Ossian on the Georgian Stage

Abstract James Macpherson's “translations” of the poems of Ossian were highly influential on stage culture in continental Europe. There were many musical and theatrical adaptations of the poems, and those performances were taken seriously by critics and audiences alike. The modern scholarly consensus is that the theatrical response to Ossian in Britain was meager by comparison and those productions that were staged made little impact. In this essay, I argue that Ossian had an extensive and enduring influence on the depiction of Scots and Scotland in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, despite the low number of explicit productions. The article covers the best known of Ossian stage adaptations, John Home's The Fatal Discovery (1769) in relation to its source text. I go on to demonstrate that Home's most successful play, Douglas (1756), was often performed with an array of images and themes that derived directly from Ossian. As I will point out, one of the era's most popular ballet pantomimes was the Ossian-inspired Oscar and Malvina (1791). I conclude by suggesting that domestic versions of the works of Sir Walter Scott often incorporated Ossianic material. It was as though the type of culturally loaded versions of Ossianic performance encountered in continental Europe had been subsumed into the general expectations of theatrical adaptation of Scott's works in Britain, and especially in the staging of his poetry.