Ballad Opera Research Articles

Elizabeth Boyd's Disappearing Act: Performing Literary Legacy on the Georgian Stage

How do we trace the historical processes that grant some writers visibility and, hence, legacy, while shoving others into the historical closet? This essay offers the case study of Elizabeth Boyd (1727-1745), a novelist, poet, and playwright who has received some attention from scholars interested in women’s contributions to the legacy of William Shakespeare in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular, her unperformed play, Don Sancho: Or, the Students Whim, a Ballad Opera of Two Acts, with Minerva’s Triumph, a Masque (1739) dramatizes a woman writer’s reflections on the politics of legacy at this formative moment in the history of authorship and the British theater. While the play was not performed, key scenes were later plagiarized in popular afterpieces by theater managers and playwrights Henry Giffard and David Garrick. Boyd, along with her inclusive vision of theatrical legacy as the domain of men and women of different classes, disappears in the male playwrights’ fantasies of exclusively masculine, British literary greatness. The story of Boyd’s erasure speaks to the gendered and classed exclusions and elisions in the social and economic processes by which legacy is formed, in this case, in the gendered power relations of eighteenth-century theater and its management.

The Influence of William Hogarth on Later Generations

The Influence of William Hogarth on Later Generations

‘When you change the view from where you stood, the things you view will change for good’: An introduction to the mobilities paradigm in musical theatre

Musical theatre is frequently framed as connected to place and space, as terms like ‘the Broadway musical’ or ‘the Viennese operetta’ imply. National categorization, used prominently in titles of key monographs and handbooks, has turned out to be a moulding structure for the genre’s historiography. The term ‘American popular song form’ insinuates that musical form and style may reasonably be categorized by national adjectives. This is also true for the national attribution of earlier genres, such as the supposedly British ballad opera, French opéra comique and German singspiel. Signature pieces of the genre, e.g., the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, have been read as documents of national re-affirmation. Nevertheless, a major portion of the repertoire can just as well be reinterpreted as a statement for mobility, thus bringing into question the tropes of regional rootedness and national at-homeness. Starting with methodological assumptions given in Stephen Greenblatt’s cultural mobility manifesto (), this article will examine the unquestioned frames of fixity in musical theatre scholarship and sound out alternatives that allow readings of the genre as mobile.

Fielding, Opera, and Oratorio: The Case of Handel

It is generally stated without qualification that Fielding was a great admirer of Handel. This is understandable given that his works of the 1740s and 1750s are replete with praise of the composer. Curiously, however, during the 1730s, his compliments to Handel are few and far between. True, in his ballad operas from that period, he borrowed a number of the composer's melodies, but in multiple instances, he attached comic lyrics that mocked their seriousness. This paper contends that Fielding's apparent change in attitude in the 1740s was rooted in Handel's own change as he moved away from Italian opera and toward English oratorio. While Fielding was critical of the former, the latter genre aligned with his aesthetic ideal, which favored word-centric music performed in English with a minimum of “Tinsel, or . . . Ostentation.” Indeed, it is arguable that in his ballad-opera adaptations of Handel, which he often assigned to performers whom Handel also employed, Fielding was prefiguring on a lesser scale what would later make Handel his ideal of all an English composer should be.

“Tinkers” in Verse: The Dublin Gate Theatre’s Production of Donagh MacDonagh’s God’s Gentry (1951)

In his ballad opera God’s Gentry, produced in 1951 at the Dublin Gate Theatre under the direction of Hilton Edwards, Donagh MacDonagh set out to satirize totalitarian regimes and the welfare state by making the “class” of the tinkers the rulers of Ireland for a year, led by Marks (“Marx”) Mongan and aided by the old Irish god Balor of the Evil Eye. Written in verse and interspersed with popular folk tunes to which MacDonagh wrote new lyrics, the play imagines the tinkers’ outlook on life as the antithesis of capitalism, law and order, and Christian family values. Nora, the village shopkeeper’s daughter, is seduced by the free and merry ways of Marks and his people, but when the nation is declared bankrupt and the pagan, socialist “tinker’s republic” collapses, her jilting of Marks and her return to settled life signal a more general reversal of the nation to bourgeois values. This essay considers the way in which Travelling people are represented in the text and on the stage both as metaphorical stand-ins for politicians governing Ireland and nations beyond its borders and as an actual Irish minority perceived as an unregulated and transgressive entity—a “nation within a nation”—by the settled population. The article also considers how the life of the Travellers was imagined aesthetically in what MacDonagh referred to as the “grand” settings and costumes designed for the Gate production by Micheál Mac Liammóir, who also played the part of Marks.

