Theatrical Career Research Articles

John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage by Barbara Wooding (review)

Barbara Wooding. John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1603-1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. xiii + 209. 60.00 [pounds sterling]. If one evaluates a life purely in terms of the cultural and artistic experiences it contains, then John Lowin enjoyed arguably one of the most enviable lives in history. In a theatrical career spanning almost fifty years, he was present (one may assume) at the first performances of almost all Shakespeare's Jacobean plays: indeed, he was on stage for those first performances, as one of Shakespeare's leading men. But he was also the first Mammon in Alchemist; the first Bosola in Duchess of Malfi; and the creator of identifiable roles in plays by Fletcher, Massinger, and others. In fact, he was a member of the original cast of a large proportion of the masterpieces of Jacobean and Caroline drama. First recorded in Henslowe's Diary working for Worcester's Men, he worked his way up to become a senior figure in the King's Men, the leading theater company of their day, and was for a long time their effective leader. For all these reasons, then, he is a pivotal figure in early modern English theater, and Barbara Wooding's new biography of him is to be celebrated. Born (probably) in 1576, John Lowin is first documented for certain in 1594, as an apprentice goldsmith. Chapter 1 of Wooding's study documents this part of his career, uncovering, for instance, new archival evidence about the shady practices of his master, who was in repeated trouble with the authorities for using substandard metal. After completing his apprenticeship, he starts to appear in Henslowe's Diary as a member of the relatively obscure Worcester's Men in connection with such intriguing lost plays as The Italian The Unfortunate General, and The Second Part of the Black Dog [of Newgate]. In 1603, Lowin transferred his services to the company soon to be known as the King's Men. Wooding observes, It was the best career choice he ever made (10). chapter, Pamphlets, Plays, Pageants, and 'Prentices, traces career up to around 1613. Wooding has intriguing material to go at, including the fascinatingly uninformative print pamphlet Conclusions upon Dances, written by Lowin around 1605; and Maid's Tragedy, in which Lowin is known to have played the part of Melantius. Wooding mixes this together with what is known of life story, and with the history of the period and the cultural history of the stage. She uses parish records, literary texts, and theater-history documents to weave the story together. There is a wealth of documentation, although Lowin himself remains an elusive figure. Wooding observes in a later chapter--and it is a recurring note through the book--that Lowin's opinion, as always, is not on record (90). From 1627 onwards Lowin was one of two Housekeepers--effectively, co-leaders--of the King's Men. As his role as theater manager becomes more important, the book turns into an almost annalistic history of the company. There are long sections on, for instance, Massinger's Roman Actor and the challenges it might offer in performance; on the second war of the theaters, so called; and on the evolving history of the King's Men up to the 1642 closure. one exception to this basic chronological plan is provided by chapter 8, an in-depth discussion of the incomplete manuscript of the Caroline comedy Soddered Citizen. manuscript contains numerous signs of revision, in various hands, which, Wooding argues convincingly, demonstrates the input of the players themselves (and by implication of their leader Lowin). A final chapter reviews what is known about activities after the 1642 closure, finding him active in projects such as the attempts to revive playing during the Commonwealth, and the Beaumont and Fletcher publications. beauty of a chronological, biographical journey through the theatrical history of this period is not that it offers a complete revision of what is currently known about that history, but that it gives it all a human timescale. …

Warhol’s 1960s’ Films, Amphetamine, and Queer Materiality

Warhol’s 1960s’ Films, Amphetamine, and Queer Materiality Juan A. Suárez (bio) Critics and historians have traditionally made too little of Warhol’s insistence, throughout his 1960s’ memoirs, that “[t]he big social thrust behind the Factory from ‘64 to ‘67 was amphetamine,”1 and that much that went on at the Factory, artistically or otherwise, had some connection with the drug. For example, why did Warhol’s assistant Billy Name line the Factory in silver? Silver was modern and connoted the space age and the classic Hollywood silver screen, muses Warhol, but in the end it must have been also “an amphetamine thing—everything always went back to that” (P, 65). Amphetamine certainly fueled the energy and creativity of the two main groups that peopled the mid-1960s’ Factory—the “fags on speed” who gathered at the San Remo, a [Greenwich] Village coffee shop, and the college-educated Harvard/Cambridge set (P, 64). The former were peripherally involved in the creative ferment of downtown New York: in experimental poetry, dance, performance, and off-off-Broadway theater. The latter were bright scions of upper-class and upper-middle-class families who became enmeshed in the life of the Factory between early 1965 and late 1966. Both groups left behind an ephemeral, largely performative body of work consisting in amphetamine-driven patter and comedic routines, “trip books,”2 environments (the silver Factory itself), and lighting designs. It was art in a minor mode, made without any thought of solidity or permanence, to be consumed on the run and, at best, live on in memory. And this would have been its fate if it had not been for Warhol’s films and recordings, which have, in this regard, an important documentary function. If Warhol lent these unconventional artists visibility, they in turn may have confirmed him in the possibilities of creativity under speed, which he had been exploring on his own before he enlisted them into his projects and his world. The main San Remo “fags on speed” were Billy Linich (later, Billy Name), Ondine, and Fred Herko.3 Linich had lit some Judson Church [End Page 623] dance shows and collaborated with Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones’s mimeographed art review The Floating Bear. He was Warhol’s sometime boyfriend and long-term assistant, and a fundamental shaper of the look and atmosphere of the silver Factory on West 47th Street near the United Nations. Another of the San Remo personalities was Ondine (nickname of Robert Olivo), a street wit and hanger-on who wrote the column “Ondine’s Advice to the Shopworn” for The Sinking Bear—the parodic reply to The Floating Bear. Ondine became one of the central performers in the middecade Factory films, had a brief theatrical career in the late 1960s, acting in plays by John Vaccaro (Conquest of the Universe, 1967), Ronald Tavel (Vinyl, first produced as a Factory film, 1965), and Soren Agenoux (Chas. Dickens’ Christmas Carol, 1966).4 For his part, Herko was a prodigious, if ephemeral, talent in Judson Church dance. He quit his piano studies at Juilliard to enter the American Ballet Theater school at the comparatively late age of nineteen and became shortly afterward a choreographer and dancer in the downtown scene until his speed use started to erode his abilities. A close friend of Linich, with whom he shared an apartment for a while, Herko made a Warhol screen test and appears in Kiss (1963–64), in two versions of Haircut (1963), in the unpreserved Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963), and in Dance Movie (aka Rollerskate, 1963), which showed him skating through different areas of New York City while striking dance positions.5 Linked to them by drugs and friendship rather than artistic leanings were Rotten Rita (Kenneth Knapp), the Duchess (Brigid Berlin), and Binghamton Birdie. Rita appears throughout Warhol’s a: a novel (1968), essentially a transcript of twenty-four hours of speed-driven conversations recorded on magnetic tape over a two-year period, and Binghamton Birdie is fleetingly seen in Couch (1964) and cast in a screen test, but neither he nor Rita were an integral part of the Factory world. Berlin, however, furnished one of...

