Women And Victorian Theatre

Victorian women were exhilarated by the authoritative voice and the professional opportunity the theater offered them. In this book Kerry Powell chronicles the development of women's participation in the theater as playwrights, actresses and managers and explores the making of the Victorian actress, gender discourse and playwriting of the period, and the contributions these made to developments in the following century.

Spiritualists in the nineteenth century spoke of the "Borderland," a shadowy threshold where the living communed with the dead, and where those in the material realm could receive comfort or advice from another world. The skilled performances of mostly female actors and performers made the "Borderland" a theatre, of sorts, in which dramas of revelation and recognition were produced in the forms of seances, trances, and spiritualist lectures. This book examines some of the most fascinating American and British actresses of the Victorian era, whose performances fairly mesmerized their audiences of amused skeptics and ardent believers. It also focuses on the transformative possibilities of the spiritualist theatre, revealing how the performances allowed Victorian women to speak, act, and create outside the boundaries of their restricted social and psychological roles.

Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain is the first book to make a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theatre from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays, which will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars in nineteenth-century studies and theatre historians.

Using historical evidence as well as personal accounts, Tracy C. Davis examines the reality of conditions for `ordinary' actresses, their working environments, employment patterns and the reasons why acting continued to be such a popular, though insecure, profession. Firmly grounded in Marxist and feminist theory she looks at representations of women on stage, and the meanings associated with and generated by them.

This collection addresses key questions in women's theatre history and retrieves a number of previously "hidden" histories of women performers. The essays range across the past 300 years--topics covered include Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' "Mademoiselle Mars," Mme. Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre.

This is the first book to explore the involvement of John Ruskin with the popular theatre of his time. Based on original archival research, this book offers a fresh look at the aesthetic and social theories of Ruskin and his direct and indirect influence on the commercial theatre of the late nineteenth century.

This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.

Explains how Victorian women readers strategically identified with literature to defy stereotypes and inspire their action and creativity.