London Stage Research Articles

Staging Sociability in The Excursion: Frances Brooke, David Garrick, and the King’s Theatre Coterie

While previous critics have classified Frances Brooke’s novel The Excursion (1777) as a moral tale aligned with either the sentimental or pastoral tradition, this article makes the case for interpreting The Excursion as a political satire directed against corrupt theatre politics. Reading the plot in the context of contemporary letters, periodicals, and theatrical miscellanies reveals a thick weave of topical allusions to the 1770s London stage and uncovers a buried homage to celebrity actress Mary Ann Yates, Brooke’s friend and business partner. Brooke leverages her novel to promote the interests of her theatrical circle and her own claim to be recognized as one of the great theatre managers of the day—specifically, as the equal to David Garrick. As a satire of theatre politics, The Excursion allows Brooke to map out a specific vision for what constitutes good acting, how the government should reform its theatre policy, and why accessible theatre is especially crucial for women, creative professionals, and audience members alike.

The Appearance of Blacks on the Early Modern Stage: <i>Love’s Labour’s Lost</i>’s African Connections to Court

While scholarship is certain that white actors did appear in blackface on the Elizabethan stages, this paper argues for the additional possibility of actual moors and blacks appearing on stage in early modern London. Examining the positive social, political, and economic implications of using in performance these bodies perceived as exotic, I argue for the appearance of blacks in Love’s Labour’s Lost as a display of courtly power in its 1597-8 showing for Elizabeth I. Building on this precedent, Queen Anna’s staging of herself as black in the 1605 Masque of Blackness , I argue, worked to assert the new Jacobean court’s power.

Jews and Muslims in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Othello

In this paper, I will discuss the representation of Jewish and Muslim characters in Marlowe``s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare``s Othello. The approach I will follow throughout this paper is the New Historicist one; i.e. relating the plays to the historical and political background in which they were written. In this regard, I will argue that the seemingly friendly relationship between England and the Muslim world during the reign of Queen Elizabeth played a significant role in the way both Jews and Muslims were represented on the London stage. Queen Elizabeth, whose throne was threatened by the Pope of Rome and the Catholic King of Spain, had to seek an alliance with some strong party who would help her. She found refuge at the then mighty Ottoman Sultan. When it comes to the representation of Muslims and Jews in Marlowe``s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare``s Othello, I found that the friendly relation between the Muslim world and England helped in representing Muslimcharacters in a favorable way than their Jewish counterparts. Shakespeare was objective in representing his ``others`` while Marlowe was subjective.

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.

The London stage, 1890-1899: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel

Preface to the Second Edition Introduction Acknowledgments Abbreviations References Chapter 1: Productions 1940 Chapter 2: Productions 1941 Chapter 3: Productions 1942 Chapter 4: Productions 1943 Chapter 5: Productions 1944 Chapter 6: Productions 1945 Chapter 7: Productions 1946 Chapter 8: Productions 1947 Chapter 9: Productions 1948 Chapter 10: Productions 1949 Appendix Title Index Genre Index Theatre Index General Index About the Author

The London stage, 1900-1909: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel

The London stage, 1900-1909: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel

The London stage, 1910-1919: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel

The London stage, 1910-1919: a calendar of productions, performers, and personnel

