Overview

The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance provides a representative sample of plays and performances—from a range of genres, styles, and formats—that were popular on the nineteenth-century British stage. The introduction explores the ways in which different plays and dramatic conventions related to each other, and how audiences understood those conventions. The richly illustrated anthology tries to recapture the living forms of performance that are often lost in printed texts.

Full Product Details

Author:   Tracy C. Davis
Publisher:   Broadview Press Ltd
Imprint:   Broadview Press Ltd
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.839kg
ISBN:  

9781551119007

ISBN 10:   1551119005
Pages:   550
Publication Date:   20 December 2011
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Repertoire George Colman, the Younger, The Africans; or, War, Love, and Duty (1808) Col. Ralph Hamilton, Elphi Bey; or, The Arab’s Faith (1817) James Smith and R.B. Peake, Trip to America (1824) George Henry Lewes, The Game of Speculation (1851) Christy’s Minstrels (1857-61) Programme with Musical Selections William Brough, The Nigger’s Opera; or, The Darkie That Walked in Her Sleep(1861) William Brough, The Gypsy Maid (1861) Dion Boucicault, The Relief of Lucknow (1862) T.W. Robertson, Ours (1866) B.C. Stephenson and Alfred Cellier, Dorothy (1886) Joseph Addison, Alice in Wonderland; or, Harlequin, the Poor Apprentice, the Pretty Belle,and the Fairy Ring (1886) J.M. Barrie, Ibsen’s Ghost; or, Toole Up-to-Date (1891) Paul Potter, Trilby (1895) Netta Syrett, The Finding of Nancy (1902)

Reviews

This outstanding collection will change how we think about nineteenth-century theatre. Tracy Davis's beautifully edited and footnoted selection ranges from monologues to minstrels, musicals to melodrama, military drama to the New Women problem play. But this edition is something more, for Davis asks her readers to abandon the progress narrative of theatre history, in which innovation and originality are privileged over continuity and convention. She helps us make the leap from reading a play to seeing and hearing it. I know of no better introduction to the lavish, witty, foolish, and romantic plays of the period; the range of subject matter and the exuberant music and acting will astonish and delight readers. Nineteenth-century drama, at last, comes alive in this brilliant collection. --Martha Vicinus, Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University Professor Emerita

This anthology is probably the most thorough and at the same time the most imaginative attempt ever made to bring new readers, performers, and students into contact with the amazing riches of the nineteenth-century stage. The all-new selection is backed by sophisticated new theorisation of 'the repertoire' inspired by recent performance theory. Its arrangement, progressing through the century and also through the genres of performance, offers a sense of the innovation and variety of one of the richest periods of stage life there has ever been in Britain. - Jacky Bratton, Royal Holloway, University of London Davis's aim in this anthology is to use careful contextual editing to fill in th[e] blanks [in order to make these performances comprehensible to a contemporary audience], to recover the lingua franca out of which these scripts were composed but which has since been lost. By providing the information that writers, performers and audiences would automatically have had to hand, she brings us closer to these performances as they would have been experienced in their own time. - Matthew Kaiser, from review in the Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University. She has published widely on performance studies and the nineteenth-century theatre.

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