Kitty Clive, Or the Fair Songster

Kitty Clive, Or the Fair Songster

Author: Berta Joncus

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781783273461

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Kitty Clive (1711-1785) was a top London stage star. She dominated spoken as well as musical comedy. From the 1740s onwards, her reputation suffered a sharp decline. For anyone curious about star production in eighteenth-century Britain, her story is not to be missed. Kitty Clive (1711-1785) was a top London stage star. Singing powered her ascent and, for twenty years, was foundational to her success as she came to dominate spoken as well as musical comedy. Her protean powers transfixed audiences, whether in low-style productions or in works by masters like Purcell, Shakespeare, and Dryden. Celebrities such as Handel and Henry Fielding wrote vehicles for her. Clive's career was unique. Despite a sometimes awkward biography - her father was a disgraced Irish Catholic; she defied managers; her marriage was almost certainly a social ruse and her 'husband' a homosexual - her musical voice helped her to become the champion of British song, of patriotism, and of propriety. Yet in the 1740s, critical opinion turned against Clive and the financial power she wielded. Salvaging her career with David Garrick's help, Clive gutted her legacy. She quit serious song and took to caricaturing herself on stage, winning back audiences by disparaging her earlier achievements. Altering works mid-performance, creating and re-shaping stage genres, and leveraging press coverage while seeming not to, she was above all a shrewd manager and a fascinating stage artist. Clive's career reveals to us gorgeous song otherwise lost and perspectives previously unknown. For music historians, musicologists, theatre scholars, and anyone curious about performance history and star production in eighteenth-century Britain, her story is not to be missed. BERTA JONCUS is Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.


Loving Justice

Loving Justice

Author: Kathryn D. Temple

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 147989527X

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A history of legal emotions in William Blackstone’s England and their relationship to justice William Blackstone’s masterpiece, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), famously took the “ungodly jumble” of English law and transformed it into an elegant and easily transportable four-volume summary. Soon after publication, the work became an international monument not only to English law, but to universal English concepts of justice and what Blackstone called “the immutable laws of good and evil.” Most legal historians regard the Commentaries as a brilliant application of Enlightenment reasoning to English legal history. Loving Justice contends that Blackstone’s work extends beyond making sense of English law to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, sadness, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness. By enlisting an affective aesthetics to represent English law as just, Blackstone created an evocative poetics of justice whose influence persists across the Western world. In doing so, he encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice. Ultimately, Temple argues that the Commentaries offers a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice, and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.


David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity

David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity

Author: Leslie Ritchie

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-01-17

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1108475876

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Explores how David Garrick - actor, newspaper proprietor and part-owner of Drury Lane Theatre - mediated his own celebrity.


Theatres of Feeling

Theatres of Feeling

Author: Jean I. Marsden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1108476139

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Engaging account of theatregoing in the later eighteenth century that explores how audiences responded emotionally to the performances.


Striptease

Striptease

Author: Rachel Shteir

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0195300769

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This first complete history of a century of striptease is filled with rare photographs and period illustrations.


Dance in Handel's London Operas

Dance in Handel's London Operas

Author: Sarah Yuill McCleave

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1580464203

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Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas, including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Sallé" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.