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian gothic stage

Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)A book which considers Bram Stoker's immersion in late nineteenth-century theatre both on the Dublin and London stages, and how this may have contributed to his gothic fiction, is long overdue. Catherine Wynne is ideally placed to write such a study. Born and raised in Ireland, where she took a BA and MA in English at University College Dublin, she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Oxford with Irish poet-academic Bernard O'Donoghue. Currently, she is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. Her career, in other words, follows the same Anglo-Irish trajectory as that of Stoker himself, and her study is particularly nuanced with regard to that cultural background. Wynne has previously researched Stoker's theatre reviews, and published in 2012 Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays, and Fiction, all of which provides a rich seed-bed for this current study. She cites Irish novelist Colm Toibin who, on the eve of Stoker's centenary in 2012, suggested that the gothic novelist occupies a space 'in between' Dublin and London and, like Oscar Wilde, that he found his 'space' in the theatre (p. 3).Born in Dublin in 1847 (during the Irish Famine), Bram Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin, and became a civil servant. In his twenties, his nights were spent at the theatre, reviewing plays for the Dublin Evening Mail. In November 1876, Sir Henry Irving, the most celebrated stage actor of the late Victorian period, came to Dublin with his production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The event was to prove transformative in Stoker's life and career. Not only did he see and review Irving's Hamlet, but attended and reviewed separately all three performances. Interestingly, the first two, though extremely positive, also contained some criticisms. Irving was attracted by the second review in particular and asked to meet the author. The outcome was an offer for Stoker to relocate to London and to become the manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He did so later that year and as manager, was intimately bound up in the staging of the melodramas that were the lifeblood of Irving's theatre and that were to feed directly into Stoker's imaginative writings.Wynne's book provides a close intertextual reading of Stoker's gothic fiction and the blood-boltered, spectacular melodramas he saw performed on the Lyceum stage. Her book is an invaluable and revealing index of just how often stage plays are explicitly invoked in Stoker's novels. In Dracula, for instance, Jonathan Harker reaches for a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet (the play Irving performed in Dublin) when deciding to write down what he has just seen - the Count climbing lizard-like up the walls of the castle:Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he had Hamlet say: 'My tablets! Quick, my tablets!/'Tis meet that I put it down, etc.' for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.1Hamlet, when he speaks these lines, has just had his own encounter with the supernatural in the shape of his father's ghost. The submitting and hence subduing of a supernatural encounter to the rational act of recording is an obsessive concern throughout Dracula.Given the explicit invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet by Jonathan Harker and hence by Bram Stoker, it might be expected that a study such as Wynne's would explore in more detail the connections that have been made between the mesmeric onstage presence of Henry Irving and the uncanny figure of Count Dracula. The author, however, resolutely sets her face against following this line, declaring early on her opposition to 'the biographical over-reliance on the notion that Irving is the model for the vampire' (p. 3). In her closing pages, she reiterates even more emphatically that her study 'contests the prevailing reading that sees Irving as the model for the vampire' (p. …

AIDS: Lisson Grove, North West London, 1986

I knew that the anxiety I felt outside their apartment was not rational. Here I was, a trainee in family medicine making my weekly call. I didn’t touch the coffee, opting to concentrate on treating my patient. I placed my black doctor’s bag by his bed opening it for access to the prescription pad. He was a young man with AIDS who suffered from dementia and diarrhea. The word ‘‘treatment’’ was a misnomer since I had little to offer. What was I to say? This was a London stage without an audience. The three actors were two lonely marginalized people with a joint existential struggle and their ill-equipped doctor. I who was supposed to help them couldn’t find the words. There was little time left, but in the solitude of this poorly lit room the hours passed slowly. Jon, the boyfriend was an older man tattooed, unskilled and unemployed. The coffee had been offered in friendship. I knew that I was neither much of a friend nor much of a doctor. The district nurse would rarely call. I was too inexperienced to determine who else visited but I had a feeling that they had few if any callers. After writing up a script for medication to treat the diarrhea and checking on the phone to find out why there had been a delay in the delivery of diapers I felt that my duty was done. As my hand reached for the front door latch, I already felt better. In my haste to leave, I hardly said goodbye. I was ashamed to be no different from the masses; scared of contamination by the ‘‘gay disease’’. Fear of infection and homophobia were a combination that kept all but the already infected at bay. This couple understood that it was better to isolate

John Rastell’s London Stage: Reconstructing Repertory and Collaborative Practice

The study of repertory has greatly illuminated practices among playwrights and playing companies in the later sixteenth century. The repertory approach has yet to be applied to early and mid-Tudor drama, although this method holds out the promise of recovering the collaborative practices connected with John Rastell's stage, the first public stage in London. This article urges scholars active in repertory studies to take a fresh look at Henrician drama and theatrical practices, and employs Heywood and Rastell's play Gentylnes and Nobylyte as a case study in the forces that shape repertory in this earlier period.

