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Journal articles on the topic 'Victorian drama'
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1
Kardiansyah, M. Yuseano. "English Drama in the Late of Victorian Period (1880-1901): Realism in Drama Genre Revival." TEKNOSASTIK 15, no. 2 (October 18, 2019): 64. http://dx.doi.org/10.33365/ts.v15i2.100.
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A progressive growth in literature was seen significantly during Victorian period. These decades also saw an overdue revival of drama, in which the existence of drama was started to improve when entering late of Victorian period. Along with that situation, Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871) emerged as a popular drama writer at that time besides the coming of Henrik Ibsen’s works in 1880’s. However, Robertson’s popularity was defeated by other dramatists during late of Victorian period (1880-1901), drama writer like Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Beside Wilde, there were several well known dramatists during late of Victorian period. Dramatists as Shaw, Jones, and Pinero were also influential toward the development of drama at that time. In the discussion of English drama development, role of late Victorian period’s dramatists was really important toward the development of modern drama. Their works and efforts really influenced the triumph of realism and development of drama after Victorian period ended. Therefore, the development of drama during late of Victorian period is discussed in this particular writing, due to the important roles of dramatist such as Wilde, Shaw, Pinero, and Jones. Here, their roles to the revival of English drama and the trend of realism in the history of English literature are very important.
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Powell, Kerry, and Anthony Jenkins. "The Making of Victorian Drama." Theatre Journal 44, no. 3 (October 1992): 414. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3208567.
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Smith, Julianne. "Victorian Drama and Undergraduate Periodical Research." Victorian Periodicals Review 39, no. 4 (2006): 357–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2007.0011.
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Demoor, Marysa. "Anthony Jenkins, The Making of Victorian Drama." Documenta 10, no. 3 (April 21, 2019): 260–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/doc.v10i3.10846.
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Eriks Cline, Lauren. "The Long Run of Victorian Theater." Victorian Literature and Culture 48, no. 3 (2020): 623–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s106015032000025x.
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It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018), edited by Carolyn Williams; The Drama of Celebrity (2019), by Sharon Marcus; and Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.
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LaPorte, Charles. "Aurora Leigh, A Life-Drama, and Victorian Poetic Autobiography." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 53, no. 4 (2013): 829–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sel.2013.0044.
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Davis, Tracy C. "The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 2, no. 6 (May 1986): 117–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00002013.
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The public nature of their work should seemingly have ensured that children employed in the Victorian theatre enjoyed better conditions than their brothers and sisters, so often suffering on one of those treadmills at which the virtuous Victorians set their offspring to work. Yet little is known of the actuality of their experiences, and the present article represents a pioneering investigation into the area. Drawing on the researches of contemporary social reformers as well as on the reminiscences of the children themselves and of their employers and colleagues, Tracy C. Davis, who teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen's University, Kingston, Canad, presents an intriguing picture of exploitation mixed with adulation, and a pervasive muddle of defensive indifference, gradually brought within the bounds of well-intentioned legislation.
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Radford, Fred. "Domestic drama and drama of empire: Intertextuality and the subaltern woman in late victorian theatre." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20, no. 1 (January 1997): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905499708583438.
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Goldhill. "See Josephus: Viewing First-Century Sexual Drama with Victorian Eyes." Victorian Studies 51, no. 3 (2009): 470. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/vic.2009.51.3.470.
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Miller, John MacNeill. "When Drama Went to the Dogs; Or, Staging Otherness in the Animal Melodrama." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 132, no. 3 (May 2017): 526–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2017.132.3.526.
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For much of the nineteenth century, nonhuman animals shared the English stage with human performers in a series of popular, widely produced quadruped dramas. Work in animal studies and performance theory overlooks this phenomenon when it laments theater's unbroken history of animal exclusion—a notion of exclusion that quadruped dramas actually helped propagate and reinforce. The animal melodramas produced through the Victorian era featured animal characters whose appeal depended on the perceived otherness of animal actors, especially the knowledge that animals did not so much act in the drama as perform set responses to subtle, real-world cues from their trainers. Playwrights used animals' imperfect integration in the dramatic illusion to inject an uncanny sense of reality into their melodramatic plots. Their experiments with estrangement admit the difficulties of animal performance by explicitly staging animal otherness—but only as a spur to deepen human engagement with the more-than-human world.
