), p. 77Google Scholar. See also the roundtable discussion of the book in French Historical Studies 21 (1998): 213–64Google Scholar.

²⁰ Chartier, Roger, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, 1995), p. 46Google Scholar; Carlson, , Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, pp. 38–60Google Scholar; Orgel, Stephen, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 1–36Google Scholar; Bennett, Susan, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2d ed. (London, 1997), pp. 125–39Google Scholar; Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Shadow and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (Iowa City, Iowa, 1997), pp. 319–37Google Scholar.

²¹ See Bruce Kapferer's discussion of performance in “Performance and the Structuring of Meaning and Experience,” in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Turner, Victor and Bruner, Edward M. (Urbana, Ill., 1986), p. 193Google ScholarPubMed: “All performances … regularly move members of the ritual gathering from positions in which their standpoints are largely structured in contexts external to that in which the patient is located, to positions within the context established around the patient.” The point is that the boundaries between these different context-locations are permeable and so encourage the transference of meaning from one zone to the other.

²² For important discussions of the relationship of 1790s radicalism to its broader cultural field, see Eley's, Geoffrey “Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, Craig C. (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 325–31Google Scholar; and, for the development of radicalism in print culture, Gilmartin, , Print Politics, pp. 1–10Google Scholar.

²³ Loftis, John, “Political and Social Thought in the Drama,” in The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, ed. Hume, Robert D. (Carbondale, Ill., 1980), pp. 278–85Google Scholar; Bryson, Scott, The Chastised Stage: Bourgeois Drama and the Exercise of Power (Saratoga, Calif., 1991)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

²⁴ Chartier, , Forms and Meanings, p. 49Google Scholar.

²⁵ See Hampsher-Monk, Iain, “John Thelwall and the Eighteenth-Century Radical Response to Political Economy,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 1–20Google Scholar; Claeys, Gregory, “The Origins of the Rights of Labor: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805,” Journal of Modern History 66 (1994): 249–90Google Scholar.

²⁶ See the classic work by Barish, Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Porter, Roy, “The Enlightenment in England,” in Porter, Roy and Tiech, Mikuláš, The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 11–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Tatler, no. 167 (4 May 1710).

²⁹ Tatler, no. 183 (8 June 1710).

³⁰ Spectator, no. 370 (5 May 1712), no. 446 (1 August 1712).

³¹ Tatler, no. 172 (16 May 1710).

³² Marshall, David, “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 592–613Google Scholar, and his The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York, 1986), pp. 171–74Google Scholar; Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), pp. 62–65, 67–98, 132–48Google Scholar.

³³ Lillo, George, dedication, The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnell, (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965), p. 4Google Scholar.

³⁴ An example: “Constance, un coude appuyé sur la table, et la tête penchée sur une de ses mains, demeure dans cette situation pensive” [Constance, with an elbow on the table and her head resting on one hand, remains in this thoughtful pose]. Denis Diderot, Le fils naturel, act 1, scene 4, in Oeuvres Completes, ed. Assezat, J., (Paris, 1875), p. 26Google Scholar.

³⁵ See Mercier, L. S., Du théatre, ou novel essai sur l'art dramatique (Paris, 1773)Google Scholar, chap. 10. In 1799, Holcroft would marry Mercier's daughter, Louisa. See also Graf, Roman, “Voicing Limits: Rereading the Dramatic Theories of J. M. R. Lenz and L. S. Mercier” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992), pp. 93–95, 114–19, 136–37Google Scholar.

³⁶ The Life of Thomas Holcroft, Written by Himself, Continued … by William Hazlitt, ed. Colby, Elbridge, (New York, 1968), 1:256–73Google Scholar. Beaumarchais's piece was written in 1778, suppressed for six years, and then allowed to be performed in 1784.

³⁷ Life of Thomas Holcroft, 1:272–74Google Scholar.

³⁸ Besides helping Holcroft pirate Figaro, Bonneville acted as a literary wind vane in Paris after Holcroft returned to London, and sent him notices of marketable and “curious” works. It was a productive relationship: Holcroft cranked out bookshelves of translations in the 1780s, including The Historical and Critical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Voltaire (1786), The Life of Baron Frederic Trenck (1788), and The Secret History of the Court of Berlin (1789). See Maertz, Gregory, “The Transmission of German Literature and Dissenting Voices in British Culture: Thomas Holcroft and the Godwin Circle,” in 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early-Modem Era, ed. Cope, Kevin L. and Morrow, Laura, (New York, 1997), pp. 271–300Google Scholar; Colby, Elbridge, A Bibliography of Thomas Holcroft (New York, 1922), pp. 11–12Google Scholar.

