In the November 29, 1711, edition of The Spectator, Joseph Addison imagines an unusual theatre-goer: a manual laborer who is also an expert critic. This talk explores what this imaginary figure might reveal about the relationships between the theatre, the colonial relation, and bourgeois life and leisure, and their implications for the writing of theatre and performance history.

Nicholas Ridout is Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Michigan 2013), Theatre & Ethics (Palgrave 2009), and Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge 2006). He co-edited, with Joe Kelleher, Contemporary Theatres in Europe (Routledge 2006) and was the author, with Joe Kelleher and members of the company, of The Theatre of Sociètas Raffaello Sanzio (Routledge 2009). In 2016-17 he is the Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, where he is working on a new project about theatre, consumption, and the colonial relation, entitled Scenes from Bourgeois Life.

Part of the Performance Studies Research Group, a crossdisciplinary research cluster of the Simpson Center for the Humanities, organized by Scott Magelssen (Theater History).