An actor manages: actor training and managerial ideology

This article reads the development of psychologically based actor training against larger changes in the organisation of work in North America and Europe in the twentieth century. Konstantin Stanislavky's System and later adaptations including the American Method are wrapped into a larger ideology of individual self-management and discipline – mental, physical, and emotional – that accompanies the emergent managerial class of the post-war era. An actor is an ideal manager, and therefore prefigures only a few decades later the ideal freelance worker in the post-Fordist era of creative, immaterial, flexible, and precarious labour. The article maps the contours of a citational network between actor training and business management, focusing on the production, maintenance, and instrumentalisation of emotion, empathy, and social relations by waged labour. This ‘alternative’ historical reading of actor training allows us to question and perhaps challenge discourses of ‘transferable skills’ and ‘employability’ in higher education drama and theatre departments. When do the positive qualities of a career in theatre or performance such as creativity and autonomy become the same qualities required by those who can survive the insecurities, uncertainties and overall precarity of the ‘new’ flexible labour market?

Children in Fascist Regime Cinema: The Case of Luigi Ballerini’s La Fuggitiva (1941)

After a sustained presence in silent movies, children almost vanish in Fascist cinema, which was dominated by the light comedies of the white telephones—a fact that clashes with the regime’s promotion of large families, population increase and the valorization of motherhood. Children begin to reappear in the melodramas of the early Forties mainly as a complement to the figure of the mother, who is depicted in sentimental stories about single parenthood, illegitimate children, hard negotiations between traditional motherhood and self-realization. Piero Ballerini’s film La Fuggitiva (1941) offers an interesting and problematic story of the mother-child relation, where, in the absence of the biological mother, too busy pursuing her theatrical career, we see the glorification of the maternal surrogate, a woman who is a paragon of sacrifice and selfabnegation. La Fuggitiva is also a film in which a child actress takes a prominent role. In this sentimental drama, the little girl suffers for and rebels against the loneliness and neglect stemming from the lack of a mother and a loving family setting. The film stages the crisis of the patriarchal family and the suffering of the child in ways that anticipate De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano.

