Clearing the Stage: Gender, Class, and the Freedom of the Scenes in Eighteenth-Century Dublin

• Published in: PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 2004-10, Vol.119 (5), p.1264-1278
• Main Author: Harris, Susan Cannon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0030-8129; 1938-1530
• DOI: 10.1632/S0030812900101737

This essay investigates the conditions and consequences of Thomas Sheridan's attempt to bar spectators from behind the scenes at the Theatre-Royal in Dublin's Smock Alley. Sheridan succeeded in revoking the “freedom of the scenes”—a privilege by which aristocratic men were allowed to roam the green room, dressing rooms, and stage during the performance—because Dublin was the cultural and political center of a colonial society whose members were struggling for control over the spaces outside the theater. The reform provoked a conflict known as the Kelly riots, which began with a spectator's attempted rape of an actress in Sheridan's production of John Vanbrugh's Aesop. Contextualizing the Kelly riots in the political and cultural situation of eighteenth-century Ireland, this article illuminates the role that the theater plays in the construction of subjectivity and in the interrelation among gender, class, and national identities.