ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 9, Victorian dramatists cast British manhood into the spotlight in plays that figured colonial rebellion as an assault upon British masculinity. But masculinity is a complicated concept, a category of identity that simultaneously informs and is inflected by social categories such as class and ethnicity. There were, in other words, a number of different “masculinities” available to Victorian men, which is perhaps why the theatre so urgently tried to articulate which precise variety of masculinity would best serve the nation’s needs in its moment of crisis. This may help explain why the dramas produced in the months immediately following the Mutiny of 1857 addressed the crisis in colonial control by exploring the boundaries of national character and the potential assimilability of Britain’s peripheral ethnic alterities. 1
