‘Rank Imposture’ and ‘Mimic Goblinry’ in Scott's Doom of Devorgoil: A Genre Politics of National Drama

Abstract

This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section.

Scholars seldom associate Sir Walter Scott with nineteenth-century drama or with the commercial interests of the theatre, including those of playwrights and publishers. However, Scott's dramas reveal his keen interest in dramatic traditions as well as an astute comprehension of the theatre as a commercial institution subject to the complex politics of nation and empire. The Doom of Devorgoil, as an authorial masquerade, exposes Scott's willingness to transgress and manipulate cultural constructions of personal and national identity. However, as a dramatic production created to conform to the templates of the theatre as a culture industry, it unveils a symptomatic and disturbing affiliation between the formation and practices of the so-called national drama as a melodramatic form and the dramatic reproduction of national identity. A performance and a critique of ‘rank imposture’, The Doom of Devorgoil underscores the critical importance of understanding the production of genre politics on stage and within dramatic discourses of the period.