Eighteenth-Century Stage Research Articles

From Love of Money to Love for Love: Heiresses on the Long Eighteenth-Century Stage

Abstract Heiresses have been overlooked in seventeenth and eighteenth-century theatre criticism. When they are discussed, it is usually alongside the prodigal hero’s resolution of his financial difficulties and rakish behavior through marriage. Financially and sexually desirable, the heiress is therefore an important and influential character in the marriage plot. This article presents a literary historical analysis of the changing representation and function of the heiress in comedy, to argue that the evolvement of the heiress in the marriage plot reveals emergent and shifting discourses about money, family and sentiment in the long-eighteenth century. The treatment of the heiress on the eighteenth-century stage reflects a sentimental response to the role of money in marriage in line with the ideology of companionate marriage. Whereas, on the late seventeenth-century stage, the heiress acts as economic manager and wittily protects her financial interest.

Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women. By Helen E. M. Brooks . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; pp. x + 201, 8 illustrations. $95 cloth. - Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. By Fiona Ritchie . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; pp. x + 256, 6 illustrations, 5 tables. $99.99 cloth, $80 e-book.

Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women. By Helen E. M. Brooks . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; pp. x + 201, 8 illustrations. $95 cloth. - Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. By Fiona Ritchie . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; pp. x + 256, 6 illustrations, 5 tables. $99.99 cloth, $80 e-book.

Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women by Helen E. M. Brooks, and: Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1800 ed. by Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr (review)

Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women by Helen E. M. Brooks, and: Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1800 ed. by Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr (review)

LAURA ENGEL and ELAINE M. McGIRR (eds). Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830

The essays collected in Stage Mothers make a strong case for the importance of theatrical motherhood to the study of eighteenth-century maternity. The figure of the stage mother encompasses both the female performer, who was often (but not always) herself a mother, as well as the maternal roles she played on the eighteenth-century stage. The concept of stage motherhood, then, contributes to what Diana Solomon calls ‘betweenness’, the overlap between the actress’s persona and the character that she plays. Maternity, either in real life or in the world of the play, could also form part of the way in which an actress constructed her persona for an audience using what, in studies of female performers and celebrity culture, Joseph Roach terms ‘public intimacy’ and Felicity Nussbaum has named an ‘interiority effect’. Furthermore, the apparently inevitable sexualization of the actress by some of her audience gives new resonance to the erotic connotations of motherhood (a state which while idealized also draws attention to the woman as a sexual being). This volume provides a welcome addition to recent scholarship on motherhood in the eighteenth century by Toni Bowers, Marilyn Francus and Ruth Perry, amongst others. The editors and contributors acknowledge their indebtedness to this work, with Francus’s concept of the ‘spectral mother’, a figure absent yet haunting, applied frequently in the case studies offered here. The essays also extend research on the topic in important new directions. Engel, McGirr and their contributors demonstrate that stage mothers are uniquely positioned to provide insight into the various dimensions of maternity because of the complex interplay between their on-stage and off-stage identities.

Review of Helen E.M. Brooks, Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women

Review of Helen E.M. Brooks, Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women

Mediated Performances: Negotiating the Theater of War on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage and Page

A review of Daniel O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau: Romantic Pierrot

Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

Aparna Gollapudi Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747. Aparna Gollapudi. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xii+185.

<i>Aparna Gollapudi</i> Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747<i>Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747</i>. Aparna Gollapudi. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xii+185.

