In the years following the 1737 Licensing Act, the English stage found
itself for the first time facing serious competition from the novel -
newly respectable and increasingly fashionable. But the story is not one
of theatre's decline and the novel's rise. As Ros Ballaster shows in
this lively and innovative study, the relationship between the two media
was one of an intensely creative and productive rivalry. Novelists sent
their heroes to the theatre, dramatists appropriated the plots of
popular novels, the celebrity status of actors was advanced through
guest appearances in printed prose fictions. Some figures, like
Richardson's virtuous serving maid Pamela, or Sterne's eccentric
humourist Tristram Shandy, acquired such independent lives in the minds
of the public that they migrated into the mainstream of popular
culture.
Fictions of Presence describes how major authors of the period - Eliza
Haywood, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox and Oliver Goldsmith - spanned
both genres. It charts the movement of popular fictional characters
between stage and page. And it looks at the representation of
contemporary audiences and readers in the new types of the (female)
mimic and the (male) critic. Crucially, Ballaster delineates the ground
over which the two media competed: the ability to create 'presence' - a
sense of being present with the moment of action, of finding 'being' in
fictional worlds - in the mind's eye of readers and theatregoers. In so
doing, she not only illuminates the shared history of the theatre and
the novel, but describes the power of aesthetic experience itself.
ROS BALLASTER is Professor of Eighteenth Century Studies in the Faculty
of English, University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. She
has written extensively on women's writing of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, in addition to investigating the effect of
oriental culture on literature of the Enlightenment.
