[In the essay below, Lamb discusses the works of Foote as they relate to Britain's emergence as a world power.]

For some time now it has been generally recognized that the relative neglect and conventional aesthetic and moral disapproval of the eighteenth-century London theater's most notorious figure, Samuel Foote, must give way to both formal and contextual re-evaluations. Much of the impetus behind this general call for re-evaluation lies in an appreciation of Foote's extraordinary success and popularity, for in his day he was as well-known and widely-discussed as David Garrick. Foote was the author of some thirty comedies and was a highly successful wit, actor, and theater manager.¹ To dismiss him for reasons moral (he should not have made fun of people) or aesthetic (he wrote farce; his farce is possibly sentimental; his farce is usually topical; his farce is badly plotted) would appear to miss the point. To dismiss as ill-considered the good (if sometimes outraged) opinion of contemporaries ranging from Samuel Johnson to the large numbers of anonymous and semi-anonymous admirers who patronized his plays at the theater and who read his plays in print seems arrogant. Foote must have been doing something interesting—if only we could work out what it was.

Though recognizing the limitations to the approach, most critics still attribute Foote's enormous popularity almost solely to his skill as a mimic, his opportunism, and the topical controversy some of his work provoked. The result has been an inordinate number of contributions to Foote scholarship which identify the objects of Foote's mimicry and satire. But during and following Foote's life his works received regular performances at Drury Lane and Covent Garden whether he performed in them or not,² while such plays as The Englishman Returned from Paris or The Liar, despite a paucity of satirical caricatures of real people, remained popular for decades both on the stage and in print.³ Furthermore, about half of the almost two hundred printings before 1800 of Foote's works, including almost twenty printings of the collected works, occurred following Foote's death in 1777.⁴ This number of printings over about fifty years is remarkable by any standard, and is particularly so by eighteenth-century standards. Topical controversy is by its nature shortlived and therefore would not account for the decades of popularity that many of Foote's works sustained, while the talent of Foote as actor would have limited, if any, relevance to those who read the plays in the privacy of the closet—and none to those who saw the plays cast without him. The enormous popularity of Foote's plays, in other words, did not solely inhere in the audience's love of mimicry and topical controversy as has been generally assumed in Foote criticism.

Much of the basis of Foote's popularity and his position in the culture of the third quarter of the eighteenth century still remains to be examined. In the more thorough or recent studies, critics have addressed formal issues such as whether or not Foote is sentimental;⁵ performance and more strictly theatrical issues such as the function (as opposed to the fact) of Foote's mimicry, his experimental staging, and his theater management;⁶ and, to a limited extent, how Foote's work fits into larger cultural trends.⁷ It is within this final line of inquiry that this essay falls. Though most of Foote's plays demonstrate a passing concern with the impact on national integrity of foreign influence, many of them engage the issue directly by exhibiting tourists, expatriates, or colonizers as central characters. The issues which these plays address make them part of the massive and particularly earnest cultural and political restructuring of Wales, England, and Scotland into a national community following the Jacobite uprising of 1745. The process of defining national identity and what is alien to it is a complicated, not entirely logical, and potentially explosive process. An English Catholic family in eighteenth-century Britain, no matter how ancient, was perceived to be composed of foreign “outlanders” (to use the contemporary term), and this perception found reflection in legal, property, educational, and other restrictions.⁸ In contrast, a Welsh person who spoke only Welsh (as was usual in those below the gentry level) was considered, and most often considered himself or herself, to be British.⁹ As a collectively maintained understanding, what is important in nationalism is not what is (on some mythically measurable scale) “really” alien or national but what is perceived to be alien or national.¹⁰

Several critics have noticed Foote's preoccupation with that which is foreign and have read him as an exemplary anti-French xenophobe or as an unthinking patriot.¹¹ His position, however, is significantly more sophisticated than it has been judged to be. For example, it is not the French, or foreigners, or even those with foreign-influenced behavior per se who are the object of Foote's attack, and in fact he goes to surprising lengths to avoid satirical portraits of foreigners. His Paris and his Calais are, somewhat surprisingly given their geographical location, almost French-free. Remarkably, considering Foote's reputation for opportunism, he refrains from attacking the French even in The Englishman Returned from Paris (1756), which opened on the eve of the Seven Years War when presumably any attack on the French would have been well-received propaganda. The absence of satirical portraits of foreign manners exhibited by foreigners is intentional. In The Englishman Returned, the play so historically well-situated for overtly xenophobic attacks, Lord John, the voice of reason, expostulates with Buck: “I may seem singular; but the customs of particular countries, I own, never appeared to me proper objects of ridicule” (I.148).¹² In an exchange between the character Foote (played of course by Foote himself) and two avid theater-goers, Smart and Canker, in the Introduction to The Minor (1760), the playwright re-articulates Lord John's point as a literal refusal to do something that would compromise the sophistication of his comedy:

CANKER:
Give us then a national portrait: a Scotchman or an Irishman.
FOOTE:
If you mean merely the dialect of the two countries, I cannot think it either a subject of satire or of humour [because it is “accidental”]. … Now, affectation I take to be the true comic object. … If … the blunders of a few peasants, or the partial principles of a single scoundrel, are to stand as characteristic marks of a whole country, your pride may produce a laugh, but … at the expense of your understanding.
CANKER:
Heydey, what a system is here! Laws for laughing! And pray, sage sir, instruct us when we may laugh with propriety?
FOOTE:
At an old beau, a superannuated beauty, a military coward, a stuttering orator, or a gouty dancer. In short, whoever affects to be what he is not, or strives to be what he cannot be, is an object worthy the poet's pen, and your mirth.

