Annotations on the Representation of Race: Performing Edward Young's The Revenge Then and Now

Abstract: Taking as its point of departure the work of critic and theorist Christina Sharpe, this paper explores what it means to produce eighteenth-century plays which feature enslaved, Black protagonists "in the wake" of what she posits as "slavery's as yet unresolved unfolding"—both then and now. With a particular focus on Edward Young's The Revenge (1721), a tragedy which was repeatedly, revised, cut, and adapted to suit different performers and to appeal to evolving audience tastes across the eighteenth century, the paper meditates on the ethics of care and resistance that we ought to bring to our encounter with the archive of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama and considers how Sharpe's transformative optics might inform our efforts to return some of these works to our twenty-first century stages.