ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a controversial tragedy about the Gracchi, drastically censored during the revolutionary period before and after the 1819 massacre at Peterloo. The censor’s stranglehold on spoken theatre from 1737 onwards illuminates the apparent lack of overtly class-conscious plays on classical themes in public theatricals. Dramatic performance has always had a relationship with politics in Britain. At the height of the early 18th-century struggle over the ownership of classical cultural property, the Odyssey was treated to a class-conscious reading in a ballad opera staged at the Little Haymarket Theatre. Since the main case-study in this chapter concerns the drastic censoring of James Sheridan Knowles’ play about the Gracchi because it was so sympathetic to the working class, a brief account of stage censorship in Britain is needed here to provide context. The impact of the French revolution in Ireland differed from its impact in England. The Irish peasants, oppressed by English or Anglophile landowners, identified with the French revolutionaries.