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Garza, Ana Alicia, Lois Burke, Christian Dickinson, Helen Williams, Lucy Barnes, and William Baker. "XIII The Victorian Period." Year's Work in English Studies 98, no. 1 (2019): 702–857. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ywes/maz015.
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Abstract This chapter has six sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Periodicals and Publishing History; 5. Drama; 6. Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre. Section 1 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 2 is by Lois Burke with assistance from Christian Dickinson, who writes on Dickens; section 3 is by Ana Alicia Garza; section 4 is by Helen Williams; section 5 is by Lucy Barnes; section 6 is by William Baker. Thanks for assistance with this chapter must go to Dominic Edwards, Steven Amarnick, Richard Bleiler, Nancy S. Weyant, the bibliographer of Mrs Gaskell, and Patrick Scott. In a departure from previous years, and in order to avoid confusion as to who has contributed what to this chapter, George Borrow, Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Richard Jefferies, previously found in the General and Prose section, and the Brontës, Samuel Butler, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, George Gissing, and Anthony Trollope, previously found in the Novel section, will be found in section 6, Miscellaneous and Cross-Genre, as will materials that came in too late to be included in other sections.
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Wozniak, Heather Anne. "THE PLAY WITH A PAST: ARTHUR WING PINERO'S NEW DRAMA." Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 2 (September 2009): 391–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150309090251.
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In the late Victorian period, when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best.
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O'Malley, P. R. "NICHOLAS FREEMAN, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain." Notes and Queries 59, no. 4 (October 4, 2012): 614–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjs173.
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Barrett, Daniel. "Play Publication, Readers, and the "Decline" of Victorian Drama." Book History 2, no. 1 (1999): 173–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bh.1999.0002.
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Carroll, Rachel. "Black Victorians, British television drama, and the 1978 adaptation of David Garnett’s The Sailor’s Return." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 2 (February 6, 2017): 207–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989416687350.
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The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attracted significant public debate in recent years. In this context, this article revisits a critically overlooked British film adaptation featuring a woman of African origin as a protagonist in a drama set in Victorian England. The Sailor’s Return (1978), directed by Jack Gold, is an adaptation of a historical fiction written by David Garnett and first published in 1925. This article aims to situate the novel and its adaptation in three important contexts: set in rural Dorset in 1858, the narrative can be considered in the context of Victorian attitudes to people of African origin; written by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, the novel is informed by modernist perspectives on the legacies of the Victorian era; broadcast to a popular audience in the late 1970s, the film can be located in a politically progressive tradition of British television drama. Approached in this way, this multiply mediated cultural representation serves to generate insights into the treatment of racism in liberal left cultural production, from early twentieth century modernist milieus to the anti-racism of the British left in the 1970s. These contexts will inform close textual analysis of two motifs — the depiction of the countryside, and the role of costume — which have proved central to ongoing debates about racialized constructions of national identity in British historical film genres. This article will argue that the 1978 film adaptation of The Sailors Return presents a significant precedent when considering what Stephen Bourne has termed the “invisibility” of Black British history in British historical film.
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Abbas, Saleem, Firasat Jabeen, and Muhammad Askari. "Normative Model Of New-Woman: A Discourse Of Ten Female Protagonists Of Urdu TV Drama Serials (2010-2019)." Pakistan Journal of Gender Studies 20, no. 2 (September 8, 2020): 123–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.46568/pjgs.v20i2.520.
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This paper examines the normative model of ‘new woman’ (Dutoya 2018) in Pakistani dramas from the perspective of gender, class, and culture. TV drama is a predominant form of entertainment in Pakistani media. In early Urdu dramas, female characters are infrequently depicted in a progressive way but now, educated, independent, and urban middle-class women can generally be observed in lead and supporting roles. Along with a shift of female representation in Pakistani Urdu dramas, the study discusses the construction of a Pakistani normative model of ‘new womanhood.’ Through a qualitative content analysis of ten female protagonists from Pakistani Urdu TV dramas of last decade (2010 through 2019), I argue that Dutoya’s socially permissible model of ‘new woman’ can be noticed in the majority of contemporary Urdu dramas. In other words, female protagonists are portrayed with diverse attributes of modesty and modernity. I further argue that the idea of ‘new woman’ is not a new phenomenon for the Pakistani society. Unlike a colonial idea of ‘super wife’ and Victorian concept of ‘super woman,’ my assertion is that Pakistani version of ‘new woman’ is a response to western wave of feminism, religious orthodoxy at home, and cultural conservatism prevalent in Pakistan.
