Theatre and the practice of citizenship: from antiquity to the French Revolution

Citizenship is a pivotal term in contemporary political philosophy as also in the rhetoric of politicians. It is both a legal category and an ethical term implying a pattern of altruistic behaviour. My research examines how pre-modern theatre related to the question of citizenship: was participation in theatre something a citizen was expected to do, or was it something no citizen should demean themselves by doing? Was theatre going an expression of one's identity and function as a citizen, or essentially a private act, an aspect of leisure? My research begins with the Greeks, who had long placed choral dancing at the centre of collective life before tragedy emerged. I look at the boy-meets-girl form of 'New Comedy', where membership of the citizen body is often pivotal to the plot. These were Grecian plays in a world where Greeks characteristically constituted an ethnic or cultural elite.

The principal reference point for my historical research is the French Enlightenment. Rousseau argued romantically, following Plato, that cities should not be corrupted by theatre; his native city of Geneva was all the better for banning theatre and placing military or domestic festivals at the centre of its cultural life. My argument pits Rousseau against Voltaire, who was best known in his own day as a writer of tragedies. Voltaire wrote plays that were vehemently anti-clerical and demonstrated strong republican sympathies, and he wanted these plays staged in Geneva. Voltaire exemplifies, for purposes of my argument, the ideal of the author who contests the oppressive status quo, and uses drama courageously as a site where freedom of speech is tolerated and things can be said that cannot be said elsewhere in the public arena. Yet he writes for passive spectators, and it is unclear how passive spectators transform themselves into active citizens. The French revolutionaries were devotees of Voltaire's plays set in the Roman republic where monarchs were found unacceptable. They also drew inspiration from Rousseau's model of the public festival without asking themselves Rousseau's fundamental question: does theatre in its traditional form make a positive contribution to society, or not?

The other major historical area that I investigate is early modern England. I look at the disintegration of the medieval city, with its participatory but also elitist culture centred on the craft guilds, and the implications of mass migration to London. Catering for a floating populstion in the metropolis, some authors used the theatre to create a sense of London as a community, while Shakespeare the migrant from Warwickshire preferred to create a sense of the nation state, with the theatre constituting the state in miniature. Theatre going is an activity that creates a sense of social bonding for the audience and different theatres created different sorts of communities.

I finish by taking a bird's eye view of a western tradition where both theatre makers and political strategists modelled themselves on ancient Greeks or, more often, Romans. Western theatre and western democracy prove to be closely linked, and I am concerned to demonstrate that they rest on principles that are historically transmitted and neither universal nor inherently natural. The purpose of my historical research is to illuminate the present.