³⁹ The Licensing Act clarified the role of the royal theaters at Covent Garden and at Drury Lane by reinforcing their monopoly on the production of plays. It stipulated that a copy of any play to be produced must be given to the lord chamberlain at least fourteen days in advance of first night. If the lord chamberlain found any parts of the play objectionable and wished to prohibit their performance, he would communicate these objections to the playhouse manager, who would lose £50—and worse, his license—if he allowed the play to go forward uncorrected. To further streamline the process, in 1738, the offices of Examiner and Deputy Examiner were created to handle the actual inflow of plays. See Conolly, , Censorship of English Drama, pp. 13–17, and for the 1790sGoogle Scholar, chap. 4.

⁴⁰ Ibid., pp. 102–3.

⁴¹ The Parliamentary Register; or History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, vol. 43 (London, 1796), pp. 548, 550Google Scholar.

⁴² Cox, , “Ideology and Genre,” pp. 580–87Google Scholar; see also Grieder, , “Annotated Checklist” pp. 21–47Google Scholar.

⁴³ Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, vol. 8, bk. 6, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Philp, Mark (London, 1993), 3:452Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, ed. Claeys, Gregory, (Indianapolis, 1992), p. 31Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ For a more sustained analysis of Paine's use of theatrical metaphors, see Boulton, James T., The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London, 1963), pp. 144–47Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Paine, , Rights of Man, p. 31Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Wollstonecroft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, ed. Tomaselli, Sylvana (Cambridge, 1995), p. 6Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Pigott, Charles, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London, 1795), p. 111Google Scholar. See also A Political Dictionary for Guinea-less Pigs (London, [1795])Google Scholar. The ever-resourceful Spence apparently began work on a dictionary during the middle of the decade. See British Library MS 27808/314. See also Rogers, Nicholas, “Pigott's Private Eye: Radicalism and Sexual Scandal in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 4 (1993): 247–63Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ That those on the other side of the ideological fence were theatrical rather than rational actors was a charge made by all sides in the pamphlet wars of the 1790s. See Russell, , Theatres of War, pp. 23–24, 85–86Google Scholar, and her “Burke's Dagger: Theatricality, Politics and Print Culture in the 1790s,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1997): 1–16Google Scholar. See also Furniss, Tom, Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), p. 257Google Scholar; Herzog, Don, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, N.J., 1998)Google Scholar, chap. 4.

⁵⁰ Smith, Olivia, The Politics of Language, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 21, 43, 50Google Scholar; Russell, , Theatres of War, pp. 23–25Google Scholar; Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York and Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 3; Harling, Philip, “Leight Hunt's Examiner and the Language of Patriotism,” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 1159–81Google Scholar; Turner, John M., “Burke, Paine, and the Nature of Language,” Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 51Google Scholar; Barrell, John, “Imagining the King's Death: The Arrest of Richard Brothers,” History Workshop Journal 37 (1994): 1–2Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Monthly Review 10 (February 1793): 208–9Google Scholar. Holcroft would later repeat this refrain in his essay on acting in the Theatrical Recorder. See “The Art of Acting,” Theatrical Recorder 1 (February 1805): 134Google Scholar.

⁵² See Arsleff, Hans, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton, N.J., 1967), pp. 17–20Google Scholar; Land, Stephen K., From Sign to Propositions: The Concept of Form in Eighteenth-Century Semantic Theory (London, 1974), pp. 87–92Google Scholar.

⁵³ O'Neale, John C., The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (University Park, Pa., 1996), pp. 83–90Google Scholar. Like many in the Godwin circle, Holcroft was familiar with the work of both Helvétius and Condillac; the 1806 sale catalog of his library listed works by each. See “A Catalogue of the Library of Books, of Mr. Thomas Holcroft, Sold at Auction by King & Lochee, 13 Jan. & 4 Following days, 1807,” London, 1806, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Houghton, B1705.455.

⁵⁴ Monthly Review 10 (February 1793): 210Google Scholar; 10 (April 1793): 367.

⁵⁵ Turner, , “Nature of Language,” pp. 31–53Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Monthly Review 10 (March 1793): 297Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ For broader view of the cultural significance of physiology and visuality in the epistemological changes of the eighteenth century, see Stafford, Barbara Maria, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 47–49Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ See Roach's, JosephThe Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Fischer-Lichte, , The Shadow, pp. 31–34, 39Google Scholar. Fliegelman's, JayDeclaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993)Google Scholar explores relationships between gestural transparency and republican virtue during the American Revolutionary period.

