Shortly after he took up the position of Deputy Manager and Treasurer at Smock Alley, the Irish Theatre Royal, in 1746, Benjamin Victor, an English newcomer to Ireland, approached the manager, Thomas Sheridan, with a number of suggestions that he felt would result in a better regulated theatre in that location. However, as he later reported in his History of the Theatres of London and Dublin (1761), Sheridan always rejected his proposals as too dangerous, saying 'You forget yourself, you think you are on English Ground.' Theatre historians who have followed Victor in writing on the eighteenth-century Irish stage have generally been guilty of a similar kind of forgetting when it comes to this institution. Focusing on the similarities between the Dublin and London stages, they have concluded that the Irish theatre of this period was either a provincial theatre or a British colonial institution.

In this essay, however, I will suggest that the Irish theatre is better characterised as a subaltern site in the sense that the post-colonial critic, David Lloyd, uses the term; a space in the Irish colonial past which was capable of bringing into being new, non-'English' states of culture and practice. In Ireland, as in other imperial sites, the forces of colonialism and modernity generated more politically ambiguous hybrids than properly reformed colonial subjects. As these improper subjects made their way into the Irish theatre - as writers, actors and audience members - they produced forms and practices that resisted British colonial culture while also gesturing at alternative Irish cultural logics. The subversive play of these unorthodox 'actors' is not easy to recover and requires us to shift our historiographic gaze from centre stage to the theatrical peripheries - to the 'shadow play' that was always being staged around the edges of the British colonial theatre and within the interstices of the British dramatic text. What at first looked like imitative acts were, in effect, acts of colonial mimicry which subverted and estranged the dominant cultural script.

The scope of the immortality debate in the Renaissance

The debate during the Renaissance over the immortality of the soul encompassed epistemology, metaphysics, and theology. The metaphysical question was whether there is something spiritual that gives life to human beings, such that they are endowed with an ontological status superior to animals and a lasting reality. If this is true, then there is a human soul that transcends the perishable body. But a problemarises: what is the evidence for this, and what does it mean for man to be essentially spiritual? If one were to deny the need for any ontological difference between beasts and men - and that would entail abolishing the principle of life or soul as something distinct from body - then the fact of consciousness and truth over and beyond particular beings demands explanation.

Hence an epistemological problem arises from the metaphysical one. For the mere possibility that animation and spirit might be illusions or misconceptions of life and thought raises a question of epistemology. This, however, is not to be pursued in terms of formal logic, but by way of reflection upon the working of the human mind inasmuch as it seems to be the “place” (or subject) where claims are proffered that transcend particulars and where reflexivity seems to reside. The question is, then, whether the “place” of truth is coextensive with truth itself, and - supposing truth has an ontological status beyond that of physical things - whether the mind or intellect as this “place” shares that ontological status. That is to say: is the intellect as eternal as the truths it is supposed to and tries to think?

London has dominated the historiography of the British stage in the long eighteenth century. Our theatrical histories are intensely, avowedly metropolitan; moreover, they focus almost exclusively on the playwrights, performers and managers associated with the London patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. By comparison with discussions about literary production in provincial cities, performance outside London has received little attention. When the provinces do emerge from the theatrical shadows, it is all too often as the places from which great performers such as David Garrick and Sarah Siddons escaped for the bright lights and fame of the London stage. One of the major aims of this essay is to challenge the marginal position of provincial theatres.

The need to question what Loren Kruger has called 'the habitual assumption of metropolitan authority in London' is fundamental to the redefinition of British theatre history currently taking place. Joseph Roach's groundbreaking account of 'circum-Atlantic' performances between London and New Orleans highlighted the way in which performances cut across national borders; the last decade has also seen a resurgence of interest in Irish and Scottish theatre and a new emphasis on dramatic 'micro-history'. My own essay sets out in a different direction with the aim of producing a more comprehensive interpretation of Britain's theatrical geography. The focus of this argument is designed to reveal the circulation of performers and plots between metropolitan and provincial theatres, the varied forms of artistic innovation taking place beyond the capital and the important role of provincial stages in the business of imagining the nation.

“Hispanic scholastic philosophy” in this chapter designates a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stream of philosophy which flowed out of medieval universities, increased to a torrent on the Iberian peninsula, then poured into other regions of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. Arising in the wake of Spanish and Portuguese explorations and conquests, which at the end of the fifteenth and through the sixteenth century brought radically new, and usually bloody, encounters between European and non-European peoples, it was at its core concerned with such encounters. Other background themes were furnished by the Counter-Reformation, especially the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545-63) and its aftermath; the late Renaissance debates among philosophers, humanists and skeptics; and the revival of Thomistic texts and thought. Two subjects stand out as particularly important and influential: (1) moral and juridical philosophy centering on “the law of nations” (the jus gentium). and (2) theoretical philosophy, which included Aristotelian physics but culminated in metaphysics.

