Consumption and the Stage: A Late‐Blooming Fashion

Consumption reigned for much of the long eighteenth century as one of Europe's most modish ailments, but in English and French theatre things were quite different. Far from propagating the sentimental vogue for consumption, the eighteenth‐century stage often satirised it as a risible affectation. Only with the birth of French Romantic theatre and its subsequent rise to transatlantic popularity did drama begin to depict consumptive protagonists who embodied a new conception of bourgeois heroism for a revolutionary age. Through a comparative analysis of English and French performances this essay explores consumption's belated, but triumphant, emergence as a fashionable stage disease.