Theatre Historians Research Articles

Hall Caine and the Melodrama on Page, Stage and Screen

The Victorian novelist Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine became a household name during a spectacular career that spanned more than forty years. But despite a wealth of critical interest in nineteenth-century popular fiction by both literary and theater historians, there have been surprisingly few attempts to reassess Caine's novels, and even fewer which revisit his popular dramas. Hammond discusses the importance of Caine's many dramatic interpretations, using his work to map out some neglected areas of cross-reference between literature, theatre, and film which might open up new avenues of enquiry.

The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922. By Cheryl Black. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; xvi + 224 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Anyone who has encountered the Provincetown Players, the art theatre that launched Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill, knows what an amazingly vibrant and creative community it was, a progressive smart set teaming with ideas for a new American drama. In The Women of Provincetown, Cheryl Black gives us the most richly detailed work on the Provincetown to date, drawing on an impressive range of primary sources. For this reason alone, the book is essential reading for theatre historians and other scholars working on the emergence of American drama. A playwright, actor, director, and dramaturge herself, Black has enough experience to explore the range of roles needed to make theatre, providing a context for the predominantly literary studies of Provincetown plays.

Shakespeare Survey 54: Shakespeare and Religions. Edited by Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; pp. x + 372. $80 cloth.

This richly eclectic volume contains much of interest for theatre historians and academic critics of Renaissance drama as a sociocultural phenomenon. Additionally, it offers a good deal for theatre artists. The main part of the volume, dedicated to the theme of “Shakespeare and Religions,” comprises sixteen articles on topics as various as performance in Japan and the first translation of Shakespeare into Hebrew. Most of the articles are broadly new historicist in flavor, offering insights into interpretation through examination of cultural formations embedded within the text of the plays. Religion is, of course, demonstrated to be one of the most formative influences.

Music critic Gustav Michel

The writers whose real vocation was not music left significant traces in the history of Serbian music critics and essayism of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Numerous authors, literary historians theoreticians and critics, jurists and theatre historians, wrote successfully on music in Serbian daily newspapers, literary and other magazines, until the Second World War. This study is devoted to Gustav Michel (1868 - 1926), one of the music amateurs who ought to be remembered in the history of Serbian music critics. Gustav Michel was a pharmacist by vocation. He ran a private pharmacy in Belgrade all his life. But he was a musician as well. He played the viola in the second (in chronological order of foundation) Serbian String Quartet. The ensemble mostly consisted of amateurs, and it performed standard pieces of chamber music (W. A. Mozart L. v. Beethoven, F. Schubert, F. Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, A. Dvo?zak). These musicians had performed public concerts in Belgrade since 1900 up until Michel?s death. Belgrade music critics prised the performances of this string ensemble highly. Gustav Michel was also a music critic. Until now only seven articles, published by this author between 1894 and 1903, in Order (Red), Folk Newspaper (Narodne novine) and Serbian Literary Magazine (Srpski knjizevni glasnik) have been found. Michel?s preserved articles unambiguously prove that their author had a solid knowledge of music theory and history, the knowledge that exceeded amateurism. Nevertheless, Michel did not burden his first critics with expert language of musicology. Later on, in Serbian Literary Magazine, the magazine which left enough room for music, Michel penetrated more into musical terminology, thus educating slowly forming Serbian concert-going public. The analysis of Michel?s texts showed that he was not, in contrast to the majority of professional music critics, an opponent of virtuosity. Gentle and liberal, he did not oppose the National Theatre administrations when they decided to add operettas to its repertoire. Here he also differs from expert critics, for example Miloje Milojevic or Petar Krstic - who led a real crusade against operetta. Michel paid scrupulous attention to correct diction, as an important part of the vocal technique. As a critic, Gustav Michel was inclined to relatively modern music. He was not strict in his judgments of Serbian performers? and composers? achievements; he always took account of very difficult conditions under which the Serbian people, after many centuries of the Turkish occupation, started its cultural and musical emancipation in the 19th century. (He was especially considerate towards novice musicians) However his critical assessment of the genre status of the overture to the first Serbian opera, "Na uranku" ("At Dawn") by Stanislav Binicki, revealed an incisive critic. The weak side of his critic lies in too general language not exact enough for characteristics of musical interpretations. However Gustav Michel was a witty and ironic writer, and his few articles marked the beginning of an expert and modern music critic in Serbia.

