Staging Memory And Materiality In Eighteenth Century Theatrical Biography

“Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies’ 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre’s history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin’s story at the turn of the century and James Boaden’s theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work’s predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to “co-author” biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.

A peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference Introduction —LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA, WITH ODAI JOHNSON, CHRYSTYNA DAIL, AND JONATHAN SHANDELL PART I STUDIES IN THEATRE HISTORY Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason —ODAI JOHNSON Caricatured, Marginalized, and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia’s Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939 —JONATHAN SHANDELL Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate —SCOTT PROUDFIT Asia and Alwin Nikolais: Interdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance —ANGELA K. AHLGREN PART II WITCH CHARACTERS AND WITCHY PERFORMANCE Editor’s Introduction to the Special Section Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances —CHRYSTYNA DAIL To Wright the Witch: The Case of Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft —JANE BARNETTE Nothing Wicked This Way Comes: Shakespeare’s Subversion of Archetypal Witches in The Winter’s Tale —JESSICA HOLT Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom —MAMATA SENGUPTA (Un)Limited: The Influence of Mentorship and Father-Daughter Relationships on Elphaba’s Heroine Journey in Wicked —REBECCA K. HAMMONDS Immersive Witches: New York City under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell —DAVID BISAHA PART III Essay from the Conference The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2020 New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s —LINDSEY MANTOAN

English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explores the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. Chapters in this book discuss anecdotes about actors, actresses, musicians, and other theatre people.

In 1710, England’s first copyright law gave authors the ability to own their works, but it was not until 1833 that literary property law was extended to protect dramatic performance. Between these dates, generations of playwrights grappled for control over their intellectual property in a cultural and legal environment that treated print differently from performance. As ownership became a central concern for many, actors fought to possess their dramatic parts exclusively, playwrights struggled to control and profit from repeat performances of their works, and managers tried to gain a monopoly over the performance of profitable plays. Owning Performance follows the careers of some of the 18th century’s most influential playwrights, actors, and theater managers as they vied for control over the period’s most popular shows. Without protection for dramatic literary property, these figures developed creative extra-legal strategies for controlling the performance of drama—quite literally performing their ownership. Their various strategies resulted in a culture of ephemerality, with many of the period’s most popular works existing only in performance and manuscript copies. Author Jane Wessel explores how playwrights and actors developed strategies for owning their works and how, in turn, theater managers appropriated these strategies, putting constant pressure on artists to innovate. Owning Performance reveals the wide-reaching effects of property law on theatrical culture, tracing a turn away from print that affected the circulation, preservation, and legacy of 18th century drama.

Charles Macklin (1699?–1797) was one of the most important figures in the eighteenth-century theatre. Born in Ireland, he began acting in London in around 1725 and gave his final performance in 1789 – no other actor can claim to have acted across seven decades of the century, from the reign of George I to the Regency Crisis of 1788. He is credited alongside Garrick with the development of the natural school of acting and gave a famous performance of Shylock that gave George II nightmares. As a dramatist, he wrote one of the great comic pieces of the mid-century (Love à la Mode, 1759), as well as the only play of the century to be twice refused a performance licence (The Man of the World, 1781). He opened an experimental coffeehouse in Covent Garden, he advocated energetically for actors’ rights and copyright reform for dramatists, and he successfully sued theatre rioters. In short, he had an astonishingly varied career. With essays by leading experts on eighteenth-century culture, this volume provides a sustained critical examination of his career, illuminating many aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical culture and of the European Enlightenment, and explores the scholarly benefit – and thrill – of restaging Macklin’s work in the twenty-first century.

Making Stars provides multiple perspectives on the simultaneous emergence of modern forms of life writing and celebrity culture in eighteenth-century Britain. Crossing multiple genres and media, contributors reveal the complex and varied ways in which these modern ways of thinking about individual identity mutually conditioned their emergence during this formative period.