Warhol’s 1960s’ Films, Amphetamine, and Queer Materiality

Critics and historians have traditionally made too little of Warhol's insistence, throughout his 1960s' memoirs, [t]he big social thrust behind the Factory from '64 to '67 was amphetamine,1 and much went on at the Factory, artistically or otherwise, had some connection with the drug. For example, why did Warhol's assistant Billy Name line the Factory in silver? Silver was modern and connoted the space age and the classic Hollywood silver screen, muses Warhol, but in the end it must have been also amphetamine thing-everything always went back to that (P, 65). Amphetamine certainly fueled the energy and creativity of the two main groups peopled the mid-1960s' Factory-the fags on who gathered at the San Remo, a [Greenwich] Village coffee shop, and the college-educated Harvard/Cambridge set (P, 64). The former were peripherally involved in the creative ferment of downtown New York: in experimental poetry, dance, performance, and off-off-Broadway theater. The latter were bright scions of upper-class and upper-middle-class families who became enmeshed in the life of the Factory between early 1965 and late 1966. Both groups left behind an ephemeral, largely performative body of work consisting in amphetamine-driven patter and comedic routines, trip books,2 environments (the silver Factory itself), and lighting designs. It was art in a minor mode, made without any thought of solidity or permanence, to be consumed on the run and, at best, live on in memory. And this would have been its fate if it had not been for Warhol's films and recordings, which have, in this regard, an important documentary function. If Warhol lent these unconventional artists visibility, they in turn may have confirmed him in the possibilities of creativity under speed, which he had been exploring on his own before he enlisted them into his projects and his world.The main San Remo fags on were Billy Linich (later, Billy Name), Ondine, and Fred Herko.3 Linich had lit some Judson Church dance shows and collaborated with Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones's mimeographed art review The Floating Bear. He was Warhol's sometime boyfriend and long-term assistant, and a fundamental shaper of the look and atmosphere of the silver Factory on West 47th Street near the United Nations. Another of the San Remo personalities was Ondine (nickname of Robert Olivo), a street wit and hanger-on who wrote the column Ondine's Advice to the Shopworn for The Sinking Bear-the parodie reply to The Floating Bear. Ondine became one of the central performers in the middecade Factory films, had a brief theatrical career in the late 1960s, acting in plays by John Vaccaro (Conquest of the Universe, 1967), Ronald Tavel {Vinyl, first produced as a Factory film, 1965), and Soren Agenoux {Chas. Dickens' Christmas Carol, 1966).4 For his part, Herko was a prodigious, if ephemeral, talent in Judson Church dance. He quit his piano studies at Juilliard to enter the American Ballet Theater school at the comparatively late age of nineteen and became shortly afterward a choreographer and dancer in the downtown scene until his speed use started to erode his abilities. A close friend of Linich, with whom he shared an apartment for a while, Herko made a Warhol screen test and appears in Kiss (1963-64), in two versions of Haircut (1963), in the unpreserved Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963), and in Dance Movie (aka Rollerskate, 1963), which showed him skating through different areas of New York City while striking dance positions.5Linked to them by drugs and friendship rather than artistic leanings were Rotten Rita (Kenneth Knapp), the Duchess (Brigid Berlin), and Binghamton Birdie. Rita appears throughout Warhol's a: a novel (1968), essentially a transcript of twenty-four hours of speed-driven conversations recorded on magnetic tape over a two-year period, and Binghamton Birdie is fleetingly seen in Couch (1964) and cast in a screen test, but neither he nor Rita were an integral part of the Factory world. …

Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby (review)

Reviewed by: Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? by Robert W. Goldsby Felicia Hardison Londré Molière on Stage: What’s So Funny? By Robert W. Goldsby. New York: Anthem Press, 2012. xx + 202 pp. $39.95 paper. Among Theatre Communications Group’s annual listings of the ten most-produced plays on the professional American stage since 1994–1995, a play by Molière makes the list only once: Tartuffe in 2006–2007. Robert W. Goldsby’s book just might be the impetus to give us more Molière. Goldsby’s long experience as an actor and director of the Molière canon undergirds his passion for the plays and his generous-hearted understanding of the personal motives and relationships behind them. In seventeen chapters grouped into four “acts” that loosely correspond to phases in Molière’s life and career, the book intertwines biography with textual and production analysis of the plays as vehicles for the stage. Goldsby’s warm association with Molière goes back to the Comédie-Française’s 1947 revival of Le Misanthrope in which wartime Resistance hero Aimé Clariond reprised his role as Alceste. As a student on the G.I. Bill in the 1940s, Goldsby had the good fortune to attend the play’s first postwar performance. The communal intensity of “joy and grief” (4) generated that evening led to a theatre career that included chairing the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and directing professionally. Eleven plays by Molière in fifteen different productions (including some in his own translation) figure among the 153 productions Goldsby has directed. He writes about Molière from intimate acquaintance. The first brief chapter summarizes Molière’s life up to 1658 when he won the favor of Louis XIV along with the means to settle his troupe in Paris. The lively writing throughout the book yields abundant nuggets like this: “[Molière] learned that though he loves tragedy and tragediennes his true talent is making people laugh, even, unfortunately, in the tragedies” (10). Subsequent chapters each analyze dramaturgically one or two plays in chronological order even as they continue tracing Molière’s biography in relation to his work. The method involves frequent use of the phrase “we can imagine” as Goldsby deftly ties dramaturgical tidbits to what was apparently going on in Molière’s personal life. Yes, Molière loved women, and Goldsby shows how the playwright’s passions led to the great roles he created for actresses. Through Tartuffe’s attempted seduction of Elmire, Arnolph’s doting on young Agnès, and Alceste’s helpless fixation on Célimène, “Molière confronted on stage his own passion for Armande” [End Page 285] and turned his “deepest feelings” into a “subject for laughter” (62), even—as in the case of Agnès—when Armande Béjart did not play the role she inspired. Beyond the biographical material and the analysis of Molière’s plays for the stage, the book functions as a kind of theatregoing memoir or vicarious experiencing of important productions and directors (and even a range of translators) of the plays from the original creations to our own time. For example, chapter 14 on Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) celebrates Jacques Copeau’s 1920 production with Louis Jouvet playing Géronte, Jouvet’s 1951 production with Jean-Louis Barrault as Scapin, and Goldsby’s own 1958 Berkeley production for which he used the translation by Lady Gregory. The dramaturgical analysis constitutes a directorial case study in putting farce on the stage. Goldsby’s analysis of the act 2 scene in which Scapin dupes Géronte incorporates snippets from Lady Gregory’s dialogue as well as examples of farcical devices like the “bright idea,” the “turn and go” exit, the “magic prop”; and then Goldsby moves on to the famous “sack scene” and breaks it down into ten playable beats with fine fodder for any director. Chapter 7, which covers Tartuffe, includes case studies of “brilliant entrances” (53). Chapter 8 on Dom Juan; ou, le Festin de Pierre shows how directors like Stephen Wadsworth and Jacques La Salle milk the...