Shakespeare and the Theatre Reviewer

This ‘Viewpoint’ offers a selective guide to further reading on the subject of Shakespeare and journalistic theatre criticism. It seeks to point enthusiasts and theatre historians in the direction of the most interesting books and articles – new and old – that have explored the ways in which theatre reviewers have responded to Shakespearean performance.

Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth Century London Stage (review)

Kinservik, Matthew J. 2002. Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth Century London Stage. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. $38.50 hc. 301 pp.I recently saw a production of April De Angelis's new play A Laughing Matter at the Royal National Theatre. It merrily dramatizes the choice between financial concerns and artistic instinct that David Garrick faced as he debated whether or not to produce Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. De Angelis's play chronicles the hazards of eighteenth-century theatrical life, as actors, writers, and managers navigated the treacherous shoals of fickle public taste, censorship, personal ambition and aesthetic sensibilities.Matthew J. Kinservik's recent study of the eighteenth-century stage is a painstakingly researched examination of some of the same issues. Professor Kinservik sets out to study without prejudice the effects of the 1737 Licensing Act upon the production of satiric comedy. Unlike some scholars, such as L.W. Conolly or Calhoun Winton, who argue that the act largely undermined dramatic satire, Kinservik contends that rather than punishing playwrights or prohibiting plays, the Lord Chamberlain's office sought to help plays to the stage. In so doing, it encouraged a public and artistic taste for a particular kind of satiric comedy, characterized by an equal emphasis on ridicule and moral reform, which Kinservik labels as satire.His first chapter examines the production of satiric comedy in the years immediately following Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). He offers a helpful analysis of what the term meant to an early eighteenth-century writer or theorist, posing a stern challenge to other theatre historians who need to liberate 'satire' from [their] reductive opposition to 'comedy' and to 'sentiment' that continues to characterize satire theory. (2002, 21-22). Doing so allows for a more accurate appraisal of the marriage between moralizing reform and satiric energy that characterized many successful plays of the early eighteenth-century stage.The second chapter takes up the 1730's, which witnessed a revival of topical, punitive satire (Aristophanic in Kinservik's schema). When studied contextually, this kind of play seems an anomaly. In his careful chronicle of Henry Fielding's development, Kinservik shows how he began as a sympathetic satirist but eventually responded to the new satiric possibilities modeled by John Gay's The Beggar s Opera. His work grew increasingly topical, partisan, and representational, finally attracting the hostility of Sir Robert Walpole's ministry. But the argument that the government instituted the Act to put a stop to Fielding's work, as Martin Battestin has suggested, is too simple and reductive a perspective.Chapter three establishes the immediate effects of the Licensing Act, focusing on both its prohibitive and productive effects. …

"That furious lesbian": the story of Mercedes de Acosta

In this first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theatre historian Robert A. adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes his own interviews with de Acosta s intimates to correct established myths and at last construct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant portrait of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright. Born to wealthy Spanish immigrants, Mercedes de Acosta (18931968) lived opulence and traveled the same social circles as the Astors and Vanderbilts. Introduced to the New York theater scene at an early age, her dual loves of performance and of women informed every aspect of her life thereafter. Alice B. Toklas s observation, Say what you will about Mercedes, she s had the most important women the twentieth century, was well justified, as her romantic conquests included such internationally renowned beauties as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, and Eva Le Gallienne as well as Alla Nazimova, Tamara Karsavina, Pola Negri, and Ona Munson. More than a record of her personal life and infamous romances, this account offers the first analysis of the complete oeuvre of de Acosta s literary works, including three volumes of poetry, two novels, two film scripts, and a dozen plays. Although only two of her plays were ever published during her lifetime, four of them were produced, featuring such stage luminaries as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Eva Le Gallienne. Critics praised her first volume of poetry, Moods, in 1919 and predicted her rise to literary fame, but the love of other women that fueled her writing limited her opportunities to fulfill this destiny. Failing to achieve any lasting fame, she died relative poverty at the age of seventy-five. De Acosta lived her desires publicly with verve and vigor at a time when few others would dare, and for that, she paid the price of marginalized obscurity. Until now. With That Furious Lesbian Schanke at last establishes Mercedes de Acosta s rightful place as a pioneerand indeed a championin the early struggle for lesbian rights this country.Robert A. has edited a companion to this biography, Women Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta, also available from Southern Illinois University Press.

