6 Plays By George Colman The Younger And Thomas Morton

This volume contains edited texts of five plays by two late eighteenth-century dramatists. The plays have been chosen to represent the range of the two playwrights and the variety of dramatic material on offer during the period. The full-length plays and afterpieces by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton were as popular as Sheridan's works in their time, but today are seldom performed or read. This discrepancy lies at the heart of Barry Sutcliffe's extensive introduction, which explores the critical and social background to the dramatic activity of the period and relates the dramas to the shifting demands of the theatre audiences for whom these plays were written.

This 2001 book looks at how British drama and popular entertainment were affected by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Not every presidential visit to the theatre is as famous as Lincoln’s last night at Ford’s, but American presidents attended the theatre long before and long after that ill-fated night. In 1751, George Washington saw his first play, The London Merchant, during a visit to Barbados. John Quincy Adams published dramatic critiques. William McKinley avoided the theatre while in office, on professional as well as moral grounds. Richard Nixon met his wife at a community theatre audition. Surveying 255 years, this volume examines presidential theatre-going as it has reflected shifting popular tastes in America.

William Godwin is one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. He wrote four plays at the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries. This book has two main objectives: to provide the first comprehensive discussion of these four plays, and to consider the notion of theatricality in relation to Godwin’s political project.

Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

Colonization, slavery, traffic in women, and connoisseurship seem to have particularly captured the imaginations of circumatlantic writers of the later eighteenth century. In this book, Nandini Bhattacharya examines the works of such writers as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Colman Jr., James Cobb and Phillis Wheatley, who redefined ideas about Value and Taste. Writers re-presented the ethical debate on Value and trade through aesthetic metaphors and discourse, thus disguising the distasteful nature of the ownership and exchange of human beings and mitigating the guilt associated with that traffic. Bhattacharya explores the circumatlantic redefinition of Taste and Value as cultural and moral concepts in gender and racial discourses in slave-owning, colonizing, and connoisseurial Britain, and demonstrates how Value and aesthetics were redefined in late eighteenth-century circumatlantic discourses with particular focus on the language of slavery, trade and connoisseurship. She also delineates the workings of transnational consciousness and experience of race, class, gender, slavery, colonialism and connoisseurship in the late eighteenth-century circumatlantic rim. Throughout the study, Bhattacharya rereads late eighteenth-century British literature as a stage for the articulation of theories of difference and domination.