The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne. By Todd Gilman

The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne. By Todd Gilman

Branding Iron: Eugen Sandow’s “Modern” Marketing Strategies, 1887-1925

Abstract Eugen Sandow was a professional strongman who started his theatrical career in 1887. Upon his retirement in 1903, the Sandow name was known internationally as a synonym for strength, health, and bodily perfection. Sandow used this popularity to market a number of different products including books, a magazine, health clubs, exercise equipment, and miscellaneous health products. Although literature on Sandow documents his cultural influences and continues to grow, none specifically or comprehensively address the business and marketing aspects of his career. This paper attempts to fill that void. It argues that Sandow utilized a three-pronged strategy in order to establish his personal brand. Furthermore, it examines the way Sandow leveraged his brand in order to market his name and other products worldwide. Finally, the paper is a starting point for others to examine ways other popular physical culturists like Bob Hoffman, the Weiders, and Arnold Schwarzenegger marketed their brands.

The theatre career of Thomas Arne

Contents Acknowledgements Preface Musical Examples Polemical Introduction Chapter 1: Young Thomas Augustine Arne Chapter 2: Drury Lane 1735-40 Chapter 3: From Cliveden to Dublin Chapter 4: Young Charles Burney Chapter 5: Drury Lane 1744-50 Chapter 6: Divisions and Difficulties Chapter 7: Dublin Encore Chapter 8: The Brent or, English Syren Chapter 9: Harmony in an Uproar Chapter 10: Arne's Orbit Chapter 11: The Great Stratford Jubilee Chapter 12: Arne's Last Operas Chapter 13: Poor Devil of a Crotchet Monger Chapter 14: Decline and Death Appendix 1: Letters between Arne and Garrick Appendix 2: Arne's Will Bibliography

Notes on Anne Bracegirdle

A great deal has been documented regarding Anne Bracegirdle’s theatrical career and her planned but failed abduction by Captain Richard Hill and his accomplice Lord Mohun which occasioned the tragic death of the actor William Mountfort. However, until now little appears to have been researched in the context of her intriguing ancestral roots. In 1680, at the age of nine, a young girl found herself playing the part of a Page in Thomas Otway’s ‘The Orphan’ upon the stage of the Dorset Garden Theatre in London. The girl in question was Anne Bracegirdle daughter of Justinian and Martha of Northamptonshire. Justinian, a gentleman, had apparently suffered a great loss through problematic dealings of surety to friends and in such dire circumstances felt it wise to place his young daughter with the actors Thomas Betterton and his wife Mary Saunderson Betterton who were then living in London.1 The necessity of adoption resulted in an acting vocation for young Anne, for under the Bettertons’ care and guidance she rose from child player to one of London’s most respected Restoration actresses. She was admired equally with Boutel, Barry, Gwynn, Oldfield, and the formidable Mary Saunderson Betterton her devoted custodian.

“AN UNSULLIED REPUTATION IN THE MIDST OF DANGER”: BARSANTI, PROPRIETY AND PERFORMANCE IN BURNEY'S EARLY JOURNALS AND LETTERS

Although it has been recognized for some time that drama and the theatre were of key importance in Frances Burney's life and writing, the regular presence of Jane Barsanti's name in her journals and letters from 1769 to the late 1770s has remained almost wholly unremarked upon. In this article, the friendship between Burney and the young actress is set centre stage and its importance in the formative years of the writer's professionalism is explored. Barsanti set out in her own professional life during the years leading up to Burney's composition and publication of Evelina (1778). Her situation thus had personal resonance for a young woman whose family was so involved in the world of creative professionalism, and who was contemplating creative work of her own. Burney's interest in and attitudes towards Barsanti in her journals and letters demonstrate the nature of her investment in the possibility that the “prudish” version of feminine propriety she favoured could coexist with a theatrical career. Her representation of and commentary on Barsanti also further our understanding of her own, and her family's, struggles with their status as creative professionals within polite society in the later eighteenth century.

Christian Gottlob Neefe and the Bonn National Theatre, with New Light on the Beethoven Family

When the Bonn stage was closed after the death of Elector Max Friedrich in 1784, the director of its theatre company, Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Grosmann, decided to leave the city to further his career elsewhere in the Rhinelands. During the next few years, he was kept informed about developments in Bonn by two of his erstwhile colleagues, Christian Gottlob Neefe and Nikolaus Simrock, whose correspondence paints a vivid picture of musical life in the city during the later 1780s. The new Elector, Maximilian Franz, permitted a visiting troupe to perform during Carnival each year, but repeatedly delayed the decision to re-establish a resident troupe. In 1787 Christoph Brandt, a singer in the Bonn Hofkapelle, attempted a home-grown initiative, perhaps to test the market for a new permanent company. Although this failed almost immediately, a single, well-attended public rehearsal of Monsigny’s Le Deserteur was given, in which Johann van Beethoven made what was probably his last stage appearance. In a letter dated 14 May 1787, Simrock rated his performance ‘zimlich gut’. In the event, a new Bonn troupe was not recruited until 1789, when it featured the young singer Magdalena Willmann. Neefe and his musical colleagues were relieved finally to be able to resume their theatrical careers.