Voice sexuée ou a-sexuée sur la scène lyrique londonienne au XVIIIe siècle

It is not the least of paradoxes that the castrati that performed in Italian opera both in Italy in the 17th century and on the London stage after the Restoration should have acted the parts of manly seducers, mighty kings or warriors in spite of their high-pitched, ‘feminine’ voices. Roger Freitas argues that in order to understand the predilection for castrato voices one need to take the erotic bodily dimension of the singers into account. The fascination exerted by this type of voices was closely linked to a contemporary conception of sexuality. This article consequently attempts to analyse, by opposition, the meaning and impact of the emergence of the oratorio genre. It argues that the rise of oratorio was accompanied by a re-composition and re-definition of the respective masculine and feminine territories and that the metamorphosis of the heroic voice on the English lyrical stage in the collective imagination may be interpreted as the allegorical index of a shift towards a “modern,” “Enlightened” conception of sexuality.

The Celebrated Monsieur Desnoyer, Part 1: 1721–1733

George Desnoyer first danced in London in 1721 and 1722, and returned to pursue a successful performing career there between 1731 and 1742. He may have been born around 1700 in Hanover, for he was the son of the dancing master ‘Denoyé’ employed by Georg Ludwig Elector of Hanover (later King George I of England) from at least 1694. 1 Musicians named ‘Desnoyers’ can be found in Paris records from the 1650s. 2 The elder Desnoyer may have been related to Antoine Desnoyers, who was a member of the ‘violons de la Chambre’ at the court of Louis XIV from at least the late 1670s until about 1694. 3 He may also have been the Desnoyers who danced in the 1689 and 1690 revivals at the Paris Opéra of Lully's Atys and Cadmus et Hermione respectively. 4 Whatever his lineage, George Desnoyer was already a skilled exponent of French belle dance style and technique when he first appeared in London, at the Drury Lane Theatre, early in 1721. Desnoyer's father died on 18 April 1721, and he was presumably appointed to succeed him for he left England during the summer of 1722 to become dancing master to George I's grandson Prince Frederick, who had remained in Hanover. His appointment at the electoral court formally ended early in 1730, and the following year Desnoyer returned to London. He was billed as ‘first dancer to the King of Poland’ when he appeared at Drury Lane in late 1731, and for the next few years he divided his time between London, Dresden and Warsaw. Desnoyer's London career lasted until 1742. Over the years, he performed solos, duets and group dances as well as appearing in a variety of afterpieces, and he enjoyed notable partnerships with several leading female dancers. Although virtually all the choreographies he performed are lost, there is much other evidence to shed light on Desnoyer's dancing style and technique. I have documented the lives and careers, as dancing masters, of George Desnoyer and his son Philip elsewhere. 5 In this article I will explore and analyse George Desnoyer's repertoire during his first two periods in London, 1721–1722 and 1731–1733. In a second article, I will look at his repertoire and his dancing partnerships between 1734 and his retirement from the London stage in 1742. 6

Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 by Marianne Montgomery (review)

