“A Winter Drama”: Decolonizing South America and Environmental Restoration in Sheridan’s Pizzaro

Perhaps Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be the eighteenth-century playwright most associated with scenic spectacle. For example, his afterpiece The Camp, as Cecil Price explains, offers the British public “scenic tricks and illusions … when literary invention was a standstill, and wit and wisdom were busy elsewhere.” David Taylor mitigates this criticism, suggesting that his “lavish closing spectacle … comes to emblematize the supremacy of Britain’s technologies of warfare.” However, Pizarro (1799) was more daring than The Camp and also more seamlessly integrated its spectacle into its stage action. Specifically, the play, among other features, opens by staging a “magnificent Pavilion near PIZARRO’s tent” (sd,1.1), and includes the enormously popular Cora’s song, staged with “Thunder and Lightning” (sd, 5.1). This chapter aligns attitudes about stage scenery—its presence and increasingly daring exhibitions—and perceptions about the weather. While the scenery, music, and the artists who orchestrate it are instrumental to the drama’s success, they, traditionally, constitute and compose the “background” of the play. Similarly, as Cora mentions the “weather” heightens the suspense, but recedes into “offstage” space. But when Sheridan foregrounds scenic effects and specifically stages how the Peruvians integrate it with the physical environment, he ushers in a new theatre which models how to enmesh built and physical environments.