This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by placing the practices and products of the Victorian theatre in relation to Victorian visual culture, through the lens of the concept of 'Ruskinian theatre', an approach to theatre which values its educative purpose as well as its aesthetic expression.
This is the first book to explore the involvement of John Ruskin with the popular theatre of his time. Based on original archival research, this book offers a fresh look at the aesthetic and social theories of Ruskin and his direct and indirect influence on the commercial theatre of the late nineteenth century.
Examining the wide-ranging implications of Ruskin's engagement with his contemporaries and followers, this collection is organized around three related themes: Ruskin's intellectual legacy and the extent to which its address to working men and women and children was realised in practice; Ruskin's followers and their sites of influence, especially those related to the formation of collections, museums, archives and galleries representing values and ideas associated with Ruskin; and the extent to which Ruskin's work constructed a world-wide network of followers, movements and social gestures that acknowledge his authority and influence. As the introduction shows, Ruskin's continuing digital presence is striking and makes a case for Ruskin's persistent presence. The collection begins with essays on Ruskin's intellectual presence in nineteenth-century thought, with some emphasis on his interest in the education of women. This section is followed by one on Ruskin's followers from the mid-nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism that looks at a broad range of cultural activities that sought to further, repudiate, or exemplify Ruskin's work and teaching. Working-class education, the Ruskinian periodical, plays, and science fiction are all considered along with the Bloomsbury Group's engagement with Ruskin's thought and writing. Essays on Ruskin abroad-in America, Australia, and India round out the collection.
This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin’s immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays, Staging Detection foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period, from popular melodrama to society comedy. Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor’s blockbuster play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights, novelists, critics and actors, from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, Staging Detection sheds new light on Victorian acting styles, furthers our understanding of melodrama, and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture, Staging Detection shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud, omniscience and earned authority. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian literature and popular culture – as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.
Featuring contributions by new and established nineteenth-century theatre scholars, this collection of critical essays is the first of its kind devoted solely to Victorian pantomime. It takes us through the various manifestations of British pantomime in the Victorian period and its ambivalent relationship with Victorian values.
"The great Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin spans 39 volumes and, over the course of the century, further compilations of his private diaries and letters have appeared: but the most important epistolary relationship of his later years, shared with his Scottish cousin Joan (Agnew Ruskin) Severn, has until now been entirely unpublished. These letters - more than 3,000 of them - have been challenging for Ruskin scholars to draw upon, with their baby-talk, apparent nonsense and unelaborated personal references. Yet they contain important statements of Ruskins opinions on travel, on fashion, on the ideal arts and crafts home, on effective education and other questions: and Ruskin often used his letters to Severn as a substitute for his personal diary. In this important new edition, Dickinson presents an edited, annotated selection of a correspondence which, until now, has been almost inaccessible to scholars of Ruskin and of the Victorian period."
From long-haired 'Fleshly Poets' to intense, 'ultra pre-Raphaelite' artists, few stylistic movements in the history of art and literature have provoked the imagination and indignation of British playwrights as much as the Aesthetic Movement. During an intense and short-lived period from 1877 to 1881, the London stage saw fierce competition as playwrights and theatre managers raced to capture the zeitgeist, capitalizing on the unorthodox, eccentric and highly theatrical proponents of the Aesthetic Movement. The 'quite too utterly utter' Apostles of this new school were satirized to such an extent that the Illustrated London News (1881) complained that the London stage was 'thickly sown over with a crop of lilies and sunflowers', with 'aesthetes in every burlesque and comic opera produced'. This edited volume brings the four key plays satirizing the Aesthetic Movement together for the first time in an easily accessible format, allowing scholars and students to discover their secrets: The Grasshopper by John Hollingshead (Gaiety Theatre, 1877) Where's The Cat? by James Albery (Criterion, 1880) The Colonel by F.C. Burnand (Prince of Wales's Theatre, 1881) Patience by W.S. Gilbert (Opera Comique/Savoy, 1881) Including a brief introduction by Dr. Devon Cox, providing background and context to the dynamic, symbiotic relationship between the Aesthetic Movement and the British stage, and complete with biographical notes and an introduction to each play, Aesthetic Movement Satire: A Dramatic Anthology shines a light on this explosive flashpoint in British Theatre
Shakespeare and the Victorians explores the place of Shakespeare in Victorian culture, and shows how the plays and the man became central to all levels of Victorian life and thought.
