Nineteenth Century Theatre

This chapter will rethink the nature and scope of sources of cultural contact between metropole and colony in Victorian Britain. It will prioritize the materiality of merchandise as a key constituent in the discursive construction of India in the realm of popular representation. It will also define this notion of the popular, covering in its ambit not just literary texts across the genres of adventure and travel writing but also theatre and scientific and industrial fairs and exhibitions.

This provocation uses a case study of the French history painter Paul Delaroche to examine the way in which theatricality is invoked as a critical term. Fried considers Delaroche’s work to exemplify theatricality, a designation that, for him, connotes qualities of exaggeration and inauthenticity. I argue against Fried that this is not how Delaroche was viewed in his own time. This leads to a wider consideration of the assumptions that underpin thinking about theatricality. In particular, I question the idea that theatricality is a quality of popular, as opposed to avant-garde, art. Finally, I want to challenge the automatic association between theatre and artifice that is threaded through discussions of theatricality.