(II, 12-13)

Foote's formulation of the properly comic is, of course, closely related to Fielding, who remarks in his Preface to Joseph Andrews: “The only Source of the true Ridiculous … is Affectation.”¹³ “Affectation,” for Fielding, is rooted in hypocrisy or vanity, much as it is for Foote. Foote's formulation is noteworthy, however, for explicitly stating that the proper subjects for satire do not include “national portraits.” (“National” in this context refers to the distinguishable regions of Great Britain and Ireland, but his point is broadly applicable.)

Instead of foreigners, Foote specifically attacks Britons who have misappropriated foreign culture, and he typically sets them against other characters who have successfully appropriated the same foreign culture into a recognizably British identity. Those whom he attacks on the basis of their frenchification—e.g., Buck in The Englishman plays—do not represent the majority of Foote's French-educated characters even in the plays in which they appear. In The Englishman plays and A Trip to Calais, for instance, French-educated members of the British elite (Lord John, Colonel Crosby, Lucinda, and Miss Lydell) are presented as models of superior behavior. In fact, Lucinda (who has been called “the elaborate personification of English purity and integrity”¹⁴) and the upstanding Colonel Crosby, children of political exiles, had been reared in France and have only returned to Britain as adults.

Foote's nationalist concerns center on the form taken by foreign influence and on whether it can be recast as British. The British characters in his plays originate in diverse social groups and regions, as reflected in their dialects. But an Irishman such as O'Donnovan in The Capuchin (1776) is not a target because he is an Irishman or even because he is Catholic (and his portrait is certainly not an attack on French Catholicism). He is targeted because he has changed his name from Phelim O'Flam and turned Capuchin not out of a religious calling but because of a dislike for the useful labor perceived to be his role by birth and ethnic origin—and because he lost his job as a scandal monger in England. A limitation in Foote's practice of his comic theory should be noted in this context. He relies on ethnic prejudice for his portraits. For instance, even though O'Donnovan/O'Flam is not the target of satire because he is an Irishman, he is ridiculed for stereotyped Irish shortcomings. Foote's project does not include re-evaluating or undermining commonly held biases, though it does leave room for the less biased or better informed to see the satire of such characters as O'Donnovan/O'Flam as other than blanket satire of a particular group.

Nonetheless, for Foote a French person speaking with a French accent is not (properly) funny. An English person speaking with a French accent is amusing, however, because to do so is affected. The way such characters as O'Donnovan/O'Flam project themselves into the social sphere does not mirror their “real” place in a well-articulated social order. Foote thus targets elaborated refusals to perform the roles collectively assigned as “natural,” whether these be laborer or nationalist law-maker and whether they be dependent on age, gender, or national orientation. The comic for Foote, as for many of his contemporaries, is thus overtly regulatory, strengthening and further defining the performance roles of a well-articulated social reality by stigmatizing those who refuse their assigned social roles.

Foote's avoidance of satirical portraits of “foreigners” extends into his treatment of the colonies as a source of alien and destructive influence. Though colony-born characters were not unknown on the London stage, he favors British-born characters who have been negatively transformed by contact with the colonies and thereby have become serious threats to the landed society of the metropolis. The Nabob (1772), one of Foote's most famous plays, represents colonial culture as creating dangerously alienated Britons.¹⁵ Ignoring the extensive colonial booty acquired by successful European wars, Touchit explains the technique of imperial expansion to the Mayor as follows:

… why, here are a body of merchants that beg to be admitted as friends, and take possession of a small spot in a country, and carry on a beneficial commerce with the inoffensive and innocent people, to which they kindly give their consent.
MAY.:
Don't you think now, that is very civil of them?
TOU.:
Doubtless. Upon which, Mr. Mayor, we cunningly encroach, and fortify by little and by little, till at length, growing too strong for the natives, we turn them out of their lands, and take possession of their money and jewels.

(III, 213-14)

Because he had learned these colonizing techniques, Sir Matthew Mite presented a direct threat to an Indian colony, and he also is now a distinct threat to British landed interest and family organization. Mite the colonizer attempts to turn an ancient propertied family—the Oldhams—off their lands, has taken their money, and also attempts the possession of their daughter. In response to his scheme, the merchant Thomas Oldham exclaims: “This is an artful project: no wonder that so much contrivance and cunning has been an over-match for a plain English gentleman or an innocent Indian” (III, 192-93). Both the population of the metropolis and that of the colony become the colonized. The Mayor continues his explanatory conversation with Touchit:

MAY.:
And don't you think, Master Touchit, that is a little uncivil in us?
TOU.:
Oh, nothing at all: these people are but a little better than Tartars or Turks.
MAY.:
No, no, Master Touchit; just the reverse; it is they have caught the Tartars in us.

(III, 214)

The “tartar” in the British, which remains latent at home, flourishes among those “but a little better than Tartars or Turks.” Essential Britishness is transformed by the context. Sir Matthew complains that his “complexion has been tinged by the East” (III, 207)—a physical change mirroring the deeper changes which make him entertain such ideas as founding in London that un-British institution, a seraglio (III, 212). A fundamental transformation has been effected in Mite by his residence in the colonies.