The Rain in Spain

The Rain in Spain George Watson (bio) The whole strength of England, George Bernard Shaw once remarked, is that most people are snobs. That sums up what is often taken for granted, and it masks two assumptions seldom brought to light. One is that it is silly or worse to be a snob; the other is that only the English do it—or do it well. There are foreign lands that use the word gentleman as if they had neither the word nor the thing, though they have both, and for as long as anyone can remember England has been the whipping boy of the world for those who seek moral credit by claiming to treat everyone alike. Shaw had already noticed plenty of snobbery in his native Dublin, as Oscar Wilde did before him, before he settled in London at the age of twenty in 1876, and he speaks of it in his letters—but not in his plays and prefaces, in which he nails the English to the wall again and again as class-ridden nincompoops. Just before the First World War he wrote Pygmalion, a play the fifties musical My Fair Lady was based on; and both play and musical hammer home the point that to promote yourself from the lower orders in English society you have to change your accent, and that to change it you need a lot of technical training by a phonetician like Professor Henry Higgins. "The thing has to be done scientifically," Shaw says in his preface, "or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first." Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, the cockney girl, chant a vowel-exercise about the rain in Spain that stays mainly in the plain, until the flower girl who must some day pass as a lady finally gets it right. Higgins is triumphant: "By George, she's got it." "Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music," T. S. Eliot remarked to Rex Harrison after the first London night of My Fair Lady, but the musical is no less emphatic about snobbery than Pygmalion. Enlightened societies everywhere claim to behave otherwise. In "Do We Have a Class Society?" in We Write for Our Own Time (selected essays from the Virginia Quarterly Review), Henry Steele Commager patriotically claims that the whole concept of class is un-American, belonging as it does to the Old World, and speaks ominously of the English as being branded at birth on the tongue. The article first appeared in 1961, at a time when President John F. Kennedy's Harvard accent was exciting comment but before President George W. Bush's version of Texan was widely known, and its patriotism is impressive. Mark Twain knew better, and in an explanatory note at the start of Huckleberry Finn in 1884 he itemizes the several kinds of Missouri accent used by his characters, black and white, in case anyone should think they were all trying to talk alike and not succeeding. Regionally defined accents [End Page 483] with implications of status are commonplace in the wider world, and most people who choose to switch accents neither use nor need a phonetician like Higgins. In professional life, especially, it is so common to switch that you sometimes ponder the significance of staying as you are. I recall an incident in an Australian university when a student production was being cast; it called for a character with an Australian accent, which proved astonishingly hard to fill. But then anyone aspiring to a career in theater is likely to use the standard of Received Pronunciation in an audition unless told otherwise. Accent change is nothing to be embarrassed about. It amounts to a freedom to reinvent yourself on the threshold of adult life, and most people do it readily and without help. It is fun, after all, to be anyone you want to be—as the Germans say, Stadtluft macht frei. Not everyone, fortunately, is a dogmatic egalitarian. Gladstone publicly called himself an inequalitarian, a word he claimed to have invented, though it was not speech he mainly had in mind, arguing that if equality ever came to England he would be in favor of abolishing...

"The Duchess", Mary Robinson, and Georgiana's Social Network

All the main characters in Saul Dibb's film The Duchess (2008) are based on figures who appeared in the list of subscribers to Mary Robinson's Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson (1791). These names include Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire; her husband, the Duke of Devonshire; his lover and Georgiana's friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster; Georgiana's lover, the politician and future Prime Minister, Charles Grey; and such prominent Whig politicians as the statesman, Charles James Fox, and the playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Robinson's subscription list included among other notables all the sons of King George III, many of the most Whiggish peers, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Robinson's lover and MP for Liverpool, Col. Banastre Tarleton, and Della Crusca himself, Robert Merry. Robinson's 1791 volume reintroduced her to a fashionable social network from which she had been absent for the previous several years following the scandal of her affair with the Prince of Wales. Robinson's theatrical career, her apprenticeship under David Garrick, her status as a sex symbol and the dissolution of that status into gossip, pornography, debt, disability, and Robinson's subsequent reinvention of herself as a professional writer make her, like Georgiana, a case study in the vicissitudes of Romantic period celebrity--which is one of the main subjects of Dibb's film about Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. Robinson's professional network, with John Bell, publisher, at the center, intersected and overlapped with the political network of Whigs that included Fox, Sheridan, the Prince, and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. (1) Although Robinson does not appear among these illustrious Whigs in The Duchess, Dibb's film, nonetheless, is the closest cinematic representation to date of the fashionable world that promoted, persecuted, and professionalized her. And this network also sustained many of the other writers who propelled the market for commercial literature during the late 1770s, '80s, and '90s. So, Dibb's film, despite misrepresentation of history, Whig politics, and even Georgiana herself, shows a more accurate picture of this significant demographic of early Romantic period readership than, say, Ken Russell's or Julien Temple's depictions of Wordsworth and Coleridge. (2) The professional (albeit not the imaginative) lives of the first generation Romantics had more to do with the world of West End elegance than with ruined cottages, old beggars, and enclosure laws. This particular network of readers and writers, then, helps to fill in the cultural and social space between the early readers of, say, Fanny Burney of 'Wordsworth and helps to visualize them in context. Curiously, the Prince of Wales does not appear in the film although Georgiana thought of him as a brother and, like others in her network, considered him the great hope for Whig supremacy. The film, instead, portrays the Prince's closest political allies, Sheridan and Fox, as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Georgiana's Hamlet. For the sake of the domestic and social drama, The Duchess only briefly depicts Georgiana's cultural interests and influence. Dibb shows her, for instance, hosting a private performance of Sheridan's School Jiff Scandal, the scene being short-hand for Georgiana's patronage of the arts, which included the works of Mary Robinson. For all of Robinson's adult life and literary career, Georgiana's encouragement, however distant, served her own poetic identity. Robinson herself describes Georgiana as admired patroness, my liberal and affectionate friend (Memoirs 238). At the start of her literary career, Robinson was still tangentially connected to the social network depicted in the film--the frequently treacherous bon ton and the power centers connected with the Prince of Wales and Charles James Fox, both her former lovers. Robinson first proclaimed her admiration for Georgiana in her 1776 poem Written on Richmond Hill, published in Town and Country Magazine, calling her beauty's queen. …

