Download or read book Victorian Theatrical Trades written by Michael R. Booth and published by London : Society for Theatre Research. This book was released on 1981 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theatre in the Victorian Age written by Michael R. Booth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-07-26 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive survey of the theatre practice and dramatic literature of the Victorian period.
Download or read book Shakespeare s Victorian Stage written by Richard W. Schoch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the revivals of Shakespeare's history plays during the Victorian period, as staged by the famous actor-manager Charles Kean. Between 1852 and 1859, Kean produced celebrated productions of Henry V, Henry VIII, King John, Macbeth and Richard II, renowned for their unprecendented attention to antiquarian detail in sets, costumes, and properties (many of which are shown in the book's illustrations). These productions provided audiences with an unparalleled opportunity to participate in the Victorian obsession with history, especially of the medieval period. Using valuable primary sources, including promptbooks, scenic designs, costume sketches and contemporary reviews, Richard Schoch places mid-Victorian attitudes towards the theatre in the context of major intellectual and political movements of the age. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre history, Shakespeare studies and Victorian culture.
Download or read book The Economics of the British Stage 1800 1914 written by Tracy C. Davis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-21 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of economic theory in relation to the development of nineteenth-century British theatre.
Download or read book The Victorian Marionette Theatre written by John Mccormick and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2004-04 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating and colorful book, researcher and performer John McCormick focuses on the marionette world of Victorian Britain between its heyday after 1860 and its waning years from 1895 to 1914. Situating the rich and diverse puppet theatre in the context of entertainment culture, he explores both the aesthetics of these dancing dolls and their sociocultural significance in their life and time. The history of marionette performances is interwoven with live-actor performances and with the entire gamut of annual fairs, portable and permanent theatres, music halls, magic lantern shows, waxworks, panoramas, and sideshows. McCormick has drawn upon advertisements in the Era, an entertainment paper, between the 1860s and World War I, and articles in the World’s Fair, a paper for showpeople, in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, as well as interviews with descendants of the marionette showpeople and close examinations of many of the surviving puppets. McCormick begins his study with an exploration of the Victorian marionette theatre in the context of other theatrical events of the day, with proprietors and puppeteers, and with the venues where they performed. He further examines the marionette’s position as an actor not quite human but imitating humans closely enough to be considered empathetic; the ways that physical attributes were created with wood, paint, and cloth; and the dramas and melodramas that the dolls performed. A discussion of the trick figures and specialized acts that each company possessed, as well as an exploration of the theatre’s staging, lighting, and costuming, follows in later chapters. McCormick concludes with a description of the last days of marionette theatre in the wake of changing audience expectations and the increasing popularity of moving pictures. This highly enjoyable and readable study, often illuminated by intriguing anecdotes such as that of the Armenian photographer who fell in love with and abducted the Holden company’s Cinderella marionette in 1881, will appeal to everyone fascinated by the magic of nineteenth-century theatre, many of whom will discover how much the marionette could contribute to that magic.
Download or read book Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance written by Amy Lehman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiritualists in the nineteenth century spoke of the "Borderland," a shadowy threshold where the living communed with the dead, and where those in the material realm could receive comfort or advice from another world. The skilled performances of mostly female actors and performers made the "Borderland" a theatre, of sorts, in which dramas of revelation and recognition were produced in the forms of seances, trances, and spiritualist lectures. This book examines some of the most fascinating American and British actresses of the Victorian era, whose performances fairly mesmerized their audiences of amused skeptics and ardent believers. It also focuses on the transformative possibilities of the spiritualist theatre, revealing how the performances allowed Victorian women to speak, act, and create outside the boundaries of their restricted social and psychological roles.
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 Acting Naturally written by Lynn M. Voskuil and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voskuil argues that Victorian Britons saw themselves as "authentically performative," a paradoxical belief that focused their sense of vocation as individuals, as a public, and as a nation.
Download or read book Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850 1910 written by Michael R. Booth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1981. This study concentrates on one aspect of Victorian theatre production in the second half of the nineteenth century – the spectacular, which came to dominate certain kinds of production during that period. A remarkably consistent style, it was used for a variety of dramatic forms, although surrounded by critical controversy. The book considers the theories and practice of spectacle production as well as the cultural and artistic movements that created the favourable conditions in which spectacle could dominate such large areas of theatre for so many years. It also discusses the growth of spectacle and the taste of the public for it, examining the influence of painting, archaeology, history, and the trend towards realism in stage production. An explanation of the working of spectacle in Shakespeare, pantomime and melodrama is followed by detailed reconstructions of the spectacle productions of Irving’s Faust and Beerbohm Tree’s King Henry VIII.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science written by Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first ever companion to theatre and science brings together research on key topics, performances, and new areas of interest.
