ABSTRACT
The dramatist, declared Elizabeth Inchbald in 1807, exists ‘under a despotic government’. This chapter explores some of the traces and legacies of this ‘despotic government’ in the theatre of Elizabeth Inchbald and Thomas Holcroft. It presents censorship as a collective enterprise involving managers, audiences, and Anti-Jacobin reviewers, as well as the Examiner of Plays whose official role it was to license new plays for performance. As Richard Bevis has observed, developing the work of Dougald MacMillan, the acting editions and printed texts of eighteenth-century theatre for the stage and the closet were destined for distinctive cultural markets. The plays of Inchbald and Thomas Holcroft offer an intriguing dramatic field for the argument. Inchbald seems to have carried out a painstaking process of moral and political revision on her acting scripts before publication. The chapter explores Holcroft’s inquisitorial dramaturgy and his appropriation of stock characters and conventions to create quasi-legal indictments of aristocratic society.
