The European Enlightenment & Middle Class Theatre

18th century European thought is often grouped under the name of the Enlightenment. This was a reaction to all the religious wars that had torn Europe apart throughout the 17th century. A recognition of the power of science to explore the world, and a new faith in the capacity of pure reason and rationality to answer not only scientific, but also political and social issues. There was a new focus on finding truth not in religion but in nature. However, there were ongoing debates that would continue into the nineteenth century about what that nature really was. The diehard rationalists advocated a mechanistic view of a universe that was rigorously logical and could be understood through empirical observation and experiment. Others believed that truth resided within the soul of each human being. This is the Jane Austen dichotomy between sense and sensibility. Both had an impact on thinking about theatre.

In stark contrast to Hobbes, who advocated a benevolent monarchy to elevate humanity from a state of nature which was innately bad (“Life is nasty, brutish and short”), Enlightenment philosophers frequently started from the premise that human nature is innately good, and that both personal and social bonds would thrive if individuals were true to their innate virtues and their moral sentiments, resisting selfishness and exercising benevolence.

Rousseau epitomizes this view when he writes in The Social Contract, “Man is born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains.” The philosophical approach known as romantic individualism stems from this. Be true to yourself and you can’t go wrong. The measure of truth is in our own soul. People are good. It is society that is corrupt. Evil is not innate, but rather a corruption of our good natures that can be reformed. This was a view also promoted by Addison and Steele in periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator. They argue that theatre should be a vehicle for educating the public in these moral sentiments appropriate to a new middle class. These are the roots of what we will later speak of as liberalism—the belief that prosperity and justice are best served by limiting the role of government and all other social institutions and letting people do whatever they want. Of course, the heroes of liberalist thought are the capitalists and industrialists who take advantage of such freedoms to amass huge fortunes.


The new drama, by extension, should abandon the aesthetics of Restoration comedy and French comedy of manners in which fops and rakes ridicule each other with witty repartee for a new kind of middle class drama about the struggles of middle class characters in which the middle class virtues such as thrift, hard work and family loyalty are rewarded and vices that destroy the family or the productivity of society are punished. This is the poetic justice that Rymer hinted at in the Restoration, but which became the moral compass for the new bourgeois drama. The important point to keep in mind here is that these shifts are a response to specific changes in European society. You can’t understand the rise of some of these things that start to look like realist drama outside the context of a middle class, capitalist and increasingly nationalistic society.