⁵⁹ Hill, John, The Actor: Or a Treatise on the Art of Playing (London, 1755)Google Scholar. See also Rousseau, G. S., “John Hill: Universal Genius Manqué: Remarks on His Life and Times, with a Checklist of His Works,” in Lemay, J. A. Leo and Rousseau, G. S., The Renaissance Man in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles, 1978), pp. 49–95Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ As David Hume wrote, the nature of the passions resembled “a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays.” Hume, David, “Of the Passions,” Treatise on Human Nature (1739), pp. 440–41Google Scholar, quoted in Roach, , Player's Passion, p. 105Google Scholar.

⁶¹ As Hartley's Eleventh Proposition asserted, “Any Vibrations, A, B, C, &c. by being associated together a sufficient Number of Times, get such a Power over a, b, c, &c. the corresponding miniature Vibrations, that any of the Vibrations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite b, c, &c. the Miniatures of the rest.” Hartley, David, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duties and His Expectations (London, 1749), p. 67Google Scholar. See also Allen, Richard C., David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany, N.Y., 1999), pp. 182–85Google Scholar; and Roach, , Player's Passion, p. 107Google Scholar. For the vibratory nerve paradigm more generally, see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, chap. 1. Hartley's theories were popular in radical Dissenting culture in the late eighteenth century. Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and Godwin found his doctrines useful in explaining necessitarian philosophy. See Allen, , David Hartley, pp. 192, 376–88Google Scholar; Roach, , Player's Passion, p. 25Google Scholar.

⁶² Roach, , Player's Passion, p. 25Google Scholar.

⁶³ Life of Thomas Holcroft, 1:xivGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ Holcroft, Thomas, “The Art of Acting,” Theatrical Recorder 1 (January 1805): 64Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Holcroft, Thomas, “The Art of Acting,” Theatrical Recorder 1 (February 1805): 136Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ In addition to Roach, Player's Passion, see A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Bremmer, Jan and Roodenburg, Herman (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Barnett, Dene, “The Performance Practice of Acting: The Eighteenth Century. II. The Hands,” Theatre Research International 3 (1977): 1–19Google Scholar; Knowlson, James R., “The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965): 495–508Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Austin, Gilbert, Chironomia: Or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (London, 1806)Google Scholar, pl. 2.

⁶⁹ Ibid., pl. 10 (illustrations), pp. 487–88 (quotations).

⁷⁰ Roach, , Player's Passion, esp. p. 76Google Scholar; Fliegelman, , Declaring Independence, pp. 106–7Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Hill, , The Actor, p. 232Google Scholar.

⁷² Theatrical Recorder 2 (July 1805): 44Google Scholar.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 45.

⁷⁴ Ibid., pp. 139–40.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 192.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 45.

⁷⁷ Ibid, p. 45.

⁷⁸ See Fox, William, On Jacobinism (London, 1794), pp. 1–2Google Scholar; or consider Pigott's arresting definition of “Throne” in A Political Dictionary, p. 172Google Scholar: “A sumptuous, richly furnished and elevated seat …. A man, fantastically drest out in ermine, velvet, gold and silver spangles, squirrel and rabbit skins. Thus tricked out, like the wooden god of Otaheite … it is no wonder that men should be so deluded, as to think him more than mortal, when it requires so little of imagination to metamorphose him at once into an object of worship. Under this impression, when they approach the throne, they are struck with awe and dismay, and address this bundle of fine clothes with bended knee and humble voice, as if they were attempting to appease an irritated Deity …. And yet if you ask one of these despicable wretches, after having gone through this pantomimic scene, whether he is a lunatic? ‘No,’ he will tell you, ‘I'm a loyal man.’ Pitiful, sorry wretch!”

⁷⁹ Stafford, , Body Criticism, p. 1Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Lavater, Johann Caspar, Physionomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe (Leipzig, 1775–1778)Google Scholar.

