Views of Roman History

William Whitehead's The Roman Father (1750) was the most prominent Roman play in late eighteenth-century Britain, and highly revealing of how Britons engaged with Roman history. This Element begins by surveying all eighteenth-century Roman plays, and shows that they focused on what it calls 'the transhistorical Roman character', typically set against a more historically-specific depiction of Rome. It proceeds to explore The Roman Father's text, reviews, performance history, and links to other aspects of historical culture. It argues that, of the three attitudes to history present in eighteenth-century Britain – the exemplary, historicist, and sentimentalist – all three were active in the theatrical context, but took genre-specific forms. Nonetheless, the changing attitudes visible in the theatre between 1750 and 1800 testify to changing attitudes to Roman history outside the theatre too: the decline of the exemplary attitude and the transhistorical Roman character, and the increasing prevalence of historicism and sentimentalism.