8 - Napoleonic Gothic

Summary

St. Helena’s theatrical culture after 1770 reflects South Atlantic links with slavery, revolution and theater, soon to be reanimated by the arrival and residence of defeated emperor Napoleon in 1815. A transhemispheric crossroads where the British worlds of the north and south, east and west literally converged, the island’s theatrical and social life provides a finale to this study’s examination of theater and performance in the British empire. Three specific performances – one in Richmond, London, of St. Helena, or the Isle of Love (1776), and two in St. Helena, The Revenge in 1817 (to which Napoleon was invited) and Inkle and Yarcio in 1822, after the island-wide agreement ot abolish slavery, demonstrated the systemic nature of empire, the fictions of race that it perpetrated and the performativies of human difference that undermined its structures. The Saints were transucltural players in a wider, violent and acquistitive imperial drama, performers of a hybrid and syncretic Englishness that acknowledged its diverse sources.