Place in the Performance Experience

Theatre and performance are art forms that play intensively with space and place. Central to each is the live presence of performers and spectators, which means that space becomes a vital factor in the performance experience. because it is the performance space that makes this co-presence possible. The nature of the theatre building and its location within the civic space of the community are significant elements in the performance experience for spectators, and theatre historians and semioticians have produced an impressive body of scholarly work exploring the ways in which theatre buildings can be seen to manifest prevailing philosophies of representation 'and to reflect the functions fulfilled by theatrical performance in the society in question. In the second half of the twentieth century, theatre practitioners all over the western world engaged in an enormous amount of exploration and experimentation with the material realities of the performance space.

Grand-Guignol: the French theatre of horror

The du Grand-Guignol in Paris (1897-1962) achieved a legendary reputation as the Theatre of Horror, a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night. Indeed, the phrase grand guignol has entered the language to describe any display of sensational horror. Since the du Grand-Guignol closed its doors 40 years ago, the genre has been overlooked by critics and theatre historians. This book reconsiders the importance and influence of the Grand-Guignol within its social, cultural and historical contexts, and attempts a major evaluation of the genre as performance. It gives full consideration to practical applications and to the challenges presented to the actor and director and also includes new translations of 10 Grand-Guignol plays previously unavailable in English. The presentation of these plays in English for the first time is an implicit demand for a total reappraisal of the grand-guignol genre, not least for the unexpected inclusion of two very funny comedies.

The Contaminated Audience: Researching Amateur Theatre in Wales before 1939

As concepts of nationhood and national identity become increasingly slippery, so the theatre historian attempting to recover neglected histories submerged within the dominant discourse of the nation state needs to be wary of imposing an ideologically pre-determined reading on the surviving evidence of performance practice and audience response. It is also important to acknowledge that theatre practice which represents the majority experience of national audiences does not necessarily conform to the subjective value judgements of the critic-historians who have tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record. In attempting to re/write the history of twentieth-century British theatre Claire Cochrane has researched the hitherto neglected area of amateur theatre which was a widespread phenomenon across the component nations. Focusing in this article on the cultural importance of amateur theatre in Welsh communities before the Second World War, she explores the religious, socio-political, and topographical roots of its rapid expansion, and the complex national identities played out in the collaboration between actors and audience. Claire Cochrane lectures in drama and performance studies at University College Worcester. Her most recent book is Birmingham Rep: a City's Theatre, 1962–2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). She is currently working on a history of twentieth-century British theatre practice for Cambridge University Press.

‘Parish’ and ‘City’ -- A Shifting Identity: Salisbury 1440-1600

Historians of theatre usually discuss the quem quaeritis Easter tropes and Hroswitha’s plays as discrete phenomena: debating whether or not the quem quaeritis represents a first step in the development of liturgical drama, discussing Hroswitha’s plays as the first Christian plays based on saints’ lives and not tied to the liturgy. The Easter tropes and the plays of Hroswitha may not be as unrelated as they appear. The tropes may be more than mere tropes, more than just extensions of Scripture woven into special liturgical services. They may be consciously scripted “playlets” aimed at purposes far beyond beautifying and intensifying the liturgy. These “playlets” may relate to, and stem from, issues of educational and ecclesiastical reform that marked the efforts of tenth- and early eleventh-century, Lotharingian/German clerics, who in turn were connected in a sort of network to ecclesiastical reformers in France and England. Hroswitha, personally and institutionally, was part of this network, and her plays may well be another phenomenon reflecting those policies. To demonstrate that premise, it is necessary to trace the network Lotharingian/German, French and English reformers, Hroswitha’s place within that network, and the common interests and policies of these reformers in matters of ecclesiastical reform.

Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends by Jody Enders (review)

REVIEWS 224 ter five explores the impact on the legend of the idealization of domestic privacy during the Victorian era when Godiva is refurbished as a symbol of female self-sacrifice (namely in her reluctant emergence from her rightful place—the home) in the service of the common good. Donoghue’s final chapter deals primarily with Godiva in the twentieth century, over the course of which she loses her political and moral motivations and becomes largely a symbol of indulged naughtiness unburdened by guilt and shame: “Peeping Tom has gone off on a career of his own. Godiva rides. Everyone gazes. And everyone winks” (108). The author explains this evolution partly in terms of Godiva’s appropriation by the chocolate manufacturer, but also hypothesizes that the cultural work of the legend as articulating a theory of the voyeuristic gaze has been overwhelmed and antiquated by the cinema. Throughout the book Donoghue engages in a candid examination of the state of medieval studies and their largely unacknowledged indebtedness to popular medievalism. Donoghue’s writing style is upbeat and enjoyably irreverent, conveying his personal enthusiasm for a subject which he has obviously researched exhaustively and conscientiously. If the book has a weakness it is in its organization— Donoghue’s most tantalizing ideas concerning Godiva’s place in theoretical discussions of voyeurism, privacy, and subjectivity (for example) lose their impact by being scattered throughout chapters organized more chronologically than thematically. (A historian might equally well observe that Donoghue’s chronological organization is continually derailed by theoretical conjecture.) The book remains, nonetheless, an intellectual treat, allowing readers burdened with a variety of agendas and backgrounds to pause and indulge in the private consumption of an irresistible legend. CHRISTINE THUAU, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA Jody Enders, Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002) xxx + 324 pp., ill. An unusual addition to the burgeoning list of studies of death and dying in the Middle Ages, Death by Drama undoubtedly fulfills its author’s wish to imbue “medieval French drama studies with contemporary relevance” (xxviii). Because theater invites belief, asking its audience to suspend disbelief even while asserting itself as a pretense, theater and the stories surrounding it are particularly suited to a study about how and where the components of art and life intersect . Enders recognizes that these intersections, in which “believability is ‘truer’ than truth,” are not limited to the theater but are also the “province of urban legends” (11). With this similarity in mind, Enders directs her accounts about “the real life of medieval theatricality ... to medievalists, theater historians , cultural historians, performance theorists, fiction lovers, urban-legend mavens, and general readers” (xxviii), and she warns her readers to expect a blurring of narrative registers: “I will be too much a storyteller for the historian, too much a medievalist for the general reader, too contemporary for the history buff, too historical for the popular-culture enthusiast” (xxviii). Some readers are likely to add that Enders is too self-consciously a postmodern writer. Her reluctance to draw conclusions and to assert one view over another, alongside her eagerness to interrogate a narrative from all possible points of view, to ask question upon question, and to uncover all possible meanings, especially the REVIEWS 225 contradictory ones, can wear heavily upon a reader. And Enders enjoys contradicting her own assertions, as in this example from the end of part I: “The Devil now takes us by the hand into part II, where he demonstrates that, if incredulity was as credible as true belief, and faith as incredible as diabolical magic, then fear and trembling were just as likely as grins and giggles. Or were they?” (102). Enders may be highly entertaining as well as annoyingly clever, but happily, she is usually willing to put weight upon anything that seems likely to be true, granting the accommodating reader some reprieve from a tiresome play of signifiers and rhetorical sleight-of-hand. And with its contemporary relevance and its interdisciplinary bent, Death by Drama has much to offer the scholar. The research is top-notch, the notes are thorough if idiosyncratic, the bibliography excellent, and the inclusion of the original French and...

IV. Staging Receptions

The focus of this chapter is on reception and staging, including opera, dance and physical theatre. There are two aspects of staging which raise crucial issues for reception studies. The first is that staging implies a live performance, a live audience. Each live performance is different and it is impossible to recapture it to allow the kind of analysis and debate about an established ‘text’ that is possible when discussing a poem or a painting. In fact, the task of the theatre historian in trying to reconstruct past performances has been compared with that of an art historian trying to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions: One only needs to imagine what a history of painting would look like where the author had at his disposal neither originals nor copies of pictures but only any number of good descriptions! The historian of the theatre finds himself provisionally in just such a situation as soon as he leaves the realm of his own perception’. In the 1920s when this distinction was drawn it was a radical one since it added to a historiographical approach, which was already shared with cognate areas of study, a new approach based on personal observation. This provided a counterweight to the transitory character of theatrical performance.