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Donghaile, Deaglán Ó. "1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (review)." Modernism/modernity 19, no. 4 (2012): 807–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2012.0083.
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Perris, Simon. "Our Saviour Dionysos: Humanism and Theology in Gilbert Murray's Bakkhai." Translation and Literature 21, no. 1 (March 2012): 21–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/tal.2012.0045.
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This article analyses the 1902 translation of Euripides’ Bakkhai by the renowned scholar, internationalist, and popularizer of Greek drama, Gilbert Murray. In particular, Murray's syncretistic use of religious diction in the translation is contrasted with his secular humanist reading of the play: throughout the translation, pagan, Olympian polytheism is described in Christian terminology. I conclude that this apparent contradiction reflects the early twentieth-century literary-historical context in which Murray operated, and his own idiosyncratic, ritualist reading of the play and of Greek tragedy in general. Murray interpreted Bakkhai as a ‘secular mystery play’ in celebration of humanism, but he lacked the poetic resources to express this in verse without recourse to Christian phraseology. Within Murray's overall project of popularizing Greek drama, this translation stands as a significant, influential experiment in post-Victorian secular-mystical verse drama.
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Whiteley, Giles. "HENRY LONGUEVILLE MANSEL'S PHONTISTERION (1852)." Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 2 (May 16, 2018): 485–514. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150318000104.
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Established in 1859, as a merger of the Whigs, Radicals and Peelites, the British Liberal Party and their ideological forerunners won 15 out of a total of 20 parliamentary elections between 1832–1910. Responsible for passing socially progressive legislation domestically, Victorian liberalism can lay claim to being the most significant political ideology of the period. By bringing together aspects of classical social liberalism and liberal free-market conservatism, this specifically Victorian brand of liberalism enabled Britain to take a place at the center of world affairs. Indeed, by the mid-1850s, the emergence of Victorian liberalism had begun to be seen as something of a political necessity, as demonstrated by Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848–61), a foundational text of Whig historicism, in which Lord Charles Grey's 1832 Reform Bill was characterized as the teleological culmination of British history. But while the liberals styled themselves as progressives and their opponents as reactionaries, Whig history has tended to oversimplify the dynamics of this narrative. In this context, Henry Longueville Mansel's closet drama Phontisterion offers a fascinating glimpse into a contemporary Tory response to the seemingly irresistible rise of Victorian liberalism.
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Denison, Patricia. "Victorian and Modern Drama: Social Convention and Theatrical Invention in T.W. Robertson's Plays." Modern Drama 37, no. 3 (September 1994): 401–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/md.37.3.401.
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Rangping, Ji. "An Ethical Literary Analysis of The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines." Interlitteraria 23, no. 1 (August 5, 2018): 63–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2018.23.1.7.
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The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, a classic Shakespeare drama adaptation by Mary Cowden Clarke, tells the girlhood stories of Shakespeare’s heroines in a series of fifteen tales. Analysing the tales from the perspective of ethica l literary criticism and the theory of the Sphinx factor (an original c ritical theory formulated by the Chinese scholar Nie Zhenzhao), this paper explores such ethical and social problems as the double standards of sex ethics and the inequalities between man and woman by means of the Animal factor analysis and argues that by disclosing these problems in a deliberately abhorrent way, the tales fulfil the task of ethically educating Victorian readers, and female readers in particular, in an enlightening and entertaining way while leading Victorian women to the appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays.
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Rahman, Izza Amalia, Mutmainnah Mustofa, Irfan Susiyana Putra, and Abdul Moueed. "Teaching Literature in A Doll’s House Drama." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 8, no. 1 (May 6, 2021): 73–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.36232/jurnalpendidikanbahasa.v8i1.962.
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In education, teaching literature is an essential way to strengthen students’ character building. A kind of literature to teach character building is drama. Drama is literary work that contains so many characters. It can be used as a tool for character development to students who have been taught with literature. This article aims to discuss the characters of Nora Helmer (a woman lived in Victorian era when women had powerlessness) in A Doll’s House Drama written by Henrik Ibsen. The method used is descriptive qualitative. It concentrated on providing explanation in the form of description about Nora Helmer’s characters that could be taught as students’ character building. The analysis of Nora’s characters results several findings. Woman’s figure represented by Nora’s characters are loyal, love and compassion; obedient; care and helpful; patience and spirited; responsible; brave. The findings show that a woman at that time even though she had a lot of difficulties, she tried to solve the problem, she tried to be the best for her husband and family. But when she was disrespected, she had to be brave to uphold her dignity. This article expects the students can increase their good characters, competence, conscience, and compassion in learning language.
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Smith, Jacob, Cary M. Mazer, Richard W. Schoch, and Rob King. "Reviews: Silent Film Sound., Shakespeare and the Victorians., Victorian Shakespeare, Volume I: Theatre, Drama and Performance., Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity., American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices." Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 32, no. 2 (November 2005): 70–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/nctf.32.2.6.
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Davis, Tracy C. "The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage." New Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 20 (November 1989): 321–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0000364x.
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The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).
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Lawrence, David Haldane. "Performing Working Boys: the Representation of Child Labour on the Pre- and Early Victorian Stage." New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 2 (May 2008): 126–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x08000110.
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During the early years of the nineteenth century children laboured in factories, down mines, up chimneys, at sea – and in the theatre. In this article, David Haldane Lawrence discusses the portrayal of child labour in the drama of the 1830s and 1840s, concentrating on five plays: The Factory Girl, The Factory Boy, The Dumb Man (or Boy) of Manchester, The Climbing Boy, and The Cabin Boy, whose child heroes extricate themselves from appalling conditions to confront their villainous oppressors, and through coincidental circumstances are elevated to a higher social position. But the realities of child labour are not fully portrayed on the stage, and the working boys of the period remain idealized figures. Here, a comparison is made between this idealization and the actual working conditions of child labourers. The theatricality inherent in the stage representation of child labour is further enhanced by the fact that the leading ‘boy roles’ were usually played by women, and the performances of the cross-dressed specialists in ‘boy roles’ is also discussed, as is the influence on ‘factory boy’ drama of socially relevant fiction, particularly Frances Trollope's novel about child labour, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy, published in 1840.
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Reynolds, Matthew. "Review: Victorian Shakespeare, volume 1: Theatre, Drama and Performance; volume 2: Literature and Culture." Essays in Criticism 55, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 80–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgi06.
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Ince, Bernard. "Rise of the Monkey Tribe: Simian Impersonation in the British Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 8, 2018): 357–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x18000428.
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In this article Bernard Ince surveys and critically examines for the first time the bizarre phenomenon known as the ‘Monkey Drama’ in the British theatre. A genre of early origin, pre-dating the age of Darwinism, it is to be found in all areas of entertainment, especially during the nineteenth century when the quintessential characteristics of simian mimicry were established. Commonly juxtaposed with the legitimate drama in afterpieces, ‘man-monkey’ spectacles not only blurred conventional man–beast boundaries, but also challenged prevailing conceptions of theatrical legitimacy. The genre attracted myriad performers of varied origins and specialisms, whose ability to mimic simian characteristics stemmed not only from agility and flexibility, but also from careful study of the ‘monkey tribe’ itself. While some familiar names figure among the roll-call of simian impersonators, many artists are little known. Although difficult to quantify precisely, the genre had reached its zenith before the middle of the nineteenth century, the 1820s through the 1840s being a significant formative period. After mid-century, popularity was maintained, but to a lesser degree, largely through pantomime, only to decline significantly after 1900. In a broader context, the study furnishes new material for current interdisciplinary debates regarding the relationship between performance, evolution and visual culture in the Victorian period. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.
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Poston-Anderson, Reviews, Magnus Schneider, and Ben Wiles. "Reviews." Studies in Musical Theatre 1, no. 2 (August 31, 2007): 213–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/smt.1.2.213_4.
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Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet, Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, Alexandra Carter, (2005) Aldershot: Ashgate, 177 pp., ISBN 0 7546 3736 0 (hbk), 50.00Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries, Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas (eds.), (2006) Aldershot (UK) and Burlington (US): Ashgate, 274 pp., ISBN 0 7546 5098 7 (hbk), 65.00The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim, Scott McMillin, (2006) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 230 pp., ISBN 0691127301 (hbk), 15.95
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Hillsman, Walter. "Women in Victorian Church Music: Their Social, Liturgical, and Performing Roles in Anglicanism." Studies in Church History 27 (1990): 443–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400012237.
