Eighteenth-century drama is often dismissed as homogenous, aesthetically uninteresting, or politically complacent. This book reveals the incredibly intriguing and intricate nature of the period's history plays and their often messy dramatisaton of the complexities of patriotic rhetoric and national identification.

LOUISE MARSHALL lectures in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, UK. She has written several articles that discuss the political resonance of the early eighteenth-century stage and the dramatic representation of mythologies of Britishness.