The Evolution of Opera Performance from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the Nineteenth Century

"The presentation of the book The Evolution of Opera Performance, from Scenographic Miracles to the Opera Productions of the 19th Century, offers a synthesis of our work as a musical theatre director. Our aim is to stimulate the public’s interest in the opera genre and opera staging, by revealing aspects in the history of opera performance(s), as they have been shaped, century after century, by following the gradual effort and the tireless passion of its creators. Our aims are also to illustrate the original charm and the infinite resources of this genre, which continues to delight the public at large and the knowledgeable even today. Keywords: opera performance, opera staging, liturgical drama, vernacular drama, secular drama, dramatic madrigal, intermedi, the Florentine Camerata, Claudio Monteverdi, comédies-ballets, tragédie en musique, semi-opera, opera seria, the comic opera, opera buffa, ópera comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, tonadilla, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart "

The Beggar’s Opera as Social and Political Satire: Origin, Development and Popularity

This research paper revolves around the origin, development and popularity of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera when taken as a significant social and political satire. Historical representations are required to set up the shaping factors and origin of this play. Besides, the paper sheds light on the influences that have prompted him to attempt this kind of dramatic art. Furthermore, it can be assumed that that play is the production of Gay’s satirical attitudes towards the social and political systems prevailing in his time that are facilitative to this artistic production. The researcher will make certain touches upon Gay’s innovative mind to create a genre unprecedented in his time—the ballad opera tradition—that has gained immense popularity in the literary media and influenced many major dramatists such as Thomas Beckett and others to follow his example.

Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster by Berta Joncus

Reviewed by: Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster by Berta Joncus John Cunningham Berta Joncus, Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster ( Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2019). Pp. 541. $99.00 cloth. Catherine "Kitty" Clive (née Raftor) (1711–1785) was one of the first female stars of the London stage. Born in London to a disgraced Irish Catholic father, William Raftor, she assumed her married name from the barrister George Clive in 1733. Between her debut in 1728 and retirement in 1769, Clive acted and sang on the London stage in a range of productions (including plays, masques, ballad operas, oratorios, and operas), including the role of Dalila in Handel's Samson (1743). Her career coincided with the rise of the English press media and its increasing construction of celebrity. Her star power brought with it financial rewards, which ultimately contributed to the public turning on her in the 1740s, leaving Clive to throw her lot in with David Garrick and, in the process, abandoning and disparaging the serious song through which she had built her career. In this excellent book, Berta Joncus tells the enthralling story of this remarkable heroine. The name Kitty Clive will, of course, be familiar to anyone with an interest in the eighteenth-century London stage; her modern reputation is largely founded on her acting skills. Over 13 substantial chapters, Joncus paints a detailed picture of Clive not simply as an actress but as a performer highly conscious of her self-image and an active participant in its construction. In addition to her meticulous analyses of the theatrical contexts and the works and roles that Clive inhabited, Joncus explores visual representations of Clive in portrait and porcelain. While Clive is generally considered primarily as an actress today, Joncus demonstrates that, in fact, Clive's singing, musicianship, and musical training were the essential elements in her success. Moreover, the "modern ignorance of Clive as initially a celebrated songster, and then a first comedienne-soprano, stems largely from eighteenth-century writings, including Clive's" (4). The book examines Clive's singing career until around 1750. Joncus explains how in this first half of her singing (rather than acting) career, Clive used song as a means of bonding with her audience through improvisation, direct address, and parodying imitations; after 1750, serious song ceased to be an important aspect of Clive's repertory. Though the book's focus only on this early stage of Clive's career leaves a substantial portion of it unexplored, Kitty Clive, or the Fair Songstress nonetheless represents a major reassessment of this largely neglected star of the eighteenth-century stage. Joncus begins with an evocative exploration of Clive's modern reputation, its construction in the eighteenth century, and the emerging culture of stardom and [End Page 734] public identity. In the chapters that follow, Joncus shows how Clive's representation and reputation changed. In the 1720s, she trained with the ill-fated Henry Carey, who in Clive saw an ideal student, one with the potential to realize his own theatrical ambitions. Clive's emergence coincided with The Beggar's Opera and with Lavinia Fenton's star in rapid ascent as Polly Peacham. At the rival Drury Lane Theatre, Colley Cibber sought to stage a ballad opera based on virtue and innocence, with Clive as the leading lady opposite Cibber himself: Carey's Love in a Riddle. The poor quality of the work and Cibber's own lack of singing ability (and self-awareness) were rescued by Clive's own performance. And so Clive's early image of propriety and seriousness was born, as was her reputation as a singer. The next few years brought continued success in both serious and comic roles, culminating in the 1732–33 season. Sexuality and gender are recurring themes in the book. Joncus suggests that Clive's alleged marriage in 1733 never took place and that their association reflected a kind of mutual protection of both borne of the attraction that both felt to members of their own sexes. As Clive's status grew, she became embroiled in several rows and scandals that eventually broke her reputation in the 1740s. For example, in the so-called "Polly Row" (1736...

