Editorial: Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film is dedicated to the memory of two distinguished scholars, Michael R. Booth, who died in October 2017, and Victor Emeljanow, who died in April 2018. Michael had intended to present a paper at the City, Space, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century Performance conference organised by this journal in conjunction with the University of Warwick and held at the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, Venice, in June 2018. As it turned out, the conference was dedicated to his memory, a tribute that we felt was apt given Michael’s pioneering work on the representation of urban environments on the nineteenth-century stage. Victor was also expecting to attend the City, Space, and Spectacle conference. The paper he had intended to give was presented by his longtime friend and colleague Jim Davis, who has also edited the version that appears in this issue. This special issue is dedicated to the theme of ecologies and environments, and most of the articles that follow originated in our symposium, Theatrical Ecologies and Environments in the Nineteenth Century, which took place on 1 July 2017 at the University of Warwick. In our call for papers, the theme was construed broadly to include proposals that addressed the impact of theatre and early film on the environment, ecological themes in theatre and performance, and the application of ecological methodologies to the interlacing economic, cultural, and social networks of theatrical production. While the interdisciplinary turn of recent decades has encouraged approaches to the subject that highlight the connectedness of theatre and performance history to other spheres, we wanted to invite participants to think specifically about what ecological themes or methodologies might bring to our understanding of nineteenth-century performance. As we wrote in our call for papers, ecocriticism is a live issue in both theatre studies and nineteenth-century studies, but remains an under-examined area in