⁸¹ Graham, John, “Lavater's Physiognomy in England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1962): 561–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸² Juengel, Scott J., “Godwin, Lavater, and the Pleasures of Surface,” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 74Google Scholar. More broadly, see his “About Face: Physiognomies, Revolution, and the Radical Act of Looking” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁸³ Graham offers a useful summary of the publishing history of the Essays during the 1790s in “Lavater's Physiognomy in England.” See also his “Lavater's Physiognomy in England: A Checklist,” Papers of the American Bibliographic Society 55 (1961): 297–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁴ See, e.g., Sotheby, William, Poems: Consisting of a Tour through Parts of North and South Wales, … and an Epistle to a Friend on Physiognomy (London, 1790)Google Scholar; Woodward, George, Eccentric Excursions: or, Literary and Pictorial Sketches of Countenance, Character and Country …. (London, 1798)Google Scholar; Musus, Johann, Physiognomical Travels, Preceded by a Physiognomical Journal (London, 1800)Google Scholar; The Ladies Physiognomical Mirror, or Lovers Portraits (London, 1798)Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Shortland, Michael, “The Power of a Thousand Eyes: Johann Caspar Lavater's Science of Physiognomical Perception,” Criticism 28 (1986): 379–408Google Scholar, is particularly succinct on pre-Lavaterian physiognomy; see pp. 379–82; Lavater, Johann Caspar, Essays on Physiognomy; For the Promotion of the Knowledge and Love of Mankind; Written in the German Language by J. C. Lavater, and Translated into English by Thomas Holcroft (1789; reprint, London, 1804), p. 15Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Lavater, , Essays on Physiognomy, pp. 79–80Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 79–80.

⁸⁸ Joan Stemmler notes the different orientation that Holcroft brought to the Essays but makes little of it, since her chief goal is to recapture a “pure” Lavater. See her “The Physiognomical Portraits of Johann Caspar Lavater,” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 152–53Google Scholar. My interest, as I hope is clear, is more concerned with what was “done” to Lavater's ideas once they achieved a certain level of cultural circulation.

⁸⁹ Analytical Review (December 1789), pp. 459–62, (April 1790)Google ScholarPubMed, pp. 426–31, 471–72.

⁹⁰ See Holcroft's letter in response to the Analytical Review (January 1790), pp. 110–12Google Scholar. See also his critique of Edmund Morris's False Colours (a farce that ridiculed physiognomies) in Monthly Review 11 (August 1793): 410Google Scholar.

⁹¹ It was performed an additional five times in the 1795/6 season. See The London Stage, 1660–1800: Part 5, 1776–1800, ed. Hogan, Charles Beecher (Carbondale, Ill., 1969), 3:1681, 1751Google Scholar.

⁹² Claeys, , “Rights of Labor,” pp. 256–57Google Scholar.

⁹³ Holcroft, Thomas, The Road to Ruin (London, 1792)Google Scholar, act 1, scene 1.

⁹⁴ Ibid., act 3, scene 2.

⁹⁵ Ibid.,

⁹⁶ Holcroft, , “The Art of Acting,” p. 66Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Godwin, William, “Essay V: Of Trades and Professions,” The Enquirer, Part II, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Philp, Mark, vol. 5Google Scholar, Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Clemit, Pamela (London, 1993): p. 174Google Scholar.

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Holcroft, Thomas, Letter to the Right Honorable William Windham, On the Intemperance and Dangerous Tendency of His Pubic Conduct, 2d ed. (London, 1795), p. 47Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Life of Thomas Holcroft, 2:228, 243, 249Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Claeys, , “Rights of Labor,” pp. 277–9Google Scholar.

¹⁰² Jean-Christophe Agnew argues convincingly that the expansion of market culture was profoundly marked by concerns over personal theatricality and authenticity. See Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

¹⁰³ Holcroft, , Road to Ruin, 2:2Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 2:1.

¹⁰⁵ Holcroft, , Monthly Review 15 (September 1794): 107–8Google Scholar. Gary Kelly suggests that an unsigned letter from January 1796, proposing marriage to Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), may be from Holcroft. See Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York, 1992), p. 196Google Scholar. Of course, Wollstonecraft later married Godwin.