«Channel» In' Cin' as first original Chinese national monumental opera

The purpose of the article is to define the genre-specific opera of In' Cin' «Channel" (2012) as the first original China national monumental opera. The methodology consists in the application of historical and genre methods of research. The scientific novelty of work has conditioned the analysis of opera concepts of the Chinese musicologists of beginning ХХІ ages essence of which consisted in development оf criteria of original China national monumental opera: the core meaningfulness of plot, dramatic event clever as psychological motivation, "space" for the introduction of music, forming of opera situation for creation of with a plot song, the interlacing of many storylines. Conclusions. The genre specificity of the Yin Qin opera is to synthesize genres of romantic ballad opera (ballad opera), grand opera (grand opera), opera song (song opera), lyrical opera, opera legends, choral opera-mystery, opera- oratorios, opera stories, musical dramas of ideas and symbols.

Literature and the Culture of Elections and Electioneering in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the rise of contested elections as an important aspect of political life, and an outpouring of literary texts concerned to represent, and intervene in, the electoral process. This article recovers this rich, wide-ranging, and ideologically diverse genre, and argues that, interacting and overlapping with other forms, literature both reflected and helped to shape electoral culture. Popular literary varieties (from ballad opera to mock-heroic verse) were reworked to serve topical electoral purposes. This literature contributed to the culture of elections, making available particular, generically shaped representations and potentially increasing forms of electoral participation and partisanship. Like election rituals and other forms, literary texts encouraged engagement with elections among voters and non-voters. Indeed, through their formal qualities and modes of dissemination, literary texts could have pronounced power to engage varied audiences, and fuel a culture of contested elections, even when many seats were not contested and many could not vote. The election miscellany highlights links between election literature and regional printing, political, and literary cultures, and the growth of a market for this writing. At the same time, the authorship of election literature afforded diverse individuals a form of political expression and participation. Furthermore, the article considers the significance of the divergent, generically inflected views of candidates, elections, and the electoral activity of particular groups such literature advanced—for wider political culture, as well as specific elections. It proposes that texts from rousing ballads to vividly critical satires energized the divisions key to adversarial electoral culture, and could play into different calls for ‘reform’.

Print, Manuscript, and Oral Literary Cultures: The Case of Eighteenth-Century Irish Song