Mite's scheme fails, though not because it is internally flawed or because he reforms. Foote inverts the usual eighteenth-century formula in which strange circumstance and temporarily aberrant behavior momentarily pervert the right order of things, and instead he prefers strange circumstance to abort disaster.¹⁶ The genre of comedy or farce requires a “happy” ending, so the playwright provides it, but without blunting his point. He produces a character who unexpectedly steps forth at the end to fix everything. The problem is not revealed to be minor, nor is there a misunderstanding that is easily explained. In portraits of colonizers such as Mite, Foote consistently destabilizes conceptions of an orderly division between imperial metropolis, colonizer, and colonized. They are not geographically, culturally, and socially separable, nor do they function in discrete hierarchical subordination.¹⁷

The contrast between Foote's choice of the colony-transformed and the most famous example from this period of a colony-born character who returns to England, Belcour in Cumberland's The West Indian (1771), throws into relief Foote's concerns in The Nabob. Though Belcour's parents are English, he has been transformed by his foreign birth and upbringing. As he laments: “Oh my curst tropical constitution! Would to heaven I had … never felt the blessed influence of the sun, so I had never burnt with these inflammatory passions! … why did I ever quit the soil in which I grew; what evil planet drew me from that warm sunny region, where naked nature walks without disguise, into this cold contriving artificial country” (V.x.6-16).¹⁸ By placing his character's birth in the colony, Cumberland displaces the problem of the change in “essential” ethnic characteristics provoked by colonial influence. Belcour is “naturally” the way he is because his essential nature has been formed in response to the physical characteristics of the place in which he was born and raised. (Cumberland shares here the common contemporary convictions about the determining nature of climate and topography.) Despite the confusion of identity caused by such an origin—Belcour is identified as the “Foreign gentleman” (I.v.1) by servants, but identifies himself as a “fellow subject, and a sharer in [the Londoners'] freedom” (I.v.49-51)—he is represented as absolutely honest, absolutely ruled by his emotions, and absolutely respectful of the man he understands to be his English merchant (really his father). His newly emergent identity is no threat to its parent identity.

While both playwrights respond to contemporary debates about the cultural, political, and economic impact of the colonies,¹⁹ Cumberland's play is an apology for imperialism. It naturalizes the political and cultural problems associated by contemporaries with the colonies within the structure of a conservative family comedy. The analogy between the unrefined Belcour and his attitude towards his merchant/father, on the one hand, and the raw-material producing colony and the merchant nation-fatherland on the other is well-articulated in the play. The son/colony has no intention of usurping the power or authority of the parent/imperial metropolis. Though Cumberland's son/colonist/colony is unusually open to misunderstanding, he bolsters and is subordinate to his parent/British identity like a good child was supposed to be to his or her father's. In contrast, Foote's The Nabob is an attack on imperialism as a threat to British familial, cultural, political, and economic integrity. It exposes as a fiction the orderly hierarchical flow of authority and power from imperial metropolis to colonizer to colonized. As in his other work, Foote refuses to neutralize the threat to national integrity presented by what can be learned or absorbed abroad. At the end of the play, Mite remains a non-reformable and potent threat.

The adopting of foreign speech and behavior patterns (unless they are re-created as essentially British) is not, for Foote, a harmlessly funny affectation. The loss of “natural” language, as in the case of Buck or Sir Matthew Mite, establishes a loss of “natural” identity and indicates monstrosity. As Lucinda angrily exclaims, Buck “hast lost [his] native language, and brought home none in exchange for it” (The Englishman Returned; I, 169). No longer willing or able to read English (I, 166), Buck's spoken language—a hybrid of French and English—reflects his negative transformation into something neither French nor British. Sir Matthew Mite is also identified by his language as alien to Britain. As Thomas assesses it, “His style is a little oriental … but most exceedingly clear.” His brother, Sir John, rejoins: “Yes to Cossim Ali-Khan, or Mier Jaffeir” (The Nabob, III, 191). Sir Matthew is no longer even categorizable in English—he is known by an Indian word, “nabob.” Mite's language, a cross between English and Indian, reflects an internal change. He has lost his native British nature without gaining a complete one in exchange, and is therefore identifiable as neither British nor Indian. Neither character's hybrid language has become incomprehensible (in fact its meaning is transparent), but it reflects their “unnaturalness.”

The potential creation of a monstrously hybridized elite as a side-effect of the institution of the grand tour was a commonly voiced fear after mid-century. The misanthrope Crab, arguing with Lord John, formulates this fear succinctly in The Englishman Returned: “but, how frequently are substituted for national prepossessions, always harmless, and often happy, guilty and unnatural prejudices!—Unnatural!—for the wretch who is weak and wicked enough to despise his country, sins against the most laudable law of nature; he is a traitor to the community where Providence has placed him; and should be denied those social benefits he has rendered himself unworthy to partake” (I, 154). A native—though perhaps naive and vulgar—national character could be in the course of a tour transformed into the guilty and unnatural traitor to national identity. Such overtly nationalist concerns were increasingly emphasized in the debate over the travels of ruling-class male minors (other tourists such as women and adult men provoked relatively little public commentary) as the century progressed.²⁰ Though to earlier travel advisors such an emphasis would have seemed peculiar, by the 1750's a tour's success had come to be judged by the nationalist gestures provoked in the young man by contact with alien cultures and by traditional tourist accomplishments such as languages, horsemanship, knowledge of antiquities, and the removal of provincial prejudice.²¹ As Lord John argues with Crab: “But do you think, sir, the shaking-off some native qualities, and the being made more sensible, from comparison, of certain national and constitutional advantages, objects unworthy the attention?” (I, 154). The exemplary tourist was now to return from the Continent more the British ideal of British than he was when he left. His love of his country, instead of being based on Crab's untravelled gentleman's “national prepossessions,” was to be carefully and knowledgeably articulated and based in a rational discrimination between alternatives. Because of the not ill-founded conviction that grand tourists were the future rulers of Britain, the addition of nationalist requirements to those of polite accomplishment produced strident public attacks on the institution of educational Continental touring as something that corrupted the native national purity of young men.

