Conviction on the Hanoverian Stage: Representing Religious Toleration in the Drama of Samuel Johnson and Eliza Haywood

Abstract

<p>Recent studies of the British Enlightenment have turned to a site of cultural production traditionally overlooked in Enlightenment scholarship: the playhouses of Eighteenth Century London. This paper takes up this line of inquiry into Georgian theatrical entertainment by exploring the ways in which the medium of Georgian theatre was uniquely positioned to tackle one of the central quandaries posed by Enlightenment sociability: the contested place of religious conviction within a state established on principles of religious diversity. In this paper, I examine the drama of Eliza Haywood and Samuel Johnson in the context of public concerns over religious pluralism, and the gradual attempts by the Hanoverian state to legitimate forms of toleration to Protestant non-conformity. By looking at the ways in which Hanoverian drama represents the charged relationship between religious conviction and communal peace, I suggest that the Georgian playhouses were especially invested in interrogating the ways in which the institutionalization of religious toleration put pressure on norms governing the representations of intimacy and the domestic sphere. Focusing on the feminization of religious conviction and representations of interfaith romance in the drama of Johnson and Haywood, this paper seeks to account for the ways in which the Georgian stage managed the conflicting emotions around the issue of toleration, and the forms of personas and identities it opposes and licenses.</p>