Download or read book The Censorship of English Drama 1824 1901 written by John Russell Stephens and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1980, this was the first study to make use of the Lord Chamberlain's files on English stage censorship. Dramatic censorship is shown to be a significant index of the Victorian age and the book fills an important gap in the knowledge and understanding not only of Victorian theatre, but of Victorian manners and attitudes.
Download or read book Theatre Censorship written by David Thomas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using previously unpublished material from the National Archives, David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne provide a new perspective on British cultural history. Statutory censorship was first introduced in Britain by Sir Robert Walpole with his Licensing Act of 1737. Previously theatre censorship was exercised under the Royal Prerogative. By giving the Lord Chamberlain statutory powers of theatre censorship, Walpole ensured that confusion over the relationship between the Royal Prerogative and statute law would prevent any serious challenge to theatre censorship in Parliament until the twentieth century. The authors place theatre censorship legislation and its attempted reform in their wider political context. Sections outlining the political history of key periods explain why theatre censorship legislation was introduced in 1737, why attempts to reform the legislation failed in 1832, 1909, and 1949, and finally succeeded in 1968. Opposition from Edward VII helped to prevent the abolition of theatre censorship in 1909. In 1968, theatre censorship was abolished despite opposition from Elizabeth II, Lord Cobbold (her Lord Chamberlain) and Harold Wilson (her Prime Minister). There was strong support for theatre censorship on the part of commercial theatre managers who saw censorship as offering protection from vexatious prosecution. A policy of inertia and deliberate obfuscation on the part of Home Office officials helped to prevent the abolition of theatre censorship legislation until 1968. It was only when playwrights, directors, critics, audiences, and politicians (notably Roy Jenkins) applied combined pressure that theatre censorship was finally abolished. The volume concludes by exploring whether new forms of covert censorship have replaced the statutory theatre censorship abolished with the 1968 Theatres Act.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737 1832 written by Julia Swindells and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2014 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides a comprehensive guide to theatre of the Georgian era across the range of dramatic forms.
Download or read book Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre written by George Taylor and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sport in Australian Drama written by Richard Fotheringham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-31 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport in Australian Drama, first published in 1992, provides an intelligent view of Australian society at play.
Download or read book Decadence in the Age of Modernism written by Kate Hext and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity. Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama written by Carolyn Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.
Download or read book Salome written by Oscar Wilde and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salome is Oscar Wilde’s most experimental—and controversial—play. In its own time, the play, written in French, was described by a reviewer as “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive.” None, however, could deny the importance of Wilde’s creation. Contemporary audiences and reviewers variously regarded Salome as the symbol of a thrilling modernity, a challenge to patriarchy, a confession of desire, a sign of moral decay, a new form of art, and a revolt against the restraints of Victorian society. Less well known than Wilde’s beloved comedies, Salome is as enduringly modern and relevant. This edition uses the English translation done by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and overseen and corrected by Wilde himself. Appendices detail the play’s sources and provide extensive materials on its contemporary reception and dramatic productions.
Download or read book One Hot Summer written by Rosemary Ashton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique, in-depth view of Victorian London during the record-breaking summer of 1858, when residents both famous and now-forgotten endured “The Great Stink” together While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence. Ashton mines Victorian letters and gossip, diaries, court records, newspapers, and other contemporary sources to uncover historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists—Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. She also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Ashton reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.
Download or read book Writing and Censorship in Britain written by Paul Hyland and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-03 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1992, Writing and Censorship in Britain explores the issue of censorship, from a range of cultural and literary perspectives, from the Tudor period to the 1990s. Written by some of the leading experts in the field, this collection charts the struggles for artistic expression, reveals how censorship is appropriated as a legitimate tactic in the defence of oppressed and marginalised groups, and analyses the struggles writers have employed in the face of its complex dynamics. Here variously defined, defended and deplored, censorship emerges as both an unstable and a potent concept. Through it we define ourselves: as readers, as writers and as citizens. This book will be of interest to students of literature, history and law.