For present purposes the birth year of Hispanic philosophy was 1526, when Francisco de Vitoria, OP (1492-1546), was elected to the Cátedra de Prima in theology at Salamanca and began lectures on the “Second Part of the Second Part” (IIa-IIae) of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. This introduced the Summa as the principal textbook in theology and also inaugurated a Thomistic revival in theology and in philosophy at Salamanca, then elsewhere. Choosing a terminal date for Hispanic philosophy here is more arbitrary, but a plausible one is 1718, when Miguel Viñas, SJ (1642-1718) died. It may immediately be noted that while Vitoria taught in Spain and belonged to the older religious order of the Dominicans, Viñas was a Jesuit who taught at Santiago in Chile.

Humanism and scholasticism

In the Renaissance there were two main approaches to the study and teaching of language. Though the period is traditionally associated with the development of humanism, scholasticism was far from dead. University arts courses continued to be based on the Aristotelian Organon and the specialized textbooks of late medieval logic. In Italy, the cradle of humanism, this logic was imported from the mid-fourteenth century onward where it flourished throughout the fifteenth century, with Paul of Venice’s Logica parva as one of the most important textbooks. Apart from a host of technical logical issues which were being discussed, broader issues continued to provoke debate, such as whether words signify concepts or things and whether language was naturally or conventionally significant, and there was no lack of subtle answers. However hostile to the “pettifogging schoolmen” they professed to be, early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke were obviously indebted to their ideas, and often their own theories consisted in a simplification and revision of scholastic terminology and distinctions without radically changing the linguistic paradigm.

The rise and growth of humanism, however, is the most visible sign of change in the Renaissance (though its origins went back to the late thirteenth century), and it is to the humanists’ reform of the arts of the trivium that this chapter is devoted. Obviously, this is a huge theme, and no attempt has been made here to cram into the space of one book chapter all the important names and their works - Valla, Agricola, Erasmus, Sturm, Vives, Lefèvre d’Étaples, Latomus, Melanchthon, Ramus, to mention just a few key figures.

The English relation to tragedy during the long eighteenth century was paradoxical. On the one hand, literary people continued to venerate tragedy as a high art form which required poetical gifts and profound thought and which had a special capacity to affect audiences and readers deeply. About one hundred new tragedies premiered in London during the second half of the eighteenth century and still more tragedies were published than performed. Tragedy was an important subject in the period's literary scholarship, theory and criticism. With particular intensity, theorists and critics debated the relative merits of the neoclassical tragedies of Racine and Corneille versus those of indigenous Elizabethan tragedians, especially Shakespeare. The pioneering work of editors and critics such as Lewis Theobald and Samuel Johnson also contributed to a revival of Shakespeare's tragedies in performance. The reputations of famous actors were significantly based on their successes in tragic roles from Shakespeare and from Restoration tragedies by Thomas Otway and Nicholas Rowe. Contemporaries were absorbed in acting and in the psychology and physiology of the passions. By mid-century, a growing print record included magazine drama reviews, engravings of scenes and pamphlet controversies over the relative merits of different actors. These left us with unusually detailed descriptions such as this one about Garrick's performance as Lear cursing Goneril:

Two approaches to the teaching of ethics

Renaissance humanists are known for the interest they took in ethics and moral philosophy. Many of them may have found it hard to practice virtues such as modesty and friendship, but countless letters, treatises, and dialogues (penned by authors such as Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Erasmus) testify to their preoccupation with ethical issues. It is significant that the studia humanitatis (the cycle of humanist studies that included literature and history) had as their goal the formation of the perfect man, prominent for his virtue as much as for his eloquence (vir bonus dicendi peritus).