Crab's argument against such educational tours follows the newer nationalist line of attack when he complains of the “harmless” “national prepossessions” of the young male tourist giving way to “unnatural” allegiances. But Foote is being sly in Crab's speech—Crab attacks travel, not its misuse, and the rebuttal to his argument is in front of his and the audience's eyes. Lord John, an exemplary Grand Tourist, has returned appreciating his nation and will marry Lucinda, who is represented as an ideal national despite (and perhaps because of) her youth in France. Lord John and Lucinda, like Colonel Crosby and Miss Lydell (by far the most upstanding characters in A Trip to Calais), are represented as cosmopolitans who would be acceptable to either French or British society but who by knowledgeable choice prefer British ways and culture. The prolonged exposure of all four to the Continent is paradoxically necessary to the superior form of Britishness which these characters embody. Foote therefore is not satirizing the effects of touring or residence on the Continent in themselves or even foreign influence in itself.

The foppish and frenchified Buck provides an example of the unnatural “traitor” which Crab attacks. Unlike Lord John or Colonel Crosby, Buck in his response to the Continent has made himself as out of place in France as he is in England:

BUCK:
… had not I had the misfortune to be born in this curst country, I make no doubt but you would have seen my name among the foremost of the French academy.
CRAB:
I should think you might easily get over that difficulty, if you will be but so obliging as publicly to renounce us. I dare engage not one of your countrymen would contradict, or claim you.
BUCK:
No! Impossible. From the barbarity of my education, I must ever be taken for un Anglois.
CRAB:
Never.
BUCK:
En verité?
CRAB:
En verité.
BUCK:
You flatter me.
CRAB:
But common justice.
MAC.:
Nay, maister Crab is in the right, for I have often heard the French themselves say, is it possible that gentleman can be British?

(The Englishman Returned; I, 165)

The joke here is, of course, that Buck wants very much to be taken to be French, and as a result he is blind to the possibility that he has obliterated all ties to any national identity. MacRuthen does not say that the French recognize Buck as French but that they feel he may not be British. Having sinned against one “laudable law of nature” by ignoring the will of Providence in rejecting his British identity, he will also be willing to transgress all other “natural” laws. As Lucinda indignantly asserts when Buck slights his father's dying wish: “Can he who breaks through one sacred relation regard another? Can the monster who is corrupt enough to contemn the place of his birth, reverence those who gave him being?” (I, 167-68). Crab and Lucinda argue that once national identity, which for them is the foundation of all other loyalties, dissolves, the entire structure disintegrates into horrifyingly “unnatural” amorality.

Though xenophobic members of Foote's audience might have identified Buck, who partially assumes the familiar shape of the stereotypical Frenchman, to be a reassuringly anti-French portrait, more sophisticated or traveled members of the audience could have recognized in him an example of cultural misappropriation. The French are not the problem in Foote's world but rather fools such as Buck, whose monstrous persona is not a comic mask to be dropped at any time. This aspect is one of the most significant differences between the sequels to The Englishman in Paris, one written by Foote and the other by Arthur Murphy.²² In Murphy's treatment a frenchified Jack Broughton throws off French manners and costume as soon as they become a liability. As he reasons, “why as my French Manners are all mere Affectation and as it will be much harder for me to keep it up I don't know whether I had not better own the truth.” His servant Roger replies: “You had, indeed Master, and be a brave Englishman as you was before.”²³ Broughton's Frenchness is an amusing costume which can be instantly discarded to reveal his “true” English identity. In contrast, when Foote collapses explicitly “foreign” and “native” identities he usually creates a grotesque and “unnatural” final product like Buck, not an easily removable mask.

The Minor (1761), however, is an exception to Foote's usual practice, for it shows similarities to Murphy's treatment of the impact of foreign influence on the young and soon-to-be powerful.²⁴ In the play, George Wealthy's father and uncle worry over the foreign vices George might have acquired in four years in Germany and proceed to test him. George is not a Buck, and in fact his foreign-influenced vices are only expensively constructed fictions. As he explains to Loader, who has expressed surprise that he would pay an opera girl to be his mistress and yet perhaps never see her, “This is an elegant refinement, unknown to the gross voluptuaries in this part of the world … 'Tis for the vulgar only to enjoy what they possess: the distinction of ranks and conditions are, to have hounds and never hunt; cooks and dine at taverns; houses you never inhabit; mistresses you never enjoy—” (II, 32). With the opera-girl reference, George's “foreign” libertinism is established as a reassuringly fictional persona as soon as the audience encounters it. George is solidly British, even though he has affected foreign vices and spending-habits—presumably to the great amusement of the audience. Since his libertinism is a fiction, his “reformation” at the end—when he refuses to victimize the woman later revealed to be his cousin Lucy—is simply a reformation of ridiculous spending habits, not of libertine behavior. The fears of George's father and uncle that his national identity has been negatively transformed by prolonged exposure to foreign culture are misplaced. As with Murphy's Broughton, the “foreign” is a mask easily discarded, though, unlike Murphy's treatment of the issue, the fact that it is a mask is established immediately. George's “foreignness” never has the status of being potentially “real.” I suspect that Foote was trying to show German influence to be non-threatening to essential Britishness. After all, his main character's given name is also that of the Hanoverian King, and it is through Germany, not France, that he has traveled. A threat to national identity, therefore, is not the issue in The Minor (though concern with the threat is), while, in contrast, it should be clear that the danger posed by the alien-native is the issue Murphy's treatment raises and ultimately avoids.

Foot's consistent concern with foreign influence is particularly illuminated in his engagement with Louis de Boissy's Le Français à Londres (1727). In the playbills of the day, An Englishman in Paris is advertised as “An Answer to a French Farce, called the Frenchman in London.” Boissy's play had been a standard on the French stage since the summer of 1727. It was extremely popular, playing twenty-four times in its first season and 211 times in the next sixty-three years.²⁵ Thus it was familiar to many British tourists, including Foote, who had virtually disappeared into France for the four years preceding his return to London in 1752—a disappearance that occasioned titillating rumors of his death there by hanging.²⁶ The relationship between the two plays was reasserted in 1755 when Le Français à Londres appeared in an anonymous translation prefaced by a letter to Foote which prophesied that the these dramas would be compared as products of France and of England.²⁷ Foote's 1756 sequel makes both direct and indirect internal references to Boissy's play.

