The Drama of Elections: Election Plays in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract This article breaks new literary and historical ground by recovering a rich but forgotten dramatic genre, and its literary and political significance: the eighteenth-century election play. It examines a range of plays which took contemporary elections as a key dramatic subject and setting—including a previously unexplored manuscript work which engages with the culture and politics of Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe—and argues that these plays open new perspectives on the period’s literature and politics, and the vital exchanges between them. Elections fuelled dramatic creativity and culture. Popular politics afforded profitable themes and occasions for comedy, satire, and heroic representations, supplying characters, settings, plots, and spectacle. Such plays, in turn, energized political culture. Election plays were circulated and performed not only when and where elections took place, and, although subject to forms of censorship, they encouraged active political engagement across the social spectrum and across the country in terms of their authors, audiences, and performers. Engaging with popular dramatic forms as well as popular politics, these plays popularized different perspectives, shaped by particular performances and conventions. They contributed to the conceptualization and commercialization of politics, fuelling a market for entertaining representations of the ‘humours’ of elections and a culture in which contested elections were seen as a key aspect of life and debate. At a time when the right—and opportunity—to vote for MPs was highly restricted, election plays both reflected, and helped to fuel and shape, an adversarial, far-reaching culture of elections and electioneering.