Print, Manuscript, and Oral Literary Cultures:The Case of Eighteenth-Century Irish Song Moyra Haslett (bio) When the "Meeting of the Harpers" was organized in Belfast in the summer of 1792, its principal aim was to record and thus preserve Irish tunes that might otherwise disappear with the deaths of the harpers themselves. While the impetus was shaped by antiquarian interests of the late century, the context of the 1790s provided obvious political motives too. (The meeting was held in the Belfast Exchange Rooms from 11–13 July so as to coincide with commemorative celebrations of the fall of the Bastille.) The Irish language tutor who was to transcribe the lyrics of the songs did not attend (we don't know why), but the musician who transcribed the tunes, Edward Bunting, would go on to publish three volumes of what he called the "ancient music of Ireland" (1796, 1809, 1840), the product of many decades of research transcribing and notating Irish melodies from performances in rural Ireland and the first sustained attempt to document Irish-language song. Beyond the three published volumes, then, are the more extensive manuscripts, held by Special Collections in the library of Queen's University Belfast, and beyond those manuscripts the vanished performances themselves, which the print and manuscript records shadow. This essay reflects on issues arising directly from the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded "Irish Song Project" conducted at Queen's [End Page 349] University (2012–2015), which, in seeking to investigate the historical development of the different repertoires of Irish song, drew upon the evidence offered by print and manuscript cultures and supplemented these with an attempt to catch something of oral culture through performance practice as late as the emergence of audio technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 As full a survey as possible of song before 1850, with a particular focus on song-tunes, was made in order to see if there were continuities of tradition and cultural practice between songs and song traditions. Although the Bunting collection at Queen's University provided the core resource, a systematic survey of songs in manuscript and print held in many libraries was attempted. The resulting online database (www.irishsongproject.qub.ac.uk) offers an indicative sample of just over two hundred songs. Selecting songs for inclusion brought difficult issues of weighting and balance into question. How could we ensure that the vibrant culture of Irish-language song in particular would be properly represented? Stretching the parameters of the survey to 1850 allowed the project to draw upon early-nineteenth-century interest in Irish song, represented most significantly in the collections by Bunting, James Hardiman, George Petrie, William Forde, Henry Hudson, John Edward Pigot, and James Goodman. Quite a few songs got published by wending their ways into Anglophone culture, particularly in the form of ballad operas or in collections of song-tunes in the eighteenth century. The tune specification for "Eibhlin Aruin" in Charles Coffey's ballad opera The Beggar's Wedding (Dublin, 1729) indicates its existence thirty years before its first appearance in a Gaelic manuscript. The popular song "Come haste to the wedding" was included in the Dublin-performed pantomime A Trip to the Dargle or the Irish Wedding (1762).2 And the tune "Cremona" is one of many Irish airs included in the London-printed Aria di Camera (c. 1730). Since musical notation is rare in early manuscripts, certainly until Bunting's project of transcribing traditional airs, these sources are particularly significant. Engraved sheets of musical notation were often too costly for Dublin printers: while prestige publications of psalms and several notable prints of Irish tunes did include printed music, the vast majority of song-texts, including ballad opera texts, appeared without their accompanying melodies. And no Dublin printer in the early eighteenth century owned a Gaelic font, so Irish-language texts had to be anglicized unless they were published abroad. Increased attention to bilingual crossings in eighteenth-century Ireland is evident in a number of recent works.3 But while previous studies of music in eighteenth-century Ireland have noted a number of songs and airs that traverse the traditionally perceived divisions of religion and...

The Influence of the Paris Stage on Kane O’Hara’s <i>Midas</i>


 Kane O’Hara’s English burletta, Midas (1762), combined many influences, borrowing its airs in the manner of the pasticcio or ballad opera and connecting them with recitative in the manner of opera seria, pantomime, and the masque. The main sources for borrowing are folk music, catches, pantomime, and English and Italian opera. Two airs from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opera (or intermède) Le Devin du village (1752) are perhaps the most surprising inclusion. O’Hara’s retention of these two airs in all versions of Midas, along with their rarity, points to their having a particular significance in relation to his purposes for Midas.
 This article explores the awareness of French music and literature in Dublin in the middle of the eighteenth century. The circumstances of the composition and first performances of Midas and Le Devin du village are compared, and O’Hara’s settings of Rousseau’s airs are analysed and viewed in relation to Rousseau’s writings on music. The original performer of the two borrowed airs, Pierre Jélyotte, was the most celebrated singer at the Paris Opera in the middle of the eighteenth century: his association with the operatic romance, and the relevance of his other roles in relation to Midas, are investigated. Jélyotte’s vocal characteristics, his association with the guitar and his pastoral roles appear to be mirrored in Apollo’s disguise in Midas. This article proposes, indeed, that O’Hara’s borrowing of two airs from Le Devin du village reveals a more pervasive influence from the Paris stage than has hitherto been suspected.