Download or read book Routledge Library Editions Victorian Theatre written by Various and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 1626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reissuing works originally published between 1971 and 1981, this compact set offers an outstanding collection of scholarship devoted to 19th Century, Victorian, theatre. A small set of performance history and criticism, this set includes a biography of Henry Irving, a look at the rise of the status of a career as actor, and a consideration of the advent of dramatic criticism. These volumes present together a lively picture of the development of the contemporary theatre.
Download or read book Essentials of Stage Management written by Peter Maccoy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essentials of Stage Management provides a step-by-step guide to a little-seen but essential role in theater. As Nicholas Hytner writes in the foreword to this volume, nobody in the theatre has to know more about everyone else's job than the stage manager. Peter Maccoy draws upon his extensive experience as a stage manager and as a teacher to lay out the functions and responsibilities of this key theatrical profession. Chapters cover the role of stage management, stage manager as manager, research and preparation, preparing for rehearsal, the rehearsal period, the production period, the performance and beyond, stage properties, safe practice, and contemporary practice. Includes a bibliography, six appendixes, and index.
Download or read book Theatrical Costume Masks Make Up and Wigs written by Sidney Jackson Jowers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first bibliography in its field, based on first-hand collations of the actual articles. International in scope, it includes publications found in public theatre libraries and archives of Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Florence, London, Milan, New York and Paris amongst others. Over 3500 detailed entries on separately published sources such as books, sales and exhibition catalogues and pamphlets provide an indispensible guide for theatre students, practitioners and historians. Indices cover designers, productions, actors and performers. The iconography provides an indexed record of over 6000 printed plates of performers in role, illustrating performance costume from the 18th to 20th century.
Download or read book British Nautical Melodramas 1820 1850 written by Arnold Schmidt and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-30 with total page 1224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1820s and 30s nautical melodramas "reigned supreme" on London stages, entertaining the mariners and maritime workers who comprised a large part of the audience for small theatres. These plays mixed sentimental moments and comic interludes of domestic melodrama with patriotic images that communicated and reinforced imperial themes. However, generally the study of British theatre history moves from medieval and renaissance plays directly to the realism and naturalism of late Victorian and modern drama. Readers typically encounter a gap between Restoration and eighteenth-century plays like those of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and late-nineteenth plays by Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. Nineteenth-century drama, with the possible exception of plays by Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, remains all but invisible. Until recently, melodramatic plays written and performed during this "gap" received little scholarly attention, but their value as reflections of Britain’s promulgation of imperial ideology — and its role in constructing and maintaining class, gender, and racial identities — have given discussions of melodrama force and momentum. The plays included in these three volumes have never appeared in a critical anthology and most have not been republished since their original nineteenth-century editions. Each play is transcribed from original documents and includes an author biography, a headnote about the play itself, full annotations with brief definitions of unfamiliar vocabulary, and explanatory notes. Comprehensive editorial apparatus details the nineteenth-century imperial, naval, political, and social history relevant to the plays’ nautical themes, as well as discussing nineteenth-century theatre history, melodrama generally, and the nautical melodrama in particular. Contemporary theatre practices — acting, audiences, staging, lighting, special effects — are also examined. An extensive bibliography of primary and secondary texts; a complete index; and contemporary images of the actors, theatres, stage sets, playbills, costumes, and locales have been compiled to aid study further.
Download or read book Pictorial Illusionism written by J. A. Sokalski and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007-04-16 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together a wealth of primary sources, J.A. Sokalski examines the aims, inventions, and methods of the pictorial style that defined MacKaye's art. Sokalski shows how MacKaye's famous Madison Square Theatre, which featured a double stage reminiscent of an elevator, created whirling pictorial illusions for fashionable New York. He argues that MacKaye's infamous failure, the colossal Spectatorium theatre for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, was the most complete realization of this illusionary aesthetic. Sokalski also explores MacKaye's influence on Buffalo Bill Cody and how civil war cycloramas expanded his concept of pictorial space.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre written by Kerry Powell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-19 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.
Download or read book Victorian Writers and the Stage written by R. Pearson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the dramatic work of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson, their interaction with the theatrical world, and their attempts to develop their reputations as playwrights. These major Victorian writers each authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked?