Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Print, performance, personhood, Polly Honeycombe. Four terms in my title; not many more pages to sketch out their interrelations. In some ways it helps that the first three are already so familiar to us (or at least we tend to think of them as familiar). Print has been more or less constantly on our scholarly radar for three or four decades; performance for at least two; depending on how we define it, personhood has been a category of interest since the dawn of anthropology, or perhaps is even coterminous with the humanities themselves. But the familiarity of these terms has rarely translated into very satisfying ways of thinking about their relations with one another. In general, we have tended to regard them as either strictly opposed to one another or else as so closely intertwined as to be, in effect, identical. So, for example, print has traditionally been set against performance as letter to its spirit, disembodiment to its corporeality, permanence to its ephemerality. Yet both terms have also been treated as the very negation of personhood, as purveyors of commodified or inauthentically “stagey” selves to be poised against that within which passeth show. More recently, of course, the converse (but structurally identical) view has often appeared: that personhood is nothing but performance, or that the subject positions hailed by various kinds of print are all that historians can ever recover. I am caricaturing, of course, but not, I think, particularly unfairly. For all the ways in which we have been taught to shun binary oppositions, our [End Page 185] professional lives are still full of them, perhaps especially when it comes to thinking about the novel and the theater, which is what most discussions of eighteenth-century print and performance boil down to. Here, both in our scholarship and our curricula, there is a distressing (and distressingly frequent) tendency to go for all too easy, and just plain wrong, stories of supercession, in which, say, the drama is where the action is up to 1740, and then the novel just takes over and we don’t have to worry about the playhouse anymore—often because, either as a corollary or an explanation, people were supposedly externally oriented and “theatrical” up to 1740, and then they turned inward, and the modern subject was born. Again, I caricature, but I have read enough manuscripts and looked at enough syllabi to feel sadly confident that while I am painting with a broad brush, the likeness is more than recognizable.¹

Enter Polly Honeycombe. A Dramatick Novel of One Act. This text, an afterpiece by George Colman the Elder, was one of the most successful farces of the entire century. In its first three seasons, it received sixty-three performances in London, and appeared in three London editions. In the same period, it ran through at least four other editions—and, I strongly suspect, performances linked to those editions—in Cork, Dublin, and Edinburgh. And thereafter, it settled into a career as a repertory staple which lasted well into the nineteenth century.² Now farces are not where we generally go for shrewd theoretical insight. Rather, their appeal typically lies in their slapstick and broad humor, their stock situations and flat characters. But Colman is nothing if not clever, and so I would like to propose that there is a kind of vernacular theory to be drawn from Polly Honeycombe, if we can only open our eyes and prick up our ears long enough to attend to how it unfolds in the time and space of Drury Lane.

Farces are, of course, fundamentally plot-driven, and so we should probably begin by just sketching out what happens in Polly Honeycombe. Our heroine is a pert young woman who lives with her parents in the City (i.e., the commercial center of London), and delights in the romance and intrigue offered up by the circulating library. Indeed, she triumphantly proclaims that “A Novel is the only thing to teach a girl life, and the way of the world, and elegant fancies, and love to the end of the chapter.”³ Alas, her parents—a retired...