Dancing in Early Productions of The Beggar's Opera

John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was accepted for production by John Rich, manager at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and received its premiere in January 1728. With its twin satirical targets of Italian opera and political corruption, and its fresh approach to musical entertainment, the opera had an unprecedented success during its first season and continued to be performed every year in London for the remainder of the century. Alongside the many songs, the libretto indicates three contrasting ensemble dances, introduced at key moments of the drama. These dances have been overlooked in most studies of The Beggar's Opera. The article investigates the significance of the dances within the ballad opera, the dancers who may have performed them and what they may have been dancing. Each dance and its music is analysed in detail, and placed within the context of the dance repertoire and wider theatrical background at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The authors also demonstrate the importance of dance in attracting audiences at Lincoln's Inn Fields; and show how, as box office receipts for The Beggar's Opera eventually declined, Rich stimulated demand by introducing divertissements and entr'acte dances unrelated to the show.

John Gay, Ballad Opera and theThéâtres de la foire

ABSTRACTDaniel Heartz was the first musicologist to link John Gay'sThe Beggar's Opera(1728) withopéras comiques en vaudevilles, light musical theatre entertainments popular at the annual Paris fairs. Other scholars such as Edmond Gagey and Calhoun Winton had also suggested that Frenchcomédies en vaudevillesmight have been models for Gay's ‘original’ new genre of the ballad opera, but were unable to find compelling evidence for their suspicions. This article shows that the music ofPolly(1729), Gay's sequel toThe Beggar's Opera, can finally provide a link between ballad operas and thecomédies en vaudevilles, as four of the unidentified French airs in the opera can now be identified as popular Frenchvaudevilles. I investigate the fruitful exchange between Paris and London in the early eighteenth century (despite prevailing anti-French sentiment in Britain), focusing on musical borrowings, translations and the performers who worked in both cities. We shall see that ballad opera and thecomédies en vaudevillesshare common ground, includingvaudevilles finals, common tunes sung by actor-singers and the use of musical parody and double entendre. A closer examination of Gay's (and his contemporaries') knowledge of thecomédies en vaudevillesilluminates previously unknown French contributions to eighteenth-century English popular musical theatre, and demonstrates the unique way in which French practices were appropriated in early eighteenth-century England.

Norman Corwin's The Lonesome Train (Live Broadcast) CBS 1944: a critical reflection

The Lonesome Train was a commercial half-hour ‘ballad opera’ or folk cantata, transmitted in 1944, about the funeral train bearing President Abraham Lincoln’s body home after his assassination in the Ford Theatre of Washington D.C. in 1865. This became culturally resonant in 1945 on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the Decca recording of the show became a sort of ‘media requiem’, played over and over again on US radio stations. The live production, directed by Norman Corwin, is a hybrid between drama and documentary, but goes further with its use of music and poetry… perhaps a musical modernist montage of traditions as varied as George Gershwin, Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Corwin has been characterised as the American Shakespeare of radio, his We Hold These Truths (1941) possibly attracting the highest audience for any radio play in human history. The central narrative character in The Lonesome Train is a reporter, a 20th century chronicler, a journalistic oracle representing the role of the freedom and significance of the US media under the First Amendment. And he narrates with style, dignity, sensitivity, subtlety and deploys the art of a storytelling aesthetic with a knowing understated language when describing Abraham Lincoln’s assassination: ‘and along about the middle of the evening something happened that wasn’t in the program. I guess you all know what that was. The news spread pretty fast…’ When the radio medium engages in any form of grieving and memorialising, with the full commitment of musical expression, poetic exposition and the rallying of an ethical belief system against threat and danger in the context of war, emotiveness, empathy and sympathy will be engendered with full force. Here, its cultural power and significance travels vertically and horizontally through the sociological vectors of state and federal power and people power. It can be argued that The Lonesome Train is the American equivalent of Handel’s Messiah. Reviewer TIM CROOK is Reader in Media & Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London and Visiting Professor in Broadcast Journalism in the faculty of English, Media and Performance, Birmingham City University, UK. He is also an award-winning journalist, author, and program maker in a career spanning four decades. His publications span history, radio studies, journalism and media law and ethics. They include Radio Drama: theory & practice (1999) and The Sound Handbook (2011) both published by Routledge.

