English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explores the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. Chapters in this book discuss anecdotes about actors, actresses, musicians, and other theatre people.
Nicoll's History, which tells the story of English drama from the reopening of the theatres at the time of the Restoration right through to the end of the Victorian period, was viewed by Notes and Queries (1952) as 'a great work of exploration, a detailed guide to the untrodden acres of our dramatic history, hitherto largely ignored as barren and devoid of interest'.
Fifteen outstanding scholars of theater, music, art, and literature explore the interrelations of eighteenth-century British theater and the various art forms that it incorporated into itself. The essays examine the theater's increasing reliance on set designers, costumers, musicians and composers, poets, dramatists, and librettists, focusing on the ways in which this dependence fundamentally changed the theater. Illustrated.
This book brings together theatre historians to identify and exemplify a variety of productive new approaches to the investigation of plays, players, playwrights, playhouses and other aspects of theatre in the long eighteenth century. Their inquiries range from stage censorship and anti-theatricalism to the political resonances of adultery comedy.
This extremely readable volume analyses many individual texts, often in detail and for the first time, and also places them within the whole range of contemporary theatrical output, with its diversity of outlook and constant shifts in fashion and subject.
Susan Whyman draws on a hidden world of previously unknown letter writers to explore bold new ideas about the history of writing, reading and the novel. Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, The Pen and the People will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people. Based on over thirty-five previously unknown letter collections, it tells the stories of workers and the middling sort - a Yorkshire bridle maker, a female domestic servant, a Derbyshire wheelwright, an untrained woman writing poetry and short stories, as well as merchants and their families. Their ordinary backgrounds and extraordinary writings challenge accepted views that popular literacy was rare in England before 1800. This democratization of letter writing could never have occurred without the development of the Royal Mail. Drawing on new information gleaned from personal letters, Whyman reveals how the Post Office had altered the rhythms of daily life long before the nineteenth century. As the pen, the post, and the people became increasingly connected, so too were eighteenth-century society and culture slowly and subtly transformed.
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 offers readers discussions of the entire range of literary expression from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. In essays by thirty distinguished scholars, recent historical perspectives and new critical approaches and methods are brought to bear on the classic authors and texts of the period. Forgotten or neglected authors and themes as well as new and emerging genres within the expanding marketplace for printed matter during the eighteenth century receive special attention and emphasis. The volume's guiding purpose is to examine the social and historical circumstances within which literary production and imaginative writing take place in the period and to evaluate the enduring verbal complexity and cultural insights they articulate so powerfully.
In an original contribution to criticism, Interculturalism and Resistance demonstrates the eighteenth-century theatrical culture's ambivalence toward what has recently been described as the "exoticism of multiculturalism.""--BOOK JACKET.