It would be a mistake, however, to regard the humanists as having revived the study of ethics after centuries of neglect. Scholastic writers had already given special attention to this subject, which they studied within the broader context ofmoral philosophy. Albert the Great (1200-80), one of the thirteenth-century architects of a renewed interest in Aristotelian thought, wrote two works on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and infected his student, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), with a similar enthusiasm for the Stagirite’s moral treatises. Robert Grosseteste (1168-1253),Giles of Rome (1245-1316), Walter Burley (c. 1275-1344/5), and John Buridan (c. 1300 - after 1358) were only a few of the scholars who provided influential interpretations of Aristotelian moral philosophy in the late Middle Ages. Also, far from retreating into their supposed bunkers of logic and natural philosophy, scholastics of the Renaissance period wrote on moral philosophy even more prolifically than before. John Argyropoulos (c. 1415-87), a Greek émigré, provided a translation of the Ethics that was better received than Leonardo Bruni’s. In the sixteenth century, John Mair (1467/8-1550), Crisostomo Javelli (c. 1470/2-1538), and Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) wrote important works on ethics and politics. Several times, Averroes’ middle commentary on the Ethics was reprinted.

The story of London theatre audiences in the eighteenth century has been told by cultural historians Peter Stallybrass and Allon White as the gradual displacement of rowdy, carnivalesque participation by the decorum of highart consumption. Drawing on Norbert Elias's History of Manners and the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Stallybrass and White narrate emerging demands for the audience to assume the docile role of quiet attentiveness and 'appropriate' reaction to the performance on the stage: 'what is new . . . is the urgent attempt to expel the lower sort altogether from the scene of reception, to homogenise the audience by refining and domesticating its energy, sublimating its diverse physical pleasures into a purely contemplative force, replacing a dispersed, heterodox, noisy participation in the event of theatre by silent specular intensity'. Stallybrass and White frame this story about audiences in the grand narrative of the middle class' ubiquitous 'rise' and the emergence of a 'bourgeois public sphere'. Unfortunately, their narrative, however elegant, has limited studies of eighteenth-century spectatorship by obscuring the specific processes by which particular audience members, struggled for and ultimately lost the right to public voices and behaviours not consonant with the 'bourgeois public sphere'.

We need more information about the social identities and relations of eighteenth-century British audiences; more is at stake in this knowledge than a history of dramatic reception. As Lisa A. Freeman concludes, 'the semiotics of placement within the theater provided for an intense experience of the socioeconomic conditions that regulated society at large and made patently clear the kinds of competing interests that had to be negotiated within that culture. Social rank was as significant an element in the experience of the theatrical space as it was in the meaning of the plays performed.'

Toward the end of his 'Thoughts on Comedy,' Horace Walpole opines, 'a good comedy, by the passions being exhausted, is at present the most difficult of all compositions, if it represents either nature or fictitious nature; I mean mankind in its present state of civilized society.' Writing during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Walpole traces developments in English comedy across two centuries, beginning with the 'old comedies' of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and ending with a meditation on the particular hazards of writing comedy in his own time. Comedy had indeed changed over the course of the eighteenth century, as playwrights left behind the acerbic wit and libertine cynicism of the Restoration stage and, in response to the changing composition of their expanding audience, increasingly adopted what was heralded as a more 'refined,' 'polished,' or 'genteel' tone in their dramatic works. Accordingly, where critical debate during the Restoration and early eighteenth century focused on the divide between humours comedy and comedies of wit, the second half of the eighteenth century featured fierce battles over the relative merits of laughing comedy - which subsumed comedies of wit and humours - as opposed to sentimental comedy, a new dramatic genre that appealed to the middling classes and that highlighted sentiment, exemplary displays of virtue, and ultimately the more emotive forms of sensibility.

For maximum rhetorical effect, advocates on both sides of the debate represented their cause in much exaggerated and often hyperbolic terms. While defenders of laughing comedies, such as Oliver Goldsmith, portrayed sentimental comedy as a 'species of Bastard Tragedy' that had usurped the place of 'True Comedy', and painted themselves as patriotic crusaders on behalf of a uniquely English comic tradition, those who took up the cause of sentimental comedy cast themselves as no less noble and no less besieged.

Probably the most significant difference between a play written and produced in the mid eighteenth century and one written and produced a hundred years later would be the reliance upon pictorial scenography in the latter. In 1740, with some significant exceptions, the space of the production would display the formal qualities of a scenically neutral theatrical place. This was a place of performance in which scenery served as a decorative background to dramatic action. By 1840 the physical presence of scenic techniques and effects would underpin almost all aspects of production as major elements within dramaturgy and the theatrical experience.

By 1840 the neutral place of performance had been replaced by detailed scenic representations of other worlds involving sophisticated theatrical processes and techniques. This new place of performance was situated within its own discrete architectural space, one that was separated from the audience by a decorated proscenium frame through which the audience looked. Throughout this process of change, important physical and psychological distinctions were established between audience and stage. Fundamentally, however, it would be true to say that spectators in 1740 might have considered it a heresy to connive at losing their sense of identity in the theatre. For that audience, the act of becoming engaged in performance involved balancing a social sense of self alongside admiration of the performer's skill in taking them over the threshold of belief into the world of the play. By 1840 every possible aspect of architecture, scenography and its associated technologies was being used in order to transport the spectator's imagination into the 'other worlds' which the theatre sought to (re)create.