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Musical outlets for English women in the medieval Church were generally restricted to convents, where they sang plain-song. Even female participation in liturgical plays like the Easter drama (with solo parts for the Marys at the Sepulchre) was normally not allowed. Singing in cathedral, collegiate, and major parish churches was limited to men and boys; in cathedral and collegiate foundations, only male singers could fulfil the statutory requirements of membership. The Henrician dissolution of religious houses thus put an effective musical damper on women in English church music for several years. (Abolition of chantry foundations in major parish churches, incidentally, caused the disbanding of most of the small parochial male choirs.)
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Nicholson, Helen. "Henry Irving and the Staging of Spiritualism." New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 3 (August 2000): 278–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00013907.
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Spiritualism enjoys an equivocal reputation not unlike that of wrestling – for whatever their intrinsic qualities, both benefit greatly from the trappings of showmanship. Supposed spiritualist mediums first manifested themselves during the Victorian era, which seems to have been highly susceptible to such fraudsters as the American Davenport brothers – whose touring ‘seances’ were, however, greeted with rather more scepticism in the North of England than in London. While audiences seemed to enjoy the way in which such demonstrations of spiritual possession were presented in a manner resembling a professional conjuring act, professional conjurers were properly offended by such presumption. So, too, was the young Henry Irving, who, with two companions, took up a challenge in The Era, the newspaper of the variety profession, to emulate the mystical achievements of the Davenports. The following paper, which was originally presented in July 1995 at the Theatre Museum as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Irving's knighthood, traces the rise and development of the spiritualist craze, and illuminates this previously obscure aspect of Irving's career. Helen Nicholson is currently completing her PhD on the life of the Victorian actress and singer Georgina Weldon, before taking up an appointment as a drama lecturer in the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published articles on Georgina Weldon in Occasional Papers on Women and Theatre, on the Victorian supernatural, and on Victorian fairies in History Workshop Journal.
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Ince, Bernard. "Staging the Unnatural: Zacky Pastrana and the Animal–Human Divide in the Victorian Melodrama For Ever." New Theatre Quarterly 36, no. 2 (May 2020): 160–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x20000366.
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The melodrama For Ever, by Paul Meritt and George Conquest, first performed at the Surrey Theatre on 2 October 1882, was a controversial late-Victorian stage production that fed the period’s appetite for dramatic histrionics, exotic displays, and monstrosity. An ephemeral piece that enjoyed no literary archetypes and few revivals, the play’s raison d’être was Conquest’s portrayal of Zacky Pastrana, a ‘man-monkey’, and his unrequited love for the murderous Ruth – a theme unique in the context of simian-based drama. Central to the play’s infamy was the covert allusion to the age-old myth of unnatural unions between simians and humans, and, although condemned as absurd and revolting by some critics, and laughable by others, its notoriety ensured popular success. Drawing on the original script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing and censoring, and situating Pastrana among famous fictional monstrosities adapted from literature for the British stage, most significantly Caliban, this article is a thematic analysis of Conquest’s unique role. It highlights through a series of interrelated readings how Pastrana’s multidimensional otherness and hybrid fluidity serves as a site of conceptual contention located at the animal–human boundary, exposing the cultural tensions in late-Victorian Britain. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to NTQ.
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Heinrich, Anselm. "‘It is Germany where he Truly Lives’: Nazi Claims on Shakespearean Drama." New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 3 (August 2012): 230–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x12000425.
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That the Nazis tried to claim Shakespeare as a Germanic playwright has been well documented, but recently theatre historians have claimed that their ‘success’ was rather limited. Instead, commentators have asserted that plays such as Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Merchant of Venice offended National Socialist precepts and were sidelined. This article attempts a re-evaluation and shows that the effect of the Nazi claims on Shakespeare was substantial, and the official efforts that went into realizing these in productions were considerable. It is also argued that the Nazis established a particular reading of Shakespeare, which lasted well into the 1960s and dominated the aesthetics of West German productions of his drama. Anselm Heinrich is Lecturer and Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Entertainment, Education, Propaganda: Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain Between 1918 and 1945 (2007), and has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009). His new monograph on theatre in Westphalia and Yorkshire for the German publishers Schoeningh is forthcoming.
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Faulk, Barry. "Nicholas Freeman. 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pp. 248. £65.00 (cloth)." Journal of British Studies 51, no. 4 (October 2012): 1049–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/666729.
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McDonald, Jan. "The Making of Victorian Drama. By Anthony Jenkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 301 + illus. £30." Theatre Research International 17, no. 1 (1992): 60–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300015686.