Reviewed by: Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620 by Marianne Montgomery Peter Kirwan (bio) Marianne Montgomery . Europe's Languages on England's Stages, 1590-1620. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xii + 150. $89.95. The variety of spoken languages other than English preserved in the early modern dramatic corpus poses a series of questions for the critic, few of which have straightforward answers. A stage direction such as "The Lady speakes in Welsh" in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV gives no instruction for the precise words to be spoken, the duration of the speech, or its tone. It implies that accurate Welsh is to be spoken, but this accuracy is left to be determined by the speaker/reader/ auditor, as is the form—verse or prose. The direction itself can be read either as an instruction to a Welsh speaker to ad-lib appropriately, or as indicating the intended effect on an audience. The editor, meanwhile, is faced with the dilemma of presenting substantial speech acts without dialogue. How can the unscripted language maintain a presence in the printed text without being implicitly deprioritized alongside the English dialogue already substituting for and translating the Welsh? Marianne Montgomery's new volume takes as its subject the multiple significations of foreign languages on the early modern London stage. Within a focused thirty-year period, Montgomery ambitiously attends to both the theatrical significance of spoken languages for early audiences, and the implications for an understanding of London's conception of the "foreign." Across chapters predominantly dealing with French, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin, she teases out the complexities of the meanings presented by the staging of these languages, which go far beyond markers of national identity. Montgomery's thesis may be summed up thus: the instances of staged non-English languages "offer audiences a cosmopolitan engagement with the foreign that does not simply reinforce difference in audible terms but instead complicates distinctions between self and other as unknown languages are made comprehensible" (4). Thus, it is not the specific accuracy of the language used that is the priority, but the ways in which it is made sense of for/by the early modern audience. The process of decodification, in Montgomery's argument, is itself the point, drawing attention to the "ethics of exchange" (20) in an increasingly globalized world. Rather than attempt systematically to cover all the implications of language as an exchange system, Montgomery uses each of the languages with a major early modern stage presence to tackle a different set of issues. She treats French and Welsh as gendered in Shakespeare's history plays, and makes an association between conquered female figures and subjugated nations/languages. Dutch, in a range of city comedies, signifies a language of commerce and mercantilism that places London at the center of European trade. Spanish is read as a racialized discourse that comes to stand as its own generic marker within a range of [End Page 138] dramas. Finally, Latin signifies religious and authoritarian knowledge, its use in comedies particularly pointing to layers of social stratification that distinguish aspects of society from one another, while at the same time satirizing the artificial distinctions drawn. Drawing on William Camden and John Speed's contemporary descriptions of Welsh invaders in France marrying native women and cutting out their tongues "lest their children should corrupt their language with their mothers' tongues" (21), Montgomery argues that the conquered female body poses a threat to the conqueror's linguistic victory, offering as examples Henry V's strategic linguistic interplay with Katherine and the presence of the Welshwoman in 1 Henry IV (whom Montgomery carefully avoids describing as either Glendower's daughter or Mortimer's wife) at the point of the contestation of land boundaries. In the latter case, it is the performance of Welshness that is the purpose (though Montgomery does not explore the possibility that the lack of content may indicate space left for a Welsh-speaking actor to insert meaningful lines), whereas in the French-speaking scenes a plurality of meanings is opened up for audiences whose fluency may vary. However, "[n]either can be fully taken as Other" (47), and...

Handel’s Samson

HANDEL'S SAMSONGeorg Friederic Handel. Samson: Oratorio in Three Acts, HWV 57. Herausgegeben von Hans Dieter Clausen. (Hallische Handel-Ausgabe, Ser. I, Bd. 18). Kassel, New York: Barenreiter, 2011. [Teilband 1: Partitur von 1743. Pref. and ed. policy in Ger., Eng., p. vii-xxx; table of versions, p. xxxi-xxxiii; concordance HWV-HHA, p. xxxiv; comparison of the texts of Hamilton's manuscript wordbook and the corresponding lines in Milton's Samson Agonistes and other works by Milton, p. xxxv-lxvii; facsims., p. lxviii-lxxv; repr. of 1743 libretto, p. lxxvi-lxxxv; text in Ger. trans., p. lxxxvi-xcvi; texts of arias added later, in Eng., Ger., p. xcvii; scoring, p. 2; index of scenes, p. 3-5; score, p. 7-328. Teilband 2: Anhange und Kritischer Bericht. Anhang Ia: original version, p. 329-86; Anhang Ib: mvts. from intermediate 1742 version, p. 387-96; Anhang II: variants and additions, p. 397-424; Kritischer Bericht (abbrevs., p. 426; RISM sigla, p. 427; sources, p. 428-50; Einzelnachweise, p. 450-526). Pub. no. BA 4099; ISMN 979-0-006-55011-1. i585.]Georg Friederic Handel. Samson, HWV 57. Klavierauszug nach dem Urtext der Hallischen Handel-Ausgabe = Piano Reduction Based on the Urtext of the Halle Handel Edition, by Andreas Kohs. Kassel, New York: Barenreiter, 2011. [Ensemble, p. iii; pref. in Ger., Eng., by Hans Dieter Clausen, p. iv-ix; index of scenes, p. x-xii; table of versions, p. xiii-xix; score, p. 1-325; appendix 1A: original version, p. 328-89; appendix 1B: mvts. from intermediate 1742 version, p. 392-401; appendix II: variants and additions, p. 404-32. Pub. no. BA 4099-90; ISMN 979-0-006-54127-0. i49.95.]The musicologist in search of a particular year through which to illustrate musical activity in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century could hardly do better than 1741. Marking the end of an era, we can note the deaths of the composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux on 13 February, and of Antonio Vivaldi on 27/28 July. Tomaso Albinoni retired. Notable publications issued that year include Johann Sebastian Bach's Clavierubung IV, which we now know as the Goldberg Variations. In France, Jean- Philippe Rameau issued Pieces de clavecin en concerts. Meanwhile, in London, George Frideric Handel directed the last staged versions of his own Italian operas. Thereafter he focused his compositional attention-in terms of large-scale works- on English oratorios, a form that he had pioneered and had included in his performance seasons for nearly a decade.Having taken his typical late-spring and early-summer break, Handel began writing Messiah on 22 August, finishing it on 14 September. Soon thereafter he began Samson, completing the initial drafton 29 October. We can be this specific because Handel dated his scores. In November Handel leftLondon for Dublin, where his actor friend James Quin had gone in June. Quin was joined on the stage of the Aungier Street Theatre in mid-December by another of Handel's friends, Susannah Cibber, who traveled to Dublin in order to repair her theatrical reputation. On 23 De - cem ber Handel led the first of the concerts in two subscription series of six concerts each. On 13 April 1742 he directed the first performance of Messiah, at which Cibber gave a most affecting performance of He was despised. Having returned to the London stage the following season, Cibber was given the lead female role of Micah in Samson. Though not performed today with anything like the frequency of Messiah, Samson, from 1743 to Handel's death in 1759, was in the top four, with over fifty performances among the oratorios on sacred themes.The story of Samson derives from the Old Testament Book of Judges, but the version set by Handel is hardly recognizable as such. As Deborah Rooke puts it in Handel's Israelite Oratorio Libretti: Sacred Drama and Biblical Exegesis (New York: Oxford Uni ver - sity Press, 2012), The biblical Samson is a wild, uncontrolled loner who despite being styled a national hero is really acting in accordance with his own impulses to satisfy his own desires (p. …

Simon Shepherd, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British TheatreThe Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre. Simon Shepherd. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+250.

<i>Simon Shepherd</i>, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre<i>The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre</i>. Simon Shepherd. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+250.

The “Famous Mrs. Barry”: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity

The “Famous Mrs. Barry”: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity Kate C. Hamilton (bio) In September 1675, the seventeen-year-old actress Elizabeth Barry performed as the maid Draxilla in Thomas Otway’s Alcibiades. Despite her minor role in the production, the young ingénue managed to attract attention—of exactly the wrong sort. As Thomas Davies explains in Dramatic Miscellanies (1784), “Mrs. Barry had an excellent understanding, but not a musical ear; so that she could not catch the sounds or emphases taught her; but fell into a disagreeable tone, the fault of most young stage-adventurers.”1 According to the famous actor Colley Cibber, the career of the late-seventeenth-century’s most famous tragedienne nearly ended before it began. He wrote in his 1740 memoir, “There was, it seems, so little Hope of Mrs. Barry, at her first setting out, that she was, at the end of the first Year, discharg’d the Company, among others, that were thought to be a useless Expence to it.”2 Despite this initial failure, Barry returned to the Duke’s Company within the production year, giving a successful performance as Queen Isabella in the Earl of Orrery’s Mustapha (1676). As the eighteenth-century theater historian and Barry biographer, Edmund Curll, explains: The first Night she played the Hungarian Queen … The very Air she appeared with, in that distressed Character, moved them [End Page 291] with Pity, preparing the Mind to greater Expectations, but when she spoke these Words to the insulting Cardinal, My Lord, my Sorrow seeks not your Relief; You are not fit to judge a Mother’s Grief: You have no Child for an untimely Grave, Nor can you lose what I desire to save. … these Passions were so finely expressed by her, that the whole Theatre resounded with Applauses …3 Barry’s emotional range—and especially her use of pathos—particularly inspired her late-seventeenth-century public acclaim. According to the prompter for the Duke’s Company, John Downes, Barry’s tragic roles in The Orphan (1680), Venice Preserv’d (1682), and The Fatal Marriage (1694) “gain’d her the Name of Famous Mrs. Barry, both at Court and City.”4 In these pathetic and “she-tragedies” of the 1680s and 1690s, she played fallen aristocrats, rape victims, and other striking embodiments of gender, class, and sexuality that became central to her stage persona. At the same time, her cultural visibility was doubly enhanced through her personal relationship with John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, a court libertine whose own notorious “performances” gained him another sort of public notice. How might have Barry’s relationship with Rochester impacted her performance and reception in tragic roles? In other words, how did Barry’s ties to Rochester impact her celebrity persona in the late-seventeenth century? We can understand Barry’s celebrity according to what Chris Rojek calls “cultural impact,” or “being talked about” in overlapping networks of theatergoers, playwrights, court figures, and players.5 This expansive definition of celebrity allows us to contextualize the phenomenon within the pre-1700 emergent print culture and to treat Barry as more than an object of interest, but also as a partial agent, in the construction of her public image. Though numerous scholars have recognized Barry’s impact upon the London stage by linking her with larger cultural and historical narratives on performance and gender, few have considered her celebrity strategy within a Restoration context. This is largely because our modern definition of celebrity is at least implicitly dependent upon a mass consumer and mass print culture to disseminate images of and interest in a famous figure. It is true that there were vastly more print sources in circulation after 1700, and contemporary scholars have successfully explored celebrity in relation to later actresses like Colley Cibber, Sarah Siddons, and Fanny Kemble.6 But assuming that celebrity depends on some tipping point in the [End Page 292] number of print media in a culture may overplay the material, quantifiable features of fame and “being talked about.” As Joseph R. Roach has argued, the concept of celebrity forms a “strand, thin but bright, [which] connects the Stuart Restoration and the theater it launched...