THE HISTORIAN AS AUDITOR: FACTS, JUDGMENTS AND EVIDENCE

Both history and auditing are “evidence-based” practices. Accounting historians, who may be skilled in audit as well as historical research, may have special insights into how sources provide evidence to support judgments and opinions. Considerations of evidence by theorists of history may be of relevance to theorists of auditing, and vice versa. The work in this area of recent historiographers Richard Evans, Keith Jenkins and Behan McCullagh is reviewed. McCullagh's claim that fairness as well as truth is central to making historical judgments is shown to resonate with the work of auditors and hence is of particular significance to historians of accounting.

Gravelot and Laguerre: Playing Hob on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

Why should a country bumpkin, a secondary character in the ballad opera afterpiece Flora, be one of the most frequently illustrated roles in eighteenth-century English theatre? The character was named “Hob” because he was a bumpkin, or “clown,” but even while the name Hob was becoming naturalized this way during the seventeenth century, it still retained echoes of Robin Goodfellow, the native trickster figure (OED) (Fig. 1). Unnoticed by theatre historians, the pictures to which I refer have been granted only passing mention by music and art historians. The images began as illustrations in a songbook, which spawned, among other things, two series of captioned engravings that were reissued periodically. The engravings were also transferred to other media (oil paintings and paintings on glass), and the Hob character turns up in a political cartoon as late as 1793.Anon. [Cruikshank], “Hob in the Well,” published by T. Prattent, 46 Cloth Fair West Smithfield, 4 September 1793 (Lewis Walpole Library, 793.9.4.1). To clarify the relation of these images to one another, we must understand their origins. Although they were undoubtedly inspired by the production of Flora (1729), the extent to which they record its staging is difficult to determine. Their chief purpose was to make money, not for the theatre but for the publishers, a factor that must be kept in mind when considering how the pictures were understood. Over time, the images became detached from the play altogether, and what they meant then is even harder to discern.

Embodied History: Reflections on the Jane Scott Project

This essay is a reflection on the theoretical implications for theatre historians of practical reconstructions, revivals, or recollections of past performance practices. It argues that the notion of `cultural memory' can be played out through performing bodies, and that the historicity of performers' bodies needs to be respected, observed, and analysed. The essay suggests that the embodied histories of style and professional practice encapsulated in classical dance performance practice can be instructive for twenty-first century researchers seeking to revive pre-Naturalist styles of acting and staging.

Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek , and: The Recess; or A Tale of Other Times (review)