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Puchal Terol, Victoria. "Performing the Female Alternative in Victorian Popular Drama: The “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”." Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, no. 35 (July 28, 2021): 21. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2021.35.01.
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During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined.
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Jackson, Russell. "Oscar Asche: an Edwardian in Transition." New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 47 (August 1996): 216–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00010216.
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Oscar Asche is one of a number of Edwardian actor-managers who have been largely ignored by theatre historians in favour of the dominant figure of Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. Asche was one of that generation of directors, which also included Lewis Waller, Sir John Martin-Harvey, and Arthur Bourchier, who regarded the staging of pictorial productions of Shakespeare as a sign of status – a claim to be taken seriously in his profession. He had an adventurous career, representative in many respects of the energy and enterprise that characterized the Edwardian theatre – yet his work also exemplified attitudes and practices that would be discounted by a generation of playgoers enthused by different ways of interpreting Shakespearean drama, a new theatrical aesthetic, and the broader social and educational aims of the non-commercial stage. After his death in 1936, he was remembered more as the author of one of the new century's most successful romantic fantasies – Chu Chin Chow – than as a Shakespearean actor-manager. The author of this reassessment, Russell Jackson, is Deputy Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His publications include editions of plays by Wilde and Jones, and Victorian Theatre: a New Mermaid Background Book (1989). He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare in Victorian criticism and performance.
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Berst, Charles A. ": The Making of Victorian Drama. . Anthony Jenkins. ; Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas. . Alan Fischler." Nineteenth-Century Literature 47, no. 3 (December 1992): 386–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncl.1992.47.3.99p0468s.
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Flowers, Betty S. "Virtual and Ideal Readers of Browning's “Pan and Luna”: the Drama in the Dramatic Idyl." Browning Institute Studies 15 (1987): 151–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0092472500001917.
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Most of “Pan and Luna” is addressed not to an internal auditor but to what Gerald Prince calls the “virtual reader,” the reader the author imagines himself or herself to be writing to – in the case of “Pan and Luna,” the Victorian reading public. Prince observes:Every author, provided he is writing for someone other than himself, develops his narrative as a function of a certain type of reader whom he bestows with certain qualities, faculties, and inclinations according to his opinion of men in general (or in particular) and according to the obligations he feels should be respected. This virtual reader is different from the real reader: writers frequently have a public they don't deserve. (9)In addition to the distinction between the virtual reader and the real reader, Prince makes a further distinction between the real reader and the ideal reader. From the writer's point of view, “an ideal reader would be one who would understand perfectly and would approve entirely the least of his words, the most subtle of his intentions” (9).
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Arrighi, Gillian, and Victor Emeljanow. "Entertaining Children: an Exploration of the Business and Politics of Childhood." New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 1 (January 31, 2012): 41–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x12000048.
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This article explores the conflict between the constructions of childhood and their political/legal implications in the context of the entertainment business, as related to the demands imposed upon children by parents and theatre managers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once children could move freely both within and between countries, these conflicts and concerns assumed a global dimension. Through a number of case studies, the authors offer some fresh observations about how legal and social imperatives affected the transmission of values about children employed as entertainers between Britain and Australasia during the period from 1870 to the start of the First World War – from the Education Acts of the 1870s to the legislation of 1910–1913 restricting the export of child entertainers. Gillian Arrighi is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has recently published articles in Theatre Journal (Dec 2008), Australasian Drama Studies (April 2009 and Oct 2010), and in Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s (Sydney, 2008). She is associate editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. Victor Emeljanow is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and General Editor of the e-journal Popular Entertainment Studies. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the reception of Chekhov in Britain and the career of Theodore Kommisarjevsky, to Victorian popular dramatists. He co-wrote with Jim Davis the award-winning Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 in 2001, and his chapter on staging the pirate in the nineteenth century was included in Swashbucklers and Swindlers: Pirates and Mutineers in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Grace Moore (2011).
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SHEPHERD-BARR, KIRSTEN. "Reconsidering Joyce's Exiles in its Theatrical Context." Theatre Research International 28, no. 2 (June 26, 2003): 169–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883303001044.
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James Joyce's one extant play, Exiles, has never been held in great critical esteem. But rather than viewing it as an aberration in the Joyce canon, a fairer reading of the play takes into consideration the play's own theatrical context: what contemporary dramatists were doing both in print and on stage, what evidence there is of Joyce's own theatrical interests and what models he may have used in his own playwriting. The conclusion is that Joyce, surprisingly, wrote neither a ‘bad’ Edwardian play nor a slavishly Ibsenist one, but a pastiche of Victorian and Symbolist drama that roots the play firmly in the theatrical currents of the 1890s. In addition, Harold Pinter's landmark productions of the play in 1970 and 1971 revealed affinities with postmodernist drama, so that the play looks forward as well as back – it is simply not of its own time. If Exiles seems out of step with the developments of modernism, that is largely because it takes its inspiration from the European experimental theatre of the fin de siécle – not from the theatrical world of the Dadaists, Joyce's contemporaries. While this realization may not rehabilitate Exiles into the modernist canon or indeed the theatrical one, looking at the play's context and history raises key questions about the role of theatre and performance in the historiography of modernism.
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Senelick, Laurence. "Wedekind at the Music Hall." New Theatre Quarterly 4, no. 16 (November 1988): 326–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00002906.
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In the valedictory issue of the first Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981). we included a fascinating glimpse of a highly unlikely convergence – between Lenin and the London Hippodrome, where the Russian revolutionary leader found music hall an intriguing phenomenon, exemplifying ‘the anarchy of production under capitalism’. The author of that article, Laurence Senelick, now introduces the experiences of a contemporary of Lenin's who, though a dramatist himself, at first appears almost as unlikely a visitor to the ‘Old Mo’, the Middlesex Music Hall in late-Victorian London – the German playwright Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and the Lulu trilogy. Long before those plays brought him notoriety, Wedekind visited London, and recorded his views of music hall in his journal. Laurence Senelick, an Advisory Editor of NTQ, teaches in the Drama Department at Tufts University, and has published widely, mainly in the fields of Russian theatre and popular entertainment.
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Heinrich, Anselm. "Theatre in Britain during the Second World War." New Theatre Quarterly 26, no. 1 (February 2010): 61–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x10000060.
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In this article Anselm Heinrich argues for a renewed interest in and critical investigation of theatre in Britain during the Second World War, a period neglected by researchers despite the radical changes in the cultural landscape instigated during the war. Concentrating on CEMA (the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts) and the introduction of subsidies, the author discusses and evaluates the importance and effects of state intervention in the arts, with a particular focus on the demands put on theatre and its role in society in relation to propaganda, nation-building, and education. Anselm Heinrich is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Entertainment, Education, Propaganda: Regional Theatres in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945 (2007), and with Kate Newey and Jeffrey Richards has co-edited a collection of essays on Ruskin, the Theatre, and Victorian Visual Culture (2009). Other research interests include émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe, contemporary German theatre and drama, and national theatres.
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Kaplan, Joel, and Sheila Stowell. "The Dandy and the Dowager: Oscar Wilde and Audience Resistance." New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 4 (November 1999): 318–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00013257.
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Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel,The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by whichThe Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell)Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettesand (edited with Michael Booth)The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author ofA Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.
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Lyons, Sarah. "Nicholas Freeman, 1895: Drama, Disaster, and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), £65, ISBN-13: 978-0748640560." Victoriographies 3, no. 1 (May 2013): 110–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/vic.2013.0124.
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Wallis, Mick. "The Popular Front Pageant: Its Emergence and Decline." New Theatre Quarterly 11, no. 41 (February 1995): 17–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00008848.
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In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.
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Varney, Denise, and Rachel Fensham. "More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and the Future of Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 1 (February 2000): 88–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00013488.
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With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into the auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. The first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’. Rachel Fensham is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, and Denise Varney is Lecturer in the School of Studies in Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
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Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. "“SHREWD WOMEN OF BUSINESS”: MADAME RACHEL, VICTORIAN CONSUMERISM, AND L. T. MEADE'STHE SORCERESS OF THE STRAND." Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 1 (March 2006): 311–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150306051175.