The Curiosity of Nations: Shakespeare and International Electronic Collaboration

The Curiosity of Nations:Shakespeare and International Electronic Collaboration Sheila T. Cavanagh (bio) The World Shakespeare Project (WSP)—www.worldshakespeareproject.org—co-directed by Sheila T. Cavanagh and Kevin Quarmby of Emory University, is crafting a model for global twenty-first-century higher education through an interconnected series of live, interactive collaborations that cross international, institutional, disciplinary, sociocultural, religious, linguistic, economic, and other disparate academic divides. As the recent Observatory on Borderless Higher Education Report suggests, traditional conceptualizations of tertiary education are rapidly becoming outmoded, but new educational constellations are often problematic: Although branch campuses and partnerships with foreign universities are on the rise, they require a level of investment and risk management that can be intimidating, even for universities with big endowments. But investment in online learning will allow universities to benefit from economies of scale and meet increasing demand from developing countries. (Katsomitros par. 1) [End Page 121] The twenty-first century offers complex financial, technological, and internationalization issues that demand more rapid change than American universities traditionally provide. In response to this need, the WSP is creating, evaluating, and disseminating a multi-faceted educational structure that can be adapted for use globally and across the disciplines. It was recognized in 2012 as the only recipient of Emory University Research Committee's "High Risk/ High Potential Initiative," which was established to promote non-traditional interdisciplinary collaborations, innovative methods, and inquiries regarding emerging areas. It has also received several other internal grants and a US Challenge Grant from the Royal Society of the Arts in order to expand its partnerships with North American Indian Colleges. The WSP links disparate international Shakespearean faculty and students together electronically. The expertise of Emory's Educational Technology staff allows us to establish live communication with institutions lacking comparable facilities. Cavanagh is WSP's founding director, and she has made regular academic visits to India since 2000. Consequently, the WSP has forged numerous connections between Atlanta and communities in India, including, for example, tribal colleges serving first-generation learners in West Bengal and other regions in Eastern India. The WSP also possesses significant links with the United Kingdom, drawing in part from Quarmby's lengthy prior career as a professional actor in London. In addition, the WSP currently works with Université Hassan II and Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, with universities associated with Fundación Shakespeare Argentina, and with Shakespearean faculty and students in Brazil. With the cooperation of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, it has also expanded its collaborative network to reach American Tribal Colleges, such as Cankdeska Cikana Community College in North Dakota and Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in Michigan. In addition, we are partnering with Gretchen Minton from Montana State University and Scott Jackson from Shakespeare Notre Dame to investigate the further inclusion of western American Indian students. These tribal connections, along with our growing international community, deepen all WSP collaborative experiences. Our live and electronic guest lecturers as well as our undergraduate research, internship, collaborative, and exchange opportunities enable us to involve an eclectic local and "virtual" group in meaningful ways. Emory's Halle Institute for Global Learning and its Hightower Fund, for example, have generously sponsored residencies with London stage and opera director Stephen Unwin and with Peabody Award-winning documentary maker Steve Rowland. Future residencies, such as the 2013 visits of [End Page 122] Shakespeare in Prison directors Curt Tofteland and Tom Magill, will broaden the diverse scope of WSP classroom endeavors. WSP sessions typically involve live videoconference discussions and performance exercises shared between faculty and students in each location. For some of our partners, Shakespeare holds an important place in the curriculum; for others, these mutual classes primarily promote internationalization efforts or offer opportunities to join broad educational discussions. We aim to create a widely accessible learning environment, which constitutes one of the most challenging, but essential, aspects of our venture. Some of the international and tribal college students are the first in their families to receive a formal education and have had limited travel experiences. Other WSP students live in cosmopolitan regions, such as Kolkata or Casablanca. Most of our international partners encounter English as non-native speakers. Each student population, however, whether at Emory...

