This Companion illustrates the vitality and diversity of dramatic work 1660 to 1710. Twenty-five essays by leading scholars in the field bring together the best recent insights into the full range of dramatic practice and innovation at the time. Introduces readers to the recent boom in scholarship that has revitalised Restoration drama Explores historical and cultural contexts, genres of Restoration drama, and key dramatists, among them Dryden and Behn
Aphra Behn was the first woman to earn her living by writing for the theater, and was ranked by Defoe alongside Rochester and Milton as one of the 'great wits' of her century.
Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.
[TRAIN OF THOUGHT is a] clever, contemporary urban comedy [that] takes us inside the heads of four late-night travelers headed downtown...Pospisil draws out neat surprises from his characters as they move toward their destinations (metaphorical as well as Recreating the pleasures of nineteenth-century platform entertainment with a tart contemporary twist, Donald Margulies' SHIPWRECKED offers a self-promoting fabulist a forum to inform and persuade, and it delights in both respects. --Variety. The Pulitze
This first comprehensive compilation of twentieth-century scholarship in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century drama provides a basis for future research and is an invaluable reference work. Items are arranged alphabetically under general headings--e.g., acting, criticism, periodicals, music, theology--as well as alphabetically by surname of actor, actress, dramatist, musician, etc. Copiously indexed.
Representative selections from Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, comedy, satire, tragedy, and farce are prefaced by descriptions of the theaters, acting styles, methods of play production, and audiences.
This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship.