Strolling Players of Empire

"This book tracks some of the novel and colorful journeys that British theatre embarked upon over the course of the eighteenth century, from nation to empire and back again. It examines unstudied circuits of theatrical performance extending across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass London, Kingston (and other urban centers of Jamaica), Calcutta, Fort Marlborough (Sumatra), St. Helena and Port Jackson (New South Wales), as well as London and archipelagic provincial towns. In each space, the performance of British drama helped consolidate a national and imperial culture that was being forged both within and beyond the nation's borders. Yet in crisscrossing political and oceanic boundaries, and circulating texts, bodies, ideas and practices meant to incarnate the best of the English, and, secondarily, British character, the stage also mobilized competing ideas about authority, cultural difference and national belonging that emanated from the small as well as the great across the flow of practices of everyday life in Britain's expansive domains. Retailing historical myths and collective fantasies, including the helpful if fictive notion of a "national character" itself, theatre was the ultimate emblem of English cultural and racial capital in an age of sail, seizing the imaginations and animating the actions of British subjects and their others ceaselessly traversing the globe"--