REVIEWS157 perceptive preface and introduction to the Female Spectator, and her insistence on the need to distinguish Haywood the author from her periodical's persona is salutary: as King observes, critics would "have little trouble distinguishing Mr Spectator, let us say, from either Addison or Steele" (set 2:2, x). In her review, in a previous number of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (14 [2001], 121), of Kirsten Saxton and Rebecca Bocchicchio's Passionate Fictions ofEliza Haywood (2000),Juliette Merritt observes that "the publication of this welcome volume of essays marks a pivotal moment in Haywood scholarship, a moment in which we can discern developing areas of interest , and ascertain which critical methods and strategies are producing worthwhile results and what preoccupations and prejudices have been left behind." The almost simultaneous publication of Selected Works ofEliza Haywood (2000-2001 ) will surely provoke much further revaluation of this kind. Discussions of Haywood as a novelist will now be more inclined to consider her epistolary productions and to study her "writing to the moment" technique, which prefigured its development by Richardson. Theatre historians will be compelled to consider Haywood as a drama critic, as well as a playwright and actress. Most important, I believe, the full significance of the Female Spectatorwill now be recognized. Cultural historians and feminist critics, who have found a wealth of material to study in Addison and Steele's Spectator, will surely turn their attention to Haywood's fascinatingly heterogenous periodical. In his general introduction to the Selected Works, Pettit expresses the hope that Haywood will "endure as a subject of scholarly attention" (set 1:1, xi). Thanks in part to his labours, and to those of his fellow editors, she will. Peter Sabor McGiIl University William Beckford, Vathekvrìth The Episodes of Vathek. Ed. Kenneth W. Graham. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2001. 397pp. $16.95; US$12.95; £7.95. ISBN 1-55111-281-7. Sophia Lee. The Recess; or A Tale of Other Times. Ed. April Alliston. Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 2000. lii + 364pp. US$47.50 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8131-0978-7. The history of the text ofWilliam Beckford's Vathek is exceedingly complex. Written first in French in 1782 when its author was a mere twenty-one years old, it was published in English, without his permission, by his translator 158EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 and collaborator, the Reverend Samuel Henley, four years later. It was then hastily translated back into French and published by Beckford on the Continent in two different versions, first at Lausanne and then in Paris. Further English editions appeared in subsequent years. After he had written Vathek, Beckford turned his hand to other Oriental tales, the Epuodes, which he intended to publish together with the original work. But things did not go smoothly, as the circumstances of his life changed dramatically. In particular , a scandal (the "Powderham scandal") following an alleged homosexual relationship with a young kinsman, William Courtenay, effectively banished Beckford from English society. Worse was to follow. His devoted and muchloved wife, Lady Margaret, died after giving birth to their second daughter. Henley's unauthorized publication of Vathek completed the annus horribilh of 1786. Kenneth Graham, in producing Vathek with the Epuodes as one text, is reverting to Beckford's original intention, an editorial decision that can be challenged. The most remarkable thing about Graham's edition is its inclusion of a new version of the first of the Epuodes, known as the "Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah." This tale, about the infatuation of an autocratic and violent Prince for a beautiful stranger, Prince Firouz, was always marred by a clumsy gender change at a vital point in the romance . Prince Firouz is suddenly turned into Princess Firouzkah. Given Beckford's own experience after Powderham, the motive is not difficult to guess at. Nevertheless the change, though awkward, never concealed for the modern reader the overtly homosexual nature of the Firouzkah version , as I made clear in the introduction to my own edition of the Epuodes (1994). Graham claims that his discovery of the new text (in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) , in which there is no such change of gender, removes the...

The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate (review)

It is tempting, as a theatre studies scholar, to be more than a little grumpy about the centrality, still, of Shakespeare and his plays as the subject of books published in our field each year. There is an overproduction of textual analysis and criticism of Shakespeare's corpus, and consideration of performance aspects of the plays remains at best a subset of dominant critical interests. Yet, scholarship in Shakespeare studies is relentlessly vibrant and challenging so that theatre scholars neglect its developments at our collective peril. It is in this context that the innovative format and performance subject of Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin's The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate should be appreciated. The two authors start from quite different theoretical perspectives—Dawson as "a theatre historian and practitioner" and Yachnin as a "neo-Marxist" (2)—but with a common goal: "to locate the theatre within a number of different cultural domains in an effort to understand theatrical experience in historical terms" (1). At the heart of the project is their mutual interest in how theatrical pleasure is constructed and experienced.

Ireland's National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (review)

Ireland's National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement, Mary Trotter's first book-length study, answers the call voiced recently by other Irish theatre historians to reassess the traditional, linear view of the inception of the Irish dramatic movement. Her project is to analyze historically how different nationalist organizations or institutions represented Irish nationhood on stage. The founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, she asserts, did not occur merely because of the efforts of a few high-profile literary figures but resulted from the endeavors and influence of many nationalist groups seeking to perform their political aims. Trotter also shows that "the representations of Irish culture by several nationalist groups contributed to the establishment of both Ireland's dramatic aesthetic and its national identity" (xviii), suggesting that the Irish dramatic movement became an instrument for national debate (168).

The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (review)

For centuries the theatre has been on the brink of bankruptcy. The repeated refinancing, management changes, and intermittent closure of the patent theatres during the long eighteenth century is well known to all theatre historians. But how did the theatre evolve in the free market economy of nineteenth-century Britain? How did it become one of the most respected, indeed, necessary institutions of modern Britain? Until now we have had few studies of the business of live theatre. Tracy C. Davis makes brilliant use of important archival sources, drawn from London and Glasgow. Her book vividly documents the complicated task of financing and managing a large theatre. As such, it is both definitive— all theatre historians will need this book—and also an invitation to further local studies. Davis is well aware of how fragmentary her documentation is, however strong on major urban centers; she ruefully notes the absence of all archives for English theatre in Wales, as well as the erratic survival of records for every theatre, including the royal patent theatres.