Download or read book Essays on the Eighteenth Century English Stage written by Kenneth R. Richards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century produced more inventive actors than fine dramatists, and it displayed its actors to increasing advantage as theatre management became more expert, and stage design more ambitious. First published in 1972, the eleven papers collected in The Eighteenth-Century English Stage, originally read at a Manchester University Symposium in July 1971, follow this historical emphasis. Two papers are centred on dramatists, four on actors, three on managers, and two on designers. Malcolm Kelsall analyses Steele’s debt to Terence, using his classical scholarship as illuminatingly as Edgar Roberts uses his musical scholarship in writing about the songs in Fielding’s plays. George Taylor compares and evaluates a number of theories of acting, and speculates on the likely relevance of the best-known books on rhetoric, whilst Kathleen Barker, Arnold Hare, and David Rostron consider the work of individual actors – Powell, Cooke, and John Kemble. Theatre managers are represented by John Rich in Paul Sawyer’s sympathetic account, Thomas Harris, who is given new life in the recent researches of Cecil Price, and Stephen Kemble, fixed by Kenneth Robinson in canny control of the Newcastle theatre circuit. Finally, Graham Barlow reaches some controversial conclusions about the dimensions of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, by subjecting Thornhill’s sketches to a practising designer’s statistical examination, and Sybil Rosenfeld carries a stage further her pioneering work on eighteenth-century scene-painting and design. The two last are attractively illustrated by 8 pages of plates. This book’s particular value lies in its bringing together several simply presented but deeply informed explorations of often neglected aspects of the eighteenth-century theatre. The papers, with their general sense of enthusiasm and concern for their subject, will interest all students of the eighteenth century, and theatre enthusiasts in particular.
Download or read book Essays on the Eighteenth century English Stage written by Kenneth Richards and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Our Coquettes written by Theresa Braunschneider and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-04-20 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a "coquette"; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Why does British literature of this period pay so much attention to vain and flirtatious young women? Our Coquettes examines the ubiquity of the coquette in the eighteenth century to show how this figure enables authors to comment upon a series of significant social and economic developments—including the growth of consumer culture, widespread new wealth, increased travel and global trade, and changes in the perception and practice of marriage. The book surveys stage comedies, periodical essays, satirical poems, popular songs, and didactic novels to show that the early coquette is a figure of capacious desire: she finds pleasure in a wide range of choices, refusing to narrow any field of possibilities (admirers, luxury goods, friends, pets, public gatherings) down to a single option. Whereas scholars of the period have generally read the coquette as a simple and self-evident type, Our Coquettes emphasizes what is strange and surprising about this figure, revealing the coquette to be a touchstone in developing discourses about sexuality, consumerism, empire, and modernity itself. Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies
Download or read book Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century 1700 1725 written by Willard Higley Durham and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on the Eighteenth century English Stage written by University of Manchester. Department of Drama and published by Methuen Publishing. This book was released on 1972 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thomas Jupiter Harris written by Warren Oakley and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first biography of Thomas Harris: confidant of George III, ‘spin doctor’, philanthropist, sexual suspect, brothel owner, and the man who controlled Covent Garden theatre for nearly five decades.
Download or read book Actors Audiences and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century written by Glen McGillivray and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an innovative account of how audiences and actors emotionally interacted in the English theatre during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by two of its stars: David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Drawing upon recent scholarship on the history of emotions, it uses practice theory to challenge the view that emotional interactions between actors and audiences were governed by empathy. It carefully works through how actors communicated emotions through their voices, faces and gestures, how audiences appraised these performances, and mobilised and regulated their own emotional responses. Crucially, this book reveals how theatre spaces mediated the emotional practices of audiences and actors alike. It examines how their public and frequently political interactions were enabled by these spaces.
