Introduction: Dramatizing Enlightenment

Summary

The introduction provides a survey of recent scholarship on the English Enlightenment and situates this study in that context. Recognizing that there a plethora of “Enlightenments,” even within a particular state such as Britain, itself a composite monarchy of nations, I argue that late Stuart and Georgian drama included articulations of radical as well as conservative Enlightened positions, notably in regard to religious toleration, imperial oppression and social hierarchy. I link my analysis of Islamic and indigenous American voices within eighteenth-century plays to recent scholarship that identifies European dependence on non-European literary, theological and technological sources in the creation of Enlightenment.