British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference

Author:   Bridget Orr (Vanderbilt University, Tennessee)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Edition:   New edition
ISBN:  

9781108731188


Pages:   295
Publication Date:   06 January 2022
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Our Price $82.80 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference


Add your own review!

Overview

In this ground-breaking work, Bridget Orr shows that popular eighteenth-century theatre was about much more than fashion, manners and party politics. Using the theatre as a means of circulating and publicizing radical Enlightenment ideas, many plays made passionate arguments for religious and cultural toleration, and voiced protests against imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples by colonial Europeans. Irish and labouring-class dramatists wrote plays, often set in the countryside, attacking social and political hierarchy in Britain itself. Another crucial but as yet unexplored aspect of early eighteenth-century theatre is its connection to freemasonry. Freemasons were pervasive as actors, managers, prompters, scene-painters, dancers and musicians, with their own lodges, benefit performances and particular audiences. In addition to promoting the Enlightened agenda of toleration and cosmopolitanism, freemason dramatists invented the new genre of domestic tragedy, a genre that criticized the effects of commercial and colonial capitalism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Bridget Orr (Vanderbilt University, Tennessee)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Edition:   New edition
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.400kg
ISBN:  

9781108731188


ISBN 10:   110873118
Pages:   295
Publication Date:   06 January 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Bridget Orr's British Enlightenment Theatre opens up an exciting research field full of radically important questions about British religious and social attitudes, their relationship to regional diversity, and the multiple ways these issues were debated on the eighteenth-century stage.' David Worrall, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research


Author Information

Bridget Orr is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. She is the author of Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714 (Cambridge, 2001) and co-author of Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840 (1999). She is editor of a special Pacific issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation and has published many essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama and New Zealand, Maori and Pacific writing and film. Among other awards she has won Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

RGJUNE2025

 

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List