ABSTRACT
David Garrick had rejected Douglas for Drury Lane, whereupon a group of progressive Scottish intellectuals decided to give the script a public reading. The Enlightenment had helped to ease the tensions between the union and Scottish national aspirations, but tension could be seen in the fortunes of the Scottish Royal Patent theatres. Garrick had rejected Douglas for Drury Lane, whereupon a group of progressive Scottish intellectuals decided to give the script a public reading. In 1746, Sadler’s Wells staged an anti-Scottish ballet, Culloden. Scotland was not cut off from England by the Jacobite rebellion, but Scots were often regarded by the English as a nation of Jacobites. In Edinburgh in 1749, when the song ‘Culloden’ was sung in the Canongate Concert Hall, a regular battle developed in the auditorium between English soldiers and supposed Jacobite sympathisers: apples and snuff boxes were thrown, and even pieces of benches from the gallery.