He Stoops to Conquer: Fielding and English Song


 Given Fielding’s noteworthy achievement as a songwriter, two puzzling issues arise. First, why are his lyrics so superior to his poetry, and second, why did he become immersed in popular song when he had limited respect for the form? The second question is the more easily answered: the often impecunious Fielding embraced ballad opera after noting the monumental success of The Beggar’s Opera. Its appeal for him, though, was not simply financial as its attack on Italian opera and use of songs to make moral points also attracted him. Once underway, however, his career as a lyricist quickly revealed his talent for word-painting, as he skillfully used music to reinforce his words’ meaning; and he integrated his airs so smoothly into the action that many are written as dialogue, giving them dramatic force. He also proved highly adept at setting new words to old melodies, using the previous lyrics to provide an interpretive framework for his own. Ironically, too, his limited respect for the genre contributed to his success as he abandoned the stilted and elevated style of his poetry and adopted popular music’s easy informality. Indeed, if English song was ‘low’, it was ultimately by stooping that Fielding conquered
 
 
 

“Déjà vu/déjà entendu” ? Handel’s opere serie on the London Stage

Handelian opera seria might well be regarded as a huge recycling machine. Partly based on the setting of outdated librettos revamped in order to suit modern taste, it often makes use of previously composed music, usually enriched and improved to please London audiences. Handel’s Serse is a case in point inasmuch as it reveals the British specificities of an exogenous musical genre which somehow manages, once it has been acclimatised to its new context, to combine strangeness and familiarity, déjà vu and creativity, rehashing and originality. Quite surprisingly, many operatic arias from Handel’s works found their way into the ballad operas once believed to parody and undermine the imported musical genre. The final part of the article, devoted to the farce The Lottery (1732), thus examines the various shades of meaning derived from the intrusion of those déjà entendu musical pieces whose incongruous origin paradoxically enlightens the dramatic and aesthetic issues at stake in Fielding’s play.

Fielding and Handel: the Beginnings of Modern Musical Theatre

This paper analyses how Fielding “recycled” arias from Italian operas by Handel in his ballad operas of the 1730s. Current scholarship has now identified and listed the many musical borrowings that took place during this period, but it seems that the aesthetic and dramatic effects of the re-contextualisation of some well-known pieces have remained largely overlooked. And yet, whether or not the lyrics of such songs were re-texted at the time, the general comprehension of a ballad opera is necessarily conditioned by a thorough decoding of all the layers of meaning accumulated in the process of rewriting. This article focuses primarily on the Handel songs from The Grub-Street Opera and on their reappearance in Fielding’s afterpiece The Lottery.

In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood by Dorothy de Val (review)

In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood. By Dorothy de Val. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011. [x, 194 p. ISBN 9780754654087. $89.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.This study of Lucy Broadwood (1858- 1929) provides a striking panorama of English musical life in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Great-granddaughter of the founder of the famous piano manufacturing firm, Broadwood was an habitue of the London concert world, privy to trade secrets and insider information about some of Europe's most famous pianists. Membership in genteel society brought regular access to the best musical salons of the capitol, where she witnessed the private performances of many of the foremost musicians of the day. A singer and pianist who also wrote songs, she received much recognition in these circles as a performer and arranger, though upper-class mores that insisted on music as a leisure pursuit ensured that her work in this area be kept to a minimum.Broadwood was also one of the pioneers of the Folk Revival, the movement to collect and codify the artifacts of British traditional culture that had been gathering momentum since the mid-nineteenth century and that culminated in the establishment of the Folk-Lore (1878) and Folk- Song (1899) Societies. She was a founding member of the latter, serving as long-time board member and secretary, and eventually as president. She also edited many issues of the Society's Journal, drawing on her expertise as co-editor, with J. A. Fuller Maitland, of the pathbreaking English County Songs (1893) as well as on her own collecting experiences in the field. Her wide reading in folklore and cultural anthropology brought an unusually keen and sympathetic intelligence to the study of traditional music, while her historical interests extended beyond folk song to include early music. She explored historical methods of performance practice with Arnold Dolmetsch, and published a number of arrangements of early English and continental works in her anthology Old World Songs (1895, also co-edited with Fuller Maitland). At the behest of William Barclay-Squire, Keeper of the Music Collec - tion at the British Museum, she edited songs by Henry Purcell. In the last decade of her life, she contributed to the British ballad opera revival of the 1920s.In short, Broadwood was both witness to and an important player in the musical life of her times. Dorothy de Val has been given the difficult task of conveying the richness of her subject in a mere 164 pages, especially as she has undertaken to write a true biography rather than a more specialized musical monograph. Thus in addition to Broadwood's many important and varied musical pursuits, we learn about her frequent European travels, indifferent health and primitive medical treatments, relationships with family members and the family firm, politics, charity work, and explorations in comparative religion and mysticism. We also encounter her many friends and colleagues, including the pianist Fanny Davies, the baritone James Campbell McInnes (a possible lover), and the civil servant Sir Richmond Ritchie, among others, all of whom receive space and appraisal in relation to Broadwood's life. If some figures and topics are somewhat slighted and the discussion occasionally seems to jump around-an impression not helped by a few chapter subheadings that seem mislabeled or misplaced-this is a perhaps inevitable consequence of Broadwood's relatively low name recognition and the resulting need to keep the book short. Still, as the means by which we get to know her and place her work socially and emotionally, the diversity of topics emerges as a strength. The challenge of being an intelligent and curious single woman in an upper-class Victorian society where marriage was the norm is particularly well drawn, as we see Broadwood chafing under society's strictures, battling depression and struggling internally about missed career opportunities. …

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century ed. by Tiffany Potter (review)

Tiffany Potter, ed.Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century. University of Toronto Press, 2012. 344 pp. 18 b and w illustrations. ISBN-10: 1442641819; iSBN-13: 978-1442641815. First the disclaimer: I have known the editor of this collection and more than half of its contributors, some for more than twenty years, and have edited some of their essays in Lumen, the proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and TransAtlantic Crossings. Given that csecs has had its own annual meeting since 1971 and that the pool of eighteenth-century scholars in this country is relatively small one, it would be difficult to find reviewer who was not connected in one way or another. However, I am not, at present, engaged in any projects with any of the authors in Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century. In order to minimize perceived conflict of interest, I intend to steer toward essays whose authors I don't know. The dust jacket, featuring A View of the Grand Walk, offers splendid view of an outdoor concert at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, well attended by women in the latest style of wide-bustled dresses. The first names of the Nuremberg-born engraver who set up print shop in London circa 1744, Johann Sebastian Muller (circa 1715-1792), are not given in the credit, and the date of this, circa 1751, is missing. He worked with the painter-designer, Samuel Wale, who was founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. The design shows woman, backed by small group of musicians, singing an elevated bandstand to crowd of well-dressed strollers. In an age that knew no film, television, or radio, this was the perfect, genteel (and much healthier) afternoon entertainment. The editor of this volume has previously published monograph on Henry Fielding (Honest Sins: Georgian Libertinism, 1999), edited Robert Rogers's 1766 tragedy about Pontiac, Ponteach, or the Savages of America (2010), and co-edited collections on Battlestar Gallactica (2007) and The Wire (2009). Some essays fix on more customary subjects, from theatres, plays, and actresses, to novels, magazines, and cookbooks, as well as populist politics, dress, and portraiture (xi). To demonstrate just how far she is prepared to push the popular-culture envelope, Potter boldly leads this collection with dazzling leap The Rape of the Lock to the 2009 adaptation, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century blends eighteenth-century studies with twenty-first century multimedia. If the dust jacket lulled you into thinking staid gathering was to follow, well. we're not in tranquil Vauxhall Gardens any more. Potter divides this collection into three parts: the first (after her own essay on zombies) more or less rooted in the eighteenth century, the second focusing on reading and writing, and the third bringing us up to speed on recent adaptations of the long eighteenth century in our so far short-lived twenty-first. So this avoids being an exclusive club for period-limited studies but is, rather, gathering where specialists can let their hair down (something both male and female authors could do) and make connections between their academic interests (which have to combat the stigma of relevance) and their cultural surroundings. Anyone who thinks the eighteenth century is dry vacuum between the Renaissance and Romantics (or the hole in the Early Modern donut) will be pleasantly shocked to learn more about the role women played in every aspect of life. Berta Joncus looks at two sopranos who used their enormous appeal to transform their roles. Lavinia Fenton took some of the sting out of John Gay's satirical lines, turning Beggar's Opera into a sentimental vehicle (25). Kitty Clive, who starred in some of Fielding's ballad operas, had strong views on how best to interpret the script. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams witnessed an argument between Fielding and Clive, sparked by his intention of casting her as the bawd in The Wedding Day. …