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2014

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2014 James Beekman Bush, Editor/Researcher (bio), Andrew Gibb, Associate Editor (bio), and Troy Matthew Lescher, Associate Editor (bio) This is the sixty-second annual report of dissertations in progress in theatre arts in the United States. The entries contained in this report were gathered from those institutions offering a doctoral degree in theatre or related fields. The accuracy of this report depends largely on the cooperation of those faculty members who submitted complete and timely information. By compiling this data, we seek to inform the greater theatre community of the diverse research projects currently underway across various universities and disciplines. This report lists (in order) the doctoral student’s name, dissertation title, institution, academic department, faculty supervisor, and projected year of completion. Dissertation topics are arranged in two parts: in part 1, topics are listed first geographically, and second by time periods; and part 2 provides additional divisions for those projects that are not easily classified within geographic or historical parameters, but conform to other emerging areas of contemporary research. A request for submissions for the 2015 edition will be mailed in October 2014. Please contact the 2014–15 editor (andrew.gibb@ttu.edu) if your institution is not already receiving the annual call for submissions. My associate editors and I are grateful for the effort of all those who have contributed to this annual report. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Texas Tech University Department of Theatre and Dance and its chair, Mark Charney, for sponsoring this endeavor. [End Page 331] Part I Africa Williams, Joshua. Don’t Tell The Hyena How Well You Can Bite: Performance, Race, and Animality in Eastern Africa. University of California, Berkeley. Performance Studies. Catherine Cole. 2016. Brazil Porter, Laurelann. Performance and Social Justice for Women in Rural Bahia, Brazil. Arizona State University. Film, Dance, and Theatre. Amira de la Garza and Tamara Underiner. 2015. England Medieval Renaissance Chapman, Matthieu. The Other Other: Re-Constructing the Paradigm of Race in Early Modern England. University of California, San Diego. Theatre and Dance. Janet Smarr. 2014. Mendelson, Avi. Putting on Antic Dispositions: Shape-shifting Shakespearean Madnesses. Brandeis University. English. Thomas King. 2015. Pyles, Timothy. Performing Magic: Shakespeare, Magic, and Early Modern Skepticism. Indiana University. Theatre, Drama, and Dance. Amy Cook. 2014. Quinsland, Kirk. Interactive Performance and the Early Modern Stage. Fordham University. English. Mary Bly. 2014. Stark-Gendrano, Rebecca. Desunt Nonnulla: Reading the Fragment in Early Modern England. Fordham University. English. Mary Bly. 2014. Tompkins, J. Case. Methods of Revision in Sixteenth-Century English Cycle Drama. Purdue University. English. Charles Ross and Paul White. 2013. Windholz, Jordan. Men Alone: Representations of the Bachelor in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Fordham University. English. Heather Dubrow. 2015. Sixteenth/Seventeenth Century Hughes, Jacob A. Shakespeare’s Chaucerian Entertainers. Washington State University. English. William Hamlin. 2014. Restoration/Eighteenth Century Brano, Anthony. Acting Oblivion: The Politics of Memory, Forgetting, and Forgiveness on the Restoration Stage, 1660–1685. Fordham University. English. Stuart Sherman. 2015. Hendrickson, Kalissa. Affecting Objects; or, the Drama of Foreign Products in English Comedy, 1660–1800. Arizona State University. English. Mark Lussier and Ayanna Thompson. 2015. Pfeiffer, Loring. Bodies and Selves: Women Playwrights and Subjectivity on the Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Stage. University of Pittsburgh. English. Jennifer Waldron. 2015. Nineteenth Century Simon, Jessica. Mimetic Sensations: Sensation (Melo)Drama, the Sensation Novel, and Victorian Realism. Columbia University. English and Comparative Literature. Sharon Marcus. 2015. France Given, William. Early Illusionists, the Technology of Filmic Representation, and the Augmentation of Perceptions of Reality of the Performative Space during the Belle Époque in Paris. University of California, San Diego. Theatre and Dance. Jim Carmody. 2014. Germany Coen, Elizabeth. Staging Theater to Realize a Nation: The Development of German National Theater in the Eighteenth Century. University of Washington. Drama. Odai Johnson. 2015. Friedman, Andrew. Theatre of Contemporaneity: Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, and Trond Reinholdtsen’s Ibsen-Saga. The Graduate Center/CUNY. Theatre. Marvin Carlson. 2016. Woolf, Brandon. Re-Functionary Stages: Cultural Policy and Contemporary Performance in Berlin. University of California, Berkeley. Performance Studies. Shannon Jackson. 2014. Ireland Cahill, Alex Iben. The Catholic Stage Guild of Ireland: Forming the Catholic...

Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Edward Nye is a dance historian who specializes in the eighteenth century and who is the author of many articles on the genre of ballet d'action, which became known in Europe during the second half of the century. His groundbreaking book, Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage, examines ballet d'action both in its own context and as a broader aesthetic phenomenon. It is an enriching milestone in a body of work that Nye has been developing for a decade.1 The book, presented in two parts, first contains an analysis of the genre within what the author argues to be its proper intellectual and historical context, and goes on to study its critical relationship to theatrical technique, or—to use a term from its era—the poetics of ballet d'action.