“A Conversation with Spectres”: Russian Ballet and the Politics of Voice in T.S. Eliot

When Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes first emerged on the pre-war London stage, it was greeted as the herald of an artistic revolution. T.S. Eliot—one of the most outspoken, if often ambivalent, commentators on modern dance—paradoxically sought to approach such radical new aesthetic forms through the notion of “tradition.” Ballet in particular performs a dual function within his poetic oeuvre: it is emblematic of both the collapse of human community within modernist spaces, yet also simultaneously represents the possibility of reintegration through transnational modes of experience. It exemplifies, for Eliot, the interpenetration of all expression, suggesting “not only the pastness of the past, but … its presence.”

Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830. Frederick Burwick.

Frederick Burwick, Playing to Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830 (Palgrave, 2012) 319 + $90.00 Frederick Burwick's bravura performance of scholarly imagination and recovery in Playing to Crowd: London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830, opens with child actors mimicking rape and murder, and concludes with pugilists beloved of the Fancy re-enacting famous bouts on of Coburg Theater. In an increasingly diverse, crowded, and still un-policed London metropolis, audiences of unlicensed theaters sought onstage a mirror of routine urban violence that plagued dark streets outside. peculiar pleasure of audience watching images of themselves on stage, is an abiding interest of Burwick's analysis, in which relation between audience and players in unlicensed theaters is an overwhelmingly self-reflexive phenomenon. (209) The borders between hero and villain, rebel and robber, were often vague, and Burwick's own heroic achievement in this volume is to help explain potpourri of violence-laced melodrama, musical drama, and miscellaneous bills of fare as driven, in first instance, by demands of London's changing urban demographics. Aside from a predilection for child actors in adult roles, these immigrant audiences--often refugees from political conflicts on Continent--craved representations of their own national heroes, from Italian fisherman-cum-revolutionary, Masaniello, to William Tell. Scenes of onstage violence thus operated at multiple scales--from true crime re-enactments of recent grisly cases from Old Bailey, to figurative or otherwise disguised renderings of state violence in revolutionary period, dramas which often struggled to bypass censoring eye of Lord Chamberlain. We often look to Romantic period for modern invention of childhood, as both social category and sentimental trope, but Chapters 1 and 3 of Playing to Crowd contain to reassure us on this score. Pre-teen girls cast in roles of flirt or seducer put one in mind of Jon Benet Ramsey, while legions of child actors processed through acting academies and onto stages of unlicensed theaters in hope of wealth and fame prefigure all too closely child celebrity industry as it operates across contemporary visual media. Jane Austen thought it scandalous enough in Mansfield Park for unmarried women to simulate throes of love onstage. How would that novel read with cast of Lovers' Vows made up entirely of children, as actually happened at Sans Souci theater in 1806! In this context, Wordsworth's disgust at age in which little actor cons another part, in Burwick's history appears less as a Romantic theory of childhood development--as Immortality Ode is customarily read--than a highly topical reaction to vulgar rabble of prodigies paraded upon London stage. Wordsworth's bitter reflections on humorous stage of life in his famous poem are, in this sense, both literal and metaphorical. For Coleridge, meanwhile, stage-child phenomenon was all of a piece with Regency cult of virtuosity, with wonderment always taking place of sense. (15) Given this highly original opening account of Romantic-era fascination with, and exploitation of children, it is all more haunting to read Burwick's subsequent reading of Coleridge's oft-neglected play Zapolya (1816), subject of Chapter 3. Werewolves had long been a staple of farce and harlequinade, but Burwick's careful reading of play and historical frame of reference allows us to see Coleridge's adaption of middle European folklore of werewolf anew, as the first to fully integrate into both character and action. (68) This is not proto-Freudian figure for unrepressed sexual violence of men--made over-familiar to us in Twilight franchise--but a more authentic rendering: werewolf as vengeful self-transformation of unloved child. …

