Afterword

English theatre during the Peninsular War offered a range of patriotic, action-packed and visually impressive popular entertainments. From spoken drama at the patent playhouses to ballets and burlettas at the minors, theatre-going in both London and the provinces provided a form of Romantic-period sociability within the reach of almost everyone. ¹ This book has explored the resourcefulness and creativity of British managers, playwrights, performers and their audiences, in response to the legal and other socio-political restrictions enforced against the early nineteenth-century stage. In its consideration of how interpretative strategies were applied to blockbusters such as Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) and the many eighteenth-century stock pieces that saturated the theatrical repertoire, this book has maintained that by clever circumvention of contemporary censorship, during the Peninsular War the nation’s crowded and excitable theatre auditoriums functioned as spaces of political discovery, assertion and confrontation.