Download or read book Ireland Enlightenment and the English Stage 1740 1820 written by David O'Shaughnessy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the contribution of Irish writers to the Georgian English stage; argues that theatre is an important strand of the Irish Enlightenment.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century English Literature and Its Cultural Background written by James Edward Tobin and published by Biblo & Tannen Publishers. This book was released on 1967 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Before the Empire of English Literature Provinciality and Nationalism in Eighteenth Century Britain written by A. Yadav and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-07-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Empire of English offers a broad re-examination of Eighteenth-century British literary culture, centred around issues of language, nationalism, and provinciality. It revises our tendency to take for granted the metropolitan centrality of English-language writers of this period and shows, instead, how deeply these writers were conscious of the traditional marginality of their literary tradition in the European world of culture. The book focuses attention on crucial but largely overlooked aspects of Eighteenth-century English literary culture: the progress of English topos since the death of Cowley and the cultural aspirations and anxieties it condenses; the concept of the republic of letters and its implications for issues of cultural centrality and provinciality; and the importance of cultural nationalist emphases in 'Augustan' poetics in the context of these concerns about provinciality. The book examines imperial aspirations and imaginings in the English literary culture of the period, but it shows how such aspirations are responses to provincial anxieties more so than they are marks of imperial self-assurance.
Download or read book British Theatre and the Other Arts 1660 1800 written by Shirley Strum Kenny and published by Associated University Presses. This book was released on 1984 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical written by Robert Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Misérables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.
Download or read book The Stage s Glory written by Berta Joncus and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-13 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Rich (1692-1761) was a profoundly influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. As producer, manager, and performer, he transformed the urban entertainment market, creating genres and promotional methods still with us today. This volume gives the first comprehensive overview of Rich’s multifaceted career, appreciation of which has suffered from his performing identity as Lun, London’s most celebrated Harlequin. Far from the lightweight buffoon that this stereotype has suggested, Rich—the first producer of The Beggar’s Opera, the founder of Covent Garden, the dauntless backer of Handel, and the promoter of the principal dancers from the Parisian opera—is revealed as an agent of changes much more enduring than those of his younger contemporary, David Garrick. Contributions by leading scholars from a range of disciplines—theatre, dance, music, art, and cultural history—provide detailed analyses of Rich’s productions and representations. These findings complement Robert D. Hume’s lead article, a study that radically alters our perception of Rich. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century written by Fiona Ritchie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.
Download or read book Harlequin Britain written by John O'Brien and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-07-28 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fall of 1723, two London theaters staged, almost simultaneously, pantomime performances of the Faust story. Unlike traditional five-act plays, pantomime—a bawdy hybrid of dance, music, spectacle, and commedia dell'arte featuring the familiar figure of the harlequin at its center—was a theatrical experience of unprecedented accessibility. The immediate popularity of this new genre drew theater apprentices to the cities to learn the new style, and pantomime became the subject of lively debate within British society. Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding bitterly opposed the intrusion into legitimate literary culture of what they regarded as fairground amusements that appealed to sensation and passion over reason and judgment. In Harlequin Britain, literary scholar John O'Brien examines this new form of entertainment and the effect it had on British culture. Why did pantomime become so popular so quickly? Why was it perceived as culturally threatening and socially destabilizing? O’Brien finds that pantomime’s socially subversive commentary cut through the dampened spirit of debate created by Robert Walpole's one-party rule. At the same time, pantomime appealed to the abstracted taste of the mass audience. Its extraordinary popularity underscores the continuing centrality of live performance in a culture that is most typically seen as having shifted its attention to the written text—in particular, to the novel. Written in a lively style rich with anecdotes, Harlequin Britain establishes the emergence of eighteenth-century English pantomime, with its promiscuous blending of genres and subjects, as a key moment in the development of modern entertainment culture.
Download or read book Handel s Oratorios and Eighteenth Century Thought written by Ruth Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-04 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-r anging and challenging book, Ruth Smith claims that the words to Handel's oratorios reflect the events and ideas of their time and have far greater meaning than has hitherto been realised. She explores eighteenth-century literature, music, aesthetics, politics and religion to reveal Handel's texts as conduits for the thought and sensibility of their time. The book thus enriches our understanding of Handel, his times, and the close relationship between music and its intellectual contexts.
Download or read book Criticism Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century written by James Harriman-Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions. It was these pivotal transitions, scripted by authors and executed by actors, that could make King Lear beautiful, Hamlet terrifying, Archer hilarious and Zara electrifying. James Harriman-Smith recovers a lost way of appreciating theatre as a set of transitions that produce simultaneously iconic and dynamic spectacles; fascinating moments when anything seems possible. Offering fresh readings and interpretations of Shakespearean and eighteenth-century tragedy, historical acting theory and early character criticism, this volume demonstrates how a concern with transition binds drama to everything, from lyric poetry and Newtonian science, to fine art and sceptical enquiry into the nature of the self.