2010 Commemorations of the Theatrical Careers of Cao Yu and Li Yuru

(2010). 2010 Commemorations of the Theatrical Careers of Cao Yu and Li Yuru. CHINOPERL: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 217-246.

Abject No More: Authority and Authenticity in the Theatrical Career of Rose McClendon

Abject No More: Authority and Authenticity in the Theatrical Career of Rose McClendon

Shakespeare and Garrick (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Garrick Fiona Ritchie Vanessa Cunningham . Shakespeare and Garrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. vii + 231. $99.00. Vanessa Cunningham's Shakespeare and Garrick throws much needed new light on the role played by the eighteenth-century actor-manager in popularizing Shakespeare. The thrust of this book is to claim a place for Garrick as a literary as well as a theatrical figure. To this end, Cunningham examines a selection of Garrick's Shakespeare alterations (the term is preferred to "adaptation" on the grounds that it was more commonly used in the eighteenth century) which span [End Page 408] his theatrical career: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Florizel and Perdita, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Hamlet. Cunningham takes issue with the two predominant "myths" about Garrick and Shakespeare: firstly, that he restored to the stage plays not seen in their original form since Shakespeare's day and secondly the characterization of Garrick as a "vandal" who "hacked and hewed" the sacred texts of the bard. Cunningham believes the reality is "both more complicated and more interesting" and builds on important work done by Michael Dobson and Jean I. Marsden in taking eighteenth-century alterations seriously in order to elucidate what Shakespeare meant to playgoers and readers in this period. Cunningham is certainly right to argue for alteration as a positive response to Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. The book positions Garrick as working at a cultural moment before what Cunningham terms "the divorce of stage and page" in Shakespeare reception. Garrick, she argues, popularized Shakespeare through his stage presentation of his works but also through the preparation and publication of alterations. What emerges here is an analysis of Garrick's versions of Shakespeare, which, while it takes account of eighteenth-century audience taste, emphasizes the status of these alterations as literary responses to Shakespeare. Cunningham's book does important work in recovering this neglected aspect of Garrick's career but paradoxically this emphasis marginalizes the status of these alterations as performance pieces. Garrick's relationships with several Shakespeare editors are discussed in detail, particularly where this is relevant to the preparation of his alterations. Garrick's Macbeth (first performed in January 1744) is considered in conjunction with Samuel Johnson's Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth (which was produced as a specimen for his edition of Shakespeare and published in 1745) and Cunningham also examines Garrick's professional relationship with William Warburton (whose edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1747). In both cases, the implication is that it was the editors who influenced the actor but it is of course possible that the reverse was true and that Garrick's performances made them think differently about the play in question. Most likely they simply had "differing ends," the editors being concerned with textual matters and Garrick with producing a playable script. The inclusion of Antony and Cleopatra in an account of Garrick's popularization of Shakespeare is perhaps questionable since this version was not a stage success; it was performed only six times in 1759 and never revived, although it was printed (unusually before the first performance). However, it does give rise to an interesting discussion of Garrick's collaboration with Edward Capell, who helped the actor prepare this alteration as he worked on his edition (published in 1767–68). Capell is seen as an editor particularly aware of the theatregoing public [End Page 409] but whether this was due to his position as Deputy Examiner of Plays (apparently undertaking more of this work than his superior) or Garrick's influence as a result of their collaboration is left unclear. The final chapter examines George Steevens's potential contribution to Garrick's version of Hamlet: Cunningham identifies some textual amendments to Garrick's preparation copy of the play (housed in the Folger Shakespeare Library) as in Steevens's hand, although she notes that the relationship of this text to what was actually performed in 1772 is unclear. Elsewhere alterations are given a rationale based on textual issues rather than on performance. The analysis of Romeo and Juliet is interesting for its validation of the climactic scene in which the two lovers are granted a final reunion...

Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius (review)

Reviewed by: Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius David Krasner Bernth Lindfors, ed. Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius. Rochester, NY: Rochester UP, 2007. 288 pp., 19 illustrations. $55.00. Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) was one of the greatest actors of the nineteenth century. In today's parlance, his superstar status would be unimpeachable. Yet he has received less recognition for his achievements than his contemporary white luminaries. The objective of Bernth Lindfors's collection of primary sources and critical essays is to set the record straight by giving Aldridge his overdue credit. Acknowledging the book Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian (1958) by Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock as groundbreaking, Lindfors, the editor of this collection, sets out nonetheless "to fill some of the lacunae" left out of previous studies of Aldridge "by bringing together a number of essays that shed light on aspects of his existence that were not treated in sufficient depth" (2). In doing so, the book succeeds at portraying Aldridge admirably. The text is divided into two sections. The first reproduces nineteenth-century documents regarding Aldridge, most significantly "Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius" (ca. 1848), an exaggerated but still informative account of the actor's life. The section offers newly translated news reports and letters that verify or reveal important data about Aldridge's professional and personal life. After a brief stay in New York, Aldridge realized that racism in the United States provided limited opportunities. He ventured to Europe, achieving recognition as one of the great leading actors of his generation. Aldridge's early career succeeded primarily in the provinces outside London rather than in the theatrical capital. In his middle-to-late career he gained success throughout Europe, including London. Known as the "African Roscius" (after the Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus), Aldridge played Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, and Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Mungo in The Padlock, and other roles with humanity, pathos, and eloquence heretofore unseen on the European stage. The second section consists of critical essays. Researchers Ruth Cowhig, Nichola Betŭsić, Joost Groenebour, Ann Marie Koller, and Krzysztof Sawala examine Aldridge's performances in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and Poland. Hazel Waters attempts to show how Aldridge fought racism by pushing "the boundaries of the roles available to him" (101). Joyce Green MacDonald argues that Aldridge challenged "the relevance of previous centuries' efforts by white actors to 'act black'" (137) by undermining the perceptions of blackness in new and innovative ways. Unsettling the fixed identity of Africans, Aldridge disrupted a theatrical trend by inserting interpretations that cut against the grain of stereotypes. Nicholas M. Evans asserts that Aldridge went to England and performed in roles antithetical to traditional popular minstrelsy, applying instead a "Du Boisian double consciousness" to his characterizations (163). Along similar lines, editor Lindfors adds that Aldridge established himself as a serious tragic actor by experimenting with "white roles," which resulted in challenging racist assumptions through a demonstration of his range and capacity. Aldridge's performances as Macbeth and Lear, writes Herbert Marshall, were intensely human, dispelling stereotypical caricatures. Keith Byerman observes that the actor's performance in comic roles, such as in The Black Doctor, also undermined prevailing perceptions. Aldridge was a superb actor, both comic and tragic, as this book evinces. In Shakespeare in Sable, the late theatre scholar Errol Hill noted that Aldridge was instrumental in bringing a naturalistic acting style to the European stage. His renditions of Othello and Shylock jettisoned the bombastic villainy that had been the bailiwick of other actors. Instead, he brought multi-dimension and nuance to his characterizations, fleshing out a three-dimensional portrayal. One of the most interesting essays in this collection is by Ann Marie Koller, who (following Hill's argument) [End Page 202] suggests that the great stage director the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen attended Aldridge's performance and was so impressed by the actor's authenticity that he was inspired to initiate his famed quest for stage naturalism. That Aldridge helped shape the future of the Western stage practice of realism and naturalism is a highly original and profoundly important idea. A further testament to Aldridge's acting skills is the fact that...

"Divine Thalie": The Career of Jeanne Quinault (review)

{ 244 } BOOK REV IEWS Kim Lee convincingly conveys the multiple notions and concepts, throughout time, of what Asian-American theatre is as viewed by the protagonists themselves . —MARÍA ISABEL SEGURO University of Barcelona \ “Divine Thalie”: The Career of Jeanne Quinault. By Judith Curtis. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 8. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2007. xi + 229 pp. $101.00 cloth. In her exhaustively researched study of Comédie-Française actress Jeanne Quinault, Judith Curtis labors to establish the importance of Quinault in eighteenth-century France as actress, adviser, and mentor in the productions and dramatic literature of the Comédie-Française and, outside her work at the Comédie-Française, as a salonnière and organizer of private theatricals. Curtis meticulously charts the life of Jeanne Quinault, a figure previously known only through passing reference in “a few anecdotes in old dictionaries of actors and from a handful of highly questionable sources” (5). By accessing recently uncovered “authentic contemporary documents,” Curtis takes pains to refute the dominant picture painted of Quinault as the epitome of the eighteenth-century amoral actress in the 1818 “memoirs” of Mme d’Épinay (6). Answering anecdote with archive, Curtis gives us a detailed account of Quinault, not as iconoclastic freethinker but as a “socially acceptable and morally commendable” actress striving “to build an air of décence into the gatherings she hosted and into her style of life generally” (5). While Curtis’s work provides a record of Quinault ’s life and the world of private société theatricals, it is not until the conclusion that Curtis draws out the paradoxes of Quinault’s life, briefly contextualizing actress and woman in the social world of eighteenth-century France. Curtis chronologically charts Quinault’s life, death, and memorialization in eleven chapters. Within this chronology, Curtis pauses to highlight particular relationships, such as Quinault’s friendships with playwright Alexis Piron and aristocrat/archaeologist Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, compte de Caylus, detailed in her fourth chapter. In her first chapter Curtis studiously works through baptismal records, marriage licenses, police reports, private correspondences, and Mercure reviews { 245 } BOOK REV IEWS to untangle the often confused histories of Quinault, her four siblings, and one sister-in-law, all of whom appeared on the Comédie-Française stage. Chapter 2 takes the reader deeper into the theatrical careers and accompanying backstage intrigue of the Quinaults at the Comédie. Curtis strays from a strict reporting of archival evidence in the third and fourth chapters to explore the world of private entertainments. Daniel Gerould’s fascinating Gallant and Libertine gave a brief overview and tantalizing taste of these illicit events; Curtis provides further detail of their construction through Quinault’s organization of and participation in the société des lazzistes. The lazzistes (including, among others, Piron, Caylus, and Secretary of State Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain et de Maurepas) staged intimate entertainments as diverse as magic lantern shows, trained dog acts, and short performances—lazzi—composed by society members.Freed from the censorship of the official theatre and the opinion of the public, Quinault would cross-dress as Maurepas, satirizing all that was “legitimate” through whimsical performances of transformation and parody. Chapter 5 examines Quinault’s growing role as a mentor and adviser to playwrights in the “legitimate” theatre . As a member of the now established and powerful Quinault clan of actors at the Comédie-Française, she was able to directly influence which plays were staged at the Comédie, who acted the parts, and, through her mentorship, how those plays were written. The “divine Thalie,” as Voltaire named her, advised and mentored a number of playwrights, including Voltaire himself and Françoise de Graffigny (77). Seemingly in contradiction to her enjoyment of the raucous“uncensored”private entertainments of the lazzistes, Quinault publicly advocated the emerging comédie larmoyant genre with its heavy doses of bourgeois morality. Post-retirement, Quinault established herself as a salonnière with the Diners du Bout-du-Banc, chronicled in chapter 5. Focused more on the literary endeavors of its members than the société des lazzistes, the salon...

