Restoration Actresses During the Reign of Charles II
Author: Beate Braun
Publisher:
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13:
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Playhouse Creatures
Author: April De Angelis
Publisher: Samuel French Limited
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 67
ISBN-13: 9780573130076
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMistresses
Author: Linda Porter
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2021-04-15
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781509877072
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAccording to the great diarist, John Evelyn, Charles II was 'addicted to women', and throughout his long reign a great many succumbed to his charms. Clever, urbane and handsome, Charles presided over a hedonistic court, in which licence and licentiousness prevailed.Mistresses is the story of the women who shared Charles's bed, each of whom wielded influence on both the politics and cultural life of the country. From the young king-in-exile's first mistress and mother to his first child, Lucy Walter, to the promiscuous and ill-tempered courtier, Barbara Villiers. From Frances Teresa Stuart, 'the prettiest girl in the world' to history's most famous orange-seller, 'pretty, witty' Nell Gwynn and to her fellow-actress, Moll Davis, who bore the last of the king's fifteen illegitimate children. From Louise de Kéroualle, the French aristocrat - and spy for Louis XIV - to the sexually ambiguous Hortense Mancini. Here, too, is the forlorn and humiliated Queen Catherine, the Portuguese princess who was Charles's childless queen. Drawing on a wide variety of original sources, including material in private archives, Linda Porter paints a vivid picture of these women and of Restoration England, an era that was both glamorous and sordid.
The First English Actresses
Author: Elizabeth Howe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-06-04
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780521422109
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book describes how and why women were permitted to act on the public stage after 1660 in England.
A Gambling Man
Author: Jenny Uglow
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2010-11-23
Total Pages: 855
ISBN-13: 1429964227
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Restoration was a decade of experimentation: from the founding of the Royal Society for investigating the sciences to the startling role of credit and risk; from the shocking licentiousness of the court to failed attempts at religious tolerance. Negotiating all these, Charles II, the "slippery sovereign," laid odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theaters may have been restored, but the king himself was the supreme actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court, and his colorful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay hidden. Charles II was thirty when he crossed the English Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, as spring after the long years of Cromwell's rule. But there was no way to turn back, no way he could "restore" the old dispensation. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship had ended with his father's beheading. "Honor" was now a word tossed around in duels. "Providence" could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire, and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. And exactly ten years after he arrived, Charles would again stand on the shore at Dover, this time placing the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV of France. Jenny Uglow's previous biographies have won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and International PEN's Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History. A Gambling Man is Uglow at her best: both a vivid portrait of Charles II that explores his elusive nature and a spirited evocation of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world on the brink of modernity.
The Rover
Author: Aphra Behn
Publisher: Joe Books Ltd
Published: 2015-06-02
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 1987955684
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe magic of Naples during Carnival inspires love between a disparate group of local citizens and visiting Englishmen.
Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan
Author: Tiffany Stern
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2000-05-18
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 0191567183
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUp until now, facts about theatrical rehearsal have been considered irrecoverable. But in this groundbreaking new study, Tiffany Stern gathers together two centuries' worth of historical material which shows how actors received and responded to their parts, and how rehearsal affected the creation and revision of plays. Plotting theatrical change over time, from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, this book will revolutionize the fields of textual and theatre history alike.
Thomas Betterton
Author: David Roberts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-06-17
Total Pages: 271
ISBN-13: 0521195845
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first biography for more than 100 years of the greatest English actor between Burbage and Garrick, Thomas Betterton.
The Loves of Charles II
Author: Jean Plaidy
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Published: 2005-10-25
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 140008248X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom princesses to country girls to actresses…the loves of Charles II come to life. Ten years after Charles I was deposed and executed, his son, Charles II, regains the throne after many years in exile. Charles is determined not only to restore the monarchy but also to revive a society that has suffered under many years of Puritan rule, when everything from theater to Christmas festivals was illegal. As king, Charles II throws himself into the gaiety of court life, becoming a patron of the arts and a consummate lover of women. He first secures a strong dynastic alliance by marrying Catherine of Braganza, a shy, plain Portuguese princess who falls in love with her handsome husband and brings him great wealth, but can never give him the son he longs for. For many years, his “untitled queen” is a bold and sensual older woman—Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine—whose husband is routinely paid to look the other way. But when the politically ambitious Lady Castlemaine becomes too powerful, she is replaced by Louise de Kéroualle, a baby-faced French noblewoman who may have been sent to Charles’s court as a spy. His other great love, and Louise’s rival, is Nell Gwyn, a stage actress who rises from the streets of London to become the king’s favorite and a hero of the working class. Court intrigue and affairs of the heart weave together in this unforgettable page-turner.
Staging Pain, 1580–1800
Author: Mathew R. Martin
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1351898213
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBookending the chronology of this collection are two crucial moments in the histories of pain, trauma, and their staging in British theater: the establishment of secular and professional theater in London in the 1580s, and the growing dissatisfaction with theatrical modes of public punishment alongside the increasing efficacy of staging extravagant spectacles at the end of the eighteenth century. From the often brutal spectacle of late medieval mystery plays to early Romantic re-evaluations of eighteenth-century appropriations of spectacles of pain, the essays take up the significance of these watershed moments in British theater and expand on recent work treating bodies in pain: what and how pain means, how such meaning can be embodied, how such embodiment can be dramatized, and how such dramatizations can be put to use and made meaningful in a variety of contexts. Grouped thematically, the essays interrogate individual plays and important topics in terms of the volume's overriding concerns, among them Tamburlaine and The Maid's Tragedy, revenge tragedy, Joshua Reynolds on public executions, King Lear, Settle's Moroccan plays, spectacles of injury, torture, and suffering, and Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions. Collectively, these essays make an important contribution to the increasingly interrelated histories of pain, the body, and the theater.
