This essay explores some of the plethora of modes of censorship of British ‘imperial’ theatre through the long eighteenth century. Suppression ranged from the informal censorship of ‘Oriental’ performance practiced by Sir Richard Steele in managerial practice and periodical censure through cancellations of productions of Patriot drama attacking colonial slavery deemed offensive by Walpole’s Licenser. While productions set in distant lands increasingly offered an allegorical means of critiquing British imperial practices, in the decades of reaction following the French and Haiitian Revolutions, plays that explicitly denounced English participation in the slave trade, such as Oroonoko, were eventually expunged from the stage by nervous managers. Helping explain this managerial censorship. William Hazlitt’s amazed and anxious response to a rare performance of Oroonoko in 1815 reveals the terror inspired in White audiences by the belief that Black spectators might re-enact the slave revolts modelled on stage by heroic African protagonists. Censorship of imperial subjects thus ranged from the attempted control of dramatic subject matter through to the governmental or managerial erasure of texts and performances deemed subversive or revolutionary.

John Staines explores the role of compassion in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). He argues that although the novel’s attitude towards slavery is complicated, its pathos makes readers feel compassion for an injustice committed against a noble human. Behn’s narrative stands at the start of the creation of the modern novel, a new genre that justified itself as a means of educating readers in sentiment and sympathy. Yet Behn’s decision to end her story by torturing and dismembering her hero is, by the standards of later novels, shockingly indecorous as it forces readers to confront his body in a final scene of compassion. In this chapter, John Staines demonstrates that the appeal to compassion is central to Behn’s text, as it is central to neoclassical discussions of rhetoric and poetics. Oroonoko’s pathos helped it continue to have influence long after its political interventions had passed into obscurity and irrelevance. Its shared suffering endured.