The Art Of The Victorian Stage Notes And Recollections

Excerpt from The Art of the Victorian Stage: Notes and Recollections I have undertaken the writing Of this book at the earnest solicitation of friends, both on and off the stage. It is a record of my own experiences of staget and stage art, during the last half century. This period of time embraces changes and uctuations of great and important interest in the history of the English Stage. What I have attempted must be looked upon as a modest effort to record personal experiences in connection with the stage; and not in the light of a history. Many lives of actors and actresses have been written. These lives constitute a history of the English Stage from the Elizabethan, to the close of the Victorian epoch. In my Notes and Recollections I deal with that part of our national stage history in which I have had personal experiences. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... creator of the character may be said to have bid farewell to the world when he fell at the altar in the last scene of all in the life of the great ecclesiastic. Sir Henry Irving's work in the art of the Stage is unique in its history, inasmuch as it comprehends a new order of impersonation and has closed the history of the conventional and academic school which lived and lingered some few years in the early part of the Victorian Era. The great results of the Lyceum work are due to two causes. First, the power of conception and the high intellect which enabled the manager to dominate the whole work; and, secondly, to his personality, which carried him into the highest ranks of society and made him beloved in the worlds of literature and art. It does not come within the scope of this work to chronicle or describe the social methods adopted by Sir Henry Irving to bring together men and women of culture. I trust those who remember those methods have pleasant memories of the stage gatherings on "first nights," when the representatives of culture in art, literature, and society met at the festive board of the genial host. Some of these occasions were memorable in connection with the art of the Victorian Stage; that after the production of "The Merchant of Venice" especially, but this event I have already recorded in my book of " Experiences." At these gatherings came the men who aided the great manager in various ways, and it was a source of pleasure to meet Sir Alma Tadema, R.A., Seymour Lucas, R.A., Madox Brown, and others. Those who were permanently attached to the Lyceum work always formed part of the gathering, and were represented by Mr. Bram Stoker, H. J. Loveday, Hawes Craven, and others. On all public occasions when Sir Henry Irving...

Features actors who were significant in their development of new and innovative ways of performing Shakespeare. This title contains extracts from diaries, memoirs, private letters, and obituaries that present a contemporary account of their acting achievements and personal lives.

During the 1820s and 30s nautical melodramas "reigned supreme" on London stages, entertaining the mariners and maritime workers who comprised a large part of the audience for small theatres. These plays mixed sentimental moments and comic interludes of domestic melodrama with patriotic images that communicated and reinforced imperial themes. However, generally the study of British theatre history moves from medieval and renaissance plays directly to the realism and naturalism of late Victorian and modern drama. Readers typically encounter a gap between Restoration and eighteenth-century plays like those of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and late-nineteenth plays by Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. Nineteenth-century drama, with the possible exception of plays by Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, remains all but invisible. Until recently, melodramatic plays written and performed during this "gap" received little scholarly attention, but their value as reflections of Britain’s promulgation of imperial ideology — and its role in constructing and maintaining class, gender, and racial identities — have given discussions of melodrama force and momentum. The plays included in these three volumes have never appeared in a critical anthology and most have not been republished since their original nineteenth-century editions. Each play is transcribed from original documents and includes an author biography, a headnote about the play itself, full annotations with brief definitions of unfamiliar vocabulary, and explanatory notes. Comprehensive editorial apparatus details the nineteenth-century imperial, naval, political, and social history relevant to the plays’ nautical themes, as well as discussing nineteenth-century theatre history, melodrama generally, and the nautical melodrama in particular. Contemporary theatre practices — acting, audiences, staging, lighting, special effects — are also examined. An extensive bibliography of primary and secondary texts; a complete index; and contemporary images of the actors, theatres, stage sets, playbills, costumes, and locales have been compiled to aid study further.

In this creative study of history and popular culture, W. D. King ingeniously illustrates how a long-forgotten instance in theatre history can reveal the very process of historical change itself. Late in the nineteenth century, Henry Irving, the leading actor-manager of the English stage, was scathingly attacked by George Bernard Shaw for his popular performance in Conan Doyle's play, A Story of Waterloo. Shaw's review was one of the first onslaughts in a war against the old guard of the English stage, against Victorianism, against England and Empire itself. King's depiction of this event and its aftermath illuminates the period's crucial values and cultural issues, and is presented in a manner that is both convincing and highly entertaining. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.