European writers in the 1780s praised the American Revolution and the creation of America’s Constitutional Republic as modern historical examples of human progress and the advance of human rights. These themes shaped the pro-American writings of authors who remained in Europe as well as those who crossed the Atlantic to make direct observations. Optimistic Europeans thus emphasized the emerging nation’s political progress in constructing constitutions and representative governments, social progress in fostering personal freedoms and commercial expansion, cultural progress in establishing enlightened education and religious tolerance, and moral progress in creating virtuous citizens and national leaders. But these same writers also condemned the new American nation for defending the regressive, rights-denying system of enslaved labor and for promoting new economic inequalities or consumerism. A critical narrative about the regressive, unenlightened aspects of the new society in the United States showed that European theorists understood how structural dangers threatened the new republic, even as they celebrated its revolutionary achievements. They feared that social contradictions within the new nation would undermine its political ideals and its more democratic social aspirations.

Chapter 3 examines the fighting over Shakespeare that takes place during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). This period of prolonged conflict is characterized by an obsessive interest in position-takings and labelling, such as revolutionary/loyalist and Jacobin/anti-Jacobin; but, as this chapter demonstrates, these wartime binaries are protean. By deploying them we are at risk of under-interpreting the conflict. The performance of Shakespeare at the major and minor theatres in London reveals this distinctive political malleability. The chapter begins by considering pressure points in the conflict when Shakespeare seems to have been loudly mobilized in support of the British war effort – such as the resumption of conflict in 1803 – but concentrates for the most part on the contested political valence of Shakespeare. It examines the opposing political sympathies and theatrical interests of John Philip Kemble and Richard Brinsley Sheridan who were both connected to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as well as the operations of the minor theatres that position Shakespeare within a battle over the democratization of culture and politics that strongly resonates with the period’s domestic and foreign conflicts. The chapter concludes by proposing that ‘conflicting Shakespeares’ become united through the vagaries of patriotism, a powerful and uncertain concept during this period and beyond.

Amid an Enlightened era, dissenting religious groups clamored for toleration and/or religious freedom, mobilizing their own campaigns and helping staff with those of the era’s other prominent movements. British Dissenters had long sought repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which limited their rights of office-holding and other honors – while American colonists bristled against official churches that had also taken hold in the colonies. The American Revolution led to an upsurge in favor of religious freedom in America that overturned almost all religious restrictions by the 1790s, though British Dissenters’ movements over the same years met reversals from a stronger Establishment.

This chapter explores politics in the British Romantic period through a close examination of the highly politicized religion of Dissent in the 1790s, tracing in particular its arguments in political tracts and sermons against slavery, the war with France, and the growing inequality between rich and poor. The centrality of religion to an understanding of revolution, rights of man discourse, public worship, and civil liberty is found in the writings of Richard Price, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with reference to Joseph Priestley, Joshua Toulmin, John Edwards, and John Prior Estlin. There is discussion of the chain of influence descending from Price to Barbauld to the young Coleridge, and a conclusion that looks at some of the continuities in Coleridge’s thinking between his earlier radicalism and his later prose works.