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STANLEYFISH RECENTLY IDENTIFIEDthe intersection between crime and religion as a hot topic, a trend that he gauged by paying attention to a popular television show: “Law and Order…from its beginning…has had its plots follow the headlines. Only if the tension between commitment to the rule of law and commitment to one's ethnic or religious affiliation was, so to speak, in the news would a television writer put it at the heart of a story.” During the same week that Fish published this claim, a Texas woman who drowned her five children had her guilty verdict overturned when it was revealed that an expert witness for the prosecution had made false statements to the court about an episode of the very same show. Commentators on the case said the witness had confused plots fromLaw and Orderwith real-life trials. One need not be Oscar Wilde to see a meta-dramatic chiasmus at work here:Law and Orderimitates life, but life also imitatesLaw and Order. The same could be said of popular Victorian crime fiction, which was serialized in eagerly awaited autonomous episodes in a manner not unlike televised crime drama. Victorian authors, moreover, commonly sought inspiration in real-life criminal plots. LikeLaw and Order, such fictional representations both mirrored and created readers' “reality” outside the text. In this article, I will examine a previously unexplored instance of such fictional recycling and reinvention: L. T. Meade's popular detective seriesThe Sorceress of the Strand, I argue, is an overt rewriting of the strange case of “Madame Rachel,” a notorious female criminal of the 1860s. Before I make my case concerning how, why, and to what end Meade revised Madame Rachel's story, let me briefly summarize the evidence for this connection.
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Kershaw, Baz. "The Theatrical Biosphere and Ecologies of Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 2 (May 2000): 122–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00013634.
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In what would a postmodern theatrum mundi, or ‘theatre of the world’, consist? In an ironic inversion of the very concept, with the microcosm issuing a unilateral declaration of independence – or of incorporation? Or in a neo-neoplatonic recognition that it is but a cultural construct of an outer world that is itself culturally constructed? In the following article, Baz Kershaw makes connections between the high-imperial Victorian love of glasshouses, which at once created and constrained their ‘theatre of nature’, and the massive 'nineties ecological experiment of ‘Biosphere II’ – ‘a gigantic glass ark the size of an aircraft hangar situated in the Southern Arizona desert’, which embraces all the main types of terrain in the global eco-system. In the Biosphere's ambiguous position between deeply serious scientific experiment and commodified theme park, Kershaw sees an hermetically-sealed system analogous to much contemporary theatre – whose intrinsic opacity is often further blurred by a theorizing no less reductive than that of the obsessive Victorian taxonomists. He offers not answers, but ‘meditations’ on the problem of creating an ecologically meaningful theatre. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, originally trained and worked as a design engineer. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and as co-director of Medium Fair, the first mobile rural community arts group, and of the reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. He is the author of The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992) and The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (Routledge, 1999), and co-author of Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (Methuen, 1990).
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Pulham, Patricia. "Traces of Wilde: Fact and Fiction in Dorian: An Imitation and The Picture of John Gray." Victoriographies 9, no. 3 (November 2019): 298–315. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/vic.2019.0355.
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The life and art of Oscar Wilde are of enduring interest to contemporary readers and audiences who remain fascinated not only by his work, but also by his biography. The dramatic nature of the three trials that took place in 1895, and Wilde's spectacular fall from grace following imprisonment and exile, speak to our own period in which questions of gender and sexuality are topics of continuing tension and concern. This essay examines two examples of contemporary writing that are informed by Wilde's biography and oeuvre: Will Self's novel, Dorian: An Imitation (2002), and Craig Wilmann's drama, The Picture of John Gray (2014), and offers the first academic analysis of Wilmann's play. Exploring these works through the lens of neo-Victorianism, it considers the balance between history and fiction in each text. Drawing on Ricoeur's treatise The Reality of the Historical Past (1984), it proposes that Ricoeur's concept of the Analogue, which encompasses both the imaginative reconstruction of the past through the documentary trace and the adoption of the critical distance required to understand it, provides a new way in which neo-Victorian literature might be understood.
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Emeljanow, Victor. "The Events of June 1848: the ‘Monte Cristo’ Riots and the Politics of Protest." New Theatre Quarterly 19, no. 1 (January 10, 2003): 23–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x02000039.
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Theatrical riots are usually dismissed as occasions during which aesthetic reactionaries battled reformers over stylistic issues of little relevance to pressing and immediate social concerns. Yet how true is this? What were the real issues which boiled over at such apparently confined and innocuous occasions as the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1809, the Paris Ernani riot of 1830, the visit of a celebrated English actor which sparked the New York Astor Place riot in 1849, or the first night of a play which brought about the Playboy riots in Dublin in 1907? The complex social and cultural tensions on such occasions clearly operated during the two days of disturbance which came to be known as the Monte Cristo riots in London in 1848, and there are curious modern parallels. Victor Emeljanow is Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His full length works include Anton Chekhov: the Critical Heritage, Victorian Popular Dramatists, and, with Jim Davis, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (University of Iowa Press, 2001), which was recently awarded the Society for Theatre Research's Book Prize for 2002.