Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama: Reception and Afterlives

Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama: Reception and Afterlives offers a feeling yet critical depiction of the man who is now perhaps best known as William Godwin’s friend but who deserves fuller and more up-to-date reckonings of the sort begun in Miriam Wallace and A. A. Markley’s collection Re-Viewing Thomas Holcroft. Amy Garnai’s approach combines biographical, historical, literary, and cultural context and analysis of the reception of Holcroft’s work by theatre audiences across two centuries. This approach enables her to show how sociability and in particular the friendship between Godwin and Holcroft shaped much of Holcroft’s theatrical (and fictional) writing, a central premise of the book and one of the most interesting. Additionally, Garnai demonstrates how Holcroft’s social networks—his work with Thomas Harris, John Philip Kemble, John Thelwall, Thomas Dibdin, and Eliza Fenwick, to name but a few—situates him squarely within the literary and patent theatre milieu at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain. Most critically, however, Garnai’s work points to Holcroft’s legacy as a writer some of whose work became part of the canon of “old British” plays that were staged throughout the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth. His generic contributions to drama—specifically to the development and popularization of melodrama in Britain in the early nineteenth century—was widely recognized and acknowledged by his contemporaries.Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama is composed of a short critical introduction and six chapters. Each chapter offers a broad treatment of a phase of Holcroft’s development as a thinker or his career as a writer. As Garnai writes in the introduction, the book “is not a cradle to grave biography” (3). Instead, she has framed meticulous textual analysis with biographical and historical elements. The first chapter, “Thomas Holcroft and the Treason Trials,” analyzes Holcroft’s political engagement in the context of the early 1790s in Britain as well as his arrest and trial for sedition in 1794. Garnai’s focus here is, as she writes, less on the politics of Holcroft’s plays and more on “the ways that theater entered politics” (13). The second chapter, “The Road to Ruin and Its Afterlives,” focuses on one of the most lasting of Holcroft’s contributions to English theatre, The Road to Ruin, a sentimental satire that premiered on 18 February 1792 at Covent Garden Theatre and was staged throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in Britain, Ireland, Australia, and the United States. Garnai argues that, even at the time of its premiere, the play’s sentimental depiction of the father-son relationship and its satiric treatment of gambling, consumption, and luxury were responsible for its popularity with London audiences and that these aspects were more influential with audiences than the play’s politics. Chapter 3, “Radicalism, Authorship, and Sincerity in Holcroft’s Later Plays,” explores the tension between Holcroft’s belief in truth and sincerity and his practical need to publish plays anonymously after the 1794 treason trials: as Garnai shows, plays with Holcroft’s name listed as author were not successful in the second half of the 1790s. Chapter 4, “Holcroft’s Diary and Other Life Writing,” is dedicated to Holcroft’s diary, which he kept for ten months at a particularly fraught period during his career as a playwright between June 1798 and March 1799, a time when Garnai argues he was facing strong cultural backlash and finding success in staging his plays especially difficult. In chapter 5, “Holcroft’s Melodrama,” Garnai analyzes the popularity of melodrama in the nineteenth century and A Tale of Mystery (1802), a translation of Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s Coelina; ou, L’enfant du mystère (1800) and the play credited with establishing melodrama with English audiences in the nineteenth century. The book’s final chapter, “Final Years and Other Afterlives,” focuses again on sociability and its importance to Holcroft’s writing, specifically on the break between Holcroft and Godwin and their reconciliation at Holcroft’s deathbed.The value of Garnai’s study lies in her meticulous textual research, which allows her to pinpoint passages Holcroft amended in response to feedback from Godwin, for example, or removed at the censor’s insistence or which elements of a particular play may have been omitted owing to audience response when first staged and then later readded when published. The result is a detailed overview of the complicated process of writing, staging, and publishing plays at the end of the eighteenth century, a process inflected by political and cultural pressures, and a clear sense of the way in which Holcroft himself was immersed in this world. Moreover, while scholars such as Jeffrey Cox have previously written about Holcroft’s contribution to the development of melodrama in British drama, Garnai’s analysis of its appeal during particular moments of cultural upheaval and the force of its popularity on the theatre world beginning in the early part of the nineteenth century carries fresh insights. Finally, in structuring her study as she has done—with a biographical and historical framework alongside careful analysis of Holcroft’s works (primarily his plays but also his life writing and his translation work) and brief comments on his fiction—Garnai offers a complete examination of Holcroft. He emerges as a writer and thinker who attempted to live out his belief in perfectibility, truth, and sincerity, even in the face of political repression and social reaction.