The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney , and: The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney, and: The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding Shawn Lisa Maurer (bio) Peter Sabor , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xv+202pp. US$29.99 (pb). ISBN 978-0-521-67092-0. Claude Rawson , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xv+195. US$29.99 (pb). ISBN 978-0-521-61548-8. The recent publication of Cambridge Companions devoted to Henry Fielding and Frances Burney affords a singular opportunity not only to evaluate the individual literary achievements of two authors with a significant place in eighteenth-century studies, but also to reflect on key developments—in terms of both gender and genre—within the field. From his own time to the present day, Fielding is acknowledged [End Page 316] as a leading player in the history of the eighteenth-century English novel, his novelistic influence—ably documented in Charles Knight's Companion essay on "Fielding's Afterlife"—both widespread and long-lasting. Yet by placing essays that emphasize Fielding's "achievements as dramatist, journalist, political writer, and socio-legal thinker" in conjunction with analyses of his more "celebrated" works of fiction (2), Claude Rawson's volume, by fruitfully reflecting the generic breadth of current Fielding scholarship, successfully rights—without in turn overwriting—past biases. Burney, too, experienced great fame as a novelist, yet her own entrance into the canon has been, by contrast, significantly delayed. Facilitated by the broader re-evaluative focus of feminist literary criticism and by specific trends within eighteenth-century studies, recent decades have seen an efflorescence of Burney scholarship, including critical and classroom editions of her extensive oeuvre. Simultaneously reflecting and itself contributing to this new scholarship, Peter Sabor's well-crafted volume bears witness to the critical "coming of age" of an author whose long life and multifaceted writings embody the kind of aesthetic, social, political, and historical engagement long valued in Fielding himself. While both volumes are constructed along similar lines—containing biographical, text-centred, and thematic approaches as well as bibliographic materials—the twelve essays devoted to Fielding provide, in general, relatively little engagement with a broader critical tradition. Instead, leading Fielding scholars focus primarily on specific reevaluations of crucial elements within the works themselves. While Fielding's novels retain, as might be expected, a primary place in the volume—with Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild, Tom Jones, and Amelia each granted a separate chapter—Fielding's extensive theatrical career, his periodical publications, and his legal writings also receive substantial attention and, in the case of Fielding's drama, compelling reassessment. Prefaced by Linda Bree's skilful depiction of the complex and contradictory nature of Fielding's relatively short life (he died at 54), Thomas Keymer's essay on "Fielding's Theatrical Career" seeks to counter the "teleological fallacy" (17) of viewing Fielding's drama through the lens of his subsequent fiction, persuasively analyzing a variety of plays to demonstrate the extent of Fielding's innovation and potential influence. Readings of individual novels, while less broad in their claims, deftly employ literary biography, close reading, and historical context to present engrossing and thought-provoking re-examinations of such issues as narrative voice, the classical inheritance, and social mobility. What emerges from these and subsequent chapters—on Fielding's style, on his relations with key [End Page 317] figures of "female authority," and on his engagement with crime and the law—is a Fielding bigger and messier, more consciously experimental and more psychically conflicted, than the carefully controlled authorial voice of his two most famous novels would imply. The ten essays devoted to Burney, by contrast, are less re-evaluative than they are themselves constitutive of a broader critical tradition. Answering the challenge put forth by Margaret Doody in this journal's own 1991 special issue on Evelina, these scholars, among them Doody herself, move successfully beyond Burney's first, and possibly still most favoured, novel to elucidate the author's engagement with the "broader sweep of history and literature" (173). Situating Burney's own remarkable literary achievements within the artistic milieu of her large extended family, Kate Chisholm's biographical essay sheds light on...