“The Glass of Fashion and the Mould of Form”: The Histrionic Mirror and Georgian-Era Performance

This essay explores the impact of mirrors on Georgian-era theatrical and social performance. It suggests that looking glasses—as they burgeoned in eighteenth-century playhouses, offstage, onstage, and backstage—provided key sites for actors and audiences to engage with both the metaphysical and empirical implications of specular display. It further reveals how mirrors functioned as cultural touchstones in critical debates over the correlation between morals and manners, authenticity and facsimile, ideal imitation and original expression, and how they thus provide fresh contextual insight into an era of aesthetic transition.