Download or read book Strategies of Ambiguity written by Matthias Bauer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-11 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a growing awareness that ambiguity is not just a necessary evil of the language system resulting, for instance, from its need for economy, or, by contrast, a blessing that allows writers to involve readers in endless games of assigning meaning to a literary text. The present volume contributes to overcoming this alternative by focusing on strategies of ambiguity (and the strategic avoidance of ambiguity) both at the production and the reception end of communication. The authors examine ways in which speakers and hearers may use ambiguous words, structures, references, and situations to pursue communicative ends. For example, the question is asked what it actually means when a listener strategically perceives ambiguity, which may happen both synchronically (e.g. in conversations) as well as diachronically (e.g. when strategically ambiguating biblical texts in order to make them applicable to moral lessons). Another example is the question whether ambiguity awareness increases the strategic use of ambiguity in prosody. Moreover, the authors not only enquire into effects of ambiguous meanings but also into the strategic use of ambiguity as such, for example, as a response to censorship or as a means of provoking irritation. This volume brings together several contributions from linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, psychology and theology, and aims at providing a systematic approach to the strategic production and perception of ambiguity in a variety of texts and contexts. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book The Politics of the Pantomime written by Jill Alexandra Sullivan and published by Univ of Hertfordshire Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on the variety and independence of pantomime in the provinces, especially Nottingham, Birmingham, and Manchester. Explores official and local censorship and the relationships between local theaters, managers, authors and audiences.
Download or read book Jane Eyre on Stage 1848 1898 written by Patsy Stoneman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was published in October, 1847, and within three months a version was on stage in London. By 1900, at least eight different stage versions had appeared in England, America and continental Europe. For the first time, all eight plays are available in Patsy Stoneman's critical edition, richly illustrated by facsimile reproductions of manuscripts, unique Victorian playbills, contemporary etchings of theatres, and portraits of playwrights and actors. Stoneman's introduction places the plays' bizarre innovations in the context of theatre history and of contemporary debates on class and gender, while each edited play-text is accompanied by detailed notes, based on original research, on the playwright, theatre(s) and performances, and contemporary reception. Most of these plays existed only in manuscript, and were quickly forgotten, yet they make fascinating reading. Nineteenth-century playwrights had no reverence for a text we regard as canonical, but added to, deleted from and twisted Charlotte Brontë's story to suit their own purposes. One play has a cast of comic servants who follow Jane from Lowood to Thornfield. In another, the madwoman is revealed as the sister-in-law of a blameless Rochester. A third has Blanche Ingram reduced to a fallen woman, seduced and abandoned by John Reed. Jane Eyre on Stage will appeal to readers interested in literary and theatrical history, cultural studies, and the intriguing afterlives of famous books.
Download or read book Henry Irving written by Richard Foulkes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Irving (1838-1905), the first actor to be knighted, dominated the theatre in Britain and beyond for over a quarter of a century. As an actor, he was strikingly different with his idiosyncratic pronunciation, his somewhat ungainly physique, and his brilliant psychological portrayals of virtue and villainy. As a director of spectacular, and commercially driven, entertainments, Irving anticipated Hollywood directors from D.W. Griffith to Stephen Spielberg. And as manager of the Lyceum Theatre, where audiences included the leading public figures of the day, he controlled every aspect of the performance. This collection of essays by leading theatre scholars explores each element of Irving's art: his acting, his contribution to the plays he commissioned, his flair for the stage picture, and his ear for incidental music. Like Wagner, Irving was a proponent of a holistic approach to the stage, that is, blending together acting, painting, music, and architecture to create harmonious, balanced, and artistic theatre. Irving emerges not only as the peer of such eminent contemporaries as Tennyson, Sullivan, Shaw, and Burne-Jones, but also as a powerful influence on the twentieth-century theatre.
Download or read book W S Gilbert written by Jane W. Stedman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was the most brilliant dramatist of Victorian England. A daring and cynical playwright, the forerunner of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, he was also a prolific journalist and humorous poet (his Bab Ballads are still widely read), and he achieved worldwide fame through his long collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan, a collaboration that created such classics as H. M. S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and all the other Savoy operas. Now the story of this remarkable writer's life - and of his stormy relationship with Sullivan - is here chronicled by a renowned authority on Gilbert and on the theatrical and literary scene in Victorian London. For this biography, Jane W. Stedman has returned to original sources, has interviewed survivors, and has scoured a whole variety of Victorian periodicals for reviews, and personal comment. Gilbert emerges as a much more complex and interesting figure than has previously been thought. The book is a worthy companion piece to Arthur Jacobs's recent biography Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician.
Download or read book The Frightful Stage written by Robert Justin Goldstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.
Download or read book Censorship written by Derek Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 2950 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.