The Englishman in Paris is nevertheless not so much the “answer” to Boissy's play that the playbills advertised as it is a sequel. In Boissy's play, the English Lord Hussay, who has been the foppish French Marquis' acolyte, exits asserting that he will “embark for France to learn Politeness” (p. 49). Buck, a Lord Hussay-type character, has been sent to France to wean him from bad company and habits. There he is the dupe of Mr. and Mrs. Subtle, the British expatriates who rent lodgings to him in Paris and who try to seduce him into marrying their ward Lucinda, whom they have previously stripped of her inheritance. Lord Hussay the spineless fool in England is Buck the duped fool in France. The disaster occasioned by sending a fool abroad is avoided almost accidentally. If Buck the fool would be a bad husband for Lucinda the virtuous victim, and if Lucinda is absolutely dependent upon the predatory Mr. and Mrs. Subtle, the only solution Foote presents is Buck's father's unexpected arrival, whereupon he recognizes Lucinda as his old friend Worthy's lost daughter and also understands Buck's unworthiness to marry her. As in The Nabob, Foote refuses to neutralize the problem he addresses by making it easily overcome on its own terms—e.g., by having Buck become a reformed person under Lucinda's influence. The ending, leaving the nexus of issues around Buck the fool just as problematic, averts the potential disaster arising from Buck's character and social position by a set of freak occurrences.

Unlike The Englishman in Paris, Foote's sequel, The Englishman Returned from Paris, really is a direct response to Boissy's play. Foote extensively alludes to Scene x of Boissy's play in a scene in which Crab, having the frenchified fop Buck take a turn around the room, suggests that he would make good money as a freak-show exhibit. In Boissy's play the English Jack Roastbeef observes the French Marquis as he would a freak-show curiosity; he has the Marquis take a turn around the room and expresses a desire, which is fulfilled, that he will say ridiculous things. In The Englishman Returned, Buck himself underlines Foote's allusion to this scene when he identifies Crab as “The … veritable Jack Rosbif of the French comedy” (I, 147).

In Boissy's play both Roastbeef and the Marquis are ridiculed and unsympathetic. In contrast, the audience is clearly meant by Foote to identify with Crab, the Jack Roastbeef character, especially when he ridicules Buck. While both Roastbeef and Crab are impolite, set in their ways, and untraveled, the latter is presented as a benevolent, sooth-saying, and basically likeable misanthrope of the type later so memorably incarnated in Smollett's Matthew Bramble. On the other hand, the repulsive Jack Roastbeef is shown to be an unfit potential husband for Eliante not because he is a misanthrope but because he is so “Silent, awkward and unmannerly” that she will necessarily be more lonely and neglected than she had been with her first English husband (pp. 13-14). As her father says to Roastbeef, “you have at the Bottom good Sense enough, but you too much neglect Politeness [apparently a French characteristic]; and Politeness … is very necessary to render a married Life happy, since it consists … in that mutual Attention and Civility which will not fail to give the greatest Pleasure to both Parties” (pp. 48-49).

The Marquis, who in Boissy's play represents an equally unacceptable extreme, is an entirely social animal. He is all air and dissemblance with absolutely no substance or sense. Therefore he too is disqualified as a potential husband by Eliante's father: “Monsieur le Marquis, you are an extremely pretty Gentleman. … But you set too little Value upon Reason [apparently an English characteristic]; and Reason is a Thing for which there is great Use in such a State as Marriage” (p. 48). Unlike Buck, the Marquis is not a danger to society—in fact, he is depicted as irrelevant to it. Boissy's Eliante will marry the Baron, who, as a Frenchman who has spent three years in London, combines French politeness and sensitivity with good English sense. The French playwright's explicit point is that the national characteristics of France and England combine to make the ideal. His play ends with an exchange between the Baron and Eliante's father that makes this agenda indisputable:

BARON:
You have shewn me, my Lord, that no Character is superior to that of a polite Englishman.
LD Craff:
And, Baron, you have taught me, that none approaches to a Frenchman who has good Sense.

(p. 50)

What follows the final scene of the play, presumably, is the ideal marriage between a Frenchman and an Englishwoman.

It is not that Boissy's political context has made him a herald of anglomania while Foote's makes him a proponent of anti-French xenophobia, as Berveiller argues. Boissy's play has characters who are French or English in origin. Foote, as noted above, avoids representing characters who are not from the British Isles—a difference in approach that reflects the playwrights' agendas. Boissy argues for an undifferentiated international elite who combine the best of all nations but are beholden to none for all of their essential characteristics, while Foote asks for a clear distinction between the British and the non-British. In Boissy's play the explicit transformation of national characteristics in the Baron through foreign influence does not result in the monstrous because in his conception French and English national characters require the corrective of one another. Foote's paragon Lord John, in contrast, is identified by a xenophobic Crab as essentially English with no trace of the suspiciously foreign (though his status as a recently returned Grand Tourist qualifies such an identification). Buck, undoubtedly to the audience's amusement, also backhandedly recognizes Lord John as essentially English. He asks Lucinda: “But don't you think [Lord John] has something of a foreign kind of air about him?”

LUC.:
Foreign!
BUCK:
Aye, something so English in his manner.
LUC.:
Foreign and English! I do not comprehend you.
BUCK:
Why, that is, he has not the ease, the je na scai quoi, the bon ton—In a word, he does not resemble me, now.
LUC.:
Not in the least.