The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870 by Jacky Bratton (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870 by Jacky Bratton Nicholas Daly (bio) The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870 By Jacky Bratton; pp. 230. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. $87.42 cloth. This study sets out to present the history of the London stage between the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Theatres of 1832 and that of 1866. In this period, the centre of gravity—and levity—of the stage shifted from Covent Garden to the magic rectangle of the West End, creating a theatre district of international importance, at once a “portal, a gateway to elsewhere” (45) and a major site of the entertainment business. In six chapters, Brat-ton charts the formation of this concrete and imaginary space through its representation in the theatrical press, its personnel, and its performances. She argues persuasively that women played a key role in its formation not only as performers but also as managers: her account of the careers of Eliza Vestris, Mary Ann Keeley, Madame Céleste, Marie Wilton, and others clearly proves her case. Anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century drama should read this book, which compresses a prodigious knowledge of its topic. There are important major arguments here about gender, performance, and history, including a historicization of the proliferation of cross-dressed parts in this period, and there are useful lessons in theatre research, such as what one can deduce about Victorian entertainment from the pages of The Era. But there are also gems of information on particular performers and particular venues: we learn, for example, of the genteel performances of the German Reeds and of the colourful life of Louisa Herbert, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as his “No. 1 stunner” before she went on to play the pre-Raphaelite Lady Audley in George Roberts’s adaptations of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel. We also learn that what is now the London Trocadero has had many identities as a place of entertainment: tennis court, circus, theatre, Argyll Rooms dance hall, and restaurant, among others. As with any study of such scope, there are weaknesses, of course. In particular, the book contains something of a gap between the title and the content, since marriage does not play a major part until we are a hundred pages or so in. There are at times similar mission drifts within chapters, particularly the last; in addition to carrying on the argument about the role of women in shaping the West End stage, the last chapter pursues a number of other issues, including the importance of Dickens in theatre history. This is all interesting and original, but it makes for a bumpy read. Some of these problems presumably stem from the difficulty of turning the complex stuff of performance history into neat chapter divisions and presenting a broad survey while also maintaining an argument about gender. Chapter 1, for example, charts the terrain of the West End by giving us the journeys of not one but two imaginary pedestrians—one male, one female—and [End Page 127] offers us historical as well as spatial information; the resulting material is all relevant but risks burying the reader in detail. In terms of sources, Bratton has built up her rich, layered account from diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and manuscript plays, as well as from books by Tracy Davis and Peter Bailey, among others. But other work on the nineteenth-century theatre—that of the late Jane Moody or Lynn Voskuil, for example—could usefully be referenced: the last fifteen years or so have seen the appearance of quite a bit of work on this period, particularly on melodrama. In terms of production, this is an attractively presented book, but a few curious errors seem to have evaded the copy-editing process, including the consistent misspelling of Shaftesbury Avenue. Such gripes aside, this is an important study, one from which I learned a great deal. It presents a highly informative survey of the nascent West End and provides compelling evidence for the central role of women in the creation of that extraordinary...