UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Mongrel Forms: Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britain, 1680-1760 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6qc5g94g Author Davis, Vivian Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Mongrel Forms Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britain, 1680-1760 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Vivian Leigh Davis 2012 © Copyright by Vivian Leigh Davis 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Mongrel Forms Tragedy, Comedy, and Mixed Genres in Britain, 1680-1760 By Vivian Leigh Davis Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Felicity A. Nussbaum, Chair This dissertation analyzes the unlicensed mixtures of tragedy and comedy that appeared in the playhouses, periodicals, and novels of the eighteenth century. Scholars have argued that in the Restoration’s coterie theaters, the Hegelian dialectic of tragicomedy functioned as a heuristic device for debates about political theory. “Mongrel forms” extends this premise, contending that by the turn into the eighteenth century, the tidiness of bipartite tragicomedy had been replaced by powerful ideas about generic contagion and corruption. For an increasingly bourgeois audience, tragicomic monsters and mongrels, widely derided by literary and dramatic critics, became associated less with debates about kingship and more closely aligned with a discourse on the perils and pleasures of different kinds of social mixing. As dramatic genres were mediated by live, feeling bodies, the “mongrelization” of tragedy and comedy created sites of contact in which social categories, such as race, class, gender and sexuality, could be contested or confirmed. Inverted generic hierarchies, and the social re-organization they intimated, could be ii attacked as aesthetically monstrous. The blended form’s resistance to regulation was also deployed subversively to make visible identities and experiences not otherwise legible. The five chapters of the dissertation include a number of case studies in which mongrelizing tragedy and comedy creates a vital space in which players, writers, spectators, and critics imagine possibilities of change to aspects of English civil society. The first chapter begins with neoclassical critic Thomas Rymer’s infamous 1693 treatise on Othello’s comic flaws, an essay in which a critique of a corrupted tragedy becomes inseparable from underlying fears about interracial desire and contact between black and white bodies. Colley Cibber’s critically neglected writing for the tragic stage comprises the dissertation’s second chapter. Though the neoclassical establishment consistently argued for the propriety of tragedy, actor-manager Cibber theorizes laughter as part of the genre’s successful performance which, he insists, brings bodily pleasure to audiences and liberties to performers. The third chapter assesses Nahum Tate’s notorious adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear in light of the changing sexual politics of the London stage. The analysis focuses on the performance history of the tragedy’s lead female role, Cordelia, in order to show how Tate’s mongrelization of King Lear expressed anxieties about women’s increasing centrality on the tragic stage and their visibility in culture more generally. The fourth chapter analyzes the tragicomic structure of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), a novel in which generic friction signals the limited range of expression available to both Lennox’s aristocratic titular heroine and professional female authors at midcentury. The dissertation closes with a study of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (1761), an allegorical canvas that positions David Garrick between two ancient female muses in order to articulate and assuage contemporary worries about actors’ sexuality and rank. iii The dissertation of Vivian Davis is approved. Helen E. Deutsch Anne K. Mellor Lowell Gallagher Sue-Ellen Case Felicity A. Nussbaum, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………….…vi Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………vii Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………..ix Chapter 1 Introduction: Mongrel Forms……………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 2 Happy Liberties: Colley Cibber’s Tragic Stage………………………………………….45 Chapter 3 Revising Cordelia: The Sexual Politics of Mixed Genres in the Eighteenth Century’s Mongrel King Lear……………………………………………………………………..104 Chapter 4 Tragicomedy in the Novel: The Generic Mandate of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote……………………………………………………………………………….…143 Chapter 5 Genres of the Moment: Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy…………………………………………………………………………………188 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………235 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Othello, act V, scene II (1709)..........……………………………………………..…14 Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library Figure 2.1: Edward Fisher, Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (1762)……………………188 Courtesy of Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, G1511 Figure 2.2: Inigo Barlow, Monument to the Memory of David Garrick Esqr. (1797)……........197 Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the support and generosity of a very large community of scholars, colleagues, friends, and family members. Acknowledgement is due, first and foremost, to my committee members: Helen Deutsch, Anne Mellor, Lowell Gallagher, and Sue-Ellen Case, all of whom provided crucial feedback and support along the way. I would especially like to thank my advisor, Felicity Nussbaum, who tirelessly read drafts and offered encouragement. My mentors, friends, and colleagues at UCLA deserve special recognition. Sarah Kareem, A.R. Braunmuller, Jonathan Post, and Christopher Mott provided necessary teaching opportunities. The Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Reading Group and the English Graduate Union both graciously allowed me to workshop sections of this dissertation in its earlier incarnations. I am also deeply indebted to the community of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars at UCLA (and elsewhere), especially Wendy Belcher, Noelle Chao, Noah Comet, Dustin Friedman, Elizabeth Goodhue, Alex Hernandez, Ian Newman, Elizabeth Raisanen, Sean Silver, and Fuson Wang. For camaraderie and good cheer, I would also like to thank Erin Suzuki, Lana Finley, and Allison Johnson. I am also grateful to the impeccable Jeanette Gilkinson and tireless Michael Lambert for helping me fill out forms, find mailboxes, and get to the right place at the right time. The dissertation research was funded by monetary support from the William Andrews Clark Library and the Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA; the Graduate vii Division at the University of Los Angeles, California; UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women; and Chawton House Library. Acknowledgement is due to the staff at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, and in particular, managing editor Brenda Johnson-Grau, who generously offered friendship, mixed tapes, and baked goods. Colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University provided teaching opportunities and support at crucial moments, including Elizabeth Canfield, Catherine Ingrassia, David Latané, and Rivka Swenson. I would also like to recognize the inspiring undergraduate and graduate students and activists I met and worked with at Virginia Commonwealth University, including the class members of GSEX 201 (Spring 2011), Jane Harwell, and Morgan Krug. Love and thanks to my family, sisters, and friends who cheered me on. I am especially indebted to Judy and Jake Mitchell, whose generosity allowed me to commute between Virginia and California. A special award goes to Gretchen, Bob, and Simon; without your support I would not have returned to California. Thanks to my mother for raising me. I would never have been able to imagine a career for myself if I hadn’t seen you do it first. The final acknowledgement belongs to my partner and best friend, Jake Mitchell, for sharing my passion for both work and play. viii VITA 1999 B.A., English Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, Virginia 2004-05 Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship University of California, Los Angeles 2005-07 Teaching Assistant Department of English University of California, Los Angeles 2008 M.A., English University of California, Los Angles Los Angeles, California 2008 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Fellowship Los Angeles, California 2011 UCLA Center for the Study of Women Jean and Irving Stone Dissertation Fellowship Los Angeles, California PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS Davis, Vivian. “Performing the Sexual Contract: Congreve and Centlivre.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 51.3 (2011): 519-543. ________. “Making of the Modern Family: Performing Dysfunction in Colley Cibber’s The Double Gallant.” Paper presented at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) International Conference for Postgraduates, Worcester, England, June 2010. ________. “Kaleidoscopes on the Coffee Table: Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer’s Art in Queer Culture: 1885-Present.” Center for the Study of Women Update (2008): 13-16. ix Chapter 1: Mongrel Forms For seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer, an unhappily mixed