(The Englishman Returned; I, 166)

The joke here hinges on the differences between the way Buck and Lord John have responded to their exposure to foreign cultures. Lord John is “Foreign and English” but not in a way that resembles Buck, who has appropriated the more bizarre French fashions and a smattering of French words and phrases alone. Unlike Buck, Lord John has successfully appropriated the good elements of the foreign cultures he has toured. Implicitly, he has used cultural appropriation further to refine his Britishness. It has refined him into the ideal Englishman. His success is measured by how little Buck understands his identity and how instantly recognizable it is to Lucinda and Crab.

Though the best of the English and the French are implicitly combined in Lord John, in Foote the explicit combination of French and English has been transferred from Boissy's idealized Baron to Buck the freak. Buck is an unacceptable partner for Lucinda not because he lacks reason but because he has so adulterated his national identity that Lord John has become a “foreigner” to him. Boissy addresses foolish imitation of the foreign—i.e., in Lord Hussay's imitation of the Marquis' foppish French ways—but as ridiculous and ill-judged, not as a potential national threat. Though both playwrights are concerned with what they identify as the “foreign,” Boissy argues for a blurring of national cultural boundaries, at least among the elite, Foote for highly-articulated definition.

Unlike characters such as Buck or Sir George Wealthy who affect the foreign, British nationals who have done things unacceptable to the larger community or who have unacceptable characters are represented by Foote as “belonging” to the periphery or, more specifically, to the twilight world of Calais or even Paris. A Trip to Calais begins with a sailor, Kit Cable, who advises Jenny Minnikin and Dicky Drugget: “Harkee, messmate! look about! you had better bring-to in this creek: here you will find the best moorings. The Hotel d'Angleterre they calls it in French; but you'll find the names of things plaguily transmogrified all along this coast” (III, 383). Kit's reference to “transmogrification” invites the audience to notice the transformations of the language and (by extension) of the people who would live in such a “transmogrified” England. The Hotel d'Angleterre is a translated Hotel of England whose patrons are alienated British. Since most of the popular Calais hotels were referred to interchangeably by equivalent English or French names, Foote's choice of the one hotel whose name refers so explicitly to England but was rarely translated into English is significant. It is simultaneously and ridiculously both English and French. The hotel's name in translation serves to underline the shift in the essential nature of its patrons. Calais, like its hotel, is a place in between—it is not French, not English. At the end of A Trip to Calais, Luke Lappelle, a Frenchified tailor, comments to Colonel Crosby, the son of an exiled Jacobite who, though born and raised in France, is returning with great joy to England:

I wonder that you, who have resided so long in France, can bear the thoughts of living at London.
COL.:
It is that very circumstance that will give it an additional relish: and believe this, Master Lappelle, as a truth, no man ever yet deserted his country, unless he had previously been by that country deserted.
LAP.:
Commong [sic] can that be? permitte moi [sic] to laugh, as they say: you see how this town is crouded [sic] with Anglois.

(III, 448)

The “Anglois” are indeed translated English. Calais and France belong to those who do not participate in the national community in communally acceptable ways. Father O'Donnovan is there because he has lost his job and dislikes labor (III, 407-08), and his catalogue of British expatriates at Calais is a rogues' gallery. They are wanted for such crimes as forgery, “crim. con.” (i.e., for adultery damages levied against a wife's lover), and bigamy (III, 411ff), or they are the English Catholic nuns at Calais (a popular tourist attraction). Of the on-stage characters, Jenny Minnikin and Dicky Drugget have eloped to the Continent, for only there (other than Gretna Green) was it widely known to be easy to marry without parental consent, while Luke Lappelle and Gregory Gingham are present to steal the French fashions and to smuggle French fabrics back to England. Most of the remaining characters are in pursuit of Jenny Minnikin or are unwillingly retained by Lady Kitty Crocodile. Similarly, in The Englishman in Paris, Foote's Paris is filled with criminal (Mr. and Mrs. Subtle) and hypocritical or affected (the barbers, tailors, etc.) British expatriates. Socially peripheral or undesirable practices are not labeled as foreign in origin, but they are identified in these plays as belonging elsewhere.

Such figures as Buck or Sir Matthew Mite would be rare among Foote's contemporaries but not primarily because of their behavior. Buck has the enormous income for 1756 of £10,000 per year; Sir Matthew is fabulously wealthy. However, even if they only exist in the imagination, characters of this type can have enormous symbolic consequence to a culture. In an oft-quoted section of their The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and A. White comment: “The social ‘other’ of the marginal and of low cultures is despised and reviled in the official discourse of the dominant culture and central power while at the same time being constitutive of the imaginary and emotional repertoires of that dominant culture.”²⁸ Forms of elite behavior, especially when they are imagined to be “foreign,” have exactly that status of being both reviled and constitutive that Stallybrass and White address. Characters such as Buck or Sir Matthew Mite have a startling symbolic centrality as Other for Foote's and—given these plays' popularity—the audience's active construction of both a nationalist elite and an emotionally charged national identity. The actual percentage of such characters in the population is irrelevant to their importance in the collective imagination—and even to their importance in decisions concerning the colonies or the education and employment of one's children.

Over the body of his work, Foote naturalizes certain things (French plays, French education) of “foreign” origin by recasting them as British, while he depicts criminal or socially unacceptable behavior as a “foreign” (most often French or colonial) adulteration of essential national identity. In Foote's imagination two contemporary debates crystallized national identity and defined what was alien to it. One debate centered on the domestic impact of Britain's imperialism. The second debate concerned whether and how male minors should encounter the “foreign” in a lengthy European tour. Plays such as The Englishman plays (1753, 1756), The Minor (1760), The Nabob (1772), A Trip to Calais (1775), and The Capuchin (1776) are extensive treatments of such issues, though most of Foote's dramas betray the same concern in passing.