¹⁰⁶ As the conservative writer Thomas Green wrote in his diary upon seeing The Deserted Daughter, “Dec. 17, 1796 … H[olcoft] is very busy at his purpose: his aim, to those who are conversant with the tenets of his sect, is sufficiently manifest; but he manages and conceals it with a discretion not very consistent, surely, with his principles” Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature (Ipswich, 1810), p. 19Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ Dening, Greg, Performances (Chicago, 1996), p. 111Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, Maxims et réflexions sur le comédie (Paris, 1694), pp. 178–79Google Scholar, quoted in Barish, , Antitheatrical Prejudice, p. 202Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ Agnew, , Worlds Apart, pp. 106, 109–11Google Scholar; Barish, , Antitheatrical Prejudice, p. 334Google Scholar; Knapp, Mary, Prologues and Epilogues of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1961), pp. 23–29, 108Google Scholar; The London Stage, 1660–1800: Part 5, l:ixxiv–lxxvGoogle Scholar. My reading of the prologue as a genre that encourages serious play in making meaning is supported by Dror Wahrman's superb “Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 159 (1998): 113–60Google Scholar. Wahrman, while viewing prologues mainly as texts rather than as performances, argues that prologues register shifts in cultural boundaries during times of national crisis.

¹¹⁰ Dening, , Performances, pp. 111–12Google Scholar; Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Trangression (London, 1986), pp. 80–99Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ Holcroft, , Road to Ruin, p. iiGoogle Scholar.

¹¹² Ibid.

¹¹³ Bennett, , Theatre Audiences, pp. 113–14Google Scholar.

¹¹⁴ See The London Stage, 1660–1800: Part 5, 3:1443Google Scholar.

¹¹⁵ Goodwin, Albert, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 193–94, 198, 216Google Scholar.

¹¹⁶ St. James Chronicle (4 February 1794); see also St. James Chronicle (8 October 1794).

¹¹⁷ Minute-book of the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), PRO TS 11/962/3508; PRO TS 11/951.

¹¹⁸ SCI Minute-book, PRO TS 11/ 962/3508.

¹¹⁹ “Warrant for Detaining Thomas Holcroft,” 7 October 1794, PRO, Privy Council 1/22/37. See Life of Holcroft, 2:46–49Google Scholar, for Holcroft's surrender to the magistrate at the Clerkenwell Sessions House. See also Goodwin, , Friends of Liberty, pp. 216–17, 239–67Google Scholar, and chap. 9.

¹²⁰ The Deserted Daughter (London, 1795)Google ScholarPubMed, act 2, scene 1.

¹²¹ Ibid.

¹²² Ibid., 3:9.

¹²³ Ibid.

¹²⁴ Nora Nachumi suggest that the science of gesture offered female novelists space in which to describe male and female sensibility as essentially equivalent and thereby sidestep a logocentric theory of communication that had privileged male sensibility. See “‘Those Simple Signs’: The Performance of Emotion in Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11 (1999): 317–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁵ Monthly Review 15 (September 1794): 107–8Google Scholar.

¹²⁶ Lavater, , Essays on Physiognomy, p. 80Google Scholar.

¹²⁷ This was an early accusation. For example, see the St. James Chronicle (8 October 1794) on Holcroft's self-surrender to the court. More recently, it has been a stance taken by Thompson, E. P.. See The Poverty of Theory (1978; reprint, London, 1995), pp. 243–45Google Scholar, and less polemically, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age (New York, 1997), pp. 87–89Google Scholar. But see Philp, Mark, Godwin's Political Justice, (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), pp. 228–30Google Scholar, and his “Thompson, Godwin, and the French Revolution,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 89–101Google Scholar.

¹²⁸ Philp, , Godwin's Political Justice, pp. 169–73, 214–20, 229Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ For the “acquitted felons” remark, see Secretary at War William Windham's speech in Parliament on 30 December 1794, Parliamentary History, 31:1027Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ See The Times (26 January 1800); for its impact on Holcroft's life abroad, see his letter to Godwin, 17 February 1802, Bodleian Library (Bodl.), Oxford, MS Dep. c. 511.

¹³¹ Holcroft to Godwin, 29 April 1800, Bodl., MS Dep. c. 511; Holcroft to Godwin, 13 May 1800, Bodl., MS Dep. c. 511.

¹³² The Seditious Meetings Bill (1795) made owners and lessors of rooms used for meetings liable to heavy fines if they had not obtained the explicit permission of two magistrates to use the rooms for such purposes. The Treasonable Practices Bill (1795) adjusted and expanded the definition of treason to be more applicable to what Attorney General Sir John Scott called modern, “French” treason. See John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death, chap. 16.

¹³³ See Worrall, , Radical Culture, pp. 17–34Google Scholar; Klancher, Jon, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, Wise, 1987), pp. 113–19Google Scholar; Epstein, “Ritual Practice”; Barrell, “‘An Entire Change of Performances?’” pp. 11–50.

¹³⁴ Philp, , Godwin's Political Justice, p. 173Google Scholar.