Personne to Personnage: Names, Fame, and Identity Games in Eighteenth- Century Theatre

Names are intrinsic to personal identity: they demarcate individuality and signal links to a historical or familial collectivity. But what happens when a name becomes public property, no longer signifying a private person, but rather a celebrated figure with a public function? And what if this public personality or personnage is an actor, representing other persons through the personnages whose names and costumes he or she adopts? On the eighteenth-century stage, these concepts were in a state of flux. As perfect stage illusion became more desirable, the material presence of the actor dissolved, privileging the reality of the personnage. Yet simultaneously a new generation of star actors managed their name and image to create offstage personnages, more famous than their onstage counterparts. At the Parisian Comédie-Italienne, actors followed commedia dell’arte convention, playing one ‘type’ for life. Some actors were known by their type names, some adopted stage names, and some gave their names to roles written for them. This article explores such slippage in the naming of actors. It uses the context of the Comédie-Italienne to analyse the interaction between new theories of acting and an increasing desire by actors to ‘make a name’ for themselves, and postulates these notions as the roots of much wider modern concepts of actorship.

Rethinking Reform Comedies: Colley Cibber’s Desiring Women

Against the critical consensus, this article argues that reform comedies are significant aesthetic and ideological works, dramatically coherent and expertly crafted, with a clear moral and satirical intent. Focussing on Colley Cibber, and especially his The Careless Husband (1704), I demonstrate that a detailed examination of these comedies, and especially of their stagecraft, challenges long-held critical beliefs about the eighteenth century stage and its representation of women. Cibber’s satires are not misogynistic attacks on woman’s supposedly natural hypocrisy, but rather moral comedies of manners and performative social behaviours that allow women to gain their ends and satisfy their desires.

&lt;i&gt;Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre Kate Cregan Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre, ed. James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xii + 220. $99.95, £55. Giving the customary deferential nod to the contentiousness of any characterization of the “early modern” period, coeditors Messrs. Allard and Martin forge on bravely in giving a flavor of the bloody stages between the rise of Shakespeare and the failures of Joanna Baillie. Three of the ten essays are relevant to Scriblerians. The coeditors set pain and trauma in life and on stage within poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and psychological contexts. They foreground Foucault’s archaeology of punishment, Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the tortured body, and Cathy Caruth’s deconstruction of trauma as key influences on the study of pain. If I follow Susan B. Iwanisziw’s argument in “Tortured Bodies, Factionalism, and Unsettled Loyalties in Settle’s Morocco Plays” correctly, Settle’s plays reflect the visible and graphic State violence of the returned Stuarts in the bloody grotesquery of their mise-en-scène and an analogy with contemporaneous Moroccan politics. Ms. Iwanisziw claims his Moroccan plays “bear the imprint of domestic terror that remains, thus far, unexamined in Settle’s works,” though well-trodden ground in relation to other writers and the Restoration [End Page 77] stage in general. In a lengthy and frequently digressive essay at the end of the “Bodies (Im)Politic” section, she outlines Settle’s quixotic politics. She at once credits him with a knowledge of North African politics in The Empress of Morocco (1671), while at the same time admitting that there is little of that knowledge to be found in direct parallels in his plot lines, concluding that in The Heir of Morocco (1682) “Settle [is] only paying lip service to North African culture and Islam in signs of prayers.” This is only one example where Ms. Iwanisziw shares something of Settle’s style: a penchant for grand statements that are swiftly qualified. In relation to one spectacularly gory revel, she asserts, “Doubtless the audience fell silent from shock and fear. Rather unnecessarily, given the all-too-familiar exhibition of traitors’ corpses in Restoration England, Abdelcador recites [a] homily.” Following that logic, familiarity with the reality of the gallows may as easily have rendered the staged version insipid or even risible. While Ms. Iwanisziw offers a stimulating confluence of ideas about Settle’s use and misuse of factual events and his political expediency, her intentions are undermined by the breadth of allusions at the expense of direct argument. By contrast, Kara Reilly’s “Lavinia’s Rape: Reading the Restoration Actress’s Body in Pain in Ravenscroft’s Titus“ is succinct and direct. Situated in the thematic section “Spectacular Failures,” this essay reads the body of Ravenscroft’s Lavinia as a metaphorical triumvirate of site (material object), sight (visually objectified) and (sexually defined) cite. For Ms. Reilly, Lavinia’s (psychological and physical) trauma is emblematic of the violation of Charles I’s body politic, the rapists exemplifying current concerns with Whig politicians. Kristeva’s theories of abjection are used to interpret Lavinia’s body as abjected from her father and by extension the Roman state, which inevitably leads to her death/expulsion at her father’s hands. The allusions to Anne Bracegirdle’s experience of playing Lavinia, The Virgin playing a violently deflowered virgin, are keenly observed and suggestive, though one wonders if the final derisory words of the play may be as much a reflection on Tamora, a most notorious “whore” who is the last woman standing/eviscerated, as much as a sexual taint on Bracegirdle/Lavinia. In “Sympathy Pains: Filicide and the Spectacle of Male Heroic Suffering on the Eighteenth-Century Stage”—another “Spectacular Failure”—Cecilia A. Feilla argues that there is a shift in the expression and the popularity of patriarchal filicide as a subject of tragedy, from the appeal of shared pain to shared bourgeois affectivity across the eighteenth century. In other words, filicide became a more acceptable topic with the rise of sentimentality and middle-class attachment, whereby fathers become murderers to put their children out of their...