Foote's plays are intimately bound up in the contemporary collective re-imagining of national identity. Perhaps part of the reason that Foote became so unfashionable in the nineteenth-century was the solidification of attitudes towards imperialism and nationalism. Suggestions of the mutable and contingent nature of national identity or of the deleterious impact on British identity of tourism and imperial expansion, so common in Foote's plays, would have seemed false by the late 1830's.²⁹ Perhaps with the recent interest in the formation, characteristics, and dynamics of nationalism and imperialism, Foote's satire can be once again appreciated for what it is—a sophisticated, experimental, and intelligent engagement with the stresses and changes in his culture. Foote himself, it should be added in closing, was not above making fun of his and his contemporaries' concern with the purity of national identity—or of the vegetable and climate metaphors so common in contemporary explanations of cultural and national difference. In his introduction to his Primitive Puppet-Shew (1773), Foote assures his audience:

As a proof too, gentlemen, that we possess that first of the social virtues, the love of our country, no foreigners can be received on our stage: all our actors are the produce of England, we have not ran-sacked Europe for expensive exoticks; this is their native country, the soil from which all of them sprung. To their various families you are none of you strangers. We have modern patriots made from the box, it is a wood that carries an imposing gloss, and may be easily turned: for constant lovers, we have the circling ivy, crab-stocks for old maids. …³⁰

Notes

1. See Mary Megie Belden, The Dramatic Work of Samuel Foote, Yale Studies in English, 80 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1929); Elizabeth N. Chatten, Samuel Foote (Boston: Twayne, 1980); Percy H. Fitzgerald, Samuel Foote: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1910); and Simon Trefman, Sam. Foote, Comedian, 1720-1777 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971). For a short biography and bibliography of Foote, see Douglas Howard, “Samuel Foote,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, 3rd series, ed. Paula R. Backsheider, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 89 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989), pp. 127-47. I am grateful to Brian Corman and Carrie Hintz for their suggestions during my revision of this article.

2. For instance, Foote played the role of Buck in The Englishman in Paris in its first two seasons and rarely took the role afterwards, though the piece itself was performed regularly for the next two decades (Howard, “Samuel Foote,” p. 135). This was not an isolated case. For other examples see The London Stage, 1600-1800, Pt. 4: 1747-1776, ed. George Winchester Stone, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), and Pt. 5: 1776-1800, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1968).

3. The Englishman returned from Paris (1756) played on the London stage until at least 1770; The Liar (1762) received regular performances until 1780, but was staged as late as 1896 in London. For a convenient table of performances of Foote's plays, see Belden, The Dramatic Works, pp. 194-95; for more complete listing, see The London Stage, Pts. 4-5. Both plays were regularly reprinted in the eighteenth century.

4. Data compiled from the ESTC on CD ROM (London: British Library Board, 1992).

5. In The Laughing Tradition: Stage Comedy in Garrick's Day (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 149-74, Richard Bevis argues against the dismissal of Foote as a sentimental writer by earlier critics (e.g., Robert V. Wharton “The Divided Sensibility of Samuel Foote,” Educational Theatre Journal, 17 [1965], 31-37) and makes a case for seeing his comedy as Aristophanic. Others have addressed the question of genre—i.e., whether Foote wrote comedies or farces; see, for example, Chatten, Samuel Foote, pp. 27-32.

6. For the observation that Foote was an ironic satirist who used topical satire and mimicry to attack the broader sensibilities of his audience, see Terence M. Freeman, “Best Foote Forward,” Studies in English Literature, 29 (1989), 563-78. Foote's creation and use of a public persona, his use of publicity, and a reconstruction of the performances of The Minor and A Devil Upon Two Sticks are treated by Charles Philip Carusi, “Scandal and Grimace: Personality and Mimicry in the Performances of Samuel Foote,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss. (Tufts Univ., 1979). A study of Foote as a theater manager is provided by Douglas J. Nigh, “Lesser Luminaries: Samuel Foote and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, from 1766 Through 1777,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of California-Los Angeles, 1971).

7. See Robert V. Wharton, “Satire and Panegyric in the Plays of Samuel Foote,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss. (Columbia Univ., 1954]), passim; Trefman, Sam. Foote, passim; and Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740-1830 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp. 71-73, who reads Foote's plays as nationalist attacks on a frenchified elite as part of his study of English nationalism, which he sees as defining itself through anti-gallicism. For anti-gallic sentiment in the context of nationalism, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1737 (1992; rpt. London: Pimlico, 1994), pp. 87-98.

8. This discussion is indebted to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 1991), who defines the nation as an “imaginary political community” (p. 6); Liah Greenfeld, “The Emergence of Nationalism in England and France,” Research in Political Sociology, 5 (1991), 333-70, and Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), who connects nationalism to internally held perceptions; Colley, Britons, and Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, who trace nationalism to a confrontation with foreign Other(s). Colley explores simultaneous loyalties and thoroughly documents eighteenth-century British nationalism. Finally, for general historical background, see the dated but still useful article by Hans Kohn, “The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 69-94.

9. See Colley, Britons, esp. p. 19 and more generally her chapter “Protestants,” pp. 11-54.

10. See ibid., pp. 13-14.

11. See especially Wharton, “Satire and Panegyric,” pp. 148-228 and passim, for the argument that Foote was an unsophisticated xenophobe who hated foreign travel; this interpretation is echoed elsewhere, particularly in Newman's reading of Foote's tourist plays and in Michel Berveiller's argument (“Anglais et Français de Comedie chez Louis de Boissy et Samuel Foote,” Comparative Literature Studies, 2 [1965], 259-69) that these plays, reflecting a xenophobic political climate, flattered the xenophobia of his audience.

12. All quotations from the plays are from The Works of Samuel Foote, esq. With Remarks on each Play and an Essay on the Life, Genius and Writings of the Author, ed. John Bee (pseud. of John Badcock) (London, 1830), 3 vols. Volume and page numbers are given parenthetically in my text. With the exception of A Trip to Calais, which was complete by midsummer 1775 but never performed, the dates given are first performance dates.

13. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 7.

14. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, p. 71.

15. Foote makes many references to colonials, but with the notable exception of The Nabob they are very brief. For example, in A Trip to Calais (1775) Lady Kitty Crocodile alludes to events in the American colonies when she calls Jenny Minnikin, a headstrong young woman who has rebelled against her parents and is seeking aid in France, “my little American” (Foote, The Works, III, 444).

16. This inversion is not unusual in Foote's work; for another example, see my discussion of The Englishman Returned from Paris, below.

17. Other characters in Foote's plays also have been negatively transformed by colonial contact. Mrs. Fleece'em in The Cozeners (1774) threatens family and land when she attempts to cozen the propertied Aircastles out of money from an unwisely sold farm. Though she had been transported to the colonies as a thief, it was her stay in Boston which honed her cozening skills (III, 307-08). Neither Mite nor Fleece'em ever show signs of reformation. Foote thus constitutes such characters as potent threats.

18. Richard Cumberland, The West Indian, quoted for convenience from British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, ed. George H. Nettleton and Arthur E. Case, rev. ed. by George Winchester Stone, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969).

19. As Robert Livingston Schuyler notes, “doubts were [being] cast on the efficacy of the legal restrictions upon which mercantilism relied for the attainment of its objects … [and] the right of the mother country to rule colonial dependencies was [being] questioned … [while] above all, the fundamental assumptions and conclusions of the mercantile system itself [were being] challenged” (“The Rise of Anti-Imperialism in England,” Political Science Quarterly, 37 [1922], 440). Though dated, Schuyler's article is still the most thorough account of anti-imperialism before the 1830's. For an account of the impact of Britain's new Asian and African colonies on the metropolis, see Colley, Britons, esp. pp. 101-45.

20. See George C. Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman: Theories of Gentlemanly Education In England, 1660-1775 (New Haven: College and University Press, 1959), pp. 156-92, esp. 178-89; for a popular contemporary formulation of the attack, see Richard Hurd, Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel; Considered as a Part of An English Gentleman's Education: Between Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Locke (London, 1764). For a recent historical survey of such matters as itinerary and diet, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), and for descriptions of tours performed in France, see Constantia Maxwell, The English Traveller in France, 1698-1815 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1931). There are no substantial studies addressing the cultural and political significance of touring for domestic English culture in this period, though there are two useful studies for the period preceding (John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667: Their Influence in English Society and Politics, rev. ed. [New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1989], and David R. Evans, “The Literature of European Travel and the Question of Authority 1640-1714,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss. [Univ. of Virginia, 1994]) and one for the period following (James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture” 1800-1918 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993]). A short but wide-ranging account is also provided by Jeremy Black, “Tourism and Cultural Challenge: The Changing Scene of the Eighteenth Century,” in English Literature and the Wider World, I: All Before Them: Attitudes to Abroad in English Literature 1660-1780, ed. John McVeagh (London: Ashfield Press, 1990), pp. 185-202.

21. See especially John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, passim. For earlier justifications of the position of the ruling elite and the earlier stage representations of “bad travellers” such as Lord Foppington as attacks on newly-powerful and newly-moneyed classes, see Evans, “The Literature of European Travel,” passim. Unlike the earlier examples of “bad travellers” Evans addresses, Buck is not meant as an attack on upward social mobility, for he is by birth a wealthy member of a well-established propertied class. Foote is interested in national, not class, integrity.

22. The sequel by Foote was staged 3 February 1756 at Covent Garden; it was a huge success and ran nineteen times that season. Murphy's sequel followed on 3 April 1756 and played one night; see Arthur Murphy, The Englishman from Paris, ed. Simon Trefman, Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles: University of California, 1969), pp. i-vii, for a detailed account of the interchange between Foote and Murphy and for the history of Murphy's play. For years Foote was charged with plagiarism by Murphy and others who had never seen Murphy's play, but, as Trefman notes, “the charge was not strictly true” (ibid., p. ii).

23. Ibid., p. 30.

24. Most readings of The Minor give detailed accounts of Foote's treatment of Methodism in the play and of the spectacular contemporary reaction. There is no need to rehearse the details of the controversy provoked by the play here. For a thorough account, see Belden, The Dramatic Work, pp. 85-106.

25. Berveiller, “Anglais et Français de Comedie chez Louis de Boissy et Samuel Foote,” p. 260.

26. See Foote, The Works, I, lxxxvi, for Garrick's Prologue, to be spoken by Foote at the play's 1754 Drury Lane performance, and Badcock's account of the rumors (ibid., I, lxxxv-lxxxvi). Since Foote was known off-stage for exactly that French-influenced foppish attire of which Buck is stripped in the play's sequel (see William Cooke, Memoirs of Samuel Foote, Esq. [London, 1805], II, 6), and since his recent and extended absence in France is insisted upon in Garrick's Prologue, the playwright may have been providing a send-up of himself in this stage character. Foote was certainly capable of it.

27. Louis de Boissy, The Frenchman in London. A comedy. From the French of Monsieur de Boissy (London, 1755), pp. iii-v. All quotations in my text are from this anonymous translation.

28. P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 5.

29. The Minor was occasionally performed throughout the nineteenth century. Very likely the well-marked division between George's essential Britishness and his foreign affectation is one of the reasons that this play survived the solidification in British attitudes towards the foreign by the 1830's. For accounts of this development, see Colley, Britons, passim, and Schuyler, “The Rise of Anti-Imperialism,” pp. 440-71.

30. Samuel Foote's Primitive Puppet-Shew Featuring Piety in Pattens, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Robert Gale Noyes, Theatre Survey, 14, No. 1a (Fall 1973), 19.