• "Art against art":Sentimentality, Mid-Century Drama, and the North American Crises
• Denys Van Renen (bio)

In this essay, I examine two English comedies that appeared in the context of North American crises. The first is a little-studied play, The Jealous Wife (1761), written by George Colman the Elder and staged during the Seven Years' War (1756–63); and the second is a minor drama of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Camp: A Musical Entertainment, first performed on October 15, 1778, in the midst of heighted tensions in Europe over the American Revolution. Each play represents how the habits and behaviors of military life seep into English society. While The Jealous Wife charts the looming influence of the military on cultural institutions and social structures, Sheridan's entertainment observes how various niche artforms compete with the extravagant pageantry of military exercises on British soil. These two plays are significant in eighteenth-century drama because they try to reckon with military conflicts that will forever change the texture of British life at home and abroad.¹

As these two plays struggle for relevance, they serve as remarkable testaments to art as the characters articulate distinct subjectivities amid the onslaught and pressures of war's homogenizing effects. The Jealous Wife centers on the domestic quarrels of the Oaklys, and the subplot features the momentarily thwarted marriage between Oakly's nephew and the heiress of a country fortune. These tensions are exacerbated by the meddling of Oakly's brother, a major in the British army. Sheridan's play focuses on the quotidian aspects of military life. The Camp, as its name suggests, responds to the absolute sensation of the camp at Coxheath, for the British would arrive in droves at the settlement to ogle at the military's exercises. Like Aphra Behn before him, Sheridan eyes warily the rival "entertainments" of the state that attract an audience that would otherwise populate the theatre. [End Page 51]

Art simultaneously accesses the spaces and temporalities of the war efforts and provides a separate realm from the naturalization of the military as organizing British identity. In the Prologue, Sheridan foregrounds the theatre's canny, if obligatory, promotion of the British military that appropriates all of "Fashion's Forms":

The Stage is still the Mirror of the Day,Where Fashion's Forms in bright Succession play;True to its End, what Image can it yieldIn Times like these, but the embattled Field?²

Through his acknowledgement that the war is everywhere—"what image can [the stage] yield / In Times like these"?—he tries to grapple with what Timothy Morton would term a hyperobject, an entity too large to conceptualize. While Morton observes that hyperobjects occupy a space that renders them "invisible to humans for long stretches of time," he states how they "exhibit their effects interobjectively [or] can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects." In other words, it is unknown as a distinct quantity and known through its properties as "hyper relative" to other things.³ Even as the military swells and escalates its presence across the globe and different spheres of life—public and private—the stage furnishes the aesthetics—"Fashion's Forms"—that allow the audience to scale vast temporalities ("in bright Succession play") and a set of coordinates ("the embattled field") that cuts across military and domestic life.

Colman and Sheridan, in fact, present multiple artforms that enable the characters to regain ontological security and creative control. In his entertainment, Sheridan depicts an enormous spectrum of art—visual, theatrical, musical, acoustic, decorative sewing and textiles, cosmetic, landscape, pastoral—whose practitioners descend on and take as their subject the camp. On the one hand, as Cecil Price explains, Sheridan offers the British public "scenic tricks and illusions . . . when literary invention was a standstill, and wit and wisdom were busy elsewhere" (711). In other words, the playhouse conceded to the vast mobilization of material, economic, and cultural resources to fight Britain's wars in the Americas and protect the country from its Continental rivals. On the other hand, Sheridan emphasizes that literary and other artists' inventions [End Page 52] continue ("still"), thereby not only illuminating "the embattled...

• “反对艺术的艺术”：感伤，中世纪戏剧和北美危机
• 丹尼斯·范雷恩（生物）

在本文中，我研究了在北美危机中出现的两部英语喜剧。第一部是研究较少的戏剧，《嫉妒的妻子》（The嫉妒的妻子，1761年），由老乔治·科尔曼（George Colman）撰写，并在七年战争（1756-63年）上演。第二部是理查德·布林斯利·谢里丹（Richard Brinsley Sheridan）的次要戏曲《营地：音乐娱乐》，该剧于1778年10月15日首次上演，当时欧洲正因美国大革命而紧张起来。每个戏剧都代表着军事生活的习惯和行为如何渗入英国社会。虽然该吃醋的妻子绘制了军队对文化机构和社会结构的迫在眉睫的影响力时，谢里登（Sheridan）的娱乐活动观察到各种利基艺术形式如何与英国土壤上的奢侈军事演习相抗衡。这两部戏剧在18世纪的戏剧中具有重要意义，因为它们试图应对军事冲突，这将永远改变英国国内外的生活格局。^1个

由于这两部剧都在争取相关性，它们在对战争的同质化冲击和压力下表达了鲜明的主观性，从而成为了艺术的非凡证明。《嫉妒的妻子》以奥克利夫妇的家庭争端为中心，该子情节的特征是奥克利的侄子和一个国家财富的女继承人之间暂时受挫的婚姻。奥克利的哥哥，英国陆军少校的干预加剧了这些紧张局势。谢里登的戏剧着重于军事生活中的琐事方面。营地顾名思义，这是对科克斯希特（Coxheath）营地绝对感觉的回应，因为英国人会成群结队到达该定居点，以观看军方的演习。就像在他面前的阿芙拉·贝恩（Aphra Behn）一样，谢里登（Sheridan）谨慎地注视着该州的竞争对手“娱乐”，这些娱乐吸引着原本会在剧院里聚集的观众。[完第51页]

艺术同时进入了战争的时空空间，并为组织英国身份而使军队自然化提供了一个独立的境界。在序言中，谢里登（Sheridan）着重介绍了剧院的精明之处，如果有必要，则提拔适用于所有“时尚形式”的英军：

舞台仍然是当今的镜子，时尚的接班人将在舞台上表演；到尽头，在这样的时代中，它却能产生什么样的图像，但是四面楚歌？^2个

通过承认战争无处不在-“ [舞台]可以产生什么样的图像/像这样的时代”？-他试图与蒂莫西·莫顿（Timothy Morton）所称的超物体（一个太大而无法概念化的实体）作斗争。莫顿（Morton）观察到超物体占据了一个空间，使它们“在很长一段时间内对人类都是不可见的”，但他指出，超物体是如何“客观地展现其效果的，或者可以在一个由物体的美学特性之间的相互关系组成的空间中被检测到。 ” 换句话说，它作为一个独特的数量是未知的，并且通过其属性被称为与其他事物“超相关”。³即使军队在全球各地以及在不同的生活领域（包括公共场所和私人场所）膨胀并在不断扩大其存在，舞台仍提供了审美观（“时尚形式”），使观众可以扩展广阔的时间范围（“以明亮的演绎形式”），跨越军事和家庭生活的一组坐标（“四面楚歌的领域”）。

实际上，Colman和Sheridan提出了多种艺术形式，使角色能够重新获得本体的安全性和创造性的控制。在他的娱乐活动中，谢里登（Sheridan）描绘了各种各样的艺术作品-视觉，戏剧，音乐，声学，装饰性缝纫和纺织品，化妆品，风景，田园风光-从业者纷纷来到营地，并以此为主题。一方面，正如塞西尔·普赖斯（Cecil Price）解释的那样，谢里登向英国公众提供了“风景如画的幻想……当文学发明停滞不前，而智慧和智慧在其他地方忙碌的时候”（711）。换句话说，剧场承认大规模动员了物质，经济和文化资源，以抗击英国在美洲的战争并保护该国免遭其大陆竞争对手的袭击。另一方面，[结束第52页]继续（“静止”），从而不仅照亮了“四面楚歌的...