To say that the greater part of the English audience was suspicious of continental opera is an understatement. They found an entirely sung 'play' difficult to accept, disliked recitative, thought the plots ludicrous and treated opera with suspicion because it was 'foreign'. To such an audience, a genre with spoken dialogue called 'English Opera' (as opposed to opera in English) was decidedly preferable. Nevertheless, the arrival of Italian opera early in the eighteenth century was welcomed by that part of the public keen for something exotic and prepared to be charmed by the music, captivated by the stagings and scandalised by the singers. That these types of opera were used for different types of critical discourse emphasises the fact that Italian opera remained a separate and distinct force and indeed came to delineate a binary opposition in eighteenth-century culture.

This binary opposition manifested itself most obviously in the division of the repertoire between the London theatres. On the one hand, Drury Lane and Covent Garden put on mainly spoken plays; the all-sung operas staged there were usually afterpieces in English, though operas with spoken dialogue also appeared among the mainpieces in various guises, including ballad opera and burletta. There were three other venues for opera in English. The oldest of these was the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. Opened in 1720, it was an occasional venue for opera performances, including those in the summer under Samuel Foote from 1747 and George Colman the Elder's seasons from 1777. The English Opera House, later the Lyceum, which opened in 1772 and was first able to function as a proper theatre in 1809, was restricted to performing opera; not until the Licensing Act of 1843 was it allowed to present spoken drama. There was, lastly, the Olympic Theatre, which, for a short period in the 1830s under Eliza Vestris, was licensed to produce 'entertainments of music, dancing, burlettas, spectacle, pantomime, and horsemanship': the meaning of the term 'burletta' came to encompass almost any musical entertainment other than all-sung opera.

In the Renaissance the Hellenistic period was not recognized as a distinctive phase in the development of ancient philosophy. Only in the nineteenth century was the term “Hellenistic” adopted to describe the three centuries between the dissolution of Alexander the Great’s empire, following his death in 323 bc, and the beginning of the Roman Empire in 31 bc, in the aftermath of the Battle of Actium. The three main philosophies nowadays classified as Hellenistic - Stoicism, Epicureanismand skepticism (in both its Academic and Pyrrhonist forms) - fall broadly within that timeframe, though the chronological boundaries are sufficiently elastic to include the Stoics Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, who lived in the first and second centuries ad. For all three Hellenistic schools, the aim of studying philosophy was to attain a state of calmness and peace of mind in our daily lives. Each school, however, set out a different path to that goal: for the Stoics, it lay in rooting out pathological emotions; for the Epicureans, in eliminating irrational fears of the afterlife and unnatural desires in the present life; and for the skeptics, in removing the anxiety produced by the futile search for certain knowledge. Renaissance interest in the Hellenistic schools centered on these competing claims.

Lacking any collective identity as Hellenistic philosophies, Stoicism, Epicureanism and skepticism each underwent its own revival over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as part of the ongoing recovery of ancient literature and thought. Although these sects became much better known than they had been in the Middle Ages, they nevertheless remained on the margins of Renaissance philosophical culture, which continued to be dominated, particularly in the universities, by Aristotelianism. Many of those who engaged with the Hellenistic sects were not philosophers but humanists, vernacular authors, and religious thinkers. And approval or disapproval of these sects usually turned on theological rather than philosophical considerations.

Humanism as a form of culture

It is apt to be forgotten by students of the Renaissance that the abstract noun “humanism,” with its cognates in Latin and the modern languages, is not attested for the period of the Renaissance itself, but began to be widely used only in the early nineteenth century. It was in the latter period, under the influence of Hegel, that the modern addiction to reifying ideologies and social trends using nouns formed from -ismos, the Greek suffix indicating nouns of action or process, began to take hold. Humanismus, humanisme, and umanesimo, the German, French, and Italian forms of the word respectively, eventually embraced two broad families of meaning. The first family understood humanism in the sense of classical education: the study of ancient literature in the original languages. It was in this sense that Georg Voigt in his seminal work, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Altertums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859), retrofitted the word to signify the Renaissance movement to revive classical studies. In Italy the word umanesimo broadened its meaning somewhat to include Italy’s literary production in the Latin language from Petrarca to Pietro Bembo.