Celebrity Shylock

This essay proposes the celebrity of fictive bodies and seeks to understand how, and how far, certain fictional characters can stimulate an audience response analogous to that elicited by the flesh and blood. One of many “celebrity characters,” Shylock is useful to this discussion in regard to the historical development of his fame: Shylock on the eighteenth-century stage begins a new kind of fascination with this character. Seeking to explain that fact, the essay outlines aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical practice that enabled audiences to consider character apart from actor and then, to showcase this shift, develops two valences of the eighteenth-century response to Shylock—the tendencies toward judgment and conversion. Both responses demonstrate how a dramatic character invokes (and complicates) the tensions between public and private life that theorists have used to define celebrity appeal.

National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage (review)

Reviewed by: National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage Lourdes Arciniega National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage. By Louise H. Marshall. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 240. At a time when Britain's national identity has begun to acknowledge the colonial "Other" within, Louise Marshall's work on eighteenth-century representations of nationhood onstage is a timely look back at a period when British national identity was emerging, bolstered by rapid imperial expansion. Marshall examines the fragile and fractured building blocks of this nascent national identity through the staging of history plays, which she sees [End Page 476] as "part of the process by which Britain's sense of stability, superiority and authority was imposed" (5). Her work provides intriguing insight into a period when theatre was uniquely positioned to reflect communal cultural experience, bridging the gap between the audience's social realities and the staged fantasies of nationhood. In the theatre, she argues, contemporary ideological debates were represented in history plays, where political anxieties were recycled through tropes of nationalism like liberty, patriotism, colonial projects, trade, and the menace of the Other. Marshall explores the emergence of nationhood thematically by aligning various ideologies then in circulation with history plays that engage similar issues. The first chapter on "Ancient Britons and Liberty," for example, highlights the ideology of the folk in plays like William Philips's Hibernia Freed (1722) and George Jeffrey's Edwin (1724), which root Britishness in Celtic and Saxon identities. Marshall reads these works through Bolingbroke's A Dissertation upon Parties (1736), which emphasized eighteenth-century Britain's strong connection to its mythological histories, "investing them with national significance, encoding them as the origins of Britishness and thus creating a mythology for the nation" (23). Ancient and modern modes of government become linked through the rhetorical tropes of liberty and patriotism, thus reinforcing Britain's mythical privilege to rule supreme. Chapter 2 moves from the figure of the patriot to that of the "favorite"—a court member granted special privilege and suspected of undue influence. The favorite was traditionally cast in plays as the imminent threat to rightful authority, "an evil presence lurking in the shadows of close court culture" (48). Marshall argues, however, that eighteenth-century history plays rewrote the mythology surrounding favoritism to reflect the period's rising political figures like Sir Robert Walpole, leader of Britain's cabinet and de facto first prime minister in 1721. Finding himself in the uneasy position of being a favorite of George I and his son George II, Walpole promoted national myth and patriotism in order to obscure his personal political ambition, while creating favorites of his own in Parliament. While rulers may condone the actions of favorites if they benefit the nation, favoritism can also create resentment and civil unrest. The rise of a favorite can threaten a country's stability, particularly if he is not of noble birth. Walpole, a commoner, "was seen as a threat to the ancient social structure of England and its moral code of chivalry or politeness" (53). In George Sewell's The Tragedy of Sir Walter Raleigh (1719), patriotism and favoritism are closely aligned in an often-problematic relationship, as Raleigh is favored by the Protestant Patriot Queen, but sentenced to death for treason by her successor, James I, at the request of Ambassador Gundamor, a favorite of the Catholic Spanish king. James Ralph's The Fall of the Earl of Essex (1731) offers another version of the downfall of an Elizabethan favorite, portraying Essex as a strategic commander and treaty-making patriot whom eighteenth-century audiences would see as an analog to Walpole, despite his noble birth, due to his prominent role in the British court. Chapter 3, "Shakespeare, the National Scaffold," explores adaptations of Shakespeare's plays during the period of Walpole's rise to and fall from power (1719-45). Because Shakespearean heroes emanated from the pen of a native-born English poet, they were hailed as patriots to be emulated and revered by an audience hungry for national homogeneity and stability. Marshall notes that some of these plays also position women...

Locale in Cardenio, Double Falsehood, Don Quixote and Wellington

This essay deals with locale in Lewis Theobald's 1727 play Double Falsehood on the early eighteenth-century English stage, and in Gary Taylor's “creative reconstruction” of it as The History of Cardenio in a production I directed on a twenty-first century New Zealand stage. Lying behind both these is the presumptive lost Fletcher/Shakespeare collaborative play Cardenio performed on the Jacobean stage in 1613; and Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, the source of the story. My concerns will lie with the court, the village, the city, the mountains and, eventually, New Zealand; and more particularly with the way in which performance may highlight or solve problems inherent in the text.

Why Did Steele’s The Lying Lover Fail? Or, The Dangers of Sentimentalism in the Comic Reform Scene

Sometimes theatrical failures can be as instructive about nuances of genre as stage successes. Especially, a flop from a successful and culturally mainstream dramatist, such as Richard Steele, can tell us much about interactions between representational strategies, audience response, and effective fulfillment of generic aims. (1) In The Lying Lover (1703), Steele began with a clear aim, honest Ambition as he calls it, to write a that might be no improper Entertainment in a Christian Commonwealth. (2) Apparently much impressed by Jeremy Collier's campaign against the Immorality of the Stage, Steele says, [I] took it into my head to write a Comedy with the Severity he required. (3) His goal of writing a rigorously moral shapes both the plot and the comic style of his second play. The Lying Lover is plotted around the repentance and reform of a flawed protagonist, the imprudent braggart, Young Bookwit. The comic reform plot, which has been seen as one manifestation of the general moralization of the early eighteenth-century stage, was becoming quite popular at the turn of the century. In the early eighteenth century, playwrights brought to the London stage protagonists with a variety of flaws so that the audience could enjoy the spectacle of their remorse and reclamation. (4) In these reform comedies, all kinds of errant individuals, from philandering husbands and spendthrift wives to jealous lovers and inveterate gamblers, were successfully reformed for the entertainment of the audience. The Lying Lover exemplifies this generic trend, but it also introduces another innovative element in its comic matrix--an intensely tearful and pathetic last act. The high-pitched emotionalism and pathos of The Lying Lover's ending has led some critics to call it one of the first comedies. (5) While there is little current critical consensus about what sentimental comedy is, or if it can even be identified as a distinct dramatic genre, there is little dispute about the fact that the eighteenth century witnessed new important ways of valuing feeling, which appear as a loose but clearly identifiable cluster of qualities in literary sentimentalism. Elements such as sympathy for the distressed, tearful response to spectacles of suffering or tenderness, and instinctive emotional or monetary benevolence, are the basic marks of the mode and can indeed be detected in the last act of Steele's play. (6) These elements of sentimentalism--whether they make The Lying Lover a or not--play a particularly interesting role in Steele's failed because they seem to weaken the logic of his reform plot. The incompatibility between and reform modes, revealed in a consideration of The Lying Lover's failure, has consequences for the conventional narrative about early eighteenth-century comedy. Often, reform comedies are seen as merely one manifestation of the early eighteenth-century sentimentalization of comedy. (7) One source of this confusion of genres is that both reform and modes have an overt moral design on the audience, with an aim to move the audience to reassess themselves and society. However, a consideration of The Lying Lover's failure reveals that in spite of their shared express aim of improving their viewers, the mechanisms of affect underlying dramatic sentimentalism are not only distinct from those of reform but can be downright detrimental to its effectiveness on the stage. Steele's early fails because, along with its other flaws, it welds together two emergent but not always compatible comic modes--the and the reform mode. The case of The Lying Lover suggests that the common practice of subsuming reform under the aegis of early eighteenth-century sentimentalism needs to be reviewed and revised. Sentimental emotionalism, far from being easily conflated with the reform mode, can actually interfere with its aims and affects. …

The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage. Gennaro Magri and his World. Ed. Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Bruce Alan Brown. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 383pp.

<i>The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage. Gennaro Magri and his World</i>. Ed. Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Bruce Alan Brown. University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, 383pp.

National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage. By Louise H. Marshall. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 223. $85 cloth.

National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of Britishness on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage. By Louise H. Marshall. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; pp. 223. $85 cloth. - Volume 52 Issue 1

Book Review: Pagodas in Play: China on the Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera Stage

Book Review: Pagodas in Play: China on the Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera Stage