ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 considers the efforts of the political activist, novelist, and playwright Thomas Holcroft to develop a “Jacobin” drama during the 1790s. British government supported the traditional didactic social purpose of theater, but official censorship expanded during the decade. Moreover, the conventions of sentimental drama in which Holcroft worked limited radical meanings. Despite these conditions, he seized on the opportunity to radicalize the genre, allowing audiences to translate representations of family strife into wider social and political meanings. By appropriating physiological and psychological theory to produce what he considered to be a scientific method of acting, Holcroft sought to offer ways for audiences to recognize emotional sincerity and radical sensibility. A reading of Holcroft’s plays staged during his busiest period of radical political activity illustrates the possibilities and limitations of these attempts to translate radical politics to the theater. In The Road to Ruin (1792), staged as he joined the SCI, and The Deserted Daughter (1795), performed in the aftermath of his indictment for high treason, Holcroft represented a future characterized by a new transparency and sincerity in human relations. And yet, a fully realized “Jacobin” drama remained